The Post-War Order

The post-war order was established in the smoldering ruin of Europe. The main winners of the Second World War were the USA and the USSR. Communism swallowed half of Europe and threatened virtually everywhere they didn’t directly rule. On the other hand, the US and the handful of industrial neutral powers financed and supplied, on credit of course, the rebuilding of the destroyed powers which fell outside the so-called Iron Curtain. Much of this fell under the guise of the Marshall Plan and the like, but not all.

            A dipole world order that lasted for the better part of fifty years wasn’t the only major outcome of the war. The Nuremburg Trials and the less sexy counterpart in Japan established that any defeated power in any major war in the future could look forward to potential war crimes charges if they colored outside the margins of the Geneva and Hague conventions. Complaints ranged from agitating a war of aggression, producing effective and unseemly propaganda, mistreatment of civilians and prisoners, and of course the intentional liquidation of unwanted minorities. This applied roughly both to Japan and Germany, although Germany was treated more harshly in these courts for various reasons (which I will conjecture later). It is noteworthy that although war crimes trials were a feature of the peace after the civil war and breakup of Yugoslavia, it seems as though similar charges have never been leveled against third world perpetrators despite plenty of fodder.

            This post-war order included other planks as well. Among them, the ever-expanding mission of the UN, and likewise the ever-expanding list of human rights. Human rights might be one of the most egregious examples of mission creep, having grown year by year since the storming of the Bastille and the ‘Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen’ (Declaration of the rights of man and citizen) [¹].  The US became the bully for this order, enforcing most of the UN mandates and a vision of world stability. Borders were to become stable lines over time which marked friendly disagreements between rules and religion and the like, as an interim state until a global, borderless future could be achieved. The steps between here and there were somewhat muddled and neglected, yet the march of progress continues. Civil war might happen – and over the past 70 years, it has happened plenty – but inter-state war is to be relegated to the dustbin of history as much as possible. Police actions are the only acceptable inter-state wars left which keep a state from becoming a pariah. It is how the US and other major UN Security Council powers keep from becoming pariahs: everything is a police action, garbed in high minded humanitarianism.

            The UN itself is a third-world front. Anyone who cannot see this is either willfully blind, delusional, or lying. It couldn’t be more apparent in various UN agendas from environmental policy and climate change to refugee policy [²] to economic development. Each of these seek to hurt the West and profit the third-world. They largely see the modern West as nothing more than a coin purse to be looted and robbed – but what when it is empty, or worse? That compromises the very vision of the post-war order: If this was to be a stable arrangement, how could it be when some groups are looting others? How could it be when there is a demonization campaign against Western history and Western man – and I mean Western man both in the sense of a civic ideal and the ethnic sense? How could it be when this very client-patron arrangement was a set of shackles that would hobble the West?

            Aside from the first major UN mission in Korea back in 1950 (notable for being the only joint action by the Security Council), most UN ‘peacekeeping’ missions have been in the third world, most frequently in Sub-Saharan Africa. The majority of voting members in the UN are third-world nations, and the Security Council is rendered completely ineffective by virtue of including rival powers whose interests nearly are nearly always at odds. There was also the dubious UN and American intervention in Kosovo and Serbia, wherein the UN and US decided to establish the first Islamic state in Europe since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

            What thought was put into these things was poorly thought out. I suspect that some very deliberately wanted to salt Europe and her colonial offspring with mass migration from the third world, interminable debt, a permanent administrative state and other issues which have come to plague these countries. But the rest of the so-called higher civil servants and politicians walked into this blindly and can find no way back out of these disasters. Especially with greater ideology now on the other side, these things are all entrenched as beliefs and interests. Even most of those who would like their countries back, at least sentimentally, they most likely have vested interests in continuing things the way they are, and feel that the tides of history flow against that sentimentality. I believe this can explain a large part of the failure of modern conservatism, adding that critical figures in the conservative ideologies and parties of virtually every major country are bought out to step in line with the leftist agenda.

