Why Conservatives Always Lose

First published on Alternative Right: http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/why-conservatives-always-lose/

In our modern Western societies, liberals do all the laughing, and conservatives do all the crying. Liberals may find this an extraordinary assertion, given that over the past century their preferred political parties have spent more time out of power than their conservative rivals, and, indeed, no radical Left party has ever held a parliamentary or congressional majority. Yet, this view is only possible if one regards a Labour or a Democratic party as ‘the Left’, and a Conservative or a Republican party as ‘the Right’—that is, if one considers politics to be limited to liberal politics, and regards the negation of liberalism as a negation of politics. The reality is that in modern Western societies, both ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’ consist of liberals, only they come in two flavours: radical and less radical. And whether one is called liberal or conservative is simply a matter of degree, not of having a fundamentally different worldview. The result has been that the dominant political outlook in the West has drifted ever ‘Leftwards’. It has been only the speed of the drift that has changed from time to time.

This is not to deny the existence of conservatism. Conservatism is real. This is to say that conservatism, even in its most extreme forms, operates against, and is inevitably dragged along by, this Leftward-drifting background. And this is crucial if we are to have a true understanding of modern conservatism and why conservatives are always losing, even when electoral victories create the illusion that conservatives are frequently winning.

It would be wrong, however, to attribute the endless defeat of conservatism entirely to the Leftward drift of the modern political cosmos. That would an abrogation of conservatives’ responsibility for their own defeats. Conservatives are responsible for their own defeats. The causes stem less from liberalism’s dominance, than from the very premise of conservatism. Triumphant liberalism is made possible by conservatism, while triumphant conservatism leads eventually to liberalism. Anyone dreaming of ‘taking back his country’ by supporting the conservative movement, and baffled by its inability to stop the march of liberalism, has yet to understand the nature of his cause. The brutal truth: he is wasting his time.
Defeating liberalism requires acceptance of two fundamental statements.

• Traditionalism is not conservatism.
• Liberal defeat implies conservative defeat.

Much of our ongoing conversation about the future of Western society has focused on the deconstruction of liberalism. Not much of it has focused on a deconstruction of conservatism. Most deconstructions of conservatism have come from the Left, and, as we will see, there is good reason for this. It is time conservatism be deconstructed from outside the Left (and therefore also the Right). I say ‘also’ because neither conservatism nor traditionalism I class as ‘the Right’. Neither do I accept that ‘Right wing’ is the opposite of ‘Left wing’; ‘the Right’ is predicated on ‘the Left’, and is therefore not independent of ‘the Left’. Consequently, any use of the terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ coming from this camp is and has always been expedient; I expect such terms to disappear from current usage once the political paradigm has fundamentally changed.

Below I describe eight salient traits that define conservatism, explain the long-term pattern of conservative defeats, and show how liberalism and conservatism are complementary and mutually reinforcing partners, rather than contrasting enemies.

Anatomy of Conservatism

Fear

Proponents of the radical Left like to describe the politics of the Right as ‘the politics of fear’. Leftist propaganda may be full of invidious characterisations, false dichotomies, and outright lies, but this is one observation that, when applied to conservatism, is entirely correct. The reason conservatives conserve and are suspicious of youth and innovation is that they fear change. Conservatives prefer order, fixity, stability, and predictable outcomes. One of their favourite refrains is ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. There is some wisdom in that, and there are, indeed, advantages to this view, since it requires less effort, permits forward planning, and reduces the likelihood of stressful situations. Once a successful business or living formula is found, one can settle quite comfortably into a reassuring routine in a slow world of certainties, which at best allows for gradual and tightly controlled evolution. Change ends the routine, breaks the formula, disrupts plans, and lead to stressful situations that demand effort and speed, cause stress and uncertainty, and may have unpredictable outcomes. Conserving is therefore an avoidance strategy by risk-averse individuals who do not enjoy the challenge of thinking creatively and adapting to new situations. For conservatives change is an evil to be feared.

No answers

We can deduce then that the reason conservatives fear change is that they are not very creative. Creativity, after all, involves breaking the mould, startling associations, unpredictability. Conservatives are disturbed by change because they generally know not how to respond. This is the primary reason why, when change does occur, as it inevitably does, their response tends to be slow and to focus on managing symptoms rather than addressing causes. This is also the primary reason why they either plan well ahead against every imaginable contingency or remain in a state of denial until faced with immediate unavoidable danger. Conservatives are first motivated by fear and then paralysed by it.

Defensive

Unfortunately for conservatives, the world is ever changing, the universe runs in cycles, and anything alive is always subject to unpredictable changes in state. Because they generally have no answers, this puts conservatives always on the defensive. The only time conservatives take aggressive action is when planning against possible disruptions to their placid life. They are the last to show initiative in anything else because being a pioneer is risky, fraught with stress and uncertainties. Thus, conservatism is always a resistance movement, a movement permanently on the back foot, fighting a tide that keeps on coming. The conservatives’ main preoccupation is holding on to their positions, and ensuring that, when retreat becomes inevitable, their new position is as close as possible to their old one. Once settled into a new position, any lull in the tide becomes an opportunity to recover the previous position. However, because lulls do not last long enough and recovering lost positions is difficult, the recovery is at best partial, never wholly successful. Conservatives are consequently always seen as failures and sell-outs, since eventually they are always forced to compromise.

Necrophiles

Their lack of creativity leads conservatives to look for answers in the past. This goes beyond learning the lessons from history. Averse to risk, they mistrust novelty, which makes their present merely a continuation of the past. In this they contrast against both liberals and traditionalists: for the former the present is a delay of the future, for the latter it is a moment between what was and will be. At the same time, conservatives resemble the liberals, and contrast against traditionalists more than they think. One reason is that they confuse tradition with conservation, overlooking that tradition involves cyclical renewal rather than museological restoration. Museological restoration is what conservatives are about. Their domain is the domain of the dead, embalmed or kept alive artificially with systems of life support. Another reason is that both liberals and conservatives are obsessed with the past: because they love it much, conservatives complain that things of the past are dying out; because they hate it much, liberals complain that things of the past are not dying out soon enough! One is necrophile, the other a murderer. Both are about death. In contrast, traditionalism is about life, for life is a cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and renewal.

