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Bakhmut under fire [Daily Aviation]

As anyone who isn’t a Stone Age, bone-in-the-nose, bow-and-arrow tribesman in some patch of the Andamans must now know, last Friday was the anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s misconceived 3-day conquest of Ukraine.  By a year ago on Saturday the Spetznaz squads roaming Kiev were meant to have decapitated the government.  By a year ago yesterday the designated Putin puppet was meant to have made the short flight from Minsk to Hostomel for the drive through cheering crowds to the city centre for his victory broadcast from the president’s office.  Putin’s masterly use of surprise would be taught at military colleges for generations.

Where we are, instead, has been summed up by countless opinion pieces across what, in military speak, is now called “the information space”.  One pithy and accurate piece was published on Friday’s anniversary at Geopolitical Monitor by occasional contributor Nicholas Velasquez.

He summed up the current disposition at the front in a single sentence:

The stockpile phase of the Russo-Ukraine war has ended and it is clear that the conflict is now attrition based.

The stockpile, it should be noted, was always expected to be the likely deliverer of Russian victory.  Western military specialists spoke from the beginning about the several million shells and deep stores of missiles of all kinds available to the invader.  After Kiev, when the Russian command’s focus was scaled back to the east, Russian shell consumption was estimated during the successful artillery battles for Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk at 20,000 shells a day.  But, ultimately, the stockpile was not deep enough.  The old Soviet artillery strategy of soaking the ground, allied to the widespread employment of missiles on civilian targets, has resulted in shell starvation and reliance on ageing and non-optimal missiles plus the forty or so that Russian manufacturers can actually produce each month.  The result is the switch to attrition (which is, of course, also a traditional Russian military strategy).

Accordingly, the world waited for the grand offensive to begin, and Russian numbers to overwhelm the defenders.  It now transpires that it did, in fact, begin about a fortnight ago, which one can see in the jump in Russian dead reported by the defenders.  Of course the losses render the generation of the required mass much slower than intended.  Yes, there is a build up, and pressure is increasing on the defenders entrenched in and around Bakhmut.  But so far meaningful advances remain elusive, in part surely because the dead tend to be experienced soldiers while their replacements are green mobiks who are not particularly sure why they are fighting.  Western media are reporting that Putin “is considering” mobilising another 500,000 men.  But his army doesn’t have the capacity to train that number for an offensive operation in much under a year.  It also doesn’t have the hardware to support them.  All it can do is to continue the same asymmetrical attritional process and hope that an exhausted West is driven to, in turn, drive the Ukrainians to the negotiating table.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are able to hold on so far, and are organising for an offensive when Western weapon and ammunition supplies allow – thought to be late spring/early summer, when the spring rains, the rasputitsa, are over and the ground is baked hard.  Their language is of a victory before winter comes again in which case, if it holds now, the fortress of Bakhmut will have survived more than a year under siege.  Unsurprisingly, this prospect is concentrating minds in Europe’s capitals and in the Kremlin about the consequences of defeat for Russia.  In his GM article Velasquez lays out what is at stake:

If the West, led by the United States, supports a peace deal where Russia gets even a mile of land in Eastern Ukraine, it sends a message to authoritarian regimes with designs on foreign lands that they can seize land by force of arms with impunity so long as the invaded state acquiesces. If the United States supports any peace settlement featuring any territorial concession it will serve as a tacit acknowledgment that the post-World War Two international order is dead.

… with the consequence that ...

Though international peace and stability should always be the object of the security policy of the West and the United States, peace in it of itself is not a noble aspiration if it can produce a world where malign states may wage war on their weaker neighbors with impunity. The Western states, as the primary architects of the rules-based international order, are responsible for its maintenance. As a result, the West must ensure that Russia’s revisionist aspirations are defeated in Ukraine and at the negotiating table.

All that is true enough.  However, I do think it stops short of the real motivation of Washington, which is to defend not the rules-based order per se but the Western investor, central banking and corporate elites’ geo-economic model for the Globality.  In that respect, internationally recognised legal restraints on the ambitions and predations of military powers are a fundamental precondition (not, of course, through any intent on the part of the Allies after WW2, but certainly by the effect of those restraints today).  Why, because the Western elites have to escape the limitations of “the West” in order to become the economic masters of the whole globe.  So Washington - the political arm of those elites - must re-engineer all the machinery of its own global hegemony in a multipolar environment secured by every other national elite consenting to leave the conflicts of history and borders behind forever.  At least that’s the expectation.  But, as stated on several MR threads, there are two other models for the Globality in play, and both are geopolitical in kind.  One, sometimes denied, subtly hidden from the historical light, is the CCP’s.  The other is Putin’s eurasianist model.  A nightmare of only superficially economic blocs, each ruled over by a single militarily dominant force, it is the polar opposite of the Western elites’ idea and an absolute challenge to the rules-based order.  The war in Ukraine is precisely a battle, and probably the final battle, in the existential conflict of these two models.  Defeat will be terminal for one of them, and it will be the Russian one.

