Readers of Nietzsche, or of Eugene Rose, are already familiar with the attribution of a cultural teleology to modernity, directed to the consummate realization of nihilism. Our contemporary crisis finds this theme re-animated within a geopolitical context by the work of Alexandr Dugin, who interprets it as a driver of concrete events — most specifically the antagonization of Russia by an imploding world liberal order. He writes:

There is one point in liberal ideology that has brought about a crisis within it: liberalism is profoundly nihilistic at its core. The set of values defended by liberalism is essentially linked to its main thesis: the primacy of liberty. But liberty in the liberal vision is an essentially negative category: it claims to be free from (as per John Stuart Mill), not to be free for something. […] … the enemies of the open society, which is synonymous with Western society post-1991, and which has become the norm for the rest of the world, are concrete. Its primary enemies are communism and fascism, both ideologies which emerged from the same Enlightenment philosophy, and which contained central, non-individualic concepts – class in Marxism, race in National Socialism, and the national State in fascism). So the source of liberalism’s conflict with the existing alternatives of modernity, fascism or communism, is quite obvious. Liberals claim to liberate society from fascism and communism, or from the two major permutations of explicitly non-individualistic modern totalitarianism. Liberalism’s struggle, when viewed as a part of the process of the liquidation of non-liberal societies, is quite meaningful: it acquires its meaning from the fact of the very existence of ideologies that explicitly deny the individual as society’s highest value. It is quite clear what the struggle opposes: liberation from its opposite. But the fact that liberty, as it is conceived by liberals, is an essentially negative category is not clearly perceived here. The enemy is present and is concrete. That very fact gives liberalism its solid content. Something other than the open society exists, and the fact of its existence is enough to justify the process of liberation.

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Zombies are targeted in advance for the application of uninhibited violence. Their arrival announces a conflict in which all moral considerations are definitively suspended. Since they have no ‘souls’ there is nothing they will not do, and they are expected to do the worst. Reciprocally, they merit exactly zero humanitarian concern. The relationship to the zombie is one in which all sympathy is absolutely annulled (殺殺殺殺殺殺殺).

No surprise, then, that the identification of the zombie has become a critical conflict, waged across the terrain of popular culture. It implicitly describes a free-fire zone, or an anticipated gradient in the social direction of violence. Zombies are either scum or they are drones.

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“War is computation with tanks. War is truth revealing. As war proceeds uncertainty collapses.”
— Konkvistador (on Twitter)

“You might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
— Lenin

“War is deception.”
— Sunzi

Neoreactionaries are often talking about ‘oikos’ tacitly, even when they think they are concerned with something closer to the opposite. For there to be an ‘economy’ much has already to have been settled. (Unlike his liberarian precursors, Moldbug never assumes peace, but he betrays his inheritance by conceiving it as an original task — a foundation.) “Begin from the inside” — that’s the idea. The Outside is war.

War is the truth of lies, the rule of rulelessness, anarchy and chaos as they are in reality (which is nothing at all like a simple negation of order). It is the ultimate tribunal, beyond which any appeal is a senseless prayer to the void. A ‘realism’ that resists such conclusions makes a mockery of the name.

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Walter Russell Mead muses on identitarian blood-letting.

First the sermon:

The eastern Congo and the African Great Lakes are remote places, and many people might wonder why Americans or the world at large should care much about what goes on there. The short answer is that the people who live there are made in God’s image as much as anybody else and they are infinitely dear to him, and to remain indifferent to the suffering of people there is to fail in our clear duty to our Creator and to some degree to betray our own humanity.

Then the analysis:

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Here‘s the link to a recent short ‘essay’ of mine on philosophy and war, written for an intriguing art project, themed by the Stuxnet worm. The PDF also includes a piece by John Menick and an interview with David Harley. (I haven’t had time to properly digest the whole thing yet — but it looks extremely interesting.) Lars Holdhus, who initiated the project, has generously given me permission to share it.

History never repeats itself, but it rhymes, runs the suggestive aphorism (falsely?) attributed to Mark Twain.

James Delingpole writes in the Daily Telegraph:

… have you ever tried reading private journals or newspapers from the 1930s? What will surprise you is that right to the very last minute – up to the moment indeed when war actually broke – even the most insightful and informed commentators and writers clung on to the delusion that things would somehow turn out all right. I do hope that history is not about to repeat itself. Unfortunately, the lesson from history is that all too often it does. 

