Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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State-Sanctioned Riots

Rioting-the unbeatable high
Adrenalin shoots your nerves to the sky
Everyone knows this town is gonna blow
And it’s all gonna blow right now:

…

Tomorrow you’re homeless
Tonight it’s a blast

 

The state’s opinion-making organs are sanctioning riots.

The police and the national guard aren’t there to protect the townspeople. They’re there to protect the rioters from people who would defend their property with lethal force.

America has ceded what used to be the prerogative of militia to professional standing armies and police forces. The result is that public defense gets left to parties who have a limited direct stake in the town itself. The soldiers don’t care because they are not from the town, are not culturally linked to the town, and could arguably care less about whether everyone there lived or died. This is the same for the democratically elected civilian governors who are in and out of office in a matter of years rather than lifetimes.

Out of the many businesses burned to the ground in Ferguson, MO over the last two days, it seems that the official military organizations have been both unwilling and unable to retaliate or act pre-emptively in such a way as to discourage future destruction.

Republican government is a joke-concept if there is no militia made up of citizens, if the rights of citizenry aren’t directly connected with the people who actually need to enforce the law directly. To the extent that citizens cede law enforcement to standing armies, they cede their governing ability. To say that citizens ‘govern’ and are ‘sovereign’ when outside parties actually implement governance without any authority higher than they are is to say something false, or at the very least to water down the word ‘citizen’ to the point to which it is meaningless.

It’s certain that, given that the most influential national press organs are supporting riots, excusing the destruction of property, that those riots will continue to spread until they are met with real physical resistance. Given that the law is an insufficient tool for progressives to achieve their goals, they are using their influence to suppress the state’s own fighting-forces, and instead relying on mobs of thugs to intimidate what remains of their scattered opposition into submission.

It’s a demonstration of power, to be able to destroy a town with impunity, at any time, using nothing but incitement to the mob, and entangling competing security forces with absurd rules of engagement which prevent them from providing an effective defense.

This is likely to continue and become worse, because to the extent that looting goes unpunished with the appropriately lethal severity, it begins a positive feedback loop. Even an auto parts shop like the one in your home town might be holding hundreds of thousands of dollars in inventory that can be easily re-sold on the internet to buyers indifferent to where they came from. There’s real plunder to be had from the American middle class, and not all of it can be seized directly from a 401(k) account at the press of a button.

Much of it has to be stolen or destroyed directly, especially when it’s real estate.

This is always the course of the left in power, and none of it should be terribly shocking. The ‘nice’ nebbish reporter provides the moral suasion for the looter coming for your property and your life tomorrow. The looter has no capacity to survive in a civilized society without the intellectuals providing verbal cover for their actions, hampering the organization of armed defense.

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Book Review: Victoria

victoria book cover thomas hobbes

Before I start writing this review, first let me state my debt of gratitude to the ‘agent’ of its author, Thomas Hobbes: a military theorist and columnist by the name of William Lind.

I started reading his columns in about 2003. I was still a teenager at the time. I was not a terribly right wing teenager, although I read broadly and open-mindedly enough to have my brain fall out a few times. Lind had a very strong influence on me at least in some compartmentalized ways. I did not take him seriously when he would go on rants about ‘Cultural Marxism,’ but I paid very close attention to him when he wrote about war.

Now, I take him a whole lot more seriously across the board, either because I’m older and more knowledgeable, or just a whole lot less cool.

A little more than half of this book has been serialized at Traditional Right, so you can see if you’ll like it there.

This is a novel about a hypothetical future breakup of the United States told through stories of a series of low-grade civil wars. Not being someone with military experience, I can’t speak to the realism of the descriptions of the fighting, but it’s mostly told in an entertaining, almost jocular manner at times. The different parts of the US break down into their degenerate forms; each part suffering some sort of sclerosis unique to that region. A lot of the fighting happens along ethnic, religious, and ideological lines in an irreconcilable way.

The closest author that I’d compare it to is Heinlein — it’s a more involved book than something like Sixth Column.

As far as I can tell, books like this aren’t usually published anymore. It’s apologetically in favor of what a typical early 20th century progressive would recognize as in favor of the foundation Anglo-American values, which in our current culture are completely anathema. This book would be completely un-shocking in 1912, and maybe even unusually left-wing in some of its scenes.

Even though there’s a climactic scene in which radical leftist professors are slaughtered by sword-wielding men, considering how radically values have shifted since the early 20th century, a scene that seems politically unspeakable today would have made a lot more sense to our ancestors.