Boring

Fear, resistance to change, lack of creativity, and an infatuation with dead things makes conservatives boring. Dead things can be interesting, of course, and in our modern throwaway society, dead things can have the appeal of the exotic, particularly since they belong to a time when the emphasis was on quality rather than quantity. Quality, understood both as high quality and possessing qualities, is linked to rarity or uniqueness, excitement or surprise, and, therefore, creativity or unpredictability. Conservatives, however, conserve because they long for a world of certainties—slow, secure, comfortable, and with predictable outcomes. Granted: such an existence can be pleasant given optimal conditions, and it may indeed be recommended in a variety of situations, but it is not exciting. Excitement involves precisely the conditions and altered states that conservatives fear and seek to avoid. It thus becomes difficult to get excited about anything conservative.

Old

There are good reasons why conservatism is associated with old age. As a person grows old he loses his taste for excitement; his constitution is less robust, he has less energy, he has fewer reserves, he has rigidified in mind and body, and he is less capable of the rapid, flexible responses demanded by intense situations and sudden shocks. It makes sense for a person to become more conservative as he grows old, but this is hardly a process relished by anyone. Once old enough to be taken seriously, the desire is always to remain young and delay the signs of old age. Expressing boredom by saying that something ‘got old’ implies a periodic need for change. Conservatives oppose change, so they get old very fast.

Irrelevant

Preoccupation with the past, resistance to change, and mistrust of novelty eventually makes conservatives irrelevant. This is particularly the case in a world predicated on the desirability of progress and constant innovation. Conservatives end up becoming political antiquarians, rather than effective powerbrokers: they operate not as leaders of men, but as curators in a museum.

Losers

Sooner of later, through their refusal to adapt until they become irrelevant, conservatives are constantly left behind, waving a fist at the world with angry incomprehension. Because eventually survival necessitates periodic surrenders and regroupings at positions further to the Left, conservatives come to be seen as spineless, as people always in retreat, as, in short, losers. The effective function of a conservative in present-day society is to organise surrender, to ensure retreats are orderly, to keep up vain hopes or a restoration, so that there is never risk of a revolutionary uprising.

Liberalism’s Best Ally

With the above in mind, it is hard not to see conservatism as liberalism’s own controlled opposition: it may not be that way, but the effect is certainly the same. Conservatism provides periodic respite after a bout of liberalism, allowing citizens to adapt and grow accustomed to its effects before the next wave of liberalisation. Worse still, conservative causes, because they eventually always become irrelevant, provide a rationale for liberalism, supplying proof for the Left of why it is and should remain the only game in town. Liberals love conservatives.

Conservatism and Tradition

Conservatism does not have to be liberalism’s best ally: conservatism can be the best ally of any anti-establishment movement, since it always comes to represent the boring alternative. Conservatives defend the familiar, but familiarity breeds contempt, so over time people lose respect for what is and grow willing to experience some turbulence—results may be unpredictable and may indeed turn out to be negative, but at least the turbulence makes people feel alive, like there is something they can be actively involved in. In the age of liberalism, conservatism is fundamentally liberal: it does not defend tradition, since liberalism has caused it to be forgotten for the most part, but an earlier version of liberalism. In an age of tradition, conservatism could well be the best ally of a rival tradition, since conservatism always stagnates what is, thus increasing receptivity over time to any kind of change. Thus conservatism sets the conditions for destructive forms of change.
By contrast, tradition is evolution, and so long as it avoids the trap of conservatism (stagnation), those within the tradition remain engaged with it. This is not to say that traditions are immune from self-destructive events and should never be abandoned: hypertely, maladaption, or pathological evolution, for example, can destroy a tradition from within. However, that is outside our scope here.

Confusion of Tradition and Conservation

In the age of liberalism, because it has forgotten tradition, tradition is confused with conservation. Thus some conservatives describe themselves as traditionalists, even though they are just archaic liberals. Some self-described traditionalists may erroneously adopt conservative traits, perhaps out of a confused desire to reject liberalism’s notions of progress. Tradition and conservation are distinct and separate processes. Liberalism may contain its own traditions. Liberalism may also become conservative in its rejection of tradition. Likewise for conservatism, except that it rejects liberalism and does so only ostensibly, not in practice.

End of Liberalism

Ending liberalism requires an end to conservatism. We should never call ourselves conservatives. The distinction between tradition and conservation must always be made, for transcending the present ‘Left’-‘Right’ paradigm of modern democratic politics in the West demands a great sorting of what is traditional from what is conservative, so that the former can be rediscovered, and the latter discarded as part of the liberal apparatus.
In doing so we must be alert to the trap of reaction. Reactionaries are defined by their enemies, and thus become trapped in their enemies’ constructions, false dichotomies, and unspoken assumptions. Rather than rejection, the key word is transcendence. The end of liberalism is achieved through its transcendence, its relegation into irrelevance.
Given the confusion of our times, it must be stressed that tradition is not about returning to an imagined past, or about reviving a practice that was forgotten so that it may be continued exactly as it was when it was abandoned. There may have been a valid reason for abandoning a particular practice, and the institution of a new practice may have been required in order for the tradition successfully to continue. A tradition, once rediscovered, must be carried forward. Continuation is not endless replication.

After Liberalism

The measure of our success in this enterprise will be seen in the language.

We know liberalism has been successful because many of us ended up defining ourselves as a negation of everything that defined liberalism. Many of the words used to describe our political positions are prefixed with ‘anti-‘. This represented an adoption by ‘anti-liberals’ of negative identities manufactured by liberals for purposes of affirming themselves in ways that suited their convenience and flattered their vanity.

Ending liberalism implies, therefore, the development of a terminology that transcends liberalism’s constructions. Only when they begin describing themselves as a negation of what we are will we know we have been successful, for their lack of an affirmative, positive vocabulary will be indicative that their identity has been fully deconstructed and is then socially, morally, and philosophically beyond the pale.

Developing such a vocabulary, however, is a function of our determining once again who we are and what we are about. Without a metaphysics to define the tradition and drive it forward, any attempt at a cultural revolution will fail. A people need a metaphysics if they are to tell their story. If the story of who we are and where we are going cannot be told for lack of a defining metaphysic, any attempt at a cultural revolution will need to rely on former stories, will therefore lapse into conservatism, and thus into tedium and irrelevance.

