Notes on immigration. Observations on the war.

20240616

I am drawn to intelligent people who have something to say and refuse to be shut up. Sebastian Jensen often writes on intelligence.  A constant theme is that unlimited immigration is not a good thing.  However, their sheer numbers, and their tendency towards violence, are enough to cow national government into shutting their eyes to the problems they bring.  The recent European elections are a signal that the time has come for this to end.

The Danes have been at the forefront, starting half a decade or more back to ship undesirable illegals back where they came from.  And they are honest with themselves about the problems.  Jensen's piece in the link above includes this graphic of just who causes problems in Denmark.

The H-shaped bars, by the way, are confidence levels.  Looking at the bottom you see that immigrants from Argentina, the USA, Ukraine are all very peaceful sorts.  The confidence interval for Argentina is wider because there are so few Argentines.  On the other hand, there are enough Turks and Syrians in Denmark to make solid generalizations.

In reviewing Robert Zubrin's "The Case for Nukes," I find a compelling case against the war that Putin is waging against Ukraine.  It relates only tangentially to his case for nuclear power, but it does shed a lot of light on what and who led Putin to this huge blunder.

Today there is a dangerous new anti-Western, anti-freedom movement centered in Russia led by fascist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who is attempting to expand it worldwide. (He is doing so with significant success. The American “Alt Right” and a host of similar European “identarian” nativist movements all draw heavily from Dugin’s ideas.

The basic concept is to Balkanize the West, strangle its economy, and undermine its commitment to Enlightenment humanist ideals by invoking tribalism, Malthusianism, and other reactionary notions drawn from a combination of brown, green, and red sources.) It is the contention of the Duginites that the world would be better off without America, or any other country with liberal values. Indeed, I was present at a conference on global issues held at Moscow State University, Dugin’s home turf, in October 2013, when one of his acolytes got up and gave a fiery speech denouncing America for its profligate consumption of the world’s resources, including its oxygen supply.

Such ideas amount to a call for war. In order to triumph in that “clash of civilizations,” Dugin calls for reestablishing the Russian Empire, with all its previous possessions including Ukraine, the Baltic States, Poland, and the states of the Caucasus, and central Asia, as the ruling core of a totalitarian “Eurasian Union” stretching “from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” This superpower would then be able to defeat the world’s remaining liberal democracies, acquiring control of all the world’s supposedly finite resources and putting an end to humanity’s dangerous experiment with progress and freedom. The mixture of “left wing” and “right wing” antiliberal elements within Dugin’s ideology have led some to perceive it as something fundamentally new. On the contrary, it is essentially a close remake of Nazism. Hitler’s key political insight was that there is no contradiction between nationalism and socialism. On the contrary, invoking the tribal instinct is essential to arouse the passion necessary to implement the full collectivist agenda in its most lethal form. Thus he accurately named his movement “national socialism,” abbreviated Nazism. Duginism builds on this, but aiming for a wider marker, shuns Nazism’s obsession with the Nordic race per se. Instead it allows any race to conceive of itself as the master race, entitled to crush all others as well as deviant or disloyal individuals within its own ranks. Embracing the ideas of Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, it denounces the idea of individual human rights as an Anglo-Saxon conceit that denies the freedom of the collective to work its will without restraint. Like Nazism, it also draws extensive elements from communism, environmentalism, and weird forms of primitive mysticism to synthesize an intellect-destroying cult that people might be willing to die for.

In the 1920s Hitler was viewed by ruling circles in Germany as a kook, but a potentially useful one. Thus, during his imprisonment following his failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler was visited by Professor General Karl Haushofer, who instructed the young demagogue in the ideas of geopolitics, positing the need to unite the conservative Eurasian continental “Heartland” against the liberal cosmopolitan maritime “Rimland” to win the coming war of civilizations that would determine the human future. Duginism embraces this geostrategic ideology in full, with the only difference being that it moves the capital of the future Heartland world empire from Berlin to Moscow.

After Hitler took power, some members of the foreign policy establishments in other countries took the trouble to read his turgid opus Mein Kampf, but they generally dismissed it as irrelevant nonsense since it was clearly insanity.

What they missed was that it was a form of insanity useful to those who believed in the necessity for war and tyranny. Those who dismiss Duginism as merely the ravings of a crank are making the same mistake.

Dictators don’t take orders from professors, but they do get their ideas from them. They also make use of the ideological constructs created by intellectuals to gain broader acceptance of their own agendas. While revanchist Russian dictator Vladimir Putin certainly doesn’t take orders from Aleksandr Dugin, Putin’s statements and actions make it abundantly clear that he is reading Dugin’s hymnal and finding it useful. Based on this worldview, in February 2022 he ordered the invasion of Ukraine.

At this writing, Putin’s invasion forces have been halted, and partially pushed back. With proper Western backing, Ukraine may be able repel the current invasion entirely. But wherever the ceasefire lines are drawn, more and bigger attacks are inevitable so long as the belief in a zero-sum world predominates.

If war is seen as necessary, then cults that sell war will not lack for sponsors, or recruits.