Without giving too much of it away, the plot is that the Federal government collapses after a brief war, and then an independent republic with its capitol in Maine dispatches advisers to turn various small wars in the other major regions of the US to its advantage. This includes a war against an all-female radical feminist nation that relies intensively on air power and bands of lesbian bikers. It’s a fun book in that way that’s willing to be a little silly when it’s using the plot to illustrate more serious ideas.

If you’ve heard about terms like ‘Fourth Generation War’ before, but aren’t sure where to start, this is not a great book to learn the concepts from the start. For that, you’d be better off reading Lind’s other work or a book like John Robb’s Brave New War or the many books that Lind cites in all of his work. This book on Maneuver Warfare also helps to make certain concepts in the novel more intelligible.

One of those interesting ideas is that of ‘retroculture,’ which is a path that some of the characters and entire countries in the book choose to take in order to guard against the Faustian temptations of modern technology. This is a more techno-fearing variant on the sort of cultural diversity seen in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, which was so influential that it inspired the creation of the Amazon Kindle, and even some terminology used in the NRx-osphere.

In the book, people first go back to older technology due to economic circumstances, but then as circumstances improve, they choose to be highly selective about what they adopt.

Overall, I was happy with the book, and read it start to finish over a period of a few days. It helped that I was already familiar with a lot of the books that this one references. I also rarely read novels published after the 1930s, and even then sparingly, so this was a welcome break from a lot of my heavier nonfiction reading.

You can buy the novel at Amazon.

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Restoration Watch: Australia Edition

Edwin Dyga, author of the forthcoming “Anarcho-Tyranny – Here and There” in the December issue of Chronicles magazine, has written about the state of conservative politics in the Anglosphere. It’s published in Quadrant, one of Australia’s leading culture/opinion periodicals.

He’s also the head of Sydney Trads, and Australian editor of the Quarterly Review.

The passage which will probably be of most interest to you is this, which discusses the only opening the right finds itself, having found its principles outside the acceptable boundaries of speech:

It does not take a stretch of the imagination to understand why establishment conservatism has largely lost the Culture Wars, even if it does not (or refuses to) realise it. Indeed, it is perhaps this defeat which feeds the lack of faith and dampens the assertiveness of conservatives in modern political discourse. Moreover, the evident lack of faith may be interpreted as a collective subconscious admission of ultimate failure in the face of an energised opponent’s incessant agitation in the cultural arena. There being no effective voice of opposition to leftist advance, the electoral centre drifts towards the point of greatest gravitational pull: progressivism. Thus, as the “mainstream” parties of the centre-right court electoral support among this ever-leftward-shifting political centre, those who do not accept the inevitability of the progressive worldview withdraw into the periphery, and as is often the case, radicalise on their journey. Yesteryear’s honest conservative becomes today’s “reactionary” almost by default. As a result, much of what passes for robust and principled opposition to cultural Marxism today seems to come from outside the political establishment: the Sidestream.

Dyga reinforces this point with quotes that could be taken from the NRx boilerplate critique:

“Remember how conservatives use to laugh at and rail at political correctness?” asked US conservative activist Elizabeth Wright in September 2010. “Now, they’re the ones who don’t want to be depicted as ‘incorrect’.”[1] Such a mindset renders an authentic conservatism largely impossible—that is, a conservatism driven by principle, not merely an attitude to preserve the status quo by streamlining the achievements of yesteryear’s radical vanguard. Indeed, the “establicon” boast at being the most competent at managerial efficiency and fiscal economism actually underscores its fundamental incompetence at reversing the leftist advance in the cultural arena. This of course makes the mainstream “Right” no less an obstacle to halting leftist advance than the official leftists they purportedly oppose. As Fabian Tassano comments in Mediocracy (2006):

The true test of an ideology’s hegemony is the degree to which its enemies feel they can criticise it only on its terms, or oppose it only by relinquishing their original principles. In this way, mediocracy’s would-be opponents become implicit defenders of the status quo.

