Martin has sent me his latest Prudent Bear piece, which deserves the posting here.

GW

Close observers of the US housing finance disaster in recent months will have noted a curious phenomenon. Companies such as Countrywide that were in late August regarded as rock solid have recently passed clearly into the danger zone while those like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that were regarded as potential market saviors have come under a cloud. In Britain Northern Rock, whose September bailout was said to be modest, involving little risk to the taxpayer has now turned into an immense 25 billion pound ($51 billion) potential black hole – real money even in the US economy let alone in the much smaller British one. This illustrates a deeply troubling quality of the largest downturns: the tendency for the free market to turn into a death spiral, in which even sound well-run institutions are engulfed.

Death spirals are fairly rare in financial history. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was perhaps the most virulent example. After the first downturn, the market recovered for several months. Then the collapse of the Bank of the United States in December 1930, together with the further economic damage from the Smoot-Hawley Tariff caused a further collapse in confidence and activity that was concentrated in the banking sector, as relatively solid institutions followed the Bank of the United States into bankruptcy. The Federal Reserve failed to correct for the money supply contraction caused by the bank bankruptcies, leading the US economy further into the pit. The additional shove given by President Herbert Hoover’s 1932 tax increase was almost unnecessary; only the confidence brought by a new president (albeit with equally counterproductive economic policies) brought recovery from 1933. By the time the spiral was over, more than one fourth of the banks in the United States had gone bankrupt and the stock market had bottomed out at one tenth of its peak.

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On April 19, 2007, anniversary of “the shot heard round the world” which started the US revolutionary war, a suspected foreign agent introduced a despotic piece of legislation to the US House of Representatives.  The House has now, apparently fearful of the Ron Paul revolution, overwhelmingly voted to pass H.R. 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 which defines:

HOMEGROWN TERRORISM- The term `homegrown terrorism’ means the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.

The Second Amendment to the US Constitution:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

It is clear from the language, and even more so the history of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution that “planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States” is “necessary to the security of a free state”.

Specifically, the “group.. born, raised… within the United States” is “the people” and the founders qualified “state” with “free” specifically to distinguish it from the current state of “the United States government”.

In March of this year I put up a post about sociobiology and Conservatism.  It was, in fact, simply a reproduction of a thread debate at Troy Southgate’s New Right Forum.

It was overly long, I know, and self-indulgent, and it entered upon some abstruse territory.  Well, we are heading back in that direction with this post.  It’s another, still-live thread from Troy’s Forum, this time dealing with the tension between empiricism and New Right philosophy.

Now, tactically, the American radical right, to which I belong, should make its accomodation with the European New Right.  Both are marginalised.  Both are attempting to confront the existential threats to their respective peoples.  For both, these involve a traitorous elite, untrammelled immigration, neo-Marxist extremism, Jewish ethno-aggression, etc.

But it isn’t that straightforward.  The ARR, beset as it is by racial guilt-mongers, Jewish media power, and official lies, seeks proofs to pave its people’s path.  The ENR, beset by American neo-liberalism, egalitarian democracy and plain history, damn it, reifies the European spirit to inspire its people upward towards the light.

Neither appreciates the other.  For American empiricism, it seems, is anti-human to the one, and the European spirit is a fiction to the other.

Here, in miniature, is the way contact between these two brothers pans out.  The thread is long and complex, and the quality of contributions is not always as considered or literate as a properly crafted blog entry.  Feel free to dive in and cherry pick, rather than labour through the whole thing.  If you are completely incurious or just impatient, look away NOW!

If further interesting Forum comments appear in my OE Inbox, I will, of course, update the entry.

OK ... the thread began innocently enough with an announcement by Welf Herfurth of his latest article.

From there it wandered contentedly into a discussion about Apollonianism and Dionysianism as understood by Nietzsche and a number of New Right philosophers and writers.  I confess that I am not at all well read in this area, and inevitably find myself on the margins of such discussions.  However, the discussion reached the point where Troy averred:-

The reason why Nietzsche’s philosophy inevitably relates to the East, of course, is because the innate Indo-European mindset tends naturaly to look in that direction and away from the imported religions of the Middle East. It’s quite ironic, really, as though East and West have changed places or exhanged values. Not that it can’t be explained by Indo-European migration on the one hand and, on the other, the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire and Islam through immigration. I’m being decidedly Euro-centric here, of course.

