White genocide discussed on CNN show as "a kind of utopia" and "the only solution"

What a world we live in. In the clip below two middle-aged men discuss Angela Merkel's open borders immigration policy. One is a celebrity chef, Anthony Bourdain. The other is an Austrian chef, painter and artist, René Stessl.

The conversation begins with Bourdain asking if it's possible to assimilate the million immigrants that Merkel brought into Germany in a single year. Stessl answers that it's possible, but he fears that it will lead to a right-wing resurgence. Both men then assert that Europe is falling back into the politics of the 1930s.

Stessl then says "I'm allowed to be naïve and talk about utopias. It's a kind of utopia, just the fact that the whole world will mix up with each other. That in 70, 80 years there will be no white people anymore and only cappuccino coloured people."

Bourdain replies "That's the only way. This is the only solution. It's our only hope. It's our way out of this. It's going to take some time. But it's really the only way. The Singaporean model where everybody is so mixed up that you really don't know who to hate because everybody is so hopelessly intertwined."

Note how Bourdain can only conceive of identity in terms of hatred, rather than positively as an expression of love for one's own tradition. Note too that he can only conceive of Nazism as an alternative to hedonistic individualism.

We just have to keep building a political opposition to these kind of men. The "diversity" that they support doesn't include us - we are to be bred out of it. Utopia will come, they believe, once we are gone. Stessl articulates this thought exactly: "I'm allowed to...talk about utopias...That in 70, 80 years time there will be no white people anymore."

The progressive utopia is no longer a society without the bourgeoisie but one without us.

It is no longer sensible for ordinary white people to support progressive "ideals" - why support a politics that is so openly hostile to your existence?

Melbourne Traditionalists meeting

The next meeting of the Melbourne Traditionalists is coming up soon. It's a great opportunity for interested people in Melbourne to catch up for an evening. We have a great venue, enjoy a drink and a meal and discuss a wide range of topics. If you're interested in coming along you can contact me for the details at swerting (at) bigpond.com or Mark Moncrieff via his website, Upon Hope.

Modern Family

In my last post I criticised Sarah Vine for suggesting that the freedom of Western girls to "be whoever" is what defines the West.

It led to a brief discussion on parenting which clarified for me one of the problems we face. Mark Moncrieff (of Upon Hope) commented that:

I think the most important word here is the word "raise", children need to be raised. But "being free to be whoever they want to be" implies that children can raise themselves.

Which led to my own (disjointed) comment in reply:

That's a good way of putting it. And you can imagine why this is so. If you are a liberal and you think that there are no objectives purposes in life and that people should just "be themselves" however they see fit, then there is little purpose to parenting your child - there is nothing definite to raise them toward. Parenting just comes to mean accepting unconditionally. Not imposing anything. Giving the child confidence to "be anything you care to be". The parents are just there to ferry the child around as a kind of support crew, rather than transmitting culture, identity, purpose, wisdom, values.

This is not the only reason why the traditional role of the parent has been undermined. It's more difficult now for parents to set the tone within the family home, given the arrival of portable, wi-fi devices (at least 20 years ago you could simply change the TV channel). But 20 years ago, many middle-class parents were happy enough if their children were raised for the purposes of educational qualifications and career, and so the traditional role of parents in socialising their children was largely left to schools.

This is clearly one issue where it is not enough to be "conservative" (in the sense of conserving the good in society) - we have to be restorationist. We have to restore an older understanding of the parental role, which means giving parents confidence that transmitting ideals of character, of natural sex roles, of identity and loyalty, and of life wisdom are significant to the development and the future well-being of their children.

What are we defending?

The Western political class is still responding dismally to terror attacks, such as the one perpetrated on young people in Manchester.

I want to focus on one response in particular, by Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail. Sarah Vine is the wife of a leading Conservative Party politician, Michael Gove. They both support Brexit and might be thought of as "establishment conservative" types.

Sarah Vine reacted to the terror attack this way:

So what we are defending, against the terrorists, is Western girls' freedom to be whoever they want to be. That is how Sarah Vine sees things.

She writes:

...this was not just a cowardly attack on innocent civilians by a blackened heart, this was specifically an attack on our girls — all of them.

Our young, beautiful, free, crazy girls — and their right to live life as they choose.

...Young women enjoying themselves, expressing themselves, being free to be whoever they want to be. Indulgent mums accompanying them, willing to endure an evening of pop hell in the interests of family harmony.

All this is anathema to Islamist fanatics, for whom notions such as sexual equality and female emancipation are an offence.