            This order was supposed to be exactly that. The long peace, so-called, was supposed to be a great triumph of man over the cruelty of the past. Not only was it a vindication of humanism, but of leftism generally. After all, the world circa 1960 (or 1980) was far to the left of the world even of only thirty or forty years before. It marks the modern delusion of leftists that they believe with some honesty perhaps that the soldiers who composed the Western Allies of the Second World War were kith and kin to modern Antifa and similar radical left street organizations. Yet, this was a sham; even as of 1945, Churchill warned of “[the] Iron Curtain which had descended over Europe.” Franklin Roosevelt had been hoodwinked by Stalin both at Yalta and during correspondences, and several high ranking cabinet members and advisors to that president and to Truman were communist agents. The cruelty and privation under communist rule all over the world is legendary and other sources elaborate it well. [³]

            But all of that cruelty wouldn’t have been possible if not for the involvement of Western and particularly American Jews as well as American cosmopolitan elites in critical points in these communist regimes, especially in the USSR. One thinks of Jacob Schiff financing the Bolsheviks and of Lend Lease. Yet with the post-war order, the USSR became the specter by which the intelligence agencies and the military-industrial complex justified themselves. This despite the fact that, aside from their nuclear armament, submarines, and the threat posed to Europe with dozens of Soviet and Warsaw Pact divisions always on standby, their force projection was always lacking compared to the US and NATO. They could not credibly threaten the US with conventional land or sea forces, and the intelligence agencies were aware of this in full detail for most of the Cold War and yet they painted precisely the opposite picture of a giant red bear poised to strike.  Virtually all of the damage caused by the Soviets was limited to their sphere of influence, namely the whole chunk of Europe abandoned to them despite that the guarantee of Poland’s independence was the reason for turning a minor war into a world war in the first place.

            The stability of this order looks more questionable during recent times with protracted civil war in Syria and radical Islamist groups waging irregular war or regular terrorist attacks in places all over Sub-Saharan Africa, the Philippines, Thailand, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and so on. (Note that Pakistan is highly unstable and also possesses a few nuclear weapons.) The infusion of Soviet ideology in the ‘50s and ‘60s into the Middle East and North Africa region and the escalation of Salafist-Wahabbi ideology made for a toxic combination ripe for terrorists to exploit. The use of suicide bombs in the Middle East actually began with Hezbollah in the Lebanese civil war. [⁴] Like other effective methods, it shows no signs of stopping. Islamic violence and suicide bombing achieve their desired ends. Despite claims by some that “ideas can’t be silenced” or “violence can never win the day,” Islamic radicals and tyrants clearly put the lie to that stupid notion. Western government repeatedly cow before Islamic radicals and the only explanations are that they’re either ideologically aligned, interested in using violent Muslims as a tool, or indeed that they are intimidated and violence works. 
            As long as there is both Islamic ideology and a massive Muslim demographic problem, they will resort to international jihad. Islam fundamentally sees the world divided into dar al-Islam, 'the house of submission (before God and the prophet),' and dar al-Harb, 'the house of war,' in which war is not merely a descriptive but prescriptive condition. The only way Salafists would give the so-called long peace a genuine shake is if the whole world were first their brand of believer. The demographic problem refers not just to inbreeding and the attendant problems that brings from recessive diseases to decreased cognitive behavioral capacity where the inbreeding rates in many Muslim countries tend to be among the highest in the world, but it also refers to the reality that polygamy fundamentally destabilizes any given society by creating a large underclass of men who generally have few options with regards to mates or resources. Muslim societies past dealt with this primarily by forming armies of these men which they would throw at their neighbors, often to great effect; Muslim societies present merely send these men abroad as migrants, criminals, and terrorists instead because of the degenerate ways of the post-war order.

            In anticipation of a permanent long peace, European countries have allowed their armies to wither and their arms stockpiles to rust or be sold away. [⁵] While many of them have press releases making promises since 2016, we have yet to see any substantial improvements in Western Europe, and with the EU it will likely take 4-6 years for any major upticks in preparedness to materialize. Yet most Western European countries have or have had in recent years women as ministers of defense and spending on militaries at around half or less of the NATO two per cent of GDP target. What many of these Western Euro countries do spend is essentially on a jobs and civics program with questionable use for deterrence or during any actual armed conflict, something we have also seen more in the US since the 1990s.