After Conservatism

One cannot be for Western culture if one is not for the things that define Western culture. A metaphysics, and therefore ‘our story’, is defined through art. Art, in the broadest possible sense, gives expression to values, ideals, and sentiments that a people share and feel in the core of their beings, but which often cannot be articulated in words. Therefore, the battle for Western identity is waged at this level, not in the political field, even if identity is a political matter. Similarly, any attempt to use art for political purposes fails, because politics, being merely the art of the possible, is defined by culture, not the other way around.

In the search for ‘our story’, we must not confuse art with craft. Craftmanship may be defined by tradition, and a tradition may find expression in crafts, making them ‘traditional’, but the two are not synonymous. Similarly, craftsmanship may improve art, but craft is not art anymore than art is craft. Art explores and defines. Craft reproduces and perpetuates. Thus, art is to tradition what craft is to conservatism. This is why contemporary art, being an extreme expression of liberal ideals, is without craftsmanship, and why art with craftsmanship is considered conservative, illustration, or ‘outsider’.

Those concerned with the continuity of the West often treat reading strictly non-fiction and classics as proof of their seriousness and dedication, but ironically it will be when they start reading fiction and making new fiction that they will be at their most serious and dedicated. If tradition implies continuity and not simple replication, then it also implies ongoing creation and not simple preservation.

After Tradition

No tradition has eternal life. Ours will some day end. Liberalism sees its fulfilment as the end of history, but that is their cosmology, not ours. Therefore, liberalism does not—and should never—indicate to us that we have reached the end of the line. The degeneration of the West is tied to the degeneration of liberalism. The West will be renewed when the liberals come crashing down. They will be reduced to an obsolete and irrelevant subculture living off memories and preoccupied with conserving whatever they have left. Once regenerated, the West will continue until its tradition self-destructs or is replaced by another. Whatever tradition replaces ours may be autochthonous, but it could well be the tradition of another race. If that proves so, that will be the end of our race. Thus, so long as our race remains vibrant, able to give birth to new metaphysics when old ones die, we may live on, and be masters of our destiny.

Scientifically Proven: Right-Wingers are Dumb

With juvenile delight, the Huffington Post reports today the findings of a recent intelligence study: racists are dumb.

The report states:

Are racists dumb? Do conservatives tend to be less intelligent than liberals? A provocative new study from Brock University in Ontario suggests the answer to both questions may be a qualified yes.

The study, published in Psychological Science, showed that people who score low on I.Q. tests in childhood are more likely to develop prejudiced beliefs and socially conservative politics in adulthood.

I.Q., or intelligence quotient, is a score determined by standardized tests, but whether the tests truly reveal intelligence remains a topic of hot debate among psychologists.

Dr. Gordon Hodson, a professor of psychology at the university and the study's lead author, said the finding represented evidence of a vicious cycle: People of low intelligence gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, which stress resistance to change and, in turn, prejudice, he told LiveScience.

Why might less intelligent people be drawn to conservative ideologies? Because such ideologies feature "structure and order" that make it easier to comprehend a complicated world, Dodson said. "Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice," he added.

Dr. Brian Nosek, a University of Virginia psychologist, echoed those sentiments.

"Reality is complicated and messy," he told The Huffington Post in an email. "Ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simpler solution. So, it may not be surprising that people with less cognitive capacity will be attracted to simplifying ideologies."

But Nosek said less intelligent types might be attracted to liberal "simplifying ideologies" as well as conservative ones.

In any case, the study has taken the Internet by storm, with some outspoken liberals saying that it validates their suspicions about conservatives and conservatives arguing that the research has been misinterpreted.

Besides a hundred-year-old photograph of mostly out-of-shape Klansmen, a few things should jump straight out.

Firstly, notice the paragraph in red, containing an opinion that directly contradicts the thesis of both the article and the originating study: the second shortest, its low-key phrasing and location, just before an altisonant final paragraph with links to external websites (the second of which contains an anemic and muddled conservative quibble), has been clearly engineered to de-emphasise that contradictory opinion.

Secondly, and following from the first point, the article self-servingly ignores the fact that egalitarianism is a simplifying ideology, analogous to the worst anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, since it blames everything that goes wrong for coloured peoples in the West on White ‘racism’.

Thirdly, the study itself is ideological, for it equates prejudice with Right-wing ideology, when egalitarianism is probably the strongest form of prejudice in modern Western society. No egalitarian is ever willing to entertain any science or data that contradicts his prejudices on race or gender or anything else, let alone listen to any dissenting opinion: all such studies are biased, all such data lies, all such opinions racist or phobic.

Fourthly, remarks about socially conservative views show the level of narcissistic myopia that characterises the Left. In contemporary society, it is the liberal-egalitarian view that is normative and socially conservative, since for long now that has been the official establishment view and also the safe, socially acceptable position being conserved. Racial consciousness and traditionalism is the radical, anti-establishment position.

The existence of such biased, politicised studies and their concomitant reporting in the media are simply weapons in the establishment’s political arsenal.

The core message is: ‘only morons people disagree with us, so don’t openly disagree with us unless you want to look like a moron'.

Their aim is to encourage conformity and smooth the way for their rainbow dystopia.

Revolution from Above

Kerry Bolton

Revolution from Above

London: Arktos Media, 2011

The popular imagination conceives Marxism and capitalism as opposing forces, imagining that—obviously—Marxists want the capitalists’ money and capitalists do not want Marxists to take it from them.

Kerry Bolton’s Revolution from Above disproves this notion.

As it turns out, and as many readers probably already know, the Marxist revolutions in the East succeeded in many places thanks to the ample funds supplied to them—consciously and voluntarily—by finance-capitalists in the West.

With access to all the money they could wish for and more, the finance-capitalists in Bolton’s narrative were, and are, primarily motivated by a desire for power, and their ultimate aim was not even more money per se, but the enduring ability to shape the world to their convenience, which translates into a collectivised planet of producers and consumers.

Marxism was useful in as much as it was a materialistic ideology that destroyed traditional structures and values and turned citizens into secular, deracinated wage slaves, irrespective of race, gender, age, creed, disability, or sexual orientation.

Capitalism was useful in as much as it made money the measure of all things and created a consumer culture that ultimately turned citizens into debt slaves, also irrespective of race, gender, and so on.