This piqued my interest.  Here was that word again ... “innate”.  And used to make Europe a spiritual child of the Sub-Continent rather than the Jewish Middle East.  I couldn’t care less about the Jewish Middle East, but   I do care about intellectual integrity:-

There is nothing in the Indo-European religious canon that is “innate”. On the contrary, it needs to be understood that everything innate is selected, including a tendency, where it occurs, towards a “spiritual” explanation of Nature and Existence ... but ONLY the tendency, NOT the forms which that may take. Certainly, Troy, we are not Jungians, and have no need to cling to forms of collective consciousness.

The intellectual procession of Western Man can be understood as a Manichean and unwinnable contest between that 50 to 60% or so who are naturally religious (including liberals) and the 40 to 50% or so who have no idea whatsoever what all the fuss is about, but generally have to go along with it anyway. The tendencies to faith and rationalism are both selected qualities of the European mind.

Troy, however, was unfazed:-

On the contrary, GW, I am a Jungian.

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THE MOON OVER ALBION

by Xenia Sunic

She emerged late one night
Heavy–orbed and unnaturally red
Pregnant with some strange powers
Over Albion.

Forests of never-dying city-dazzling lights
Always in conflict with her celestial appearance,
And the maddening crowd twitching for short excitements
Ignoring the beauty of her sudden sight.

She remained with herself,
Her bygone worshippers; long time dead,
And now finding a hideout within a white cloud,
Then powerfully emerging, madly lightning,
Over the ancient waters and stones of Albion.

Her mystery absorbed; carried on the wings of an Albatross
Over the distant seas, reflecting in the deepest waters
Far away from the mechanical city lights
That obliterate the living darkness of the nights,
And the mystery of her existence.

Hail to thee, that carry us over to shores of after-life,
Through your glimmering moonlight gardens
To the worlds of unknown time,
Through your mighty pull and cosmic flow
To everlasting deathless otherness.

The Moon over Albion!

(Click here for the audio reading of this story.)

Now Is the Time

From 1982 (when “videotext network” was used to describe the mass-availability of computer networking):

“...the prophecies of a despotic, “cashless-society” are quite likely to become a reality.  My opinion is that this nightmare will eventually be realized but not before the American pioneers have had a chance to reach each other and organize.  I base this hope on the fact that the first people to participate in the videotex network will represent some of the most pioneering of Americans, since videotex is a new “territory”.”

Now is the time.

If my ability in 1982, to predict the Internet-based Ron Paul phenomenon, counts for anything today, then let it count for this:

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Should there be European populations in Africa, living alongside Africans?

To Ian Smith, the former Prime Minister of Rhodesia who died yesterday, and the man who unilaterally declared independence from Britain on 11th November 1965, the question did not even arise.  The 300,000 white Rhodesians whose cause he championed were almost all of British descent, and almost all enjoyed a pretty good life in their southern fastness of the continent of the negro.  That had to be made to continue.  The shining commercial success, the gentle settler culture, the ties of family, the imaginings of belonging ...  it was inconceivable that these things could be allowed to be lost, simply be given up.

But where are they now?

Smith, of course, was a remarkable man in many ways, and his obituaries will dwell upon that.  Those in the conservative and nationalist spheres will laud him as a man of his people and, in the light of the Mugabe experience, someone not without wisdom and foresight.  How his words, from the Declaration of Unilateral Independence, resound now:-

... African nationalists believe that, provided they stirred up sufficient trouble, they will be able to blackmail the British Government into bringing about a miracle on their behalf by handing the country over to irresponsible rule.

A little further on in the Declaration, Smith held out the possibility that the African would, one day, be ready for self-rule:-

Those who seek to damage us do not have any great concern for the principles to which they endlessly pay lip service; for if they really believed in these principles, which they ceaselessly proclaim, then they could not possibly deny, the many disasters which have been brought about by the premature withdrawal of European influence from countries in Africa and Asia who where nowhere near ready for it.

He said it, no doubt, out of political pragmatism.  But he could not have believed it.  Indeed, elsewhere he is quoted as saying:-

“I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing.  It spread civilization to Africa.  Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing.”

Really ... rightly, Smith was, first and last, a believer in the white tribe of Rhodesia.  He trusted to their independence of mind, their industry and determination, and their self-reliance.  In an age when self-doubt and self-hatred scarred the European mind, Smith trusted wholly to these settler qualities.

Now, it’s easy for us today to support what Smith and his tribe attempted to do.  It was magnificent to stand against the moralising, liberalistic nonsense spouted by the global great and good.  And there’s no sane reason to invite an African “nationalist” to tea.

But that’s not enough.  Even if the impossible had happened, and Rhodesia had survived the odds (of 22 Africans to every white Rhodesian), it’s just not enough.

The question arises whether the shallow cultural roots and economic goods that white Rhodesians thought they were protecting were, in fact, worthwhile.  But life is more than these things, no matter that history is littered with similar collective errors of judgement.

There are secondary interests and there is a primary interest.  Smith and his Rhodesians were fighting for secondary interests, and a truly wise leader might have ventured to look ahead and divine their destruction anyway.  After all, others did: white South Africa considered the game lost across the Limpopo, and used its army at the end to keep the border crossings open for escaping whites.

Looking at Smith and UDI from our blighted vantage point today, it is odd to think that a black or Indian or Pakistani Smith might arise one day in an England rent by ethnic conflict and, in due course, certain to see a reclamation of sovereignty by its native people.  How will we view someone who refuses to repatriate, and steadfastly holds that seventy or eighty years of family history here ... weddings, births and funerals ... homes made ... taxes paid ... qualifies him and his kind to stay?  As a tragic figure, perhaps, at war with the spirit of the times.  But mostly, we will think him mistaken.  We would think the more of him if he could divine the lowly value of his interests here, and choose the higher interests of a true homeland and a secure future far away.

Ian Smith was not such a visionary.  He was a good man living, like his and every minority immigrant tribe, in the wrong place.

Alex Jones devoted almost an hour of his radio show to discussing the Zogby blind poll, which Jones Productions commissioned, that showed evidence Ron Paul is the most viable candidate the Republicans have.  (The soap infomercial is obnoxious—just slider-bar passed it.)

by Welf Herfurth

(This article contains one sick photo. I included it in the article to show how perverted society has become, at least in my opinion - Welf Herfurth)

1. Introduction

This is an article divided up, roughly, into two halves. The first concerns liberalism, or what liberalism has become. It details a transition in liberalism – from a cult of elections and parliaments, to a cult of doing your own thing (even if that involves sexual and other debauchery). The second half outlines what I consider to be the New Right antidote to the poison of modern liberalism, and explores some of the ideas of a liberal democratic anti-intellectual, Karl Löwenstein, who, in 1937, wrote a paper describing some of the political techniques used by the fascist political movements of the time. Some of those techniques are still being used by nationalists around the world (Hungary, Sweden, Russia, Britain, etc.), and, in my opinion, we in Australia can apply them equally as successfully here.

2. What is liberalism really?

Nowadays, one can read, in the Western liberal democratic press, daily denunciations of General Musharaff of Pakistan and the Burmese Junta. The two dictatorships have attracted media attention recently because of their flagrant crackdowns on ‘liberal democratic’ political opponents (or at least, opponents who the Western media assumes are liberal democratic).

Now and then, other dictatorships and/or authoritarian regimes will occupy the spotlight. One recent case is Georgia, which is led by an American-backed liberal democrat, Mikhail Saakashvili, who came to power through an ‘Orange Revolution’-type coup (nicknamed the ‘Rose Revolution’) in 2003, but is now in danger of being overthrown, and now, as a result, has declared a state of emergency and is using state repression – including tear gas and rubber bullets – to subdue the populace.

A perennial target of the Western media is Vladimir Putin. Despite his massive support among the Russian people, and massive election results in his favor, the Western media still considers him to be ‘undemocratic’ and ‘illiberal’, and upholds his critics – small groups of ‘liberal democratic’ dissidents, who have no popular support, and no agenda beyond being anti-Putin – as being more ‘democratic’, and certainly more morally worthy.

So we have a collection of countries – Burma, Pakistan, Fiji, Russia and others – which are manifestly illiberal and democratic in the eyes of Western liberal democrats. But what is it, exactly, that makes our liberal democracies so good? Why are they preferable to these dictatorships and authoritarian regimes? The answer is, simply, that people in liberal democracies are ‘more free’ – in fact, they are ‘free to do their own thing’.

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