            The stanza from the Kipling poem comes to mind.

“When the Cambrian measures were forming, they promised perpetual peace.

They swore if we gave them our weapons, the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed they sold us and delivered us bound to our foe.

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘Stick to the devil you know.’”

            Perhaps one of the most important parts of this plan was globalization. It wasn’t the sort of slow globalization that had been seeping in the cracks since the renaissance. This was to be something different; a radical and aggressive globalization, where even the erstwhile best were to be humbled. This meant that the preeminent powers of the world, almost entirely in the West, were to teach the rest of the world ‘how it’s done.’ They were to instruct the world on all things relating to industry, science, and humanity. In return, there was to be a great exchange of culture, ideas, and even mere foot traffic the likes of which the world had never seen. Modern mechanization and logistics were set to surpass levels of commerce and travel over the trade routes of antiquity; the Silk Road over its entire history would look trivial compared to the amount of global air traffic in just one or two years. The rest of the world was to catch up and humanity was to reach a new age of prosperity and civilization.

            Like everything else, globalization turned into a farce. By the 1980s and 1990s, industry was hollowing out of the US and Great Britain, finding a new home wherever you had the intersection of the cheapest effective labor and a fair degree of political and economic stability. It quickly became a race to the bottom, where American companies would generally design the first prototype, hire production engineers and have them coordinate with foreign manufacturers to actually mass produce the good (usually in China, where foreign companies are required to hand over technical data to the Chicoms). The bill of goods sold to the American people was that the amount of jobs lost on net was trivial because American factories tend to be highly automated and American workers tend to be expensive to employ; therefore, focusing on the FIRE economy (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) [⁶] with plenty consideration for marketing firms was the way of the future. Every American with drive could become either a high skill, high status professional, e.g. engineer, doctor, lawyer, accountant, and the like, or else they would find their way into the FIRE economy (or marketing). That was the dream, at least.
             The data doesn’t bear that out. The FIRE economy is not sustainable as the mainstay of the economy, nor could a third or a fourth of Americans earn a living in those sectors without the whole of the country becoming a great pyramid scheme by which the current generations were scamming foreigners and mortgaging wealth from later generations, whether their children or not, to pay for their own habits and lifestyles. Only this monolithic shell game could possibly ‘work’ and it could only ‘work’ for a generation at best. Like many things in the post-war order, the promise of a FIRE economy, where a good man could work do easy work 30-40 hours a week and still make money as good or better than in hard industry, this was a delusion born of rootless cosmopolitan dreams. 

            By 2017, it’s clear that the third world largely cannot be taught the graces of the West. They enjoy finery and plastic shit just as much as anyone. But it cheapens the West to call this process of dumping hordes of plastic trinkets everywhere ‘Westernization’ as though mere things will turn a man into a European. It didn’t work with the trinkets of the 17^th or 18^th centuries, and naturally it doesn’t work now. The West is – or was – something much deeper than the technological advancements which form our veneer, though there is that. The West is the embedded history and norms of our people; it is the folk spirit and the folk itself; it is a series of military refinements and conquests over time; it is also social technologies and built up social and genetic capital. The West cannot be simply copied by anyone outside on a surface level; the closest non-European ‘Western’ peers, Korea and Japan, lived in climates and social structures similar to Europeans and evolved slightly better cognitive-behavioral traits as measured by IQ and the general markers of civility and domestication than Europeans on average. But even they are still not Europeans in many ways subtle and glaring.

            It’s also clear that the self-inflicted damage in Western economies which has caused long-term stagnation in most Western countries is not considered an imminent crisis by current leaders. The goals are clearly to broadly level the development of the world and to see what exceptional features the West has (or had) dashed away. Hence the rampant capital consumption, the destruction of monuments, the clearing out of hundreds of years old European architecture to make way for brutalist housing projects, modernist deformities, and mosques. The US, Germany, Japan, Britain, and France were essentially the most important economic powers of the post-war order (even counting that Germany was divided East and West) until the ascent of China in the 1980s. Even so, aside from the demographic stagnation in the native born people of all of these countries, there is no other reason why economic growth should so horribly stagnate as it has since between 1990 and 2010. When a country slowed varies, but most of these countries have slumped into zero or near zero growth for years if not tens of years.

            The diplomatic alliances in this time have also turned out disastrous. Rather than alliances based on strength, common interests, etc., many of them are cynical ones based on convenience and servicing ‘our greatest ally.’ We’ve also made unnecessary enemies due to ‘our greatest ally’, our allies of convenience, backstabbing erstwhile allies in a wanton fashion, and shady deals like the gang of Harvard economists (mostly Jews) who helped loot Russia during Perestroika and sow needless anti-American sentiment. [⁷] One need hardly state the Jewish involvement in the neo-conservative foreign policy establishment, in high finance, or extractive industries (gambling, payday loans, etc.). It can’t be overstated the massive squandered opportunity that was the post-Soviet Pax Americana. With a better political order, strength would have been shored up, glory would have been shared, and territory and influence would have been extended handily; instead, all of the gains piled at the top while the everyman saw ever greater inflation eating their savings and mediocre wages. The ‘consolation prize’ is that government jobs and jobs directly reliant upon government (Military-Industrial Complex, prison system, local government support, medical system, etc.) pay more and are more plentiful than ever in history. [⁸]

            Internally, this transformation meant something different throughout the West. It meant turning the police more harshly on the citizenry and creating what Sam Francis called ‘anarcho-tyranny’ and expanding the scope of intelligence services to the point where they had leeway to watch over anyone with a FISA warrant (note that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was signed 1978), and since at least the early 2000s the NSA has engaged in bulk collection of metadata and raw intercepts of communications which, per intelligence protocols, are not considered “collected” until processed by an intelligence personnel and turned into intelligence reports. That is the ‘stick’ side of things. The ‘carrot’ is the expansion of the welfare state and an ever more soporific and mind numbing media-entertainment complex. As well, leftists promoted the sexual revolution after the mass adoption of condoms, birth control pills, and the legalization of no fault divorce. Man and woman were no longer lashed to a family and to a career for life; now they could hop from job to job, ‘partner’ to ‘partner’ as the new term goes (partner was promoted for the homosexual ‘community’), worry free and coasting through life on the most trite magazines and movies, emulating their favorite banal fiction characters and celebrities. 

The very core tasks the state long ago stood among its folk, shouting it could do better than scattered tribal bands – that is, collective defense, border security, and insuring some measure of calm within – these seem to have been abandoned either for lofty ideological notions or perhaps for a greater swindle. For what greater swindle would there be than to become the largest band of roaming thieves on the planet, rather than tied to blood and soil? That is the ultimate legacy of the post-war order. The seeming abandonment of all things right, traditional, and worthy for spectacle, rot, and swindle.

¹ http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/protection/hcdialogue%20/4ab356ab6/unhcr-policy-refugee-protection-solutions-urban-areas.html

² http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

³ https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/venona/

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/haynes-venona.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_humanity_under_Communist_regimes

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/01/02/reviews/000102.02ryanlt.html

⁴ http://origins.osu.edu/article/human-use-human-beings-brief-history-suicide-bombing/page/0/1

⁵ https://www.iss.europa.eu/sites/default/files/EUISSFiles/Brief_12_Defence_spending_in_Europe.pdf

http://news.ihsmarkit.com/press-release/aerospace-defense-security/europe-ramps-defence-spending-budgets-rise-heightened-threa

https://index.heritage.org/military/2017/assessments/threats/europe/

⁶ http://www.mybudget360.com/fire-economy-comes-back-finance-profits-gdp-total-credit-market-debt-at-peak/

⁷ https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b150nqqs1wz840/how-harvard-lost-russia

⁸ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/06/the-state-of-american-jobs/