In this manner, Marxism and capitalism were seen as complementary, as well as a method of pacifying the citizenry: too busy labouring in the factory or in the cubicle, and too befuddled by daydreams of shopping and entertainment during their free time, the citizens of this global order, fearful of losing their jobs and not being able to buy things or satisfy their creditors, are left with little inclination to, or energy for, rebellion.

Bolton explains how the finance-capitalist oligarchy is the entity that truly runs our affairs, rather than the national governments. The latter are either financially dependent, or in partnership, with the financiers and the central bankers.

To illustrate this dependency he documents the United States’ government relationship with the Bolsheviks in Russia during the revolution, not to mention the similarity in their goals despite superficial appearances to the contrary and despite alarm or opposition from further down the hierarchy. Bolton shows how genuinely anti-communist efforts were frustrated during the Cold War. And he shows that the close relationship with communist regimes ended when Stalin decided to pursue his own agenda.

The book then goes on to describe the various mechanisms of plutocratic domination. Bolton documents the involvement of a network of prominent, immensely rich, tax-exempt, so-called ‘philanthropic’ organisations in funding subversive movements and think tanks. Marxism has already been mentioned, but it seems these foundations were also interested in promoting feminism and the student revolts of 1968.

Feminism was sold to women as a movement of emancipation. Bolton argues, and documents, that its funders’ real aim was to end women’s independence (from the bankers) and prevent the unregulated education of children: by turning women into wage-slaves they would become dependent on an entity controlled by the plutocrats, double the tax-base, double the size of the market, and create the need for children’s education to be controlled by the government—an entity that is, in turn, controlled by the plutocrats. Betty Friedan, who founded the second wave of feminism with her book The Feminine Mystique, and Gloria Steinem are named as having received avalanches of funding from ‘philanthropic’ foundations.

With regards to the university student revolts of 1968, the book highlights the irony of how, without the activists knowing it, they were backed by the same establishment they thought to be opposing. These students were but ‘useful idiots’ in a covert strategy of subversion and social engineering.

The subversion does not end there, for the plutocracy has global reach and is as actively engaged in global planning today as it ever was. Revolution from Above inevitably deals with George Soros’ involvement in the overthrow of governments or regimes not to his liking. According to Bolton’s account, the reader can take it for granted that any of the velvet or ‘colour revolutions’ we have seen in recent years have been funded in some way or another by George Soros through his extended network of instruments. ‘Regime-changes’ in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine (orange revolution), Kyrgyszstan (pink revolution), Tunisia (jasmine revolution), Egypt (white revolution), Lybia (red, green, black revolution), and Iran (green revolution) were not the result of spontaneous uprisings. Anti-government parties, think tanks, media, campaigns, demonstrations, and even training courses for political agitation—all and in all cases received vast funding from finance-capitalism overseas, not from local collections of petty sums.

In other words, many a modern revolution has not come from below, but from above. And in the context of governments being in a dependent relationship to the stratospherical plutocracy, this aggregates into a pincer strategy, with pressure coming secretly from above and from below, with the pressure from below—however spontaneous and ‘messy’ it may seem when it hits the headlines—being the result of years of careful planning, financing, and preparation by overseas elites.

The reader must ask himself how it is that whenever we see one of these ‘colour revolutions’ somehow someone is able, almost overnight, to overwhelm the streets with a tsunami of well designed, professionally printed, and colour-coordinated merchandise: flags, scarves, placards, posters, leaflets, balloons, headbands, t-shirts, face-paint, you name it, it all seems very slick, aesthetically consistent, and fashion-conscious for uprisings that are supposedly spontaneous demonstrations of popular rage.

Overall Bolton crams in an enormous mass of information within 250 pages. The lists of names and figures—and some of the sums involved are truly staggering—are endless, and the persistent torrent of footnotes considerably expand on parts of the main narrative. The plutocrats’ web of influence and deceit is immensely complicated, not only as a structure but also as a process, since it thrives in double meaning, double think, and ambiguity. Those interested in a detailed knowledge of the machinations behind current and recent events, or even twentieth-century political history, would do well to read this book more than once—at least if they have ambitions of explaining it all to an educable third party.

One aspect of Bolton’s narrative that seems quite amazing is the superficially inoffensive tone of some of the enemy quotes provided. Were it not because Bolton’s findings flow in the same direction as other books uncovering the machinations of the oligarchs and their partners in Western governments, or because the answer to cui bono is provided unequivocally by the unfolding of current and historical events, it would be easy to think that the statements quoted came from deluded idealists. It may be that some truly believe in the goodness of their cause, yet such selfless altruism is hard to believe given the known absence of ethics among our current elite of super-financiers—the banking system they engineered, not to mention many of the opaque financial instruments we have come to known through the still unfolding financial crisis in the West, is a deception designed to obscure a practice of legalised theft.

The lessons are clear: firstly, modern ‘colour revolutions’ are not instigated by public desires for more democratic or liberal governance, but by private desires for increased global power and control; secondly, subversive movements can be given a name and a face—a name and a face averse that hides behind generic institutional names and orchestrates world events at the end of a complex money trail; and thirdly, the those seeking fundamental change should first become proficient capitalists or learn how to gain access to them. These are all obvious, of course, but Revolution from Above is less about teaching those lessons than about documenting how the world is run, by whom, and for what purpose. In other words, this is material with which to back up assertions likely to be challenged by, or in front of, the unaware. Sober and factual in tone, it is also good gift material for those who may benefit from a bit of education.

Interview with Dr. Kerry Bolton

First published on Wermod and Wermod: Part 1, Part 2

My first contact with Kerry Bolton occurred on the back of my first article for The Occidental Observer, 'Memoirs of a Dissident Student in Post-Modern Academia', where I recounted my experiences in postgraduate school. At the time, and as we will see in the interview, Dr. Bolton was having a few unpleasant experiences of his own, so it is easy to see now why my piece resonated with him. A fellow at the Academy of Social and Political Research and of the Centre of Independent Studies, an extraordinarily prolific essayist and writer, publisher of the journal Ab Aeterno, and a contributor to publications such as Alternative Right, The Occidental Quarterly, Counter-Currents, and the Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies among others, Dr. Bolton is the author of Thinkers of the Right and, more recently, Revolution from Above, which was published by Arktos last year. He holds two doctoratess: one in Theology and another in Historical Theology, while his writing deals with geopolitics, history, revolutions, conspiracy, religion, the occult, and Freemasonry. In this interview we explore Dr. Bolton's career, learn about his experiences in academia and the media, and get a sense of the man behind the legend. Because of the length the interview is in two parts: Part 1, Part 2.

Ron Paul as Both Denial and Possibility

 
First published on Alternative Right: http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/district-of-corruption/ron-paul-as-both-denial-and-possibility/

Back in 2008 I was excited about Ron Paul’s candidacy in the then forthcoming presidential elections.

His formula appealed to my individualism and my loathing for the system of fiscal predation and debt slavery. I also liked his rejection of neo-conservative foreign policy and his apparent rejection of America’s colonisation by Third World peoples.

I did not think he would fix everything, but he seemed a step forward.

Things look different in 2012.

I now think a Ron Paul presidency would accelerate existing trends, even if he successfully reformed the monetary system and ended America’s foreign wars.

Abolishing the Federal Reserve, rebasing the dollar, and ending wasteful wars, and government programmes would be a good step towards putting the American economy on a sounder footing.

To truly achieve this, however, he would have to decree a debt amnesty and institute a neo-mercantilist economy based on savings, investment, manufacturing, and exports.

And this, whether because of ideology or because of its impracticability, I doubt he would be able to do. At least within his allocated four years.

Yet this is not the main problem.

The main problem is the fact that, as a rationalist believer in free markets and sovereign individualism, he represents not fundamental change, but rather a more pure expression of the worldview that led the United States to its present predicament.

Americans suffer today not because they abandoned these values, but because they pursued them like no one else.

Ron Paul has grass-roots support because in American terms he is traditional. On the surface, his outlook is materialistic and secular, and the latter would appear untraditional; but this is not so, for his is a materialist theology, and in this sense he is consistent with both the English ethic of capitalism and Karl Marx, with whom he shares a common ideological origin.

Moreover, we can also conceive his campaigning brand of economism as a form of evangelical puritanism.
Ron Paul’s quantitative conception of life relies on rational arguments and empirical evidence, not on transcendent authority or spirituality, or millenarian tradition.

The modern secular bias may see this as a strength, but it is a weakness: arguments can be defeated with other arguments, data with other data. It is always possible to produce both abundantly in support of any point of view, irrespective of their relationship with the empirical world.

The radical Left has been doing this successfully for decades and having the data against has made no difference to the reigning intellectual paradigm.




Many think Ron Paul is anti-establishment because he attacks the Federal Reserve and wants to reduce the size of government. This is to ignore that the establishment has multiple facets, and his represents one that looks like change simply because it has not been dominant for a while and the popular imagination associates it with a time of prosperity.

And I say imagination, rather than memory, because many of Paul’s supporters are young and they were not around when government was small, money was sound, and taxes were low.






Many have turned to Ron Paul because, believing him to be anti-establishment, he is appealing in a time of instability, when it is clear the dominant paradigm has failed.

Yet, like Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, Ron Paul’s quantitative, rationalist, individualist outlook makes sense only in prosperous, stable, racially homogeneous societies.

In times of austerity, instability, and racial heterogeneity it poses an existential threat because the collectivism and authoritarian bias of competing non-White groups enable them better to exploit the opportunities opened to them by crises and uncertainty.

The White man wants to have a civilised reasoned debate, but neither Blacks nor Hispanics are interested in that.

As Jared Taylor amply illustrated in White Identity, Blacks want and practice Black Power, Hispanics want and practice Brown Power—legal or illegal, logical or illogical, whatever advances their cause, rationality, civility, equality, constitutionality, history, or logical consistency be damned.

What is more, the Anglo-American White is an island, fiercely concerned with his independence. He resists group memberships and when he does accept them they are always loose, distant, contingent, expedient relationships based on legal, contractual, or philosophical abstractions. In contrast, the coloured man from everywhere else is much more ready to combine with others of his kin, and the relationship is nearly always essential, biological, inescapable, not soluble through argumentation.

In times of crisis and uncertainty, Whites argue with each other, while the 'wretched of the Earth' unite against them.

Worse still, in times of crisis and uncertainty, people have demonstrated quite willing and capable of sacrificing freedom in exchange for security.

Thus, crises and uncertainty benefit whoever is more rigid, harsh, and intolerant, since authority and strength, or at least its appearance, provide a sense of security, and security is always preferable to uncertainty even when that security is unpleasant.

With his grandfatherly manner, open, free-for-all proposition, Ron Paul’s ideological purity would be no match for the brutal disturbances ahead.

In fact, since the crisis we face already means every White man for himself, squared, Paul would sanction the very condition that opens the way for a more frank and ruthless level of racial and economic predation.

It would be every White man for himself, cubed.

And every coloured man for his collective, also cubed.

In some ways, the Ron Paul phenomenon represents an act of denial: the tacit wish that things are not as far gone as they seem and that by electing the right Republican candidate, a return to traditional American values of small government, sound money, free markets, and sovereign individualism will put America back on course. It also represents the erroneous belief that America has ended up where it is because it went off course, when in reality it is where it is because it is exactly on course.

What we are witnessing is not a deviation, but a fulfillment of potentialities that go back even before the founding of the Republic.

Having said this, Americans desiring change would do well not to ignore Ron Paul or the tactical value of his campaign, for with his grass-roots support he offers an opportunity to attack the system from within, even if he represents a puritanical expression of the system.

The attacks on him by establishment opponents amount to more than a squabble between two Leftist factions, even if that is what it is, for they imply a recognition by the reigning establishment faction that he represents the thin end of a wedge able to operate on an area of shared discontent between an ill-informed public and the non-authorised, alternative Right.

The Ron Paul campagin against the Fed, war on Iran, neo-conservatism, big government, and the nanny state provide popular, socially acceptable critiques that contribute to weaken and discredit the dominant faction. In turn, he provides a popular but weak alternative made inappropriate by the ever-worsening crisis.

The reigning faction both fails to understand how Ron Paul could benefit them in the long run and fears, correctly, that a free-for-all opens the way for fundamental change in our direction. After all, free-for-all conditions, laissez faire competition, also opens the way for non-authorised factions to act without restriction.

From this standpoint Ron Paul offers both denial and possibility.

The Soul's Compass Points South: An Interview with Miguel Serrano (Translation)

Translated for the first time in English, this is an interview with the Chilean author Miguel Serrano from around 1991. The interview was conducted by Francisco Vejar. Links to Parts 1 and 2 follow the excerpt below.

First posted published on Wermod and Wermod. 

We are not the first ones to observe that Miguel Serrano’s country scrimps him deserved awards—he, an author published by prestigious British and American publishing houses, and published even in Farsi and Japanese translation. It’s not long since another of his works, C.G. Jung and Herman Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships, has come out in French (Geneva: Georg Editeur, 1991) and it is in the Belgian magazine Vouloir that essayist Bruno Dietsch reserves the following comment for the Chilean writer: Nemo propheta a acceptus est in patria (Ciudad de los Césares, No. 39, Year 1991). To this we must add that his work has been recently republished in France and Russia.

What memories have you from ’38?

Miguel Serrano: It was a secret generation. We lived thinking the world was us and nothing else. There other groups with whom we had no great contact. We got together in night cafés, where we talked. It was the era of the cafés. Our meetings were in the restaurant called Miss Universe . . .

Rest of Part 1, Part 2.

Ernest Shackleton's Farthest South and Faustian Man's Quest for Universal Conquest

First published on The Occidental Observer: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2012/01/ernest-shackletons-farthest-south-and-faustian-mans-quest-for-universal-conquest/

Last month, the Norwegian Prime Minister travelled to the Earth’s southernmost point to mark the centenary of the conquest of the South Pole, where Roald Amundsen and his team, having spent months travelling on the planet’s coldest and most hostile environment, planted their country’s flag on 14 December 1911.

Yet it is the story of Robert Falcon Scott that is best remembered: in the Antarctic Summer of 1911 the British explorer was also making a bid for the Pole—his second, after a failed attempt in 1902, when the extreme conditions on the Ross Ice Shelf forced him and his party to turn around at 82º17’S, variously afflicted by snowblindness, frostbite, and scurvy. Scott and his men reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912, a month after Amundsen, and then perished on the return journey. Their tale, recorded in the explorers’ diaries, made Scott a tragic hero across the Empire—‘the Englishman who conquered the South Pole and who died as fine a death as any man has had the honour to die.’[1] 

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In 1911 Scott had followed a route to the central Antarctic pleateau that had been discovered by a team member in his first polar journey, Ernest Shackleton. Invalided home by the expedition leader after the team returned to base in February 1903, and much aggrieved by Scott’s decision, Shackleton soon organised an expedition of his own, announced at the time as the British Antarctic Expedition.

Ernest Shackleton

Polar historian Beau Riffenburgh’sNimrod is the author’s account of that expedition, which spanned the years 1907 to 1909. As such the account is both educational and entertaining, balancing readability with comprehensive scholarship. It also includes information excluded from Shackleton’s own account, The Heart of the Antarctic, such as his biography, the character of the Victorian era, anecdotal evidence of unrecorded events, the expedition’s aftermath, and the fate of his fellow expeditioners in later years.

Objectively, Shackleton was a failure. His participation in Scott’s British National Antarctic (now known as the Discovery) Expedition of 1901-1904 was terminated early. He failed to reach the pole during his own expedition seven years later. His subsequent trans-Antarctic crossing expedition failed before his ship even reached the continent, trapped in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea. And on his final expedition he died within a day of reaching the first stop of an intended (sub-)Antarctic circumnavigation. Moreover, none of his many business ventures and money-making schemes prospered, and his life outside exploration was restless, aimless, and unfulfilled. His financial affairs were muddled, and he died heavily in debt.

Indeed, although a hero and celebrity across the Empire during the first two decades of the 20th century, he was largely forgotten after his death in 1922, outshone by his former leader and then rival, Robert Scott. Scott’s diaries, on display until May this year at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge (a scan of the whole polar journey diary is also available online), had by then enjoyed numerous editions. And in 1948 Scott’s conquest of the South Pole was immortalised in a film, Scott of the Antarctic, while Shackleton’s achievements received no such treatment.

It was not until until Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, published in 1959, that Anglo-Irish explorer’s reputation experienced a revival, which continued thereafter until it finally eclipsed Scott’s, which was by then suffering from cultural shifts and critical examinations of his legacy. By 2002, when asked to choose the 100 greatest Britons by the BBC, polls ranked Shackleton 11th and Scott 54th.

What makes Shackleton remarkable, now universally acknowledged, is his leadership, which shone brightest when adversity was greatest.

The British Antarctic Expedition was not as well funded as its predecessor. The ship after which it has since been named, Nimrod, was tiny, old, and at the time of acquisition woefully in need of repairs. What is more, Shackleton had promised Scott not to use the latter’s base on Ross Island, so he had to set up his own base at Cape Royds—a location still on Ross Island, and therefore in violation of the promise to Scott, but nonetheless farther away from the South Pole.

Shackleton's Hut in Cape Royds, Ross Island

Shackleton's base at Cape Royds, Ross Island

Shackleton’s main preoccupation was reaching 90ºS, and, unlike Scott, he was not interested in the science. All the same, because his funding depended on it, he assembled an impressive team of scientists, which included among others T.W. Edgeworth David and Douglas Mawson. Thus, the expedition included auxiliary goals, both of which were successful: conquering Mount Erebus, an active volcano in Ross Island, and conquering the magnetic South Pole, at the time located within Victoria Land.[2]

The centre piece of Riffenburgh’s book is the South Polar journey. Led by Shackleton, his was a party of four: Jameson Adams, a Royal Navy Reserve Lieutenant; Frank Wild, a Petty Officer in the Royal Navy; and Eric Marshall, a surgeon, being his team-mates. The size of the party was determined by the number of surviving ponies, four in total, which were the only non-human component of Shackleton’s transport strategy. As originally envisioned, the return journey was to involve a march of 1,719 statute miles (1,494 nautical miles; 2,767 kilometres) over 91 days. When they departed from their base at Ross Island, on 29 October 1908, they knew only that they would need get onto the ‘Great Ice Barrier’ (the Ross Ice Shelf), an structure hundreds of miles long and hundreds of feet deep, and walk due south; the route to the pole, and the geographical features of the pole itself, not to mention any obstacles that may exist in between, were unknown.