The shape of the critique is probably familiar because Dyga’s been reading the same authors that you probably have:

This is particularly true among the young members of what is sometimes also referred to as the “Orthosphere” (perhaps best exemplified by the work of James Kalb[3]) or the “Neo Reactionary” movement (chiefly popularised by the work of Curtis Yarvin[4]). Their critique has gone beyond that of paleoconservatives, who see the contest within the political establishment as a battle between two wings of liberalism: laissez faire, globalist neo-liberalism on the nominal Right and statist, neo-Marxist social democracy on the Left, both of which paleoconservatives view as corrosive to traditional society and the complex identities and liberties of its constituents.[5] Neo-reactionaries of the Orthosphere broadly agree with this assessment, however they seem to be forming a critique of modern liberalism that is both oppositional to the status quo as much as it also affirms a positive worldview centred on notions of traditional identity. Some of these notions involve a regionalist local patriotism and the celebration of men and women as distinct, complementary sexes. This “identitarian” view is favoured over the abstract universalism of utopian “one-worlders” who see everything traditionalists value as mere “social constructs” to be bureaucratically redesigned at will.

I have almost no Australian readers, and I’ve only spent a single summer there as a youth, so I’m not personally familiar enough with what’s going on down there — not nearly as informed as I am about the development of UKIP in the UK. Dyga writes about Cory Bernardi as an Australian politician who is unusual in that he “[addresses] the issue of sex and gender from an explicitly non-feminist position,” which would be nearly unimaginable in America, even among the people who would be considered religious fundamentalists.

Even Evola, Jack Donovan, Guillaume Faye, and Rollo Tomassi gets mentions. There’s something for everyone in this one.

The author gives a particularly fair shake to the ethno-nationalist strain that you wouldn’t expect from a mainline journal:

For the domestic policy analyst, the result of this liberal hypocrisy should be obvious: a “society” where certain groups are permitted strong identitarian attitudes but do not necessarily share in the historical legacies of the host, and a host which is effectively subordinated and deracinated of any sense of unique corporate personality.

Is Australia on a better course than we’ve given it credit for previously?

I even like how kangaroos taste and would eat a koala if it was served to me. Rugby is also obviously a more masculine game than American football, in the latter’s obsession with absurd plastic armor and finicky rules.

Dygra closes with this relevant nugget:

The success of the Sidestream, whether it’s the US Tea Party, reactionary political groups in Europe, or the general growth of the online orthosphere, is fed by mainstream conservatism’s refusal to address certain controversies for fear of offending modern politically correct sensibilities.

This is mostly true. In America, due to the particularity of our party system, it’s not possible for democracy to staunch the bleeding properly with a UKIP-style party. We have a winner-take-all system that heavily discriminates against alternative parties down to the most local levels of government.

Turning the country ‘purple’ like Nigel Farage is likely to do is not possible in the US.

For this reason, I have more hope for the US than I do for the UK and Australia: our democracy is more brittle, has less historical continuity, and is less capable of responding to rapid changes in public opinion. It’s more likely to fracture.

In the US, we don’t have as stringent speech controls as the rest of the Anglosphere or Europe– that’s out-sourced to the private sector and the roaming mobs of SJWs hunting for people to have thrown out of their jobs.

Where I have to depart with our correspondent in putting hope in politicians:

Economic and fiscal reform may be important, but bean-counting ennui is hardly something that inspires a people. Whether a political movement is a party seeking office or a grass-roots organisation, it needs to inspire not only to survive but to succeed in the market place of ideas. If the Coalition’s base is something more than just a motley collection of anti-Labor interests, if it in fact represents something more than just an alternative style of governance, then politicians like Bernardi should be sought out, their principled opposition to modern liberalism fostered within party ranks, and their vision incorporated as an essential component of tomorrow’s political conservatism. Failure to do so will almost certainly result in their becoming “vehicles for a progressive agenda”, evidence of which can already be witnessed today.

Although it’s perhaps harder to see in parliamentary systems with a great deal of historical continuity, at least in the US, I have to disagree with the correspondent.

In the particular situation of the US, it’s better to bite down, hang on, and prepare for the end of the current political arrangement, which is un-reformable as constituted currently. Our situation is different both quantitatively and qualitatively, even though we share a language and a great deal of history with the UK, Australia, Canada, and the rest of the former colonies. Australia has a population of all of 23 million people, and most of the physical territory is empty.

In the area of the US in which I grew up, the equivalent of Australia’s entire population is accessible on a train ride that takes less than two hours at peak traffic.

Here, the entire effort needs to go into what Dyga calls the ‘Sidestream’ — because all expenditures towards supporting democratic politics wind up captured by the left. It feeds money and people into the progressive maw rather than harming the beast.

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