Sarah Vine is giving us a choice here between Islamic terrorists or "liberated" Western women who are free to do whatever they want. To put this another way, she is defining the West in terms of the liberal value of individual autonomy - a freedom of the individual to self-define or self-determine or self-constitute.

The problems with this approach leap out at you. First, if the great thing is to be whoever you want to be, then the value of a stable, given identity, such as being English, falls in significance. Therefore, the path is made clear for an open-bordered, diverse society in which the population no longer has a shared, long-standing common identity and loyalty to each other. And so you end up living amongst people who hate you and your way of life and wish violence upon you. Being whoever you want to be as an atomised individual leaves you vulnerable to attack - in the long run the terrorists win.

The "be whoever" attitude also fails the girls themselves. Sarah Vine describes quite well the behaviour of young teenage girls:

Girls this age are a special kind of crazy — a wonderful, maddening, mystifying mix of emotions.

One minute they’re trying to persuade you that wearing fishnet tights under a pair of ripped jeans is a perfectly acceptable ensemble for a trip to church, the next they’re in floods of tears because they’ve lost their hamster.

They are a mass of contradictions: monosyllabic, moody and manipulative, but also gentle and loving, as capable of throwing their arms around you in a heart-stopping embrace as they are of telling you they hate you.

If you leave these 14-year-olds to be whoever they want to be you are going to end up with dysfunctional adult women. These girls need their parents to raise them within a strong moral framework which will help to form a good character and encourage wise life choices.

What you don't want is 20-something women who are still a mass of contradictions and a special kind of crazy. Women like this tear apart men and tear down a culture of family life. And they don't inspire young men to want to defend them or, for that matter, the larger society. So, again, in the long run the terrorists win.

Saying "be whoever you want to be" implies that there is nothing strong or wise or virtuous or true that people can aspire to be. It implies that there is no natural telos to being a man or a woman. It suggests that there is no higher character type that we can lift ourselves toward as Englishmen or Australians or Canadians.

A liberal "freedom as radical individual autonomy" just doesn't work as the basis for a civilisation. Sarah Vine believes that we are defending it against the terrorists, but the urgent need is to return to the higher values that existed before liberalism became so dominant in the West.

The evangelical churches & feminism

There is a clear, well-written post on the influence of feminism on the American evangelical churches here. A quick, worthwhile read.

What do Chinese net users think of the white left?

If a Chinese net user wants to insult their opponent they are likely to use the derogatory term baizuo which means "white left." What do they mean by this?

According to one source:

baizuo is used generally to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.

Why would ordinary Chinese people dislike the Western left so much? Here is the reason given:

The stigmatization of the ‘white left’ is driven first and foremost by Chinese netizens’ understanding of ‘western’ problems. It is a symptom and weakness of the Other.

The term first became influential amidst the European refugee crisis, and Angela Merkel was the first western politician to be labelled as a baizuo for her open-door refugee policy. Hungary, on the other hand, was praised by Chinese netizens for its hard line on refugees, if not for its authoritarian leader. Around the same time another derogatory name that was often used alongside baizuo was shengmu (圣母) – literally the ‘holy mother’ – which according to its users refers to those who are ‘overemotional’, ‘hypocritical’ and ‘have too much empathy’.

Many Chinese on social media came to identify Hillary Clinton with the white left and so supported Donald Trump in the American election. When one public intellectual, Rao Yi, took the opposing view,

An overwhelming majority of Zhihu users thought that Rao had only proved that he was typical of the ‘white left’: biased, elitist, ignorant of social reality and constantly applying double standards.

The Chinese seem aware that a modern liberal politics is suicidal:

According to Baidu Trends, one of the most related keywords to baizuo was huimie: “to destroy”. Articles with titles such as ‘the white left are destroying Europe’ were widely circulated.

To understand why the Chinese might reject the white left so firmly, it helps to consider moral foundations theory. This is a theory popularised by Professor Jonathan Haidt. Based on research into different cultures around the world, it was found that there are six basic moral foundations:

1. The care/harm foundation: the focus here is on maximising individual care and minimising harm, protecting the vulnerable.

2. The fairness foundation: not cheating the system, people rewarded according to their contributions.

3. The loyalty/betrayal foundation: being loyal to our tribe/team (including patriotism).

4. The authority/subversion foundation: respecting the authority or hierarchy necessary to preserve social order.

5. The sanctity/degradation foundation: protecting a sense of what is hallowed or sacred in institutions and ideals.

6. Liberty/oppression: not wanting to be dominated/bullied by a tyrant.

What Haidt found was that Western liberals are very strong on the first foundation (and also to a degree the sixth) but are not very committed to the others. Traditionalists, in contrast, were found to hold all six foundations in equal regard.