Ski tracks on the Ross Ice Shelf, or Great Ice Barrier

Once on the barrier, years earlier, Scott had imagined that he and his party would be able to walk on flat ice all the way to the South Pole. As they neared the end of their march they observed mountains first appearing and then nearing on their right hand side. Once Shackleton passed the previous expedition’s farthest South, using a route farther to the east of Scott’s in order to avoid the heavily crevassed terrain that had previously slowed down their progress, he found the mountains blocked the way south. These were the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, which divide the continent into East and West Antarctica. By the time he reached them, a slow start and difficult conditions on the barrier meant they had already lost three of their ponies, fallen behind schedule, cut their rations, and become weakened by the cold, the physical strain, and inadequate nutrition. Indeed, the Edwardians’ state of knowledge regarding human nutrition and of the demands imposed on the human body by Antarctic conditions meant that by the time the explorers found a route up the mountains and onto the elevated plateau beyond their daily caloric intake of 2,500 was less than half of what they needed.

Scott, Bowers, and co. sledging up the Beardmore Glacier in December 1911, following Shackleton's route.

On a starvation diet, Shackleton and his men ascended what they named the Great Glacier. The latter, subsequently renamed the Beardmore Glacier after the expedition’s biggest sponsor, happened to be also one of the largest in the world. Over the course of a month, the explorers pulled hundreds of pounds of food and equipment on wooden sledges along a fiendishly difficult and crevassed surface for what seemed an unending gradient, each hill revealing a new one behind it, their instruments revealing ever increasing altitude, day after day after day. Mid way up Shackleton found that their remaining food supplies would not last them to the pole, then still thousands of feet higher and still 287 miles away. He cut rations further.

The Antarctic Plateau

It was not until Boxing Day on 1908, 57 days into their journey, that the explorers reached the polar plateau, well over 10,000 feet above sea level. They stood at the edge of a miles-deep ice sheet extending out into the horizon. Riffenburgh is not as descriptive as Cherry-Garrard, who would be a member of Scott’s subsequent Terra Nova expedition and would later write the world’s best ever travel book, narrating his own and his fellow expeditioners’ incredible experiences on the White Continent. From Cherry-Garrard’s account of the conditions Scott found on the plateau two years later we can imagine what the Shackleton party witnessed for the first time in human history. The low temperatures on the Barrier already caused touching metal to give instant frostbite. At such temperatures the ice was iron hard. Back at base, photographic cameras had to be drained because the oil froze. The explorers generally considered a temperature of 32ºF (0ºC) boiling hot; -4ºF (-20ºC), at which boiling water freezes instantly when thrown up in the air, was very normal. Conditions on the plateau are much, much worse. On average it was colder still. Snow felt much harsher, the ice stickier; manhauling across it was like pulling heavy loads on sandpaper. The air was thin, due to the high altitude, but also loaded with ice crystals and thick to the sight, to the point where explorers often walked into a featureless whiteness that made invisible even a hand held before the face. The rarefied air caused respiration and heart rate to increase, in order to supply enough oxygen to the brain. For our standards, any diet had to be insanely high in fat: in 1909 a meal would consist of pemmican (50% pure pork fat, 50% dried meat) dissolved in a pannikin in a ‘hoosh’ with fortified biscuits, chocolate, and raisins; or months-old pony meat. Needless to say that when it is –50ºF outside, ones does not answer the call of nature in the open air.

Even this will be difficult for a city dweller to comprehend. Try doing a ten-mile walk. Then try it pulling a fifteen-foot-long wooden sledge on the asphalt, loaded with two hundred pounds of equipment—see if you complete even a mile like that. Then attempt it on a broken, uneven, undulating surface. Then attempt it again on that surface, going uphill, on a steep gradient. Then attempt it yet again in the rawest North Dakotan winter you have experienced or can imagine, and think even that was a mild day for the explorers. Now try that every day for sixteen hours every day for a week, breaking only once for lunch, and having to unpack and repack your tent and supplies ever time while getting freezer burns and having freezing gale-force winds blowing in your face. After all this, think about doing that while eating only a small fraction of what you need, from October until March. And then of doing it while you have the worst flu you’ve ever experienced. And then doing it with sleeping on a wet, frozen sleeping bag, in a tent so cold that your breath turns into a beard of ice around your face, separated by the rough rock-hard ice under your back by a piece of canvas. Finally, try to lead three men who do not take crap from anyone under these conditions on a journey to a theoretical and otherwise unknown location, with no certainty of success, low pay that may never be paid, likely death, away and cut off from everything and everyone you know, with no comforts, no means to contact anyone, no means for anyone to locate you, and no means to return home except via a ship that docks hundreds of miles away once a year and which will leave you behind if you are not there on the day that you are expected. If you are able to imagine all of this, you will have a sense of what made Shackleton so extraordinary, even for the much higher standards expected from the men of his day. But that is not all, as we will see shortly.

Robert Falcon Scott

On 4 January 1909, about ten days after reaching the plateau, Shackleton realised that conquering the South Pole would be possible only at the cost sacrificing their lives, for if they pressed on to claim their prize with supplies as low as they were, they would never survive the return journey. When other explorers would have chosen to plant the flag on the Pole and die in a blaze of personal glory, certain that their men would have followed loyally to their graves, Shackleton decided to put the safety of his men first and settle for simply extending their newly established farthest South record. Thus he led his men across the plateau, all of them knowing that the prize of months of toil and hardship was now irrevocably out of reach. Still, they went as far South as they possibly could. On the final day, leaving all their supplies behind, they made a final dash, even running at times, to the turnaround point. After several hours they achieved 88º23’S, 97 nautical miles from the Pole. So near, yet so far. It must have demanded enormous strength of character to resist going those final 97 miles—especially knowing that Scott was already planning an expedition for the following year, which would include a South Polar journey should Shackleton fail.

This was achievement in itself. Yet there was more to come. The explorers, much weaker and thinner than when they set out, now faced a return journey that they would have to complete in 50 days when the outward journey had taken them 73. The reason was not only food: they had a 1 March deadline; if they were not back at base by 1 March, their ship would sail home, leaving them for dead.

