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At the tail end of September 1995, the Croatian Army (HV) launched an offensive across the Una River from Central Croatia into Serb-held Northwestern Bosnia. This came on the heels of several major victories for the HV in that war, but Operation Una would quickly be a failure.

Danish UN Peacekeepers were stationed in the vicinity and got to see the whole show as it played out. Stuck in their bunkers (to make sure that they weren’t accidentally hit by stray shells), they watched the action and reported what they saw. One report that I read has stuck with me ever since; a Danish soldier was using thermal imaging binoculars and watched Croatian soldiers slowly bleed out until they died from their wounds. He said that the colour of their bodies went from red, orange, and yellow, and then to green, and finally to a shade of dark blue.

Charlie Kirk is currently in between the orange and green phases, as his social media omnipresence begins to dissipate, leaving only clips of what once had been. Charlie is fading out.

I, like many others, dismissed him at first and openly mocked him. How could you not? TPUSA had a gift shop that sold the most cringe items possible: hoodies emblazoned with the words “I LOVE CAPITALISM” were splashed all over the page. Combined with his early rhetoric that reflected the most milquetoast GOP talking points, no one could be blamed for seeing him as little more than another sponsored Con Inc. grifter.

While many of us wrote him off, he continued to build his organization, extend his network, and most importantly, rapidly mature in his politics. As he was being ignored by the likes of people like myself, he moved away from Chamber of Commerce Republicanism and towards #MAGA. So successful was he in this evolution that not only did he gain the ear of people like Donald Trump and JD Vance, but he also managed to turn his organization, TPUSA, into the youth wing of #MAGA. So critical was he to this movement that he became a power broker behind the scenes at the age of 30. Who knows where he would have been at 50 if he was not gunned down by Tyler Robinson three months ago?

We will never know. What we do know now is that Kirk was able to speak to rival factions within the overall Republican Party, having earned the trust of each of these groups. This may not have been visible to us at the time, but it certainly is obvious now. Charlie had a movement, leadership qualities, trust, a growing, powerful network, and most importantly, influence. His removal from the scene has left a massive, gaping hole in #MAGA, leaving its youth wing rudderless for the time being (and for the foreseeable future).

has gone as far as to argue that the Kirk assassination has “wrecked the right”:

Highly Respected

The Charlie Kirk Assassination Wrecked The Right

Charlie Kirk’s death shocked the world. Millions of Americans grieved over the loss of the Turning Point USA founder. His public memorial essentially became a state funeral, with thousands in attendance, and countless others watching it live. His death gruesomely illustrated the threat of political violence, with the White House declaring Antifa a terro…

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4 months ago · 103 likes · 63 comments · Scott Greer

All of that disappeared with his murder. There’s no one filling the massive void he left behind. There’s a desperation to find someone to fill Kirk’s shoes, but the only candidate they can suggest is JD Vance. Vance is vice president. He’s too busy to serve as conservatism’s manager and hold campus rallies all over the country.

The vacuum left by Kirk led to the Right’s ongoing civil war. Without an effective leader, there’s nothing holding these disparate sides together. Brutal mudslinging and purge attempts naturally follow.

Scott focuses on two different streams to criticize in the fallout from the killing:

1. the addiction to ridiculous conspiratorial thinking that is amplified by social media

2. unrealistic hopes from those who want to see concrete action against perceived political enemies

Explaining the first group as individuals seeking entertainment, Greer speaks to how politics has become a spectator sport. Compounding this negative trend is the fact that this cohort are glued to podcasts that thrive on sensationalism, since sensationalism drives clicks (meaning revenue). Entertainment has in many ways supplanted the seek for truth in the realm of politics, and the cacophony that it produces makes trying to get your own point across almost a Sisyphean task. No, Charlie Kirk was not assassinated in a plot involving the Mossad, Egyptians, and TPUSA turncoats.

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The island of Brac (pronounced Brach) is the largest in the Adriatic Sea. Around 1900, it had a population of 30,000, which meant that it was already crowded. All but the local nobility were dirt poor, living hand-to-mouth from fishing, making and selling wine, growing olives, or raising livestock. The soil was too rocky to do much farming. Around the same time, a plague hit the vineyards, forcing thousands upon thousands of locals to emigrate out of fear of starvation. The situation on the mainland in Dalmatia was not an option, as the soil was just as bad…if you could find any to buy (assuming that you had any money in the first place). Almost everyone ended up in Chile, with a sizable amount landing in Argentina and Southern California (the family who started Starkist are originally from Brac). The population hasn’t even approached that size since then, maxing out at somewhere around 20,000.

It’s a beautiful island off of the coast near Split, the city in which I reside. Its main industry is tourism, having long supplanted fisheries and wineries. People on the island live well, many very, very well. I go there a lot.

On the south side of the island you can find Zlatni Rat (Golden Cape), which is in my opinion the best beach in the entire Adriatic. It’s fine pebble, which means that you can run around in it as the pebbles are rounded down and very small and smooth. It also means that you don’t get dirty as there is no sand. The beach lies in the canal between the islands of Brac and neighbouring Hvar, and the current cools the water temperature by 1-2C in the peak of summer, meaning that it is always refreshing.

The pace of life on the island is slow, something that people appreciate more and more these days. Being Dalmatian islanders, the residents of Brac are known for their friendliness and openness (except when it comes to their wallets), and the food that they serve is excellent.

Note: Time for a history lesson. Please forgive me.

When it comes to my favourite historical subjects, I have a tendency to visit, re-visit, and then continue to again re-visit several very different topics. Readers will notice this over time when it comes to my writing, one subject in particular being New York City at the turn of the previous century up until the 1930s, another being the Manson Murders (note the physical address assigned to this Substack). I dig and I dig and I dig until I exhaust my interest, only to return to it in a year or two.

As I get older, I appreciate local histories more and more. I really enjoy excavating down to the village level, as that is where you meet the most colourful characters and encounter the best stories, especially when oral histories are available. When I briefly lived in Switzerland, I did this for the town of Solothurn and its surroundings. I have been doing the same for Dalmatia (and bordering regions) for quite some time as well, especially the immediate area in and around the city of Split.

“The Balkans produces more history than it can consume” is a quote misattributed to Winston Churchill, but one that has been referenced so often that it has now become a truism. The original quote was in reference to the Greek island of Crete, but because it is true for the whole of the Balkans (or Southeastern Europe, if that is your preference), it has passed into the realm of the real. Despite its laid back reputation and sunny weather and disposition, the island of Brac is no exception to this rule.

Besides noticing the very Mediterranean topography, visitors to the island will not be able to avoid noting just how Venetian the town centres look. This is due to the fact that the Venetian Empire ruled the island (and much of the Adriatic) for several centuries. Even though the Italian regions of Abruzzo, Marche, and Apulia are geographically much closer to Central Dalmatia and its islands, its Venice that has left the largest imprint to this day. Even the local dialect is full of Italian words (taken from Venetian pre-Italian standardization). Locals will say “pomedora” for tomato, or “portan” for front door. Pants are “pantalone”, and the kitchen is “kuzhina”. Over the centuries, Venetian officials and traders settled the island, which is why Italian surnames are still relatively common even if the Italians themselves are almost entirely gone.

Napoleon ended the Venetian Empire, and the Austrians took control of Dalmatia when Napoleon met his Waterloo. Even though forming between 2-4% of the population of the province (now Kingdom of Dalmatia within the Habsburg realm), Italians continued to form its political, economic and cultural elite. The Croatian language was only made official and permitted to be used in government, schools, and on signs just prior to the end of the 19th century, and only after serious political conflict between pro-Italian ‘Autonomists’ and pro-Croatian ‘Populists’. Even after this historic victory was achieved, the fear of Italian encroachment was ever-present, as local Italians and assimilated locals who defined themselves as Italians looked on the creation of the modern Italian state enthusiastically, hoping that it would one day extend to the Eastern Adriatic coast. In their view, Italian culture was superior to that of the “barbaric Slavs” (an argument not without merit, in my opinion).

These fears weren’t without cause, as Italy entered the First World War by negotiating the secret Treaty of London (1915) that saw most of Dalmatia ceded to it in the event a victory by the Triple Entente or over the Central Powers.

Thanks to Woodrow Wilson and his famous 14 Points, the Treaty of London was scrapped at the Paris Peace Conference (1919-20), much to the consternation of the Italians. Nevertheless, they took the opportunity of a power vacuum in Dalmatia resulting from the collapse of the Habsburg Empire to send their forces to occupy as many islands and towns on the coast as possible to create a fait accompli that the Great Powers would be forced to accept…..except the Americans refused to do just that and instead sent a naval fleet into the Adriatic to chase the Italians out from many places in Dalmatia. The arrival of the Americans was greatly cheered by locals who in many places actively fought the Italian occupation. The Italians were forced to reduce their appetite along the Eastern Adriatic coast, agreeing to a border with the newly-established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later known as Yugoslavia. It was this American action that led Italians to describe their efforts in the First World War as a vittoria mutilata (mutilated victory), providing the initial fuel for what would become Italian Fascism.

Dalmatians lived in dread of their land being seized by the Italians and being forced to live under Italian rule. It was this fear in combination with the power vacuum in Dalmatia at the end of the First World War that led local elites to demand immediate unification with the Kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro, seeing Yugoslavia as the only guarantee against Italian irredentism. So strong was this fear that many local elites in Dalmatia (and on the island of Brac) began to promote Yugoslavism as an identity over that of the Croatian one, with serious effects over the next few decades.

The political climate of the island of Brac (almost entirely Croatian in composition in those years, with a smattering of Italians and then an even smaller cohort of Serb officials and their families arriving beginning in the 1920s) reflected that of the rest of Dalmatia during the 1920s and 30s. The initial euphoria of the creation of the first Yugoslav state quickly dissipated, and despite certain island elites maintaining loyalty to the Serbian King, the vast majority of the island’s residents rallied around the Croatian Peasant Party (80% by the late 1930s) due to poor economic conditions, the assassinations of several Croatian political leaders by the regime, and also because of the heavy-handed dictatorship introduced in 1929. Islanders wanted investment, development, electricity, expanded markets for their products, and a rising standard of living. Fascism and communism were rejected by the overwhelming majority of the islanders who just wanted to live better lives on their island paradise.

World War 2 on Brac

The problem with wanting to be left alone is that it takes two to leave you alone: you and everyone else. Like much of the world, Brac was not permitted to be left to its own devices by World War 2. With the Axis invasion and defeat of Yugoslavia in April of 1941, the country was partitioned into several parts. Initially, the island of Brac was awarded to the newly formed Independent State of Croatia (NDH), a puppet regime of both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Officials of this new regime began to wash ashore the island, but the Italians decided to rectify their mutilated victory by claiming even more land in Dalmatia. At the end of May of 1941, much of Dalmatia was handed over to Fascist Italy, rendering the pseudo-Independent State of Croatia stillborn, as its leader was forced to sign it over to Mussolini. In an instant, this new state lost much of its support.

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Note: Dedicated to my friend Timothy Herman and his lovely family

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There are so many things to love about Switzerland and admire about the Swiss people that it’s difficult to focus on just one thing as you end up feeling that that you are doing the country and its people a disservice. That’s just how rich of a place it is, and I use the word “rich” not in the financial sense, but rather to describe its shared wealth in terms of social and cultural development. One of the many things to admire about the country is how you can get anywhere by train. Every city, town, and village is connected by the Swiss train system. The trains are always on time, always clean and comfortable, and the natural beauty of the country makes any journey much more than just tolerable.

I lived in Switzerland for a year some 20 years ago, and I immediately threw myself into the local cultures and learning about them as much as I could over the course of several dozen weekends. The train system made my task much easier to accomplish, as I was able to head out to all points in this small country with ease and be back in time to do what I was employed to do for the time I was there.

I based myself in the town of Solothurn, the capital of the canton of the same name. Considered Switzerland’s most beautiful baroque town, it sits at the foot of the Jura Alps (not to be confused with the Swiss Alps to the south), and has an incredibly beautiful walled town that sits along the Aare River, wonderfully-preserved due to both the efforts of the local administrations throughout the years, and especially to centuries of official Swiss neutrality. The canton of Solothurn is a Catholic one, which gives it a lot of its specific character in a country where Catholicism competed with various strands of Protestantism, particularly Calvinism.

The town of Solothurn is 42 km to the north of the Swiss capital, Bern. Bern’s old town is one of the most beautiful places that I have ever been. Surrounded on three sides by the Aare River (the same one that runs through Solothurn), it is UNESCO-protected and reminds one of a fairy tale. As a person who grew up in North America, seeing well-preserved old buildings and structures such as those found in Bern’s old town never, ever got old. I would routinely jump on a train in Solothurn and make the short trip to Bern on Saturdays at least once a month while I was in Switzerland.

It was the first Saturday in April of 2005 that I decided to take another trip to Bern, but this time I decided that I would do something different this time. Instead of taking the train back, I would leave for Bern earlier than usual and then walk all the way back to Solothurn. The weather forecast promised a “mostly sunny” day with warm temperatures. “Why not?”, I thought to myself. 40 kilometres may seem like a long hike, but in excellent conditions such as those that presented themselves on that spring day, it would be an excellent way to get a better feel for the countryside between the Swiss capital and the little baroque town where I then resided.

40 kilometres is a long way to walk! “It’s worth it, anyway”, I thought to myself somewhere around kilometre 16. I was getting a sense of the lay of the land via foot, something that you cannot get by train voyage. At a certain point beyond the suburbs of Bern, I was able to identify how these towns and villages fed into the Swiss capital logistically and economically in times past, as the spread of the city (and the modern structures that accompanied them) had not yet permeated this far.

Bern is not just the capital of Switzerland, it is also the capital of the canton that shares the same name. Unlike Solothurn, Canton Bern is Protestant. This means that it has certain characteristics in terms of culture and governance that separate it from Switzerland’s Catholic cantons. As the country is very decentralized, these local customs and laws make the country all the more unique….and interesting.

I calculated that I would be back home around 8pm that night, just in time to get ready for a party later that evening that I was invited to. It must have been around 6:30pm when I approached Biberist, a town just inside of Solothurn Canton. Church bells were ringing, and they were ringing for some time. I did not hear any church bells ringing while walking through Canton Bern. The bells did not stop ringing. I was used to church bells ringing at several points through the day in Solothurn, but this time was different as the ringing continued without end. “What’s going on here? It’s not a special Saint’s Day”, I wondered to myself.

It took me a few minutes, but then I realized that this meant that Pope John Paul II had died. The entire world knew that he was not long for this world, and that he could pass at any moment. For me and many like me, he was the only Pontiff that we really knew. I was too young to remember the two who preceded him, so Pope John Paul II was a permanent fixture in my life up until that point, much like Queen Elizabeth II was for many of us up until recently, or like Donald Trump is for us Gen Xers to this day. This was a moment of significance for me, as this would be the first time that I would get to experience what it meant for a new Pope to take the seat at St. Peter’s.

There was so much to think about, and the weight of the significance of the passing of such an important Pope was immense. John Paul II represented a challenge to the Eastern Bloc, and to the communist system that ruled it. The symbolism of electing the first non-Italian Pontiff in centuries was huge. The fact that it was a Pole made that symbolism even bigger, its importance impossible to deny. For those of us Catholics who lived in (or came from) communist countries, this was “our guy”. He was a direct challenge to the monopoly on power held by communists in Central and Eastern Europe, one who threatened not just their rule, but the materialist philosophy underpinning it.

Over the years, many people have asked me to write about faith, particularly my faith as a Catholic. I have always politely demurred from doing this, as I am not exactly the most spiritual of people. In fact, I often jokingly describe myself as “religious, not spiritual”, the inverse of the Eat. Pray. Love. type of female who will claim to be “spiritual, not religious”. There are so many people out there who are better qualified to write or speak on this subject than I am for the simple reason that they have something that I have lacked all these years; a greater sense of, or relation to, the spiritual.

There are many people out there who have received a calling, or who have experienced something spiritually transcendent. I am not one of those people. I do know people like this, and I have encountered actual, serious people who are pious. They are either built different from me, or have experienced something that I have never experienced, or am yet to experience. I am Catholic due to the culture that I was raised in. I am baptized and confirmed. I have received the Sacraments. Just as importantly, at least to myself, Catholicism makes sense to me. This sounds like an attempt at rationalization, and I will accept that criticism. But as I grow older and continue to familiarize myself with Catholic thinking of the past, I keep finding myself in agreement with people like St. Thomas Aquinas or Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903).

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“The people are behind us, we have resoundingly won the recent elections, we have drafted legislation that, if passed, would allow us to make important reforms that we were voted into office to complete. We have the votes to support our legislation. Nothing can stop us.”

“Isn’t there someone that you forgot to ask?”

Western democracies have three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial. Each has its own roles and duties to perform. In theory, each of the three branches are independent of one another, allowing for a system of checks and balances to prevent an erosion of democracy and forestall the rise of tyranny. It sounds so lovely!

Like everything theoretical, this separation of powers will run head-first into the brick wall of reality, leaving many with a bitter taste as to its fallout. Strict constitutionalists will insist that it’s simply too bad that the judiciary can strike down laws as being unconstitutional. They have a point. On the other hand, divisive political environments create conditions of legislative gridlock that make constitutional reform all but impossible, often for decades at a time. What are deemed “necessary reforms” and that have the backing of the popular will are then subject to the interpretation of that state’s constitution by the men and women in black aka the judiciary. This leaves that branch of government with quite a lot of power, and with human nature being as it is, permits a significant amount of partisanship to result from it.

“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”

This quote has been attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the incredibly wealthy founder of the banking dynasty that bears his name. Many dispute its attribution, with some claiming it to be the result of an Anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

But like many faked quotes, there is indeed an element of truth in them. I think that there is a case to be made that the following line can also be viewed as being true:

Permit me the control of the nation’s judiciary, and I care not who makes its laws.

I am far, far away from the best person to write on this subject, which is why this entry will be a relatively short one. I have not studied law beyond the high school level, and whatever I did encounter on the subject while pursuing Political Science in university was always peripheral to where my focus was. There are some brilliant legal minds who read this Substack, so I apologize if I do make you cringe with anything that I have written up to this point, or after it as well. I hope that someone with a much better grounding in law than myself can cover the subject of this essay at length at some point in the near future. With that in mind……..

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“This mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’—this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far,’ and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969…The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remembered all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”—Joan Didion, The White Album (1979)

It finally happened.

For eight long years, one of the most inevitable events in all of modern history finally took place: the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

I was already in bed when the shooting took place, but for some reason I woke up at around 2am and did what I have programmed myself to do over the years: pick up my phone and scroll the news.

“They finally did it”, I thought to myself. “They finally did it!”

They. They.

Instinctively, I had somehow already concluded that it was not a “he”, but “they” that did this to him. My mind involuntarily rushed to the conclusion that this was not the act of a “lone wolf”, but of a conspiracy. And why shouldn’t it have done so? For eight long years we have been relentlessly bombarded by media that this man was a threat to democracy, a threat to world peace, and “The New Hitler”. If he was indeed the New Hitler, then the only thing to lament in light of the shooting was the fact that the assassin had missed his target by an Act of God. This is what consistency would demand.

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump was the culmination of eight years of his constant demonization, the inability of Hillary’s campaign to defeat him, the neutering of his Presidency, his sidelining during the days after J6, and the failure to politically assassinate him by locking him up in prison. If he could not be politically nor legally liquidated, all that remained was his physical elimination. First came the political, then the legal, and finally the physical. It is this sequence of events which has left me convinced that this was indeed a conspiracy.

I try to be responsible when writing on my Substack, but at the same time I have a duty to be truthful with my readers. I am doing my best to keep an open mind about this event and am trying to keep my powder dry, but I, like you (and like Joan Didion in August of 1969 when she heard the news of the slaughter at the Polanski residence) was not in the slightest bit surprised that it happened. We all saw this coming, and not one of us was thrown off key when it finally took place.

The stage was clearly set for it to happen, and certain powers-that-be tried their best to set the state perfectly for it to occur. Per :

Back in April of this year, nine House Democrats introduced a bill to strip Donald Trump of his Secret Service protection under a bill that they called the “DISGRACED Former Protectees Act”, which you can find here.

This bill did not make it into law, but its attempted passage is indicative of how the path was being cleared for Donald Trump to be physically liquidated at some point in the future.

Am I saying that someone somewhere called up this failed assassin and said “hey, we need you to kill Trump”? No, I am not saying this. It’s far too early to leap to such conclusions, and as mentioned up above I do have a duty to be responsible in my writing. Speculation and theorizing are best saved for the comments section below, or on social media (it’s a lot of fun to do, I will concede).

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What I am saying is that paths have been cleared for a gunman to try to take Donald Trump out. We are already seeing how poorly the Secret Service performed on that day, and even some sitting GOP Senators and House Representatives are taking the agency to task over it, with demands for the head of Director Kimberly Cheatle.

Think about the sequence of events that led up to this assassination attempt. Think about the hysteria and demonization that propelled it. Think about the role of the FBI in targeting Donald Trump and many of his supporters.1 Then think about how the FBI was tasked with investigating the attempted assassination. The cleanup crew arrived on scene to cover the failure up in a nice and tidy way. None of us were taken aback by the events of that Saturday, just like none of us were surprised when Jeffrey Epstein conveniently “committed suicide” in his holding cell, either.

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump was a flex of power. Only through an Act of God did he survive.

“No Man, No Problem”

The line above has been attributed to Joseph Stalin, and I have little doubt that he would have uttered such a thing for two reasons:

1. it was in character for him as he enjoyed making such reductionist amoral remarks

2. his record of bloody purges speaks for itself

The elimination of an individual is an act of last resort in which all other approaches to change the target’s behaviour have been exhausted, leaving physical liquidation the only remaining solution to the perceived problem. It also serves to warn others to not act in a similar manner, lest they too eat a bullet. This act, one most often borne of desperation, is climactic. This is why such acts enthrall so many people, especially those like myself.

I was too young to fully comprehend how the murder of John Lennon affected so many people so deeply. I saw the images of the people holding vigil in front of The Dakota on the Upper West Side, but my mind could not yet process it. Less than four months later, John Hinckley tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. I remember watching the video on television, but was unmoved. The film of that attempted assassination was too short, and not much could be seen. The main reason for the lack of impact (at least for young Nic) was because the Secret Service did a fantastic job on that day.2

The first assassination (attempted or successful) that did resonate with me happened later that same year: on October 6, 1981 the Islamic Jihad assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. That one stuck with me, and it has stayed with me for one, very specific reason; the video from the scene of the assassination was quite graphic, and it was broadcast everywhere.

At exactly 2:27 you can see a man whose right arm has been obliterated thanks to the assassins:

That image burned itself into my memory, and has never once left. I brought this up before in a previous essay, and several people belonging to my age cohort let me know that they too had the exact same thing happen to them. We do not realize just how easily we are influenced in our formative years until we have the benefit of hindsight to give us perspective on it.

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Two weeks ago today I rented an automobile here in Zagreb from my friend’s agency so that I could go to my mother’s village across the border in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It’s a 70 minute drive from Split to Livno County, but you have to cross the border around 45 minutes into the trip. Croatia is both an EU member and part of the Schengen Area, the latter of which obliges members to have somewhat stricter than usual border crossing controls and protocols. Croatia has been in the EU for over a decade, but has only been within Schengen as of this past January.

The reason for my trip was that one of my favourite cousins was flying in from Switzerland (where she resides with her family) to visit her parents in her home village. Our mothers are sisters and we are quite close, and enjoy spending time with one another. An hour’s drive isn’t too much of an effort to make to see someone that you love very much.

I’ve passed through this border crossing dozens of times, so when I pulled up I assumed that it would be business as usual: I had them my Croatian ID card (we are permitted to use these to enter Bosnia and don’t require a passport) and they wave me through after some small talk.

This time was different.

The border guard inside of the hut turned to his colleague and asked him something about he saw on the screen once he ran my ID card through the machine. He then slid the small window to close it. Something was up. I waited for around five minutes or so, and he opened the window and told me to pull up ahead and park to the right side. They didn’t hand me back my ID card. I did as I was told. He exited the hut and approached me on my side and told me to wait until they could figure out what the problem was, as he clearly had no idea either.

That Friday afternoon was sunny and not too warm, so I exited the rental car and proceeded to loiter around in the area, not straying too far so as to be out of their eyesight. This border crossing is not a very busy one, as it mostly serves locals from both sides of the border making quick jaunts from one side to the other. The next border crossing to the immediate south of this one is much larger, and services trucks of all sizes. It makes this one a simple one to cross, with waiting times practically unheard of.

A line of cars began to form in the direction of Bosnia-Herzegovina, as no one was being allowed to pass through for the time being. I stood outside of my rental car about 20 feet away from the huts, one eye trained on the main office to see who would come out of it, and the other eye on the people stuck in the queue to see if they were upset with me. I had zero idea what was going on, but my mind was racing trying to figure out if I maybe did something wrong in the not-too-distant past that would warrant me being denied the ability to cross the border and exit the country. I was scratching my head, wondering what could justify this situation…..

“There’s something wrong with your ID card”, said the border guard who tried to process me after exiting the main office. “Stay there until we figure it out”, he added, as he returned to the hut and re-opened the border to the people waiting in line to cross into Bosnia.

“Okay, no problem” I replied.

What else could I say?

I proceeded to loiter in the area just off to the side of the border crossing huts, and decided to call my buddy R.1 R. works for the Croatian domestic intelligence agency, and he and I have become close friends over the years. If I’m ever in a serious jam, I can call him to try and fix any situation that I find myself in.

“They say there’s something wrong with my ID card”, I tell him over the phone. “It’s probably nothing, but keep me updated anyway”, he replies.

Over half an hour later, the same border guard who tried to process my ID card comes out of his hut to tell me “It looks like it’s not a big deal, but we still can’t figure it out. Stay there for a bit longer.”

“Sure”.

What else could I say?

Another forty-five minutes pass and I begin to get quite worried. “If it’s a minor issue, there’s no way that it should take this long”, I think to myself. I begin to scroll through my memory once more, trying to think what possibly could have led up to this moment. Still no luck.

It’s at this point when the head border cop working that shift comes out of the main office and calls me by my name to come inside. I walk over.

“We’re really, really sorry about this, but I have to confiscate your ID card. There is something wrong with it. I don’t know what it is, though”, he explains, very apologetically.

“Okay. If that’s what you need to do, then do it”, I tell him in the most calm manner possible.

“Thank you for not being upset. I am trying to reach my boss up in Zagreb (the capital city of Croatia) to figure this out. Please sign this document here that indicates that we have confiscated your ID card. You will get a copy in return.”

“Sure.”

I sign the document.

“Thank you. Please go wait outside for a bit longer until we figure this out.”

“Okay, no problem.”

I return to the rental car, and assume my loitering stance. “Is this a bureaucratic issue?”, I ask myself, scratching my head.

Fifteen more minutes pass until I am called back into the office.

“I didn’t want to tell you this at first, but when we tried to process your ID card, three red alerts popped up on the screen immediately. One from MUP (Croatian Police), and one from Interpol”, explained the shift manager.

“What the fuck????”, I thought.

“What?”, I asked, once again in the most calm manner I could muster to display.

“We don’t get it either. Go back to your car and wait a bit longer until we figure this out”, he instructed me once again.

“I am wanted by Interpol”, I thought to myself as I returned to the rental car to do some more loitering. “Why the fuck would Interpol want me?”, I asked myself. “If Interpol wants me, why wasn’t I arrested in the spot and transported to the nearest jail?” A million questions bombarded my brain as I tried to make sense out of this news. The problem was that nothing made sense. A red alert from the Croatian Police should be enough to get me arrested prior to that day as I am not very difficult to find. An Interpol red alert should find me in jail awaiting a court date. Nothing made sense.

I called R.

“What? Did you do something while you were in Canada?”, he asked me.

“No. I did absolutely nothing in Canada over the holidays. The only thing I did that would warrant any attention was when I was in New York City during Christmas to meet up with Curtis Yarvin. I threatened to beat up Vladislav Davidzon two nights in a row, but I hardly think that warrants an Interpol red alert.”

“Okay, keep me updated.”

I could either begin to panic, or start laughing at the absurdity of the situation. I chose the latter simply because I had not been cuffed and put into a police van to go to jail. Something in the system caused this, but not through any fault of my own. The fact that there was a red alert from Interpol led me to start making jokes to myself about how I was headed to The Hague for war crimes. “Might as well make light of the situation”, I concluded.

A few minutes later I got called back into the office.

“We still have no idea what’s going on. All we have found is this.” He pointed to a print out of a speeding ticket. It seems that there was an outstanding speeding ticket from September of last year when I took a trip down to Dubrovnik. In Croatia, you generally know where all the photo radars are, as you will see signs on the road that say “Area Under Radar Control Up Ahead”, giving you advance warning to slow down. Sometimes they don’t do this, and I obviously got caught on camera speeding in an area where there was no warning.

“I never received any notice of this”, I explained to the shift manager.

“I believe you…but this all that we could find.”

I then proceeded to ask him the million dollar question: “If there is a red alert from Interpol for me, why haven’t you cuffed me and put me in jail?”

“We don’t get it either, as this has never happened here before. The only instruction that we received was to confiscate your ID card, and deny you the ability to cross the border.” The shift manager was incredibly apologetic to me, to the point where I had to calm him down by assuring him that I was not freaking out. It took me a bit longer than I thought it would to make him believe me.

“Okay, so what do we do now?”, I asked.

“Here’s what you’re gonna do: we’re confiscating your ID card as we are instructed to do, and I apologize for that, but I have to do it. You’re going to turn your car around and you’re going to pay this speeding ticket. When you pay this ticket, you’re going to send proof of payment to the police station in Ston (down near Dubrovnik) by email, as your offence took place in their jurisdiction. When you are done that, you are going to go back to Split and go to the nearest police station to your residence, and show them these documents and ask them what you are supposed to do from that point onwards.”

“Okay…but we still don’t know what the exact problem is, right?”

“Right.”

I’ve spent over two hours loitering about, and we still don’t have a resolution, but we do have a clue: the speeding ticket. But does a speeding ticket warrant a red alert from both Croatian Police and Interpol?

The shift manager and his colleagues proceed to apologize for the inconvenience one last time. I hop into my rental, turn it around, and head back toward Split.

“I’m sure that I’ll see you guys soon enough”, I assure them.

I head back down the mountainside and towards Sinj, the first town on the way back to Split. I decide to pay off the speeding ticket there so as to get that out of the way as quickly as possible. As I approach a roundabout in the centre of town, I notice a police van behind me signalling me to pull over immediately.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?????”, I thought to myself, on the edge of panic for the first time today. Was I about to actually get arrested this time?

I pull over at the INA gas station and roll down my window. One of the police officers walks up to me and I prepare myself mentally for whatever is about to go down.

“Were you just up at the border crossing?”, he asks me.

“Yeah.”

“They forget to return the rental car documentation to you.”

“Oh”, I replied, relieved that I wasn’t about to get taken down in public view.

“Are you going to go back there now to go get it?”

“Yeah, I’ll do that right now.”

“Okay, I’ll let them know”, the cop said to me, wishing me a good day.

“Phew!”

I do the fifteen minute drive back to the border crossing, and the shift manager is on the verge of tears, apologizing profusely to me.

“The next time I see you, I am taking you out for food and drinks. It’s all on me. I’m so sorry about all of this today….”

“It’s okay, shit happens. As long as it’s nothing serious”, I reassure him.

I return to Sinj and head to the nearest bank to pay off the speeding ticket. I immediately email proof of payment to the police station in Ston. I then proceed to head back to Split.

I still have no idea what’s going on, but I do update R. He is laughing hysterically by this point, convinced that this was some sort of bureaucratic error. “I hope he’s right”, I say to myself.

I continue to think of any issues that could have caused a red alert to be sent out for me by Interpol as I head to the police station in Pojisanska Street in Split. I prepare myself mentally to be arrested. I proceed to the counter with the documentation that I received at the border in hand, and explain to them the situation and what the border police instructed me to do.

“Okay. Lemme see what this is all about.”

The clerk returns to me in less than five minutes. The moment of truth is at hand.

“Alright. You paid the speeding ticket and Ston Police have already lifted the alerts for you. All you need to do now is to go to FINA (akin to the DMV in the USA) and get a new ID card.”

“That’s it? You mean I’m not getting arrested and going to The Hague? I know Luka Misetic and I have him on speed dial”, I joke.

“Hahaha…no Hague for you. That’s it. This was all about an unpaid speeding ticket. You can walk to FINA from here…it’ll take you about 15 minutes. Just show them this document.”

He hands me the document.

“Enjoy the rest of your day”, he says to me.

I walk over to FINA and they process my request for a new ID card within five minutes. The entire matter is resolved.

I’m still trying to process the entire thing.

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Vladimir Putler has gone and done it now!

Most of you haven’t heard the news yet, but Russia’s most popular political figure, Alexei Navalny, was murdered this past weekend by the brutal dictator temporarily residing in the Kremlin. Well-placed sources say that this hit was ordered by the weak (and little) man known as “Vladimir Putin” because Navalny’s crack team of anti-corruption activists had found child porn on his laptop, and were about to publish this bombshell in media across the globe.

My better placed sources inform me that Putler had given the order to kill him in a fit of rage when he learned from Tucker Carlson that Navalny was a “superfan” of the animated TV series “Rick and Morty”. The show’s subversive and highly intelligent humour (most of you are too dumb to get it) is viewed by Putler as a personal affront because of the secretly encoded anti-regime messages strategically planted throughout each episode. Russia’s state security service (FSB) tried to decipher them, but their analysts are simply too dumb to be able to do so (remember: the show is for the highly intelligent, which means that most of you can’t get it….so stop pretending that you do).

During the interview prep session, Tucker Carlson shared this now famous photo of Alexei Navalny and his wife Lyudmila watching Rick and Morty on their flight back to Russia from Germany, shortly after Alexei’s recovery from Putlerian poisoning:

This is the last known photograph of Alexei experiencing freedom.

The fact that Putler personally went to the Siberian gulag where Alexei was being held prisoner in order to kill him in person speaks volumes about how weak, pathetic, and cowardly the Russian dictator really is. He knew that in any and open free election Russia (monitored by the OSCE, UN, the CIA, and other trusted international bodies) he would get trounced by Russia’s most popular politician in history. Research shows that in a head-to-head election for the Russian Presidency in a free and fair vote, Navalny would get between 85-91% of the overall popular vote. To put it simply, he had to go.

My very well-placed sources in Russia tell me that there is now a fight over custody of Navalny’s beautiful, swimmer-like corpse. Most assume that this is because Putler fears that an autopsy will reveal how he was bludgeoned to death with vodka bottles. There is no doubt that this IS the case, but there is also another reason: Putler wants to ensure that no one gets access to Alexei’s perfect remains because it is rumoured that it has already performed three miracles, thus making Russia’s most popular person in history a candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church.

Some are already calling him “The Messiah of the Russian future”:

I believe this. I also believe that every Russian town in 50 years from now will have its own Navalny Square. Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya agrees with me.

Mikhail Shishkin is fighting for democracy in Russia on the frontline in Switzerland, and I agree with his assessment here:

Russian exiles in Switzerland have a great historical track record of returning home and making their country a liberal democratic paradise, so Shishkin is one to watch.

Carole Codswallop also paid tribute to the greatest Russian of all-time:

If you don’t know who Carole is, she is the UK’s leading crusader against misinformation AND disinformation. She is leading two battles simultaneously, and has done incredible work uncovering how Putler financed and organized #Brexit. The brutal murder of Alexei makes her work all the more important.

St. Alexei, Patron Saint of Russia and Liberal Democracy

St. Alexei was not always a good person i.e. liberal democrat. In fact, his earlier life resembled that of St. Augustine of Hippo, one of Christianity’s titans. In his youth, Augustine turned away from God to pursue a life of hedonism, eventually realizing that a life without God was not a worthy life at all.

St. Alexei also rejected liberal democracy in his youth, as we can see from this 2007 entry in his LiveJournal:

Much like the typical non-liberal democrat Slav, our St. Alexei was crude, mean, vicious, savage, and sadistic…..just like his murderer, Putler.

It was around this time that God/Liberal Democracy intervened from up on high, and granted him a scholarship to Yale University via the Yale World Fellows Progam. God/Liberal Democracy picked him out of a crowd to set him on the right path, the path of godly liberal democracy. At Yale, St. Alexei attended weekly seminars based around the concept of the “Good Society”:

Good Society. World Fellows present to each other their vision for making the world a better place, what they do professionally, and how they contribute to building the ‘good society.’

He also attended salons:

Salon. World Fellows host distinguished guests for discussions on key topics, expanding their knowledge and challenging their views.

St. Alexei also experienced his own personal development:

World Fellows receive individual and group coaching and skills development training. World Fellows can audit many of the 2,000+ courses offered at Yale, work on individual or collaborative projects, and conduct independent research.

And most important of all, he was brought into a circle of good, liberal democratic people, all of whom know that the purpose of life is to spread liberal democracy around the globe no matter how many millions of people need to be killed in the process of saving the world from non-liberal democrats:

Fellows expand their global network by connecting with World Fellows in their cohort and with other Fellows spread throughout the world. Yale’s campus also provides countless opportunities to connect with faculty and students over shared professional and academic interests.

Navalny left the Yale World Fellows Program a new man. No longer would he ally himself with Russian Neo-Nazis. No longer would he spew hate against Jews, “faggots”, and “black-asses” (the evil Russian term for those from Russia’s southern periphery). He would now spew hate only against non-liberal democrat Russians, just like God demands of us all. Alexei was finally saved.

St. Alexei’s mission was now a simple one: deliver to Russia the liberal democracy that its people want and crave, but that Putler and his henchmen refuse to allow. With the financial support of liberal democratic Russian business oligarchs of the 1990s, St. Alexei began to uncover the worst cases of corruption in Russian history. Russia had never seen such massive and brazen corruption before. In fact, it was the central purpose of Putler’s Russia. St. Alexei urged Russia to return to the economic paradise of the 1990s, where market reforms worked to improve the lives of all Russians, hand-in-hand with efforts to institute liberal democrat rule. Like the vast majority of Russia’s citizens, St. Alexei wanted to turn the clock back to the incredibly successful and utopian Yeltsin Era.

St. Alexei’s efforts to bring liberal democracy to Russia were so close to succeeding that Putler had him poisoned with Novichok in 2020. Our saint had to flee to Germany to get proper treatment to save his life so that he could continue his crusade on behalf of the Russian people and western financial and state security interests. Displaying his bravery and his total lack of fear, he hilariously returned to Russia in early 2021, defying little-man Putler, daring the dictator to toss him in jail.

Putler accepted the challenge and threw him into prison…..and then had him killed three years later.

St. Alexei, Patron Saint of Russia and Liberal Democracy, Pray For Us

A hero, a saint, and also an oracle. St. Alexei urged Russia not to support evil Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in his brutal, genocidal war against the liberal democrats of al-Nusra and ISIS:

Liberal democracy won in Syria, just like our saint had predicted.

Our saint also called out the brutal, genocidal Russian invasion of Ukraine as well. My humble request is that Moscow be renamed ‘Navalnygrad’ (or Navalnyyhrad in Ukrainian spelling) once the Ukrainian Army liberates it from Moskal rule and a liberal democratic government is installed in power by the CIA and MI6. This would be the most fitting tribute to St. Alexei, Patron Saint of Russia and Liberal Democracy.

St. Alexei joins a long list of liberal democrats who have been murdered by Putler. Some of the better known victims include:

Ibn al-Khattab (1963-2002)

al-Khattab was a Saudi liberal democrat who went to Chechnya to lead the Arab Mujahideen there, in its quest to end Russian rule not just in that province, but in the whole of the Caucaus region. His objective was to set up the Islamic Liberal Democratic Emirate of the North Caucasus. In 2002, Putler donned a goat costume, and then sexually lured al-Khattab into a wooded area near the Georgian border. Once he had him alone, Putler stabbed al-Khattab 50,000 times, most likely leading to the liberal democrat’s death.

Yevgeny Prigozhin (1961-2023)

Prigozhin was a liberal democrat who headed the Wagner liberal democratic paramilitary force, composed of 80,000 Russian liberal democratic political prisoners, all imprisoned by Vladimir Putler. Wagner was to be the nucleus of the Free Russian Liberal Democratic Army that would march on Moscow/Future Navalnyyhrad, but his heroic effort to free Russia unfortunately failed. Putler murdered him in 2023 using a remote control device to bomb the plane he was aboard on at the time.

Boris Berezovsky (1946-2013)

The most powerful liberal democratic businessman of Russia’s Golden Liberal Democratic Age of the 1990s, he failed to detect just how malicious, evil, and especially, cunning, Putler actually was. After all, it was Boris who raised him up through the various verticals of power, convincing the Great Boris Yeltsin that Vladimir should be his successor, the one to finalize Russia’s transition to free-market liberal democracy. Upon gaining power, Putler turned the tables on liberal democrat and free market reformer Berezovsky, forcing him into exile in the UK. Boris would spend the next decade working as an NGO activist on behalf of liberal democracy and human rights in Russia. In 2013, Putler infiltrated his mansion in the Kentish countryside, and hanged him in his bathtub. It was ridiculously ruled a ‘suicide’.

Shamil Basayev (1965-2006)

The most powerful military leader of the Chechen resistance to Putler’s anti-liberal and anti-democratic rule, liberal democratic freedom fighter Basayev masterminded not only the Moscow Theater Hostage Liberation in 2002, but also the very successful liberal democratic attack on the elementary school in Beslan in 2004 which resulted in the deaths of 300+ children, all of whom were future Putler loyalists. Basayev was an incredibly effective guerrilla leader, and a man whose dedication to liberal democracy, human rights, and freedom won him admiration across the globe, including from liberal-democratic NGO al-Qaida. In 2006, Basayev fell victim to the same ploy that had ensnared and killed al-Khattab. Putin could not believe that he fell for it after knowing what had happened to his liberal-democratic colleague and fellow freedom fighter from Saudia Arabia.

St. Alexei Had a Dream

Imagine a Russia that would no longer be ruled by Putler and his clique. Imagine a Russia that would return to the halcyon days of the Yeltsin Era. Imagine a Russia, both free and democratic, one in which all of its natural resources could be stripped by foreign financial interests who have only the best interests of Russia and Russian at heart. Imagine a Russia shrunk down to the size of Muscovy, with a free Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Dagestan, etc. removed from its rule, allowed to pursue its own liberal democratic path.

This is the vision of St. Alexei, Patron Saint of Russia and Liberal Democracy. See you next year in Navalnyyhrad.

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Author’s Note:

I was recently asked to write about the Spanish Civil War and why people turned against the Republican regime and sided with Francisco Franco and other military figures who attempted to launch a coup d'état to overthrow the government in July of 1936. This essay will attempt to answer this question by painting a broad portrait of the events that lead up to that bloody conflict. This will not be a comprehensive treatment of the subject of what led Spain to fall apart that summer, as it will mainly focus on the interests, concerns, and arguments of one side (which contained many different factions, often at odds with one another). Therefore, it will not be an objective look, and will instead be very partial to one side in order to answer the question that was posed to me. A lot of obvious (and less well-known) facts will be missing from this piece due to the constraints put on it by the question I intend to answer, and for the sake of brevity.

If this essay generates enough interest, I will happily continue the story, beginning with the conservatives forming a government led by Gil Robles and CEDA…but this is entirely up to you.

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The above excerpt is a piece of historical fiction courtesy of American author and legend, Ernest Hemingway. At a crossroads in his life, he decided to go to Spain to cover the conflict for a newspaper chain. Out of his experiences in that war came “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940), one of his most celebrated novels. In this excerpt, he uses the female character ‘Pilar’ to relate the story of how Republican forces massacred a group of people in a small town who were opposed to the government and supported the Spanish Generals seeking to overthrow it. Derided as “fascists”, each of the men were forced to pass a line of pro-government peasants who would beat them with flails before throwing them off of a cliff. Civil wars are indeed the most vicious, even in fictional depictions like this one.

The Spanish Civil War is odd for two reasons, the first one being that more than any other war that I can think of, historians have placed a much stronger focus on the politics of the conflict to the detriment of its military aspects. The second reason is much more important overall, and particularly germane to the subject of this essay: it is the only war that I can think of where the histories have been overwhelmingly written by the losers.1

If you ask a random, somewhat educated person in the West about the Spanish Civil War, they will generally say that “Franco was a fascist who allied himself to Hitler and Mussolini and won the civil war in the most brutal fashion possible. He was a dictator who hated democracy and killed thousands upon thousands of innocent people.” Beyond that, they might make mention of Hemingway and his novel, or even Pablo Picasso’s painting entitled “Guernica”2, that depicts the victims of the German Luftwaffe bombardment of that small Basque town in the north of Spain. Others still will relay the fact that the term “Fifth Column” came out of the Spanish Civil War.3 Added up all together, the most simplified take becomes “Franco bad, Republicans good”.

Of course this take is wrong, as this conflict was too complex to arrive at such a ridiculous reductionist conclusion no matter which side you sympathize(d) with. To give you a quick illustration of just how complex this conflict was, here is a list of the major domestic factions that took part in it:

Spanish Republican Side:

• People’s Army (the armed forces of the Spanish Republic)

• Popular Front (left-wing electoral alliance of communists, socialists, liberals, anarchists)

• UGT (very large trade union affiliated with the Spanish Socialists)

• CNT-FAI (massive trade union of anarchist militants)

• POUM (anti-Stalinist communists, including some Trotskyites)4

• Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalonian Autonomists)

• Euzko Gudarostea (Army of the Basque Nationalists)

Spanish Nationalist Side:

• Spanish Renovation (monarchists supporting the Bourbon claimant to the throne, Alfonso XIII, who abdicated in 1931)

• CEDA (the main conservative party, Catholic conservatives)

• Requetés (traditionalist Catholic monarchist militants who supported the Carlist Dynasty, mainly from the region of Navarre)

• Falange Española de las JONS (Spanish Fascists)

• The Army of Africa, including the Spanish Legion (Spanish Army in Spain’s then-colony of Morocco, with many Moroccans serving in it)

Add to this mix the International Brigades5 that fought on the side of the government, and the German and Italian forces who backed the rebels. To list off all the political groupings that participated in the war is a mouthful, but necessary to hammer home the point of the complexity of this conflict. So here goes: nationalists, monarchists (from two competing royal houses), fascists, conservatives, liberals, social democrats, socialists, communists (from two competing camps), anarchists, and regional autonomists. In short, this war had something for everyone, which is why it caught the attention of so many foreigners (especially famous ones) at the time. But before we dive into the run up to the civil war, we need to understand some of the history of Spain that lead up to this “world war in miniature”.

A Very, Very Brief History of Modern Spain Up Until the Establishment of the Second Spanish Republic

Together with Portugal, the Spanish Empire led the world in the exploration of the globe and its colonization, opening up trade routes across oceans to exploit the natural wealth that they found in these new lands. Silver came first, and then gold. This propelled Spain to be the world’s foremost power in the 16th century, ruling the waves until its Armada was defeated by the English in 1588. Despite expanding in the 18th century, the Spanish Empire was already in decline by the mid 17th century, as the French, English/British, and Dutch overtook them diplomatically, militarily and technologically.

The 17th century was marked by economic stagnation and decline, as inflation, heavy taxation and mismanagement of the economy (including repeated plundering of the royal treasury by the nobility) were rampant, leading many Spaniards to emigrate to the colonies in the New World. Some parts of Spain even began to deindustrialize during this era, compounding its woes.

By the early 18th century, a Spanish nation-state began to emerge as Castile began to exert its dominance over the Iberian Peninsula, and the various non-Castilian peoples on it like the Aragonese, Galicians, Basques, and Catalonians. Castile would form the core of Modern Spain, a condition that prevails to this day.6

In 1715, the Wars of the Spanish Succession ended with a Bourbon victory over the Habsburgs, transferring control of Spain and its empire to the victors. Despite some reforms that improved the economy, empire, aristocracy, and the Church were still its main concerns, with The Enlightenment (that was spreading across much of Europe at that time) almost completely passing it by. Spain became involved in the tug-of-war between Britain and France over the next century, ending in disaster during the Peninsular War when erstwhile ally Napoleon occupied Spain, leading to a bloody rebellion that economically devastated it. It also sparked a series of rebellions in its colonies in North and South America, resulting in the loss of possession of all of them (except Cuba and Puerto Rico) by 1826. With the loss of those colonies, Spain’s international presence, importance, and prestige were significantly eroded.

A much reduced Spain was firmly in the hands of the nobles and the Church, with a large landowning aristocracy, and a very large peasant class that either owned tiny plots of land to cultivate, or no land whatsoever. A middle class did began to grow in size in urban settings, providing a new addition to the social dynamic during that period. But the devastation wrought by the French occupation (and the rebellion against it) combined with the loss of its colonies impoverished the Spanish Kingdom. Outside of Catalonia, industrialization was absent. The exploitation of natural resources like coal were hampered by a primitive transportation system. Demographic decline set in with massive emigration to former colonies in the Americas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 1812, a very liberal constitution (the Constitution of Cadiz) was adopted by the Spanish royals. Despite its formal adoption, significant resistance to it from Ferdinand VII and his conservative allies made it little more than a piece of toilet paper, at least to them. It was this fight between liberals and absolutists that would colour the rest of 19th century Spain, one dominated by conspiracies, palace intrigues, coups, and military interventions. So riven was Spain by factionalism between parties and within parties that Amadeus of Savoy, elected to be its King Amadeo I, famously concluded that the Spanish people were ungovernable. He immediately abdicated the throne and left the country for good.

Amadeus’ flight into exile created a political vacuum, one that was quickly filled by radicals and Republicans who declared the First Spanish Republic. This initial foray into republicanism ended in a little over a year due to the immense opposition it encountered from monarchists, the Catholic Church, and military figures who launched a successful coup that restored the Bourbons to the throne. This republic also saw regional unrest and rebellions in Catalonia and Navarre, and just as significantly, it also was witness to pro-republican socialists demanding revolution i.e. redistribution of land.

In 1898, Spain experienced a “disaster”; the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and The Philippines to the USA in the Spanish-American War. The so-called Spanish Empire was reduced to colonial holdings in Morocco, the Sahara, and Guinea. It had finally been evicted from the Americas and the Pacific as well. This resulted in a turn towards liberalism from intellectuals and politicians who felt that Spain’s anachronistic system was hopelessly uncompetitive against its modernizing rivals. On the other hand, Geoffrey Jensen argues that it was this catastrophic defeat that led the once relatively liberal military officer class to turn to the right.7

Even though Spain avoided the First World War and actually economically profited from it, the regime was still very unstable due to regional nationalism, widespread poverty, and severe political factionalism that paralyzed the state. The coup de grace was delivered by another military disaster: a serious defeat of the Spanish Army in Northern Africa at the hands of Berber tribesmen in 1921 at the beginning of the Rif War. 9,000 Spanish soldiers were killed or executed in this catastrophe in a matter of days, shaking Spain to its core.

King Alfonso XIII gave his secret backing to yet another military coup that resulted in a dictatorship under Miguel Primo de Rivera, lasting from 1923 until 1930. During this period, Spain ended the rebellion in the Rif thanks to aid from France. Economic conditions improved over the course of the decade, but the arrival of the Great Depression quickly erased all those gains, leading to a collapse in support for both Primo de Rivera and Alfonso XIII. The king removed the dictator from power, but this action only bought him a short window of time, as he had already lost the support of the urban masses of the lower and middle classes. In April of 1931, local elections proved to be a plebiscite on the Spanish Monarchy, with republican parties overwhelmingly winning the vote. Alfonso XIII read the writing on the wall, abdicated his throne, and headed into exile.

The Second Spanish Republic

This was finally it! The moment that millions of Spaniards had been waiting for had finally arrived! Shorn of its ‘regressive’ Monarchy, Spain and its citizens could finally enter modernity with pride and say goodbye to its backward past once and for all. Liberalism had finally won and Spain could now look to the future with an optimism so sunny that even an Andalusian summer would envy. Poverty and illiteracy would be eliminated, reason would replace superstition, and land would be redistributed to the poor.

Most of you reading this essay are American, and many of you are not familiar with this slice of history. When you see, read, or hear the word “republicanism”, you will naturally mentally associate it with your country’s version of it. Us non-Americans are very used to Americans informing us that the USA “is not a democracy, but is instead a constitutional republic”. I do like to mention from time to time that I have always admired how civics lessons were drilled into the heads of American students from a very young age. In your minds, republicanism is not a negative concept, and you would be right to view it that way considering just how stable and successful your country has been serviced by this system of governance.

Not all republics are created equal, nor do they all perform at an equal level. The First Spanish Republic ended in less than two years thanks to enormous resistance and a military coup that overthrew it. The Second Spanish Republic lasted eight years, with a military coup that attempted to overthrow it five years into its existence, failing to do so, resulting in a horrible, tragic, and bloody civil war. The story of the Second Spanish Republic is the story of a centre that could not hold, with powerful and passionate forces far from its centre pulling in totally opposite directions, tearing the country into two pieces.

“A republic, if you can keep it”

In the first election for the Spanish Cortes (parliament) since the proclamation of the Second Republic, the Spanish right was in disarray and wholly unorganized due to the shock of Alfonso XIII’s abdication. With little options for an alternative to the new state of affairs, conservatives and right wingers largely threw their lots in with the Radical Republican Party, as its platform was viewed to be the least damaging to their interests. Others backed the Liberal Republican Right (DLR) as it openly defined itself as Catholic, the only major party to do so in this campaign.

The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) fared the best overall, urging a “legal revolution” to resolve Spain’s economic and social ills. Despite this pledge to uphold legality, the party contained many extremist factions who sought to either use incrementalism to usher in a socialist state, or radicalism to do it quickly. These radicals were almost a carbon copy of the Radical Socialist Party (PRRS), a grouping who sought immediate socialist revolution for Spain, as “there is nothing to be conserved”.8

These Republicans and Socialists were in an electoral coalition, allowing them to win the elections handily. Now it was time for them to govern.

Covering the centre-right, bourgeois left, and socialists, Spain’s first republican government found itself to be swimming against the anti-democratic tide sweeping Europe. Democracy was seen as not capable to solve the many, many debilitating issues caused by the Great Depression, with authoritarianism of the left or right viewed as better suited to tackle them. The fact of the matter is that this democratic system did work to impede many of the reforms sought by the coalition government, and by millions of Spaniards as well. Paralysis in government, caused at first by unwieldly governing coalitions, and then by unrest, strikes, and violent rebellions, led many who were initially enthusiastic about the democratic aspects of republicanism to quickly conclude that the democracy part should be done away with.

Stanley Payne describes for us the Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), the party that captured the most votes:

The Republican left formed only the left-center of the new governing alliance, whose left wing was the Socialist Party. Founded in 1879, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) was a classic movement of the Second International that for decades had been one of the weakest Socialist parties in Europe.

……..

Always treated leniently by the Spanish government, the Socialists had on most occasions followed more moderate policies, participating in elections and slowly building a trade union base. The profound structural changes of the 1920s and the coming of democracy enabled the Socialist trade union, the Unión General de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers; UGT), to expand into a mass movement, reaching more than a million members by 1932. The Second Republic offered the Socialists their first opportunity to participate in a government — something that the French Socialists had not yet done — an opportunity that they accepted without having fully resolved the issues of reformism versus revolutionism in their doctrine. The dominant tendency was to take the position that the Republic would produce decisive changes, opening the way peacefully for a Socialist system to be achieved without revolutionary violence. The UGT leader Francisco Largo Caballero declared at the outset of the new regime that as a result violent revolution “would never put down roots in Spain.” The Socialists also viewed the Spanish changes within a larger context as a new tide of democracy and progressivism that would roll back the trend toward fascism initiated by Mussolini a decade earlier.9

At first they were dedicated to constitutional legalism, but much of the party began to radicalize very quickly, especially Largo Caballero. Almost immediately, the Socialists clashed with the Radical Republicans over the question of private property, with the Socialists seeking to expropriate land from wealthy landowners to redistribute to campesinos. This led to the departure of the Radical Republicans from government with its remaining coalition partners.

The Agrarian Question

The “Agrarian Question” was one of the key issues that Spain faced for some time. In 1931, some two million Spaniards were landless peasants, forced to work on the big latifundia estates owned by incredibly rich landlords who paid them a pittance to farm their holdings. This issue was highly divisive, as it pitted the wealthy landowning aristocracy and its allies in the Catholic Church against a very large and dirt poor mass that was already politically radicalized, with most supporting anarchism as the best political option to pursue their interests. These anarchists, mainly found in Catalonia, Aragon, and Andalusia, were radicalizing even further, as physical violence was seen as an acceptable tool to seize land from these rich landowners. The campesinos were impatient and demanded land redistribution immediately, “or else”. Furthermore, the various parties supporting republicanism made land redistribution a core issue of their platform. They had to deliver on their promises.

Land redistribution implies forceful seizure of property by government, a very radical act. The emphasis on this issue put the fear of God into many landowners, and into other holders of private property (especially industrialists) as they feared that they would be the next target.

Anti-Clericalism and Anti-Catholicism

More than any state repression, more than any economic exploitation, the republican government viewed the Catholic Church as its primary enemy. The Church was a roadblock in the drive to modernize Spain, and its complete removal from the public square and the destruction of its influence on Spanish society were viewed as the most necessary tasks at hand by the new government. In fact, this all served as the lowest common denominator for the ruling parties. It was where there was the most overlap, the lowest-hanging fruit for agreement.

Radical secularism was the path forward, and, as Payne notes, it began to eerily mirror all the criticism it levelled against the Church and its Priesthood. It took on a fanatical tenor, to the point of resembling medieval religious fervour. Everything wrong with Spain was to be blamed on the Church.

As Payne writes:

The more radical secular ideologies themselves functioned, if not as “political religions,” at least in many cases as politico-ideological substitutes for religion. Only as a kind of religious warfare can the intensity of the clerical-anticlerical conflict in Spain be understood. Much of anticlerical doctrine came from France, and condemned Catholicism for every manner of ills: excessive possession of wealth of various kinds, oppression of the poor, maintaining an authoritarian internal structure, a supposedly overweening political influence, preaching political doctrines in church, sexual abuse and perversion, chaining the common people to ignorance and poverty. The Church was also blamed for historical abuses and the failures of Spain and of its empire.

The anticlericals seemed to present a mirror image of what they denounced, exhibiting extreme intolerance and desire for domination, which might be expected to stimulate an equivalent response in Catholics. Anticlericalism also showed a pronounced tendency to replace the sacrificial and liturgical role of the Church, inverting the Passion of Christ in anticlerical rituals, while the worker left advanced its own concepts of the sacrificial, redemptive role of the common people.10

Laws were passed to deny clergy the right to teach children in the name of ‘public health’.

And then came the violence, years before the actual civil war:

Certain other restrictions were placed on Church economic activity, and public demonstrations of religion were also banned. The Society of Jesus was dissolved, priests were occasionally fined for delivering “political sermons,” and some of the more zealous city councils even fined Catholic women for wearing crosses around their necks. Very early in the life of the new government, Catholic churches and buildings became targets of arson and mob destruction in the famous quema de conventos of 11 – 12 May 1931, in which more than 100 buildings were torched and sacked in Madrid and several cities of the south and east, destroying also priceless libraries and art. The authorities then gave the first example of the left Republican habit of “blaming the victim” by acting to arrest monarchists and conservatives rather than the authors of the destruction. Later, during the spring of 1936, illegal seizures of Church buildings and properties would often simply be winked at by the Azaña – Casares Quiroga governments then in power. At no time did any of the leftist parties take the position that Church interests and properties merited the full protection of a state of law.11

The government did nothing to stop the evictions of Priests and Nuns from their churches and convents, nor did they try to stop the looting and torching of these same buildings. They were given carte blanche by ruling authorities to forcibly secularize Spain via these acts of violence. Manuel Azaña, then Minister of War in the cabinet (he would go on to become Prime Minister of Spain later that year, and then President of the Republic from 1936-1939), famously proclaimed “All the convents in Spain are not worth a single Republican life”.12 He led the left-liberal republican party Republican Action (AR). To him, it was critical that the Catholic Church be denied any role in education in Spain. Furthermore, civil marriage was to be instituted in place of the Catholic Sacrament, all church property was to be seized, and lastly the Jesuit Order was to be expelled from the country altogether. In Republican Spain, he was slightly to the left of centre.

The first government managed to pass a law on land expropriation, but very little was taken out of the hands of landowners, and none of them were the largest ones. The only ones who experienced land seizures were smaller and medium-sized landowners. The only real successes that they scored were in some labour reforms like the introduction of collective bargaining rights13 and the extension of the vote to all adult women. Besides barring Catholic Orders from education, divorce was legalized, nobles were stripped of their titles, and the new Constitution enshrined the right of local autonomy for Spain’s regions.

Early Challengers to the Government and the Republican System

Counterintuitively, the first challengers to the new regime appear not from the recently-defeated right, but rather from the left…the hard left.

Spain was unique in that it had a strong anarchist, specifically anarcho-syndicalist, tradition, unlike elsewhere in Europe where the far left was dominated by Bolsheviks, and later, Stalinists. This was due to certain idiosyncrasies belonging to Spain, such a traditionally weak central state combined with localism, and the lack of the development of a large industrial proletariat (which didn’t arrive until much, much later).

The anarchists were fanatically anti-Catholic, much more radical than even the communists, and were the main source of political violence in the first 1/3rd of 20th century Spain. They were THE dangerous extremists.

Their labour union, CNT, boasted up to two million members, and FAI served as their political vanguard. Together they launched three violent insurrections against the republican regime, with all three failing and the result being increased repression of the CNT. The Anarchists were a mass movement with widespread support, strongest both in rural Andalusia and industrial Barcelona.

OTOH, the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) was rather lacking. Entirely directed from Moscow, their party base was miniscule up until 1936. Only then would they begin to take a prominent role in Spanish politics…a very, very prominent one!

The overt Anti-Catholic laws and the violence directed against Catholics and their churches naturally caused the rise of Catholic reaction. Carlists began to train paramilitary forces in the province of Navarre. Other monarchists began to openly call for the return of the monarchy under a centralist and authoritarian regime of their own.

The only insurrection from the right came courtesy of a weak and failed pronunciamento courtesy of General Sanjurjo, and a select cadre of officers in Madrid and Seville.

Only in Seville did the revolt succeed for a few hours, the retired General José Sanjurjo briefly seizing control of the garrison and city before he was forced to flee. This revolt was even weaker than any of the anarchist insurrections and was easily suppressed. Ten people were killed. Sanjurjo was quickly arrested, tried, and sentenced to a long prison term.14

The republican regime responded to these challenges by repression. The press was clamped down so hard that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini congratulated Azaña for his ‘decisive action’. The government passed the ‘Law of the Defense of the Republic’ which led to the creation of the Assault Guards, a police force that acted quickly and brutally to any perceived threats to the constitutional regime.

Mindful of complaints that the special national constabulary, the Civil Guard, was armed only with Mauser rifles and not trained for modern crowd control, the Republican authorities set about organizing a new urban constabulary armed with clubs and pistols, theoretically prepared for more humane crowd control. Its very name, Guardias de Asalto, indicated the vigorous policy espoused by the Republican regime. Incidents proliferated as strikes, demonstrations, and insurrections produced considerable violence, which in turn prompted harsh repression from the Civil Guard and the Assault Guard. After two and a half years, there had been nearly 500 fatalities in such confrontations, the majority of the victims being anarchosyndicalists, and suspension of civil guarantees had become more frequent than under the constitutional monarchy before 1923.15

This government radicalism also threw up the most important challenger, CEDA, a mass political movement of the Catholic right. Even though it had a stated policy of legality and parliamentarianism, it sought to capture the republic in order to create its own non-liberal society, much like how the PSOE sought to use legalism to create a socialist Spain. Its rapid rise was both a reaction to the state’s overt anti-Catholicism and anti-traditionalism, and a result of the right beginning to organize after two years in the political wilderness.

The Casas Viejas Incident

The historical consensus is that the Second Spanish Republic began to break down in 1934 courtesy of that year’s insurrection (which we will deal with next week), but Payne insists that instead the process began with the Casas Viejas Incident (January, 1933).

In the classic Thames Television documentary series “The World at War” (UK, 1970s), a German Social-Democrat who sat in the Reichstag in the Weimar Era explains how The Night of the Long Knives ended any ambiguity about the Nazis as they went from having a chance in governance to being outright murderers. This view stuck with me over the years and I was reminded of it when first learning about the Casas Viejas Incident years ago.

Staying true to form, the anarchists were restless and, as is their nature, opposed the present government in Spain as they opposed all governments, viewing them as inherently oppressive. Their massive labour union, CNT, led by the vanguard of FAI, began demonstrations in various locations across the country, with the greatest actions taking place in Andalusia. Political violence ensued, with two Civil Guards wounded. The Assault Guards, set up by the new Constitutional authorities in the Republic to provide a new force to purportedly protect those who lacked protection under the Monarchy, raided the village of Casas Viejas near Cadiz. They encountered a group of anarchists locked in a house and set fire to it (while disarming others in the village who were armed), and then executed them.

At this point the Second Spanish Republic was already a ‘murderer’.

A Teetering Government

By this point, the central conflict was between the competing visions of the republican parties (albeit divided among themselves) and the Socialists who paid lip service to republicanism, merely seeking to use it to create a socialist state. The Youth wing of the PSOE was even more radical than the main party as it sought to completely move away from parliamentary democracy towards the immediate creation of the a socialist state.

Even though the Socialists sought radical change, they were outflanked by the much more radical anarchists organized around their labour union, CNT. They managed to wrest even greater labour concessions out of the government via demonstrations, strikes, and violent acts than the Socialists did by way of legislation. Socialist collaboration in reform legislation only led to greater labour unrest as the CNT outflanked the UGT (Socialist trade union organization) by direct action. Extra-legislative actions gained more for certain groups than did the legislative process. This lesson was taken to heart by the anarchists who viewed it as a win for their political philosophy, and served as a loss for the constitutional order.

Warning Against Radicalization

Much as there are many people sounding the alarm about the increasing political polarization in the USA, 1930s Spain had its own faces that did the exact same thing. Spanish Socialist Julián Besteiro was one of those faces, and he took the opportunity of speaking before a gathering of Socialist Youth to warn them about the dangers of opening Pandora’s Box:

In July he had blamed Italian and German Socialists for provoking the bourgeoisie of their countries into fascism through the premature use of Socialist power, even though in Germany this had taken the form of parliamentary government participation. Worse yet, the introduction of a Socialist regime in Spain through Bolshevik-style violence and dictatorship would simply inaugurate a bloodbath, “the most sanguinary Republic known to contemporary history.” Besteiro’s Cassandra-like predictions were uncannily accurate, and this was no exception: in the Republican Zone during the first six months of the Civil War in 1936, the rate of political executions would considerably exceed that of the Bolsheviks during the Russian civil war. At Torrelodones he once more warned of the folly of extremism, the results of which would be quite di¤erent from what its advocates imagined: “If a general staff dispatches its army to fight in unfavorable conditions, it becomes totally responsible for the subsequent defeat and demoralization,” adding that “often it is more revolutionary to resist collective madness than to be carried away by it.”16

Powerful Spanish Socialist Indalecio Prieto warned his more extreme youthful comrades not to engage in the same methodology:

Prieto was less challenging but also warned that there were definite limits to what Spanish Socialism could achieve at the present level of development and given the changing relations of political forces both in Europe and in Spain. He too stressed the fallacy of the facile comparisons being made by the left wing of the movement between Russia in 1917 and Spain in 1933. In Russia key institutions had already collapsed before the Communist takeover; in Spain the government, Church, and armed forces were intact, while the bourgeoisie was stronger than in Russia.17

The Socialists continued to radicalize, despite these warnings, leading to the various republican parties in the governing coalition finally breaking with them, and calling for a new election.

The End of the Coalition Government

When one skims through history, our western liberal bias leads our brains to automatically assume that a democracy would somehow be more inherently moderate than a dictatorship, whether military or monarchical, or whatever. The Second Spanish Republic quickly disabuses us of this notion:

As Ángel Alcalá Galve observes, one of the striking features of the new regime was the manner in which it quickly reproduced key weaknesses of the old monarchist system, demonstrating that the problem was not really one of monarchy versus Republic but of the Spanish political culture of the early twentieth century, which was proving intractable.18

What this means is that regardless of the form of governance that is adopted, deeper conflicts are at play and it is not the system that is responsible for it. There is a fatalism in this in that some conflicts do have to play themselves out until one side wins and the other loses, or both sides exhaust themselves and arrange a consensus, or a third power removes the first two.

History repeating itself:

Whereas the old system had been threatened by an extreme left, the new system was threatened with subversion and violence by both an extreme right and an extreme left. Just as the monarchist parties had become too internally divided to govern, this internal division now threatened the Republican parties. The Socialists had attempted a revolutionary general strike against the monarchy in 1917; in 1934 they would attempt one against the Republic.19

A new system can allow for new representations and can create new forms of governance, but it is not necessarily a silver bullet for deeper-seated problems.

Now watch this part and think of the current struggles between liberals and those exact liberals disenchanted with what we call “The Woke” today:

The middle classes were fragmenting into a Catholic right, a liberal center, and a Republican left……Eventually the gulf between liberal and left Republicans would become unbridgeable. The increasing split in the Republican parties, with only the liberals willing to accept the logic and rules of a liberal democratic system, placed the future of the new regime in doubt. If all the Republican parties did not accept their own system, there was even less to expect from the non-Republican parties.20

Many liberals, of which I include today’s American conservatives and Classic Liberals, insist on appealing to reason and principle, while the hard left runs them over with the application of sheer power. Here is Popper’s “Paradox of Tolerance” but repositioned: should liberals tolerate those from the left that do not tolerate liberalism?

The Elections of November 1933

1931-33 served as little more than a leftist convention in government; conservatives and the right did not put up a fight against republicanism as they sat on the sidelines while the left rammed through a series of reforms that alienated the former. Yet the internal disputes between the various republican parties and the PSOE led to the collapse of the government and the need to call new elections.

The left sought to sandbag their first electoral win by changing the rules so as to allow them to capture more seats in a mixed first-past-the-post and proportional system that favoured large parties to the detriment of smaller ones. What they didn’t bank on was opposition to their rule manifesting itself in an electoral loss.

A violent campaign (this time with the Socialists playing a leading role, and with church burnings making a comeback) saw two ceditas (from the CEDA party) murdered, courtesy of a small republican party out of Valencia. The temperature was high and rising.

Nevertheless, CEDA managed to score 115 seats, with the Radical Republicans 104, and the PSOE only 60, in a system that was supposed to be tilted to the left. They had shot themselves in the foot and immediately cried foul. The granting of the franchise to women served to help CEDA, and Spain’s democratic centre was now strengthened. The left immediately sought to overturn the results of this vote, with various bizarre schemes that all fizzled out. They openly used the arguments that were made against their electoral reforms by the opposition to argue in favour of overturning their loss!

BTW, does this sound familiar?

This whole dismal maneuver revealed what had become the permanent position of the left under the Republic: they would accept only the permanent government of the left. Any election or government not dominated by the left was neither “Republican” nor “democratic,” a position that might well have the effect of making a democratic Republic impossible.

……….

When even its own tendentious and unfair regulations were inadequate to give it electoral victory in 1933, the left chose to ignore the very constitution it had been instrumental in writing. From this time forward, the left would flout legality ever more systematically, eventually reducing the legal order to shambles and setting the stage for civil war.21

A conservative reaction to the first two years of rule by republicans and socialists resulted in an electoral victory. What would they choose to do while in power? In the meantime, the anarchists were up to their old tricks again.

Anarcho-Syndicalist Insurrection of December 1933

Once again, the Anarchists were back at it and this time they had much more success than at the beginning of the same year.

Bombs went off in Barcelona, trains were derailed elsewhere, an armed revolt took place in Badajoz in the southeast of the country. Barcelona and Zaragoza saw the brunt of the action, and FAI-CNT took over towns in Huesca, Alava, and Logroñ, declaring ‘libertarian communism’, torching money and records during their short-lived rule. The Civil Guards once again quickly put down the revolt.

This was the sixth(!) violent insurrection in 3 years. The net effect was the continuing suspension of civil rights and the destruction of faith in the new constitutional order.

Concluding Remarks

This is the perfect time in this story to stop for now. The conservatives are about to form a government for the first time in the Spanish Republic, and will face immense opposition, both legal and extralegal.

The pace of the division and collapse of Spain begins to really pick up from this point onwards, as leftist factions simply refuse to not tolerate being in control of the country. Violence begins to soar as faith in the governing system and its institutions erodes rapidly. Extreme political, social, and cultural polarization sets in as the centre significantly shrinks, with compromise between parties all but impossible. Meanwhile, the officer class watches events unfold closely, and with serious concern as to how they are developing.

If you enjoyed this introduction to this subject and want me to continue, I ask you kindly to click this button below to support my writing. A lot of work goes into these essays, and a lot of time is spent researching and writing as well. The Spanish Civil War is one of my favourite historical subjects due to its significance and also because of how it resonates to this day. Hit the button below and support my work:

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Jack Posobiec and Blake Neff recently released a podcast special on this exact same topic.

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The wars in Ukraine and in the Gaza Strip hold the world’s attention at present, but there is a third conflict taking place simultaneous to the aforementioned two that in my opinion is just as important, even though no blood is being shed over it: the fight between US universities and its donor class over the issue of speech on campus.

Almost everyone is aware that the majority of US Academia leans to the left, and often to the very left. Free speech on campus has been an issue for decades, and in the previous two, attacks on free speech have come from the left and far left who control academia via what is known as “de-platforming”, the concept in which a person or organization has the right to speech, but not the right to a platform. Through concerted efforts to shut down events i.e. de-platforming, left and far left student groups and organizations have successfully denied speech rights to those whose ideologies they oppose. The examples are numerous.

This state of affairs became the status quo across America, with conservatives long ago ceding academia to the left, and liberals (especially of the Classic Liberal mould), continuously getting squeezed, sounding the alarm the free speech on campus was dying. Almost everyone who was opposed to what was happening on campuses throughout the country became coloured by despair, and defeatism. A “long march through the institutions” saw academia fall to the left.

The violent raid by Hamas on Israel upended this situation, as some student groups and academic figures went as far as to celebrate Hamas’ “decolonization”. Campus politics veer heavily toward support for the Palestinians, as they are viewed as the “oppressed”, with Israel a “colonizer” and “oppressor”. The outbreak of protests and demonstrations on campuses in favour of the Palestinians upset not just many conservatives and liberals, but upset quite a lot of Jews, especially rich and powerful liberal Jews who make up an important segment of the university donor class.

There are those who seek to conflate support for Palestinians with support for the violent actions of Hamas, and that would be unfair. But there are some who have openly supported Hamas as a “de-colonizing force”. Alongside this, there has been a lot of bile and hate directed towards Israel, and to be fair, to Jews as well (and on the flipside, towards Arabs and Muslims). Pro-Palestinian protesters are adamant that anti-Zionism cannot be equated to anti-Semitism, with Jewish pro-Palestinian protesters being very vocal about this. After all, there are many Jewish groups, like the Ultra-Orthodox Satmar, who are opposed to the existence of the present State of Israel on religious grounds.

The explosion of anger and fury on campuses at Israel for its retaliation against Hamas (including the large toll inflicted on the civilian population in the Gaza Strip) has led some powerful donors to take action against what they see as ‘rabid’ anti-Semitism on campus, with some accusing more extreme elements of outright supporting terrorism. The face of this effort comes in the form of Bill Ackman, the billionaire manager, founder, and CEO of hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management, Harvard alum, and big time donor to his alma mater.

Almost a month ago, I wrote the following essay in which I detailed Ackman’s public efforts to address what is going on at certain university campuses regarding the conflict between Israel and Hamas:

In the above essay, you’ll see how this fight between the donor class and the universities has progressed. Since then, Ackman has sought the resignation of the heads of UPenn, MIT, and Harvard, collecting his first scalp this past Saturday when Liz Magill resigned as President of the University of Pennsylvania.

This battle is very complex as it touches on many important issues that affect all Americans. Academia and a large chunk of liberals are opposed to the donor class involving themselves in how these institutions are run, seeing it as trespassing on their turf, some going as far as to claim that capital is seeking to capture academia, and change it wholesale to reflect their own interests. To be fair they do have a point. They also raise the issue of free speech on campus, and the right to express opinions without sanction by university authorities. Again, they do have a point.

The reality of the situation is very different though. Ideological capture has long ago eroded free speech on campus, with de-platforming serving as a work around to limit the speech of others. Secondly, without the support of the donor class, these schools would not only be hit financially, but more importantly, they would incur reputational harm, and erode the network system that serves to catapult young people into the nation’s elites.

Matters came to a head last week when the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT testified on Capitol Hill during a Congressional Inquiry into anti-Semitism on university campuses. Their testimony was a disaster, highlighted by Harvard University President Claudine Gay answering that “context matters” when asked if calling for the genocide of the Jews violated university rules regarding bullying or harassment (she later apologized for her answer). The question that everyone was left with was “How can we combat anti-Semitism while reinforcing freedom of speech on campus?”

The Donors Debate

The three Ivy League presidents clearly walked into a trap that was carefully laid out for them. Not only are these institutions under attack by the donor class, but they are also being threatened by people in US Congress.

This update does not concern itself with the fine details of this fight, nor the ongoing war which sparked it. My focus instead revolves around what will satisfy the complainants in this case? Not only are the issues of free speech on campus and the role of donors in university administration present for all to see (alongside anti-Semitism and ‘Islamophobia’), this fight has also created an opening for those opposed to DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) to hopefully try to take a battering ram to it.

DEI represents not just the ideological capture of the USA’s higher education institutions, but also the ideological capture of the business world as well. DEI is the institutionalization of “Wokeness” in academia, government, and in business. It represents the triumph of “The Woke”, and how they intend to (and already are) fundamentally transforming the USA into something that it never was. Almost three years ago, I wrote this essay about this fundamental transformation:

I and many others have written on the very negative aspects of DEI, and as a non-American, I have also made mention of how important it is for the DEI beast to been slain in the metropole, the USA, so that the provinces don’t succumb to it. DEI is fundamentally anti-American, anti-business, anti-meritocratic, and so on. Let’s leave it at that for now.

DEI is also anti-East Asian, anti-Indian, anti-White, anti-Heterosexual, anti-Israeli, and yes, anti-Semitic. How is it anti-Semitic? The DEI Megaplex views Jews as Whites, and therefore as part of the “oppressor class”. People and groups opposed to DEI see this fight between donors and university administrators as an opportunity to finally begin to chop away at DEI. This requires the cooperation and vision of the donor class to do so.

The fear is that Ackman and team would seek a special carve-out within DEI on university campuses for Jews. In effect, this would extend DEI to give Jews protection, making them an officially protected class of people. This would mean that Jews in America would be set apart from those on campus already being discriminated against: East Asians, Indians, and straight White males. If a special carve-out is sought, these groups would not only feel abandoned, but would also resent American Jews for abandoning them despite being wildly successful in the country that they share with them.

There is also another point to make: if certain successful Jews seek a special carve-out for themselves under DEI, they will begin to be counted officially. American Jews live in a country that has been incredibly good for them, no doubt the best ever country for them to live in. Do Bill Ackman, Steven Pinker, and Laurence Tribe want everyone to know just how successful and how over-represented American Jews are in business, academia, government, etc.? The long history of Jewish suffering makes them very, very wary of governments doing headcounts of Jews.

Or should the donor class take the opportunity to wipe out the DEI Megaplex? That entire system is rotten and beyond reform, besides being thoroughly anti-business, anti-meritocratic, and fundamentally anti-American.

For those of us opposed to DEI, Bill Ackman gave us all a glimmer of hope when he published his letter demanding that Harvard remove Claudine Gay from her role of President of Harvard University. In this letter, he made mention of DEI (and more). I’ve excerpted the key parts pertaining to this discussion. You can read the letter in its entirety here.

DEI and the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (OEDIB)

In recent weeks, I have learned a lot about DEI practices at Harvard and have come to the conclusion that the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, which was formed in 2019 under Dean Gay’s oversight and vision the year after she became Dean of FAS, is none of those things. In fact, the actions of the OEDIB have led to preferences and favoritism for certain racial, gender, and LGBTQ+ groups at the expense of other groups, and made some members of the Harvard community feel included at the expense of others that are excluded.

When I mentioned in my December 3rd letter to President Gay that among others, Jewish, Asian, Indian and straight white male students were excluded from the benefits of the ODEIB office, her solution to this problem, which she outlined in an email to the Harvard community, was to propose that the OEDIB include Jewish students in some manner. This is not right answer.

The OEDIB is a major contributing source of discriminatory practices on campus and highly damaging to the culture and sense of community at Harvard. It is beyond repair and should be shut down.

I do not mean to suggest whatsoever that the goal of a diverse university that is welcoming for all should be abandoned. Rather, the OEDIB is not the solution as it is fundamentally an organization with political objectives that are inconsistent with achieving true diversity and inclusion at Harvard.

The OEDIB’s definition of equity is also inconsistent with Harvard excellence. Over its nearly 500-year history, Harvard has been a beacon for excellence based on the equality of opportunity it offers, not by promoting a system or ideology which forces or requires the equality of outcomes.

The most important element here is that Ackman and co. rejected a special carve-out for Jews in favour of trashing the DEI system at Harvard altogether. If this position holds, then DEI could fall like dominoes across academia, government, and business as well.

It does not answer the question of free speech on campus, especially how it has already been eroded, nor does it answer their concerns about anti-Semitism on campus either.

It would be prudent to inform Ackman and co. that any attempt to acquiesce to a special carve-out for Jews on campus would be immediately non-functional, as the ideology underpinning it sees Jews as Whites and therefore “oppressors” and “colonizers”. It simply would not compute. The pushback to such a compromise would be enormous, and even threats from donors to withhold funds would not be a trump card either. This conflict is not financial, but it is ideological, and goes right to the heart of the values that made America the wild success that it is today and has been for some time now, but that also allowed men like Bill Ackman to prosper.

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Author’s Note: I am a baptized and confirmed Catholic in good standing (but not in a state of grace). Some of you are not fond of Catholicism, Christianity, or even religion in general. If you choose to read this essay, try and keep an open mind. I assure you that it is not very preachy whatsoever.

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One of the few genuinely great movies of this new century is Paolo Sorrentino’s “La Grande Bellezza” (The Great Beauty)1 from 2013. Best known in the Anglosphere as the creator and director of the TV series “The Young Pope”, The Great Beauty is his most spectacular work to date.

The story revolves around the character of Jep Gambardella, a 65 year old theatre critic, journalist, writer, who serves as a central pillar of Rome’s cultural social scene. Jep has come to a point in his life where he is forced to take stock of everything that he has lived through and experienced, and finds it to be difficult to grasp, often much less important than the importance he and others have often placed on it, and quite possibly, meaningless. The film showcases many characters who are full of themselves, but empty in meaning behind the facade that they have erected for themselves. One of these characters is a Cardinal who is a potential successor to the Papal Throne, but who shows much more interest in his cooking recipes than in his actual faith.

Before you jump to the conclusion that this movie contains your standard attacks on the Catholic Church, Sorrentino throws us an unexpected curveball: the introduction of Sister Maria, a 107 year old nun who did charity work in Africa and has returned to Rome to live out her last days. She is a fan of Jep’s one and only novel “The Human Apparatus”, a book that went on to great acclaim when he wrote it in his youth. Sister Maria is portrayed as a genuinely pious and pure individual, who lives her life in the most Christian way possible, and by doing so rebukes the corrupt that occupy the Catholic Church today.

The last scene of the movie shows Sister Maria climbing up the stairs of a large basilica alone and on her hands and knees, her 107 year old body taking the punishment that she is giving to it, in an act of selfless piety and devotion to God. She is interspersed with images of Jep as an old man, and during his youth when he was less cynical, less corrupted by life.

There is an earlier scene with Sister Maria: Jep asks her why she won’t sit for an interview with him. She replies: “I took a vow of poverty. And you don't talk about poverty, you live it.”

You don’t talk about it. You live it.

I was reminded of this scene (and specifically that line) when I recently read an essay by Ayaan Hirsi Ali in which she declares herself “a Christian”.

From Muslim to Atheist, and From Atheism to Christianity

For the very few of you who do not know who Ayaan Hirsi Ali is, I will give you a very brief summary:

Born in Somalia to an anti-communist politician father, she experienced female circumcision while her father was imprisoned. Her family eventually fled Somalia, and she lived in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya before arriving in Holland in 1992 to escape an arranged marriage. Her time in Holland made her appreciate its liberal politics, culture, and society, eventually leading to her break with Islam shortly after 9/11.

She read “Atheist Manifesto” shortly thereafter and declared herself an atheist. It was then that she entered the world of Dutch politics, marking the beginning of her life as a public figure. She entered the lower house of the Dutch parliament as a representative of the centre-right VVD, but was soon enmeshed in scandal when it was discovered that she had lied on her asylum application when she landed in Holland. This led to her resignation from parliament, but her public profile only got larger as she became not only a face of the “New Atheism” movement, but also a mascot for neo-conservatives and their belligerence towards Islam.

Hirsi Ali spent years in the public eye denouncing Islam as “barbaric” and “backward”, urging a “Muslim Reformation”, and championing western liberal democracy. As a defector from Islam, she was an effective asset for US foreign policy goals in the Islamic world, even more so because of her liberal stance on women’s rights stemming from her opposition to female circumcision aka “female genital mutilation”. She had become a public intellect and was warmly welcomed into western elite circles, cemented by her marriage to Scottish historian, Niall Ferguson.

Decamping to the USA a little over a decade ago, she is presently employed at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, and retains a position with the American Enterprise Institute, aka “neo-con central”. Ayaan is very-well plugged in, and is now as elite as it gets. She has done quite well for herself. Good for her.

Her “Conversion”

The news of her “conversion” shocked many, whether Christians welcoming or questioning her declaration, or atheists upset that a leading figure of their movement has abandoned them. In her essay “Why I am now a Christian”, Ayaan credits two factors that led to her supposed conversion to the Faith. The first reason is her view that western civilization is under threat and that Atheism cannot help defend itself:

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On October 9, 2009 US President Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples".1 Many people were rightly up in arms about awarding Obama this prize as he had just entered office, not ‘rightfully’ earning such a decoration. Obama himself conceded this point when he went to collect the prize, noting that "perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the commander-in-chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars."

Many critics of this move by the Norwegian Nobel Committee suggested that their decision was based on the symbolism of Obama being the “first Black American” President. This symbolism was impossible to miss in those days, with the constant refrain of the ushering in of the “post-racial society” via his election ringing non-stop in our ears. Rather than the arrival of the post-racial society, the Obama Era resulted in the opposite: a hyper-racial society.2

Almost seven years after the end of the Obama Era, the USA remains a hyper-racial society. Of the many elements that contributed to this state of affairs, three must be highlighted for their key contributions to it:

1. The Civil Rights Act of 1964

2. The 1965 Hart-Celler Act

3. The capture of US Academia by Critical Theorists and their influence on culture and politics

The Civil Rights Act made it illegal to discriminate based on a person’s race, colour, sex, religion, and national origin. Christopher Caldwell, in his vital 2000 work “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties”, has described the Civil Rights Act as "not just a major new element in the Constitution," but "a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible."3 This law laid down the legal framework for combating discrimination in employment, schooling, public places, and so on.

The Hart-Celler Act opened wide the USA’s doors to immigrants from parts of the world that were once denied entry to it. In the past almost sixty years, the proportion of US citizens who are recognized as “non-Hispanic white” has dropped from 84% to less than 62%. Where the USA was once almost entirely biracial i.e. “white and black”, it has since become multi-racial, and the projections show that it will soon enough no longer have a White majority, reducing Whites to a plurality. The damage done to the USA by the Hart-Celler Act has been enormous, as even the liberal Atlantic Monthly now concedes (and as we recently discussed here).

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In September of 2014, exiled ex-Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili was the subject of a very smarmy and thoroughly enjoyable profile in the New York Times. Saakashvili was then residing in the Williamsburg neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York City, because Georgian voters had voted him out of power, and the new government had charged him human rights violations and embezzlement of government funds.

Despite being the darling of the CIA and US State Department after successfully leading the Rose Revolution, Saakashvili showed himself to have a strong authoritarian streak that alienated his allies. This was somewhat tolerable for Georgians, as they were used to a strong hand guiding them. After all, Stalin himself was a Georgian. What was unforgivable for them was entering into a war with Russia and losing badly.

Being an American asset means that you can relocate to the USA, and Saakashvili headed straight to his uncle’s loft in Williamsburg where he could plot his plot his political comeback and enjoy the gentrification of the neighbourhood courtesy of the hipsters. The profile is hilarious, because Saakashvili tries to ingratiate himself with the journalist profiling him by using all the key buzzwords that liberals and conservatives in the West like to hear, while doing so in the most clumsy and bizarre of manners. For instance, he describes the gentrification of Williamsburg as being “part of the democratic transformation”. Cafe Mogador, his favourite local coffee shop, is described as “my absolute favorite cafe, because it’s very democratic.”

Years and years of training courtesy of US intelligence cutouts taught Saakashvili to always appeal to values that Americans cherish, no matter how absurd they sound. This profile of him was a favourite of mine and several of my friends for years because of just how ridiculous his sloganeering was, especially when juxtaposed atop his existence in the centre of global hipsterdom (read the entire profile to enjoy it as much as I have over the years).

A cafe cannot be democratic, nor can gentrification be described as such. Saakashvili’s use of the political term “democratic” is meant to convey the idea that these things are good, because democracy is “inherently good”, at least to us Westerners. “Good things are good, so if you like good things that I like as well, this means both you and I are good.” This circular logic may seem rather silly, but there are real world applications for this, one of them being the use and abuse of the word “democracy”.

The God That Is Democracy

The least controversial definition of democracy that I can think of is that democracy is a political system whereby the people have a say in how their country is run via participation in regular and routine elections in which there is more than one option on the ballot, and where the voting is confidential. I believe this to be a very fair and logical description of what Westerners have traditionally viewed democracy to mean.

Winston Churchill once quipped that “democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others that have been tried”. This is the prevailing view of today’s West (a stance that does have some merit), and a position that that has long been an article of faith. Proponents of democracy will happily point to its success in lifting the material conditions of its citizens, the individual freedoms that it offers, and how it bested and outlasted other ruling systems such as communism. Democracy equates to freedom, prosperity, and the rule of law, and delivers all of these better than any other form of governance….so the argument goes.

The collapse of the communist bloc that began in 1989 left western democracy as the only “viable” system left standing. Command economies could not compete with free(ish) markets, and economic stagnation could not paper over demands for national freedom desired by many behind the Iron Curtain. This rapid collapse ushered in a sense of triumphalism in the West, best expressed by Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man”. Democracy, specifically liberal democracy, was to be the default operating system for the world at large, and those opposed to it were criticized as ‘anachronistic’, ‘authoritarian’, or ‘on the wrong side of history’. It is important to note here that in the 1990s, China was still rather “backward” in western terms, and the 2008 Financial Crisis was still far off in the future. No realistic competitors to democracy existed in the 1990s.

Democracy was now to be the baseline standard of governance because democracy is good, and the USA would be its shepherd. It is precisely at this point that things began to go off of the rails.

Democracy throughout History

By this point I am certain that you have managed to successfully deduce that the main subject of this essay is how the term “democracy” is cynically used and abused for the purpose of maintaining the USA’s global standing. We will get to that part soon, but first we must step back and take a look at how democracy has traditionally been defined/described/viewed by important political philosophers of the past.

I apologize if this sentence is infantilizing, but I will begin with the obvious bit whereby I must inform you that the word “democracy” comes from the Greek words demos (people) and kratos (power). This can be neatly combined to mean “power to/of the people”, matching nicely with Abraham Lincoln’s description of it being “Of the people, by the people, and for the people”. Simple, yet elegant….but nowhere near robust enough when it comes to governing large polities. Let us consult some of the big thinkers of the past to see what they have said about democracy, and while doing so, let’s view them through the lens of the present.

Pericles:

“If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if to social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way; if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by obscurity of his condition. The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life.”

A very strong emphasis on meritocracy is quite evident.

Aristotle:

“The basis of a democratic state is liberty.”

Note: Aristotle’s concept of liberty is not the same as modern views which focus on individual liberty.

John Locke:

“For if the consent of the majority shall not in reason, be received, as the act of the whole, and conclude every individual; nothing but the consent of every individual can make anything be the act of the whole: But such a consent is next to impossible ever to be had.”

Majoritarian rule, provided that the people consent to be governed by the system that is in place. Locke agrees that ‘the people’ are sovereign, and that fundamental rights cannot be infringed upon (the Founding Fathers of the USA were very inspired by his work).

Montesquieu:

“There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.”

Montesquieu insisted that for democracy to work, its executors and administrators must possess public virtue, otherwise it collapses into tyranny.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

“The idea of representatives is modern……In the ancient republics…the people never had representatives.…The moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no longer free: it no longer exists.”

“It is against the natural order for the many to govern and the few to be governed….It is unimaginable that the people should remain continually assembled to devote their time to public affairs.”

“Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men.”

For Rousseau, only the direct democracy of the ancients qualified as actual democracy. Democracy could not perform properly beyond the size of an ancient city-state, as it would require representatives, making him very pessimistic about the future of democracy.

John Stuart Mill:

“The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection.…The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”

For Mill, individual liberty was the cornerstone of democracy, and could not be infringed upon unless it harmed others.

John Rawls:

“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.”

Rawls version of democracy is non-utilitarian (the direct opposite of Mill), and is instead focused on fairness, equality, and individual rights.

If we look through the lens of the present, we will note that both Pericles and Aristotle lived in a polity (Athens) in which the franchise was held only by a small subset of men, thus excluding the majority of men and all women. Therefore, it is incredibly easy to view Athenian Democracy as undemocratic by modern standards.

Locke’s majoritarian rule would run into the issue of minority rights today, even if he did allow for fundamental rights to be safeguarded. The question, therefore, must be “Can Lockean Democracy be considered democratic by today’s standards?”

Whereas Montesquieu emphasized public virtue as a necessity for office holders, Rousseau argued that only direct democracy could be considered the real deal. In today’s world, direct democracy is viewed as too “populist” and dangerous, manifesting itself in referendums which risk the aims of the elites who govern (see: Brexit). Switzerland is an obvious exception to this rule. Rousseau would be classified as a ‘dangerous populist’ and quite possibly ‘opposed to democracy’.

Mill’s insistence on the primacy of individual rights does relatively well in our current environment in which we are experiencing “rights inflation” (i.e. the adding of new ‘rights’ such as women’s, gay, transgender, etc.), but runs head first into Rawls focus on ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’, as these two work to restrict the individual rights championed by Mill.

Yes, I am drawing attention to how there is no agreement as to what constitutes democracy by showing how definitions and classifications have changed over the centuries, and how they often contradict one another. This is an obvious point, but it is an important one.

Liberal Democracy Über Alles

There is no end to the types of democracies that are on the menu. Just to name some: direct democracy, representative democracy, liberal democracy, cellular democracy, ethnocracy, religious democracy, anticipatory democracy, associative democracy, consensus democracy, constitutional democracy, democratic centralism, economic democracy, grassroots democracy, guided democracy, inclusive democracy, Jeffersonian democracy, market democracy, People’s democracy, radical democracy, technocracy, and so on.

Not all of these recognized forms of democracy are exclusive to one another, as many do overlap. Yet like a bicyclist at the Tour de France, one has escaped the peloton and moved ahead of the pack: liberal democracy.

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I had an older first cousin named M.

He was almost a decade my senior and lived on the same street that I did when I was growing up. He was handsome, smart, funny, charming, and excelled at sports. In short, he was one of those guys that everyone couldn’t help but love.

One hot summer night when he was around sixteen years old, I was over at his house with my parents and was hanging around with his sisters. M. was late coming home, and everybody (except his father and my father) were worried. This was in the days before cell phones, and M. had relatively strict parents like I did.

Up went the garage door, with my parents, my aunt and uncle, and M.’s two aunts and two uncles relocating there from the basement to wait for him to come home. I stayed inside with his two sisters and a few of our cousins, excited to see what would happen.

It was already way past my bedtime, but this was summer and my mother was lenient when I was with family. Just as she was ready to throw in the towel and take me home, a large automobile turned the corner into the subdivision, and pulled up on the driveway.

“Thanks guys! See you tomorrow!” said M. as he climbed out and made his way up the driveway.

“M. where were you? WHERE WERE YOU?” my aunt asked angrily in Croatian.

M. just smiled at her, and kept walking.

My aunt quickly caught up to him and grabbed him by the shoulder, spinning him around.

“WHERE WERE YOU? DON’T YOU KNOW THAT WE WERE SCARED TO DEATH?”

She then slapped him in the face.

M. smiled at her after being the recipient of a powerful slap, looked at her, and said “I still love you, Mom”.

“WHERE WERE YOU?” SMACK!

M. “I still love you, Mom”, smiling like the cat who ate the canary.

SMACK!

“I still love you, Mom!” the smile on his face not changing a single bit.

It was at this point that my father began laughing, and then M.’s aunts and uncles started laughing, and finally his Mother too. The “crisis” was defused.

Charm will get you everything, and out of anything.

It was July of 2003, and London was unseasonably warm and sunny. I was on my way to the old country, with a three day stop in the UK capital to explore the city, and to have some fun as well.

Back then, I was not as familiar with London as I came to be later. The city is so immense that you will find it difficult to pick a location to start from in order to try and understand its rhythms and its flow. On that day, I found myself in and around Islington, walking west with no planned destination. I was in a fantastic mood as I was on vacation and had more than enough money to spend, and was going to meet my friends on an island in the Adriatic in two weeks from that time, as we had rented a villa for a whole month. It was one of those moods where nothing can bother you, and you are very forgiving of others, to the point of being helpful to total strangers, possibly excessively so.

Some time around 5 o’clock in the afternoon, I passed through a busy intersection where I caught the eye of a young woman. She was attractive and I was emitting a strong energy. “Fuck it! Let’s go talk to her”, I decided on the spot. After quickly exchanging pleasantries, I invited her for a drink.

“I know a great pub just down the road from here”, she said to me in a very posh accent.

“Sure, let’s do it.”

She worked in some office (the name of which escaped me immediately), and wanted to grab a post-work pint or two as per British custom. The pub that she selected was a fairly large one in that it wasn’t your standard four feet from the front door to the bar, but was actually quite spacious. What we quickly learned was that it was ‘Quiz Night’ at this pub, and everybody there HAD to participate. Paper and pen were provided to all the punters, and some fat man in his fifties grabbed a microphone and introduced himself as the Quiz Master.

“This is gonna be great!” I thought to myself, certain that she would be impressed by the vast scale of my completely useless knowledge.

I was quickly disabused of this notion as the Quiz Master kicked off the quiz by asking a series of questions about British pop culture that was completely foreign to me. I prided myself back home on knowing more than most everyone I knew about Brit culture, but these questions left me so far adrift that I couldn’t figure out how to play down the zero score after the first round. She thought it was funny (she scored only two out of five answers correctly).

I repeated my zero in the second round as well, and she only got one right. By this point, we were already a few pints in and enjoying each other’s company more than the actual quiz. Come the third round, and both she and I were scrawling “WANKER” on the paper provided to us as answers to this new batch of incomprehensible questions.

“They are disqualified!” bellowed the Quiz Master, in a voice reminiscent of Brian Blessed. He actually took his role very, very seriously, and was visibly upset with the two of us. So be it. It was time to head to another pub.

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My mother used to pick worms.

From when I was four years of age to about when I turned nine, my mother used to go pick worms for bait from April until about late October. Every weeknight around 8 o’clock a big yellow school bus would honk in front of our house. My mother would say goodbye for the evening and join around thirty immigrant women to go pick worms.

This was a lucrative business for the owner, a Hungarian woman named Elizabeth. She was older, but not really old. Her and her husband were part of the Magyar cohort that fled Hungary in 1956 when the Soviets arrived to extinguish their rebellion. Like many anti-communist refugees from Eastern and Central Europe in those days, they found refuge in Canada. My mother always praised her, insisting that she was a good woman.

The women who would board this bus every night had two things in common: 1. they were all “fresh off of the boat” immigrants (“boaters” as we kids used to call them/ourselves), and 2. they were not satisfied with the wages available in the jobs that they could get elsewhere, either in the service sector (ethnic bakeries), or factories. These immigrants were too new to get good paying jobs at automotive plants, and were relegated to textile works where the pay was much lower, but the amount of work was still the same.

Picking worms for bait meant that you could make really good money in relative terms, as you were paid for “piecework”, meaning that how many worms you picked for bait determined how much you earned that night. The bus driver would drive them out to land that was devoid of people at night, covered in grass, and had sources of water on it or adjacent to it. Sometimes they would illegally trespass onto golf courses, as these were considered the best locations to pick worms. The favoured conditions were when it would rain just before you went out. Late Spring guaranteed the best harvests as thunderstorms are very common in May and early June in Southern Ontario.

The labour was back-breaking. These worm pickers would strap a miner’s light onto their foreheads and constantly scour the turf for worms to pick. Bend over, get up, bend over again, stand up again…for hours on end. When I was four years old, my mother couldn’t find someone in our building (we hadn’t yet moved into our house) to babysit me, so she had to bring me out with her one night. She loves to tell the story about how I would run around screaming “MAMA, MAMA! I FOUND SOME WORMS!”. I have a very vague memory of this. Of course I spent most of the night sleeping in the school bus.

At the end of the night, the women would bring their buckets full of worms for the “weigh out”; the bus driver would weigh the buckets to determine how much each of them caught that night, and would log it in a binder that both he and the worm picker would sign off on. This would determine their pay.

During those years, most of the worm pickers for Elizabeth were either Croatian or Serbian, with a few Portuguese women thrown in for good measure. For some reason, Italian women (Italians were by far the most numerous of the first generation immigrants where I grew up) did not take to this job. Around a decade ago I asked my mother something about those days, and she mentioned to me that others had started up their own ventures to compete with Elizabeth, and that the worm pickers were all Laotian or Cambodian immigrants, fresh off of the boat. My mother’s cohort had long graduated to better paying and less back-breaking jobs in the automotive sector.

I must have been eight years old when my parents and I went to visit Elizabeth and her husband for dinner one night. They lived up on the escarpment in a beautiful home on large acreage. They even had a John Deere lawn tractor to cut the grass, betraying just how much land they had. Elizabeth was tall and thin with very high cheekbones. She appeared regal to me for some reason. She had two teenage daughters, both beautiful in that 1980s way to my eight year old self. As Elizabeth and my mother chatted, my father and her husband were looking at an atlas of Europe, bonding over shared anti-communist politics, partitioning Yugoslavia between an independent Croatia, an enlarged Hungary clawing back some of the territory it had lost at Trianon, and what was left over was to go to the Serbs.

My mother scored a decent paying job at a factory when I was nine, meaning that she would no longer have to break her back or face arrest for trespassing when picking worms at night. It couldn’t have been more than three or four months later that Elizabeth’s bus driver decided to have a few drinks before driving the bus. He rolled the school bus, leaving one woman killed and several severely injured (including two of my mom’s friends). He ended up in prison, although I don’t know for how long. I can still recall his face as I saw it often enough.

I think about my mother the worm picker whenever I come across the term “white privilege”. I think about my father the steelworker working six double-shifts a week. I think about how the two of them arrived in Canada with 500 Deutschmarks given to them by my mother’s father, and with me in tow, unable to speak a word of English. I was privileged, but not in the way that those who carelessly toss around the charge of “white privilege” assume. The privilege was in how I was brought up and who brought me up. It had absolutely nothing to do with our racial attributes. We came from nothing, and nothing was handed to us.

People in Europe have been asking me about the insane asylum known as North America ever since I returned to the continent. At first I would go on at length answering their questions on specific issues that they brought up. Sometimes these discussions would last for an hour or two. I eventually came to realize that I could answer their questions in a much more succinct manner, one that cut to the heart of the matter: “the culture over there insists that not only the way that we were raised was wrong, but that it was also evil”. This summation resonates with people.

You are never going to convince me that my parents are bad people. You are never going to convince me that their parents were bad people too.

Just before I turned six, my parents had saved up enough money to buy a five-year old house from an Italian family in a lovely and quiet suburban neighbourhood, only five houses away from my father’s youngest sister.

I had to change schools in the process, so I entered a new Catholic school (K-8) that May. I had three older cousins living in that house five houses away from mine, and I clung to the two sister (six and seven years older than me) for those first two months at my new school.

It was the last week of school in June, and it was a sunny day. The sun hits you different when you’re very young, although this could be a trick that my memory is playing on me via nostalgia. All the kids were in the playground behind the school, and all at once everyone started rushing to the entrance by the street as something had happened.

Across the street from the schoolyard, a girl had fallen off of her bike. The street sloped significantly downwards between the front of the school and the back, where the playground was located. On the opposite side of the street, there was an enormous 19th century farm home, almost castle-like in appearance. It had steel poles that formed the fence surrounding the property at the base of the slope. The slope of the street was big enough where your feet would clomp when walking down it. This girl, at most nine or ten years old, had ridden her bike into the steel fence. A crowd had gathered around her, and Mr. L, a grade two teacher of Italian ethnicity, was putting his hand into her mouth. “She’s swallowing her tongue!”, he cried out to another teacher, telling him to call an ambulance.

Mr. L saved the day.

I was too young to understand what was going on, but I vividly recall him saying those words. I was too scared to ride my bike down that slope for years to come.

My elementary school is no longer there. My school was torn down some 15-20 years ago to make way for a new subdivision. The school existed for only thirty years, give or take a year or two. When I was in sixth grade, we had to take French class in the girls’ change room as there wasn’t enough room in the rest of the school building or the portables outside for us. One decade later and one-third of the school’s classrooms were empty, the portables long gone.

The neighbourhood had aged out and that school was now superfluous to school board planners. