This is apparently a real thing (reformated for additional piety):

Our Chavez, who art in heaven, the Earth, the sea,
And we, delegates, hallowed be thy name.
Thy legacy come, so we can spread it to people here and elsewhere.
Give us this day light to guide us.
Lead us not into the temptation of capitalism;
Deliver us from the evil of oligarchy,
Like the crime of contraband,
Because ours is the homeland, peace, and life.
Forever and ever. Amen.
Viva Chavez!

We owe this contribution to the world’s storehouse of religious ecstasy to María Uribe, representative of Venezuela’s Socialist Party.

A brief, perfectly balanced post at Mangan’s pulls together HBD and political history into the suggestion that nationalism is just a phase we’ve been going through.

… the paradox of nationalism is that the same forces that led to its development are leading to its denou[e]ment. But what is to be done about that I don’t know.

Some quality comments there too. You’re all welcome back here after checking it out, with any relevant responses and arguments.

Nationalism is the one modern progressive ideology that gets off the hook far too easily in NRx circles. (And “what is to be done?” is Lenin’s question, adopted from this guy. It shouldn’t be proscribed, but it should definitely be subjected to disciplined suspicion.)

So weekly Chaos Patches are still happening for the time being (in case you hadn’t noticed).

Zizek! (Plagiarism exposed, tormented by Steve Sailer, publicly humiliated in Newsweek and The American Spectator, ‘apologizes‘ by blaming a ‘friend’ … plenty of mileage left in this, I believe.) Despite the brutal Schadenfreude, this blog has a soft spot for Zizek, partly because of the whole CIA agent thing.

Automatically generate Tumblr ‘arguments‘.

How to get suspended from Twitter.

Interstellar Decopunk.

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Mark Warburton passed this masterpiece along (Revolutionary Apocalypse, by Luciano Pellicani). A couple of tiny morsels from its consistently brilliant — and eerily familiar — analysis:

With Puritanism, an absolutely new element was introduced into Western civilisation: (revolutionary) politics as fulfillment of God’s will, with the objective of consciously building “a new human community, that could substitute the lost Eden” and produce a prodigious “change in human nature.” For centuries, politics had been conceived as a “cybernetic art” (Plato) or as a technique for the accumulation of power (Machiavelli). From the Puritan cultural revolution on, politics was conceived as a soteriological practice, dominated by an eschatological tension toward the Kingdom of God on earth, therefore as a calling, whose methodical objective was to overturn the world in order to purify it. The slogan originally used by the Taborites and the Anabaptists was revived: “Permanent warfare against the existing, in the name of the New World.”

And:

An all-powerful state is essential for communism, since the total destruction of civil society is the only way to destroy capitalism. By civil society we mean the “society of industry, of general competition, of freely pursued private interest, of anarchy, of natural and spiritual individuality alienated from self.” But since capitalism — Lenin’s definition is correct — is a phenomenon that is generated spontaneously, whenever the ideological power relaxes its watch, the effort to prevent mammon from raising its head must be permanent. It is a matter of annihilation that requires mass terror, since the main enemy of communism is “widespread petit bourgeois spontaneity.” Thus, the “revolutionary project challenges the normal course of history.” It is a huge effort to prevent humanity from moving spontaneously toward a bourgeois society. This is only achieved through permanent terror.

If Pellicani is already being widely discussed in the reactosphere, I’ve missed it. My guess: he’ll be considered an indispensable reference by this time next year.

The story that follows was stolen from somewhere, but I’ve not been able to recover the source. It has a definite neoconservative edge to it, which isn’t surprising given the early-nullities brain-feed it was no doubt extracted from, but it’s neat enough to be passed on.

If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires in space, the First World War was the equivalent burial ground in time. The German Second Reich, the Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) Empire, the Russian (Romanov) Empire, and the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire were all interred by it. In their place arose new geopolitical entities based upon an unstable mixture of ethno-nationalist self-determination and moral-universalist internationalism. The role of American ideas in the New Order – most immediately conveyed by the vehicle of ‘Wilsonism’ – was both substantial and ambiguous. A tight swirl of Americanization and Anti-Americanism would be essential to everything that followed.

If Austro-Germanic imperial collapse can be considered one thing, for the sake of elegance, the true narrative marvel of this story can unfold, because each dead empire was the germ of a world war, structuring history in its fundamentals up to the present day. From each imperial grave, in succession, came a challenge to the Anglophone global order, distinct in certain respects, but also displaying common, recognizable features.

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