Hitler said that the idea of peace and plenty through scientific progress was a Jewish plot to undermine people’s belief in the necessity for war. He was half right. It is certainly not a Jewish plot. But it does undermine people’s belief in the necessity for war. That is why we need it to prevail.

Do we really face the threat of general war? There seems to be no reason for it, and in fact, there isn’t. People all over the world today are actually living much better than they ever did before, at any time in human history. But the same was true in 1914. As then, and again in 1939, all it takes is the belief that there isn’t enough to go around, that others are using too much, or threatening by their growth to do so in the future, to set the world ablaze.

If it is accepted that the future will be one of resource wars, there are men of action who are prepared to act accordingly.

There is no scientific foundation supporting these motives for conflict. On the contrary, it is precisely because of the freedom and affluence of the United States that American citizens have been able to invent most of the technologies that have allowed China, Russia, and so many other countries to lift themselves out of poverty. And should China (with a population five times ours) develop to the point where its per-capita rate of invention mirrors that of the United States—with 4 percent of the world’s population producing 50 percent of the world’s inventions—the entire human race would benefit enormously. Yet, that is not how people see it, or are being led to see it by those who should know better.

Rather, people are being bombarded on all sides with zero-sum-derived propaganda not only by those seeking trade wars, immigration bans, or preparations for resource wars, but by those who, portraying humanity as a horde of vermin endangering the natural order, wish to use Malthusian ideology as justification for suppressing freedom. Such arguments sometimes costume themselves as environmentalists, but that is deception. True environmentalism takes a humanist point of view, seeking practical solutions for real problems in order to enhance the environment for the benefit of human life in its broadest terms. It therefore welcomes technological progress. Antihuman Malthusianism, on the other hand, seeks to make use of instances of inadvertent human damage to nature as an ideological weapon of behalf of the age-old reactionary thesis that humans are nothing but pests whose aspirations need to be contained and suppressed by tyrannical overlords to preserve a divinely ordered stasis.

“The Earth has cancer, and the cancer is man,” proclaims the elite Club of Rome in one of its manifestos. This mode of thinking has clear implications. One does not provide liberty to vermin. One does not seek to advance the cause of a cancer.

The real lesson of the last century’s genocides is this: We are not endangered by a lack of resources. We are endangered by those who believe there is a shortage of resources. We are not threatened by the existence of too many people. We are threatened by people who think there are too many people.

Those who accept the inevitability of general war but think they can mitigate its consequences by suppressing nuclear power have it exactly wrong. Atomic weapons can be (and were) manufactured in large numbers without there being any nuclear power plants. Moreover, much more deadly weapons can be created at much lower cost with vastly simpler facilities making use of biotechnology. We now know how to read the genetic code, and are rapidly learning how to write it. This technology offers innumerable benefits, as it will make possible the engineering of microbes — self reproducing machines if you will — programmed to make all kinds of useful substances from foods and fabrics to pharmaceuticals. But it will also enable the creation and mass production of disease organisms designed to kill, or avoid killing, members of particular ethnic groups. Using such technology, any group or nation with a few hundred million dollars to spend that feels itself aggrieved and without hope could wreak havoc upon the world. The existential threat facing humanity is not climate change. It is the ideologies of despair.

If the twenty-first century is to be one of peace, prosperity, hope, and freedom, a definitive and massively convincing refutation of these pernicious beliefs is called for—one that will forever tear down the walls of the hellish prison these ideas would create for humanity.

The most dramatic refutation possible would be to unleash the unlimited potential of nuclear power.

The husbands of the members of Oksana's Orff music group came along yesterday for a barbecue.  One husband has worked on USAID contracts.  He told me that USAID was frustrated that there are not enough minorities in Ukraine to allow them to enforce racial diversity dictates.  However, they did require that contractors hire equal number of male and female engineers.  Big problem – there just are not that many women who want to become engineers. Do you want the job done well, or do you want it done woke?

Another is a Reuters photographer who just returned from two months in Kharkiv.  As we learned in "Up Front," war reporters see more war, or more sides of war, than just about anybody else.  He was there when the US removed the restrictions on HIMARS and ATACAMS targeting objectives within Russia.  He says the effect was fast and dramatic.  He saw the equipment daily, though security concerns prevent him from taking pictures.  On the other hand, he offered the observation that Abrams tanks were not developed for this kind of warfare.  Kind of a dud.

The rate at which tactics and weaponry are evolving in this war makes a strong case that the US and the west should provide Ukraine with everything they want when they want it.  The pace of innovation means that it is being obsoleted amazingly quickly.  Cases in point are our GPS-guided smart artillery systems and Javelin man-carried anti-aircraft weapons.  The Russians adapted quickly.  Letting this stuff sit in stateside warehouses will do nobody any good.

With regard to deploying American troops, both guys were adamant.  Give us the hardware, leave the troops at home.  They have observed what DEI has done to American fighting forces and they want no part of it.  They especially don't want the Ukrainian military to be saddled with such nonsense.  They have a war to fight.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where men are men and girls are girls.  Zoriana and Marianna were delighted to flirt with the guys, who did their part well.  I'm a fairly strong guy, but these men, with kids of their own, are bigger, younger and stronger.  The girls loved being tossed way up in the air.

Graham