As Velasquez puts it:

Putin, though a liar on most issues, is correct to fear that the West wants to “inflict a strategic defeat” on Russia. The West should inflict a strategic defeat on Russia that echoes throughout the Russian decision-making apparatus, such that it changes Moscow’s strategic culture from here on out.

In other words, while Russia’s future is without doubt as a part of the international architecture, perhaps even sharing in China’s economic hegemony, in military defeat there can be no eurasianism, none of the imperial adventurism, land grabs, frozen conflicts, and satrapy of old.  It is likely that Russia will be stripped of Kaliningrad and Transnistria, and Crimea too, if the Ukrainians do not take it themselves.  Across the southern republics borders will be re-drawn.  For the first time in four and half centuries Muscovy must find sufficiency in the peoples and the immensity of its own landmass.

That being so, only one question remains for the Western elites to ponder: can they really constrain Chinese ambitions, particularly in the southern hemisphere, within a geo-economic globalist corset?  In essence, is the very idea of a multipolar world an impossibility and a blind denial of the nature of men?

The Conservative Woman, one of the last remaining Brit Disqus sites where it is possible to speak nearly honestly, published a piece this morning on the co-incidence of “the bio-security state” and fascism.  The connection was dependent on the veracity, or otherwise, of the late Umberto Eco’s undisciplined Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.

There is so much nonsense written about fascism - mostly by tediously conventional minds who insist that Mussolini was a socialist so fascism was socialism - that I thought I would post a comment very generally expressing my own comprehension of the dread philosophy.  Here it is.  Naturally, it will not be understood by the tedious.

Eco was an Italian so one would have thought he might have something useful to say about fascism, but evidently not.  Perhaps it’s just not possible anymore.  So much rot is now talked about fascism, with so many people enworlded in liberalism and modernity so incapable of reaching its essence, that the thing itself is reduced to a mere hate-label.

The first and most essential point is that it was an extreme and assertive nationalism of becoming.  It sought to be historically active and nationally transformative and, therefore, it had to be Nietzschean or it was nothing.  It was not traditionalist but modernist and radically forward-looking - “Fascist Man” was newly if not freely self-confected.  He followed the party’s prescription for the rebirth of, or return to, heroism and action.  It is not, of course, traditonalist merely to recognise that liberal modernity has reduced Man to a meek and compliant instrument of the economy, or to ask if he was something more than that in the pre-modern age.  However, its modernism meant that it accepted modern capital and sought a new and inhering role for the corporation within its transformative scheme.

The second point is that it was against the massifying tendencies of the modern world, including democracy and equality.  It was not, therefore, socialist in the sense that socialism is understood within the liberal thought-world.  It did not apprehend class but nation, and not class consciousness but ethnic consciousness in an age when ethnicity was naturally and beautifully synonymous with the nation state.  Socialism in nationalism refers to the singularity and solidarity of the folk, and the natural bonds thereof.  A huge number of somewhat simple-minded folk assume for the horseshoe theory of a single universe of thought.  It’s a falsehood.  We live in an intellectual multiverse in which the politics of genetic interests never come near to the politics of the unfettered will.  They mutually seek the other’s destruction.  Within nationalist thought, fascism (with National Socialism and Judaism) stands at the imperialistic pole of the axis, in opposition to nativism.

The third point is that it was peculiarly statist.  It rejected the destining of the folk (which inhabits National Socialism and Judaism).  Instead, it encompassed everything within the vehicle of the dynamic state as the centre of a restored greatness and empire.

This is the general flavour of the thing.  If we dispense with the horseshoe, the hate-label, and so forth, do I really see it shining through modern global elitism?  No, not at all.  Most obviously, global elitism sees no precious folk but a deracinated, a-causal, coffee-coloured mass from which its own rare and perfumed subjects are uniquely different and, by that difference, may royally inflate themselves and endow themselves with all the world’s riches.  It is not a politics like fascism, or politics at all.  It is the crime of the century.