If, then, you are a Chinese net user, who is used to taking all six moral foundations into account, you are likely to perceive the white left negatively. You will see them putting all the emphasis on the first foundation (care/harm) - hence the criticism of the white left as being "hengmu:" overemotional, hypocritical empathisers. Similarly, the lack of emphasis on fairness (as proportionality) on the left leads to the criticism by the Chinese of the support by the white left for free riders. And, finally, the lack of a concern for the loyalty foundation leads the white left open to the accusation by the Chinese of destroying their own tradition.

Templates of resistance

If you were to go back even 30 years the template of resistance to liberalism was limited. There were journals in which people could signal an intellectual or cultural superiority to leftists, without much passion or focus on changing things. The template changed a little with the advent of the internet, with a group of more intellectually principled intellectuals emerging. More recently the template changed again with a much larger and more combative opposition using social media.

There are still some key changes to be made to the template. We can become more activist and more willing to establish our own communities. You can see the potential for this in recent months. The Battle for Berkeley demonstrated that the dissident right can hold its own against the far left.

But there still needs to be a psychological shift on our side of politics. For this reason, I am closely following the efforts of the Identitarians in Europe to organise an activist opposition to the smuggling of illegal immigrants. Even if it doesn't succeed in closing down the smuggling rings, it can still be important in helping our side break through to a newer, more activist template.

I have to congratulate Lauren Southern for helping to publicise the campaign. She joined the Identitarians in steering a small boat toward one of the smuggling ships - she was detained by the coastguard for doing this. In the video below she talks with Martin Sellner, an Austrian Identitarian, about a plan to launch a more ambitious campaign against the ships:



The Identitarians have put out a publicity video of their own:



It's important that traditionalists here in Australia also help shift the template toward a more active politics. We've become involved in a few initiatives in recent months and we have decided as well to raise some money to help fund the Identitarian campaign. We're encouraging those attending our next meeting in June to bring along a donation, and we'll send this off as a group (if you're a Melbournian interested in our group feel free to contact myself at swerting (at) bigpond.com or Mark Moncrieff via his website Upon Hope).

If readers are considering donating to the Identitarian efforts you can do so via the official campaign website.

When you have to get your wife's permission

Dalrock has a tragicomic post up about an evangelical organisation in America running a programme called "Stepping up". The programme calls on men to "courageously lead at home, at church, at work, and in their communities." But here's the catch: the evangelical men leading the programme talk at length about how to get wives to "give permission" so that husbands are allowed to attend the "courageous male leader" seminars.

I laughed at the situation, even though it highlights just how far things have deteriorated. Modern marriage restricts men from carrying out the role they are supposed to play not only within the family but also within society. In this sense it is emasculating.

Men should, without fear of committing a fatal marital "infraction,"  be able to:

1. Step in when their sons are still young in order to begin the process of socialising the boy toward a successful masculine adulthood (you would be surprised by how many mothers intervene to prevent this, pushing the father away from this paternal role).

2. Dedicate some of their time and energies to their civilisational role outside the home, even if this is unpaid.

3. Socialise with other men, or else have leisure time for masculine pursuits (e.g. hiking, gym).

This should be so embedded within the culture that it becomes an expectation rather than something requiring a special dispensation from women.

Maybe one day Western men will not be nervously asking permission from their wives to "courageously lead at home, at church, at work, and in their communities."

Do men and women love the same way?

It seems to me that men and women love differently. When a young man forms feelings of love for a woman, he tends to idealise her. He experiences love as a finer feeling within himself; a feeling that makes him want to dedicate himself to the object of his love, which then means that the young woman has to be thought of in positive terms as beautiful, as good, perhaps even as pure. This elevation of women to match his own elevated feelings sometimes gets out of hand, and leads to a pedestalisation of women, sometimes in Western culture to absurd proportions. It also helps to explain why, in traditional Western cultures, there was a particular emphasis placed on women to live up to certain ideals of beauty, goodness and purity - and such a disappointment when they didn't.

(You only have to look at Western art up to 1914 to get a sense of this distinctly masculine love for women. Note too that when Western artists began to turn destructively on their own civilisation, one of the first things they did was to do the very opposite of traditional culture and portray women as ugly, malformed, diseased and slatternly - see German art of the 1920s as an example of this - Otto Dix springs to mind. It's interesting too that the small number of Western women who are now trying to reclaim love and family are instinctively beginning to uphold the values of beauty and purity in women. It is also why the red pill is such a difficult thing for men: once a man comes to believe that "women are not all that" he tends to turn away from marital love as a major focus of his life and turns instead to some form of self-development or self-completion.)

It is possible for women to love their husbands in a way that is difficult for men to comprehend. A man does not want to store up infractions committed by his wife in his mind, because this would undermine the picture he has of her that is necessary for him to love at all. But a woman can, in a certain way, live with both. She can store up infractions, but still allow a measured amount of affection toward her husband - enough, at least, to keep the relationship going.

Let's say that a woman has her first child. Her husband does his best to work to support her, but she feels stressed by the experience nonetheless. She forms a negative judgement about her husband regarding this, which is then placed in a compartment of her mind and stays there forever. At times, she will complain to others about the deficit of her husband. If a man were to do this (store up infractions), it would spell the immediate end of any affectionate relationship on his part. But not so for the wife. She can still allow a certain "line" of affection toward her husband, whilst holding back a certain amount at the same time. Typically, it seems, the woman is likely to hold back initially in the bedroom, either by limiting the amount of sex or perhaps by allowing the physical side of sex to take place but not the emotional bonding (she withholds some aspect or quality or depth of love).

This kind of thing can go on for the entire duration of the marriage, with the marriage still ultimately being successful. However, it can also go wrong. Usually, it goes wrong when the bank of infractions grows so much in the woman's mind that she decides to end the marriage. Oddly (from a male perspective) she might still allow the line of affection to continue right to the end (she can "love" in a certain way even while planning to dissolve her marriage) leaving her husband blindsided.

But it can also go wrong in another way. If the "line" of affection thrown out by the woman is too light, a man can get to middle-age, having worked decades on behalf of his wife, and feel that the marriage has been one-sided and that there has not been the pair bonding he expected. His children will have grown more independent, his wife will have aged and he might then no longer be able to sustain the idealisation of his wife - it will tire him mentally to try to hold to it (there are other reasons too for a man to reach this point, such as depression, ill-health, work problems etc.)

It's interesting that the main type of infraction that women hold onto relates to time and money. If a man works long hours and earns a lot, he might be thought to spend too much time away from home. If his job allows him to spend much time at home, then a wife might think he should be out earning more money. If he has a good balance, his wife might then think he should both be out working more as well as spending more time at home. If a man spends any of his time neither working nor at home (say, volunteering for something) this might be thought of as a nuclear level infraction, even though a woman might also view a man without a good social network as lacking status and attractiveness.

So it's generally not possible for a man to avoid infractions. The best he can do is to choose a wife who is relatively forgiving, relatively stable in her relationships, and who has not become jaded in her ability to pair bond.

I also think it would be better if a society made it clear that a man's true purpose (his telos) is both domestic and civilisational. Part of his role is to provide for his family and to be a husband/father, but he should also be able to devote some time and energy to contribute to the larger community he belongs to. It also seems reasonable that he might have some leisure time to spend with other men.

You can see some of all this at work in a piece at Slate titled "You will hate your husband after your kid is born" by Jancee Dunn. It is about how stressful having a first baby can be for a new mum and how mums will take it out on the person doing the most to support them - their husbands. She is still trying to get over it seven years later.

It seems to me that it is possible, when it comes to the newborn child issue, that the real problem is that we are trying to replace grandmothers with husbands. A husband can work either a great or a small amount to support a wife with a newborn and it doesn't seem to register either way in terms of a woman feeling supported. A woman really does seem to need her mother in this situation (even a sympathetic mother-in-law might be a more effective option than a husband in providing a sense of support).

France 2017

I wrote a poem about the French election (easier to read if you click the image):

Lauren Southern: what every girl needs to hear

In the video below, Lauren Southern points out to young women that the "liberated" path they are often encouraged to take, namely of having many sexual partners and of delaying finding a husband, often leads to unhappiness. It squanders the advantages that a young woman has in securing her future and undermines the ability of women to successfully pair bond (she has some interesting statistics on this).

Some anecdotal support for this video. I've been reading some of the newspaper columns lately of Clem Bastow, a 34-year-old Melbourne journalist. When she turned 30 she wrote:

It’s finally here: I’m finally 30 and flirty and thriving...I don't feel any dread...I mean, who knows, I may wake up tomorrow sobbing and wondering where it all went wrong, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’m feeling pretty confident...I don’t have any crushing sense of existential dread about the big 3-0.