Although already skin-and-bone wraiths, the men achieved impressive distances. Supplies they had depoted along the way, however, were not enough and a pattern was established with one good meal at a depot, followed by many days surviving on biscuits until the next stash of supplies. By the end of January Wild had developed dysentery, and a week later the entire party was struck by severe enteritis, having eaten tainted pony meat. There was no choice but to press on.

Fortunately, wind in Antarctica blows outwardly from the plateau, so the explorers were able to use their sail to keep up the distances.

The men finally reached their forward base at Hut Point on 28 February. They found the place deserted. There was no sign of the ship. No note had been left. Hoping the ship may still be in the vicinity, Shackleton decided to burn the wooden hut used for magnetic observations in order to attract attention. At first cold made it impossible to set it on fire, but after further attempts they succeeded. Not long afterwards, their ship came into view, having been anchored at some distance, and three days later they were off the barrier and aboard the Nimrod, on their way home.

I enjoy reading about the heroic age of Antarctic exploration not only because it is about as extreme as it gets on our planet, but also because it is emblematic of who we are as a people. As Oswald Spengler wrote:

At the base of every culture lies an idea that is expressed by certain words of profound significance. In Chinese culture these words are tao and li; for the Apollonian Greeks this cultural idea was contained in the words logos and to on (“that which is”). In the languages of Faustian man the basic cultural idea is expressed by the words “will,” “strength,” and “space.” Faustian man differs from all others in his insatiable will to reach the infinite. He seeks to overcome with his telescope the dimensions of the universe, and the dimensions of the earth with his wires and iron tracks. With his machines he sets out to conquer nature. He uses his historical thinking to take hold of the past and integrate it into his own existence under the name of “world history.” With his long-range weapons he seeks to subdue the entire planet, including the remains of all older cultures, forcing them to conform to his own pattern of life.[3]

The feats of Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton, and Douglas Mawson, express a desire to conquer the limits of the Earth. Spengler would argue that Faustian civilisation had already been in its twilight for a hundred years by the time these men claimed swathes of the southernmost continent for the British Empire, mapping and naming hitherto unknown geographical features, setting up scientific bases and communications, and for the first time undertaking—along with Germans, Norwegians, and other European explorers—the scientific study of its geology and climate. Yet this was also a time when the British Empire, and by extension Faustian man, were at their peak of territorial extension and cultural influence. There was a great deal of nervousness and worry about the prospect of decline and degeneration at the time, but these explorers not only thought in terms of national glory—they thought of themselves part of a superior race of men. This was a mentality that was partially destroyed with the First European Civil War of 1914-1918, and definitively obliterated with the Second one that ended 1945.

In terms of exploration, putting an American on the moon remains the crowning achievement for the United States. The Faustian men of 1969, however, were already thinking in terms it being a ‘great leap for mankind’. Only sixty years earlier the glory would have been for the ‘British race’ and the British Empire, not the whole of humanity. However, Spengler would have seen Neil Armstrong’s phrase as a more perfect actualisation of what the German metahistorian called ‘Faustian universalism’. Spengler wrote:

this instinct, totally directed to the outside world, still nourishes the old Faustian will to power and the infinite; now it has become the direful will to absolute domination of the world in the military, economic, and intellectual sense. It can be felt in the historical fact of the World War and in the concept of a world revolution, the idea of forging the swarming multitudes of humanity into a single whole. The imperialism of Babylon aimed only at control of the Near East, while that of the Indie people was limited to India itself; Greek and Roman imperialism was bounded by Britain, Mesopotamia, and the Sahara, and China’s empire extended no further than the Caspian Sea. Modern imperialism, on the other hand, aims at possessing the entire globe. We recognize no borders or limits at all. By means of a new Volkerwanderung we have made America a part of Western Europe. We have constructed on every continent our special kind of cities, and have subjected the native populations to our own way of life and thought. Such activity is the highest possible expression of our dynamic sense of world power. What we believe, what we desire, is meant to be binding on all. [my emphases][4]

The above reflections may highlight our Western universalist outlook in terms of explicit power, but it is entirely consistent with Armstrong’s mentally extending the franchise of the United State’s accomplishment in space exploration to the entire human race, by implication ascribing to every human on Earth America’s and Faustian man’s particular aspirations. Not every human wanted a man to walk on the moon, millions probably never even thought about it. What is more, among Americans only a tiny group was involved in the effort, while on the other side of the globe their rivals in the U.S.S.R. where hoping that an American would not walk on the moon—at least before the red flag had been planted on the lunar surface for the glory of Soviet man.

Amundsen's team at the South Pole from left to right: Roald Amundsen, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting in December 1911.

From left to right: Lawrence Oates, Henry Bowers, Robert Scott, Edward Wilson, and Edgar Evans at the South Pole, January 1912.

A hundred years since Amundsen and Scott planted their respective flags on the South Pole, the space has been controlled by the United States for fifty-five years, and Antarctica is held up as a model of international cooperation, all claims made during the early half of the 20th century having been put aside and all future claims having been prohibited by international treaty since 1959. While Brazil, China, India, Japan, Pakistan, and South Korea have research stations on the continent, Antarctic research remains a largely a White man’s affair, and its exploration an almost exclusively a White man’s enterprise for much of its history. The ideal of an apolitical spirit of human scientific cooperation transcending all borders remains a Faustian ideal. Yet humans are tribal, and we know full well that that which drove our greatest achievements in the history of exploration and science—the will to power and the infinite—also spells our doom. The same way that a hundred years ago Antarctic exploration and conquest was imbued with racial pride and a nationalist spirit, a hundred years from now this may well be the case again, although it may not be our descendants who dominate that part of the globe, or even of space exploration.

It does not have to be that way, of course, and, should we prove successful in our cause, the White race may rise again with a new civilisation, the way that the Faustians rose as the Graeco-Romans fell. But will they have the same will to power and the infinite? If so, the legacy of our early explorers will continue to be honoured in centuries to come, and it will be the names of our ancestors, our gods, and our heroes that name planets and celestial objects as we discover them. Let us hope that there are men of Shackleton’s calibre out there, or that we are still capable of producing them.

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[1]     Apsley Cherry-Garrard. The Worst Journey in the World. London: Constable & Company, 1922.

[2]     It is now outside the Antarctic Circle altogether, off the coast of Adélie Land

[3]     Oswald Spengler. Prussianism and Socialism.

[4]     Ibid.