The Pre-Raphaelite painter Holman Hunt’s Awakening Conscience, painted in 1853

Two or three days ago Tim Murray asked quite a challenging question:

And this is a monocle through which to view your posts in the same way that “marginal change” is a monocle through which to view everything that the late Jude Wanninski wrote (very useful model btw ... true change happens at the margin … like this blog of yours).  I suppose then, that your projects … OSP EGI (Ontological, Structural, Political, Ethnic Genetic Interests) are your way of surviving (?) that emerging global hegemony.  Am I correct here?

Such a question deserves proper consideration and an honest answer.  What constant runs through one’s material, and most expresses its force and direction.  The short answer in my case is: awakening, by which I mean a bit more than racial awakening since we require a positive and holistic collective step and not merely a rejection of the Other, important though that obviously is.  Positive, holistic ... words are cheap, never more so than in politics.  But can one construct, say, a single sentence that catches the whole flavour of it, or gets to the very heart of it in such a way that others will recognise something from their own experience and know, more or less, what is meant?

I don’t under-estimate the difficulty of communicating a positive and indeed holistic interpretation of “awakening”.  Many years ago a young American man with a very high IQ and what I suppose one might call a strongly osmotic sense for human truth arrived on this site.  He wrote some pieces for us but his real interest was (what is vulgarly termed) spiritual.  He had gleaned something from my scribblings along the lines of Timothy’s question, not that it was ever directly stated by me; but still there was something he suspected might lie on the path he was travelling.  We corresponded regularly by email, during which he told me of his periodic raids on the local library for “guru-style” self-help books.  What was my opinion of this writer ... did I think that discipline was helpful, and so on.  I began what turned out to be a long process of trying to explain the difference between exoteric and esoteric practise.  No matter how clearly I thought I expressed myself, still my correspondent came back with the idée fixe that his goal was to improve himself, or at least his psychological functioning.  Then one day an email arrived with the word “Epiphany” plastered in capitals across the top, followed by three exclamation marks.  He had got it.  He had suddenly tumbled to the great but recondite truth that the trap that was his own personhood, as it is formed by his enculturation and as it is set rock-hard in the routines and constancies of his mind-function, especially by the general state of absence in which we all exist, is the tyranny we must transcend.

I don’t know to this day what it was I had said to him that set off this realisation, or if it was anything I had said at all.  But by it he took what I could give and went on his way shortly after.  I know that a later port of call was Christopher Langan and his pan-psychist CTMU.  But after that, nothing.

Anyway, the moral of the tale is that, given the nature of “the constant” in my case, it is by no means certain that mere words will suffice, and I will very likely fail to communicate much at all.  But, for better or worse, here is the formulation for Tim’s requested “monocle”:

It is the transit out of all that we as individuals and as a people have given to and taken from our enworldment, meaning everything that belongs to Time and Place and not to us, and functions in us without our attention, quite mechanically, robbing us of all the days of our life ... and towards all we are, which abides closer to us than the breath in our body, the most redolent truth of which was known to us and was with us before, and always will be so.

There is a tendency for prominent politicians, central bankers, and other panjandrums of Western public life, inevitably men and women of a globalist bent, to refer to their coming global order not only as an historical inevitability ... the product of vast and insuperable forces ... but also as a struggle fraught with the possibility of tragic failure.  There is a sizeable “if” about the whole idea.  Notwithstanding their measureless power, these people worry that The Globality may, in fact, prove elusive.  What can this mean?

After all, there is no resistance anywhere in the West to their project.  The democratic process is a captive or, if it cannot be captured it is ignored or, if it cannot be ignored, it is repeated until the “right” answer comes back.  The main political parties were long since captured, the political class corrupted.  All offer the same narrow policy platform.  The dateline corporations are on board (despite reservations in some cases).  The astonishing technologies which are developing in computer science and the life sciences are being successfully piggybacked.  Thus the means to impose control through a digital currency, be it linked to a health passport or not, already exists.  The means to permanently surveil the movements, purchases and public statements of the population exists.  The utilisation of the dicta of Sustainable Development to cover nitrogen and methane, and so meat production, thereby “requiring” the expropriation of farmland and the forcing on the “useless eaters” of no doubt highly profitable non-meat substitutes, is coming into effect already in certain pilot countries.  It is true that the wired trans-human is still more science fiction than reality, as is the end of ageing.  But other programmes are more advanced, and not a few fully realised.  So with all this rolling along nicely, why do our glorious elites speak with such uncharacteristic diffidence?

Our glorious elites speak with such uncharacteristic diffidence because they cannot be certain of the compliance of their non-Western counterparts.  Specifically, they fear that:

(a) The ambitions of non-Western leaders remain stubbornly within the old limits of personal and national aggrandisement.