But her more recent columns show someone who is jaded and feeling the effects of hitting the wall. In one of her pieces, she confesses that she has given up on dating and has bought a single bed for herself:

When I was younger and punishing my body into an outward representation of "hotness" (read: thinness), I let my physicality do the flirting for me; now, older and having put down the fake tan can, it's harder to move in those flirty worlds. I blush, I get nervous, and I will walk away from boring small-talk rather than find a reason to justify turning a half-baked conversation into a six-month fling. You could argue that this is a good thing, but it does tend to make the spectre of "alone forever" linger.

Consequently, I find myself in a strange purgatory, where I'm pretty good at being single (and not just by circumstance; I actively enjoy it most of the time) but I would also love a partner. This is a strange position for many to grapple with; so, wait, are you lonely or not? The honest answer is "sort of".

...there seems to be an awful lot of people out there who – like me – are trying to be super-stoked on their single status but still occasionally find themselves crying from loneliness in the darker hours.

She hasn't helped her own cause. In her earlier years she seems to have gone for men solely on the basis of physical attraction:

as I get older the idea of a lasting connection being built solely on initial physical attraction is almost laughable.

Talk about not being especially interested in casual (or committed) sex and people give you the sort of expressions that will tend to inspire you to do your best impression of Meg Ryan as Sally Albright in When Harry Met Sally

I'm not suggesting physical attraction is unimportant, but if you are seriously looking for a future spouse you'll be thinking of a lot of other things as well. And note too that Clem Bastow has now reached a point of jadedness where she has lost interest in sex - hardly a promising mindset to be in if you are trying to attract a husband (pity the man who gets Clem Bastow after she has slept with so many men that she has now lost interest in a physical relationship).

She is also a feminist woman who has fallen into the "white men are the enemy" mindset. That's not exactly helpful if most of your marital prospects are white men (does she expect white men to happily "sleep with the enemy"?). Here is what she wrote when a male libertarian politician suggested that people should not be forced to participate in homosexual marriages (as photogrphers, bakers etc.):

This ongoing war against "PC culture" is little more than the slow and steady death rattle of The Age Of Straight White Men. Every bleat about "censorship" or "reverse discrimination" is another piece of macho power structure crumbling to the ground, like flakes of rust falling from a dilapidated bridge. And just as you would treat any abandoned structure as a health hazard, we must exercise caution while existing within the dying days of white male entitlement, as it's very likely to cause injury to everyone but itself.

One of the reasons that alt-right women like Lauren Southern are so refreshing is that they don't engage in this kind of white male bashing. They are promoting instead the idea that men and women have a shared interest in defending their tradition.

The French election

I have never known an election to be fought more on principle than the one now taking place in France between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. Le Pen is against the globalist agenda. She said recently:

The country Mr Macron wants is no longer France; it’s a space, a wasteland, a trading room where there are only consumers and producers.

She also made this criticism of Macron:

He is for total open borders. He says there is no such thing as French culture. There is not one area where he shows one ounce of patriotism.

The French have a choice between a patriotic candidate in Marine Le Pen or an open borders, globalist, establishment candidate in Emmanuel Macron.

A victory for Marine Le Pen is important for France and for Europe. She has improved her position to 40% in the most recent polls and is supported most strongly by younger French people. I hope the older French have it in them to help their country change direction and to get Marine Le Pen over the line on election day.

Predicting liberal decline

Twenty years ago I thought that little would be achieved until a section of the Western political class (meaning all those people of an intellectual bent interested in politics) broke decisively with liberalism.

It took a painfully long time, but it has now begun to happen. Look, for instance, at the following thread that I found on Twitter. It's written by a young man who has graduated from Oxford in the fields of politics, economics and philosophy.

Of the assertions he makes I agree with No.1. The growth in the number of students I teach with severe anxiety issues is astonishing (though I'm not entirely sure what's causing it).

No.2 is likely to take place. Family stability doesn't happen by accident - it requires the support of legal and economic policies, of religious belief, of moral principle and, above all, of a whole series of cultural and philosophical understandings about love, human fulfilment, sexual complementarity, social commitments etc. It seems unlikely that the selfish, atomised individualism that reigns in a liberal society will provide the support that a stable family life requires.

No.3 is already well under way. We will have to see what kind of resistance develops over the next few years.

No.4 I'm not so sure about. It does seem to be true that employment is becoming less stable, with more people working casually or on contracts.

No.5 is already happening and is likely to intensify. Liberals are pushing ahead with ever more radical racial and sexual politics which can only alienate some parts of the population. There is no sign yet that they are drawing back.

No.6 is interesting. We don't talk about this much. Western liberalism is likely to lose some of its prestige as other powers rise.

No.7 is also critical. Liberals will continue to blame white males for failures in achieving liberal utopia. But the liberal elite itself is the obvious target of discontent for the problems of a liberal society.