There’s quite a lot of this about.

For one theoretical account of how history might rhyme, on an ominous 80-year cycle, there’s a generational model that sets the beat. “Strauss & Howe have established that history can be broken down into 80 to 100 year Saeculums that consist of four turnings: The High, The Awakening, The Unraveling, and the Crisis.” From a philosophical point of view, it seems a little under-powered, but its empirical plausibility rises by the month.

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Richard Fernandez passes along a BBC report that Saudi Arabia is already a virtual nuclear power. In collaboration with Pakistan, the Kingdom has assembled a nuclear arsenal (complete with CSS-2 delivery systems), which is presently distributed according to diplomatic convenience, with the war-heads held in Pakistan. Assuming that this report is roughly accurate, the chain-reaction of nuclear dominoes pushing the proliferation through South Asia into the heart of the Middle East has been all but completed, with only superficial formalities yet to be concluded.

It’s late, and I’m off to bed, so I’ll simply repeat: It’s late. Everything people care about is going to be side-lined by international events.

The master jigsaw puzzle piece connecting US domestic and foreign policy together is the petrodollar. Federal debt production depends upon credibility in the US currency that is anchored by its privileged role in global hydrocarbons commerce. Knock out that privilege, and US dollar holdings become one speculative asset among others. The fiat house of cards begins to tumble (perhaps with shocking rapidity).

In this context, US monetary policy begins to look like a side-line of ‘friendship’ with the Saudis, which is dissolving into quick sand. Pepe Escobar at AToL explores some of the possible consequences. (It’s especially notable that the fracking revolution could accelerate a petrodollar crisis, rather than retarding it.) There’s also a China angle, which is always fun.

Disconcertingly for almost everybody, in different ways, the awkward retraction of US power from the Middle Eastern wasps’ nest tends inevitably to destabilize the global monetary regime. The more the Saudis feel jilted, the less their commitment to the petrodollar pact, but if this was ever a low-maintenance relationship, it certainly isn’t anymore.

Bomb Iran or your currency bombs. — Things might not quite reduce to that yet, but it increasingly looks as if they will.

Either Stalin played the Anglosphere like a  cheap piano in World War Two, or something altogether more sinister was going on. Foseti clarifies the conundrum beautifully:

When the US finally joins the war, it does so with – as best as one can decipher – only a few clear war aims: 1) demanding unconditional surrender (of Germany and Japan – aka the only bulwarks against Soviet domination of post-war Europe and Asia); 2) establishing the United Nations; and 3) ending European (excluding Soviet) colonialism.

If you, gentle reader, can come up with a list of war aims that would be more destructive to mankind at the time than those, the next round is on me. Perhaps entirely coincidentally (or perhaps not) these aims would seem to all work towards the direct benefit of the Soviets. It’s almost like Soviets were making US foreign policy.

Rough Triangles analysis from William Lind:

… we think of jihad as something waged by Islam against non-Muslims, but quite often it has been between one Islamic sect and another. Now Islamists are once again declaring jihad on each other. In June the New York Times reported on an influential Sunni cleric who “has issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling on Muslims around the world to help Syrian rebels… and labeling Hezbollah and Iran” — both Shi’ite — “enemies of Islam ‘more infidel than Jews and Christians.'” David Gardner’s Financial Times piece tells of a  “conclave of Sunni clerics meeting in Cairo [that] declared a jihad against what it called a ‘declaration of war on Islam’ by the ‘Iranian regime, Hezbollah and its sectarian allies’.”

How should the West react to all this? With quiet rejoicing. Our strategic objective should be to get Islamists to expend their energies on each other rather than on us. An old aphorism says the problem with Balkans is that they produce more history than they can consume locally. Our goal should be to encourage the Muslim world to consume all its history — of which it will be producing a good deal — as locally as possible. Think of it as “farm to table” war.

All we should do, or can do, to obtain this objective is to stay out. We ought not meddle, no matter how subtly; if we do, inevitably, it will blow up in our faces. Just go home, stay home, bolt the doors (especially to refugees who will act out their jihads here) …