(b) The Western elites and their technocratic framework are perceived to be foisting yet more arrogant and grasping post-colonial dictate on southern hemisphere nations.  “Arrogant” and “grasping” the elites probably don’t mind too much.  But “post-colonial” hits a nerve.  Theirs is, after all, just another control system originating in the West.

It is the first of these fears, however, which is most disruptive, and which has brought the Western elites into open and existential conflict with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

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One of the prime events of the calendar for Anglosphere nationalism is also its year-end event.  That is Millenniyule, the unique and engrossing series of twenty plus live-streams conducted by the cultural critic and content creator Millenialwoes (Woes for short).  This year was the eighth in the series.

I have not listened to everything, though I have visited every stream to get a sense of the interview subject.  Many are well-known on the dissident podcast scene.  They are an eclectic mix, which only adds to the immense task Woes sets himself each December (and handles so expertly).  Some of them our host engages for 45 minutes, some for a couple of hours.  The two marathon streams, though, are several hours apiece.  Of these, the longest by far, at one minute longer than seven hours, was the final stream of Millenniyule 2022, with Morgoth:

Next for sheer expansiveness, at four hours nineteen minutes, was the stream with Academic Agent:

AA’s analysis, it must be said, is that of Schmittian reductionism, placing power before idealism.  But there is a lot of interest in the conversation, as there is, as ever, in the Morgoth stream.  It seems to me that one can just as profitably start the year with such material as end it.

Here is the central difficulty with Heideggerian philosophy - the being of a thing does not, in itself, supply a cause for the thing to be.  This is not quite an example of the Naturalistic Fallacy, because there is a difference between ethical choice as a construct of the higher emotions and thought, and sheer instinctual survival.  It is a qualitative difference, obviously, but it is also an operative difference.  For example, as the flame burns the hand, the nervous system signals the brain and the brain signals the muscles to tense and contract. The whole action is completed an eternity of microseconds before the emotions of fear and alarm well up.  The intellectual faculty ... the considering mind ... lumbers into view only much later still.  Considering is redundant.  So, in this case “must” is operative, not “ought”.  We don’t have a problem with Hume and Moore.  We have a problem elsewhere, in the categorical separateness of being-there-then and the animus.  Being (for example, being at the point of acquiring a burnt hand) never leaves its own site of reference.  The animus has another site, in the organism’s primordial defence mechanism.  If we hold that essence precedes existence (and we “ought”) we might consider that the animus is the cosmic will-to-be of the organism, while being is the consequent action of the organism in Time and Place.

This separateness is the reason that nationalist folks often see folkish-ness and traditionalism as tainted by a solipsistic “shire” mentality devoid of the politically necessary, hard cutting edge.  That may or may not always be fair.  But in the matter of a people’s existence there is a relatively small number of positive forces which supply, or contribute to supplying, such a cutting edge.  Survival and continuity, identity, home are the stuff of the naturalistic, nativist pole of the nationalist axis, which just might array like this:

Interestingly, these causes are also the stuff of jus bellum.  Heidegger is in them but he is not them.

These few thoughts follow from a hearing of a conversation, distinctively Heideggerian in parts, conducted by a very interesting nationalist, a thinking nationalist, named Scott Mannion with my old friend, the cultural critic, essentialist, and speaker of truths, Morgoth.  Indeed it is titled, “Morgoth – How to find trad meaning in modernist hell”:

It is clear that Scott is a genuine intellectual, possibly an academic, who has journeyed into Heidegger, arriving at experience, or re-experience, of what, I suppose, we must call our cultural heritage and tradition as signifier of our shared, particular and ethnic being.  It is clear that Morgoth’s celebrated practise of rural walking in search of the permanent and authentic in his native north-east England holds a particular significance for Scott.  I very much liked the easy overlap of their worldviews, and the courtesy with which Scott granted Morgoth time to speak of his.  The whole conversation had a positive and hopeful mein.

Scott repeatedly referred to our being as a tangible permanence which the estrangements and machine-living of modernity can never banish or besmirch, and this is true enough.  Of course, when listening to the thoughts of friends there are still always a few points of divergence.  I am primarily interested in the ontology of racial awakening rather than in cultural archeaology.  But it would be churlish to make too much of that now.  It is enough just to encounter another intellectual realist in the impoverished home of English nationalism.

When he appeared eighteen months ago on the GBNews slate, speaking truth to camera, Neil Oliver surprised a lot of people who remembered him only as a presenter of history programmes and the series Coast.  This is his latest offering, which is pretty good.  A few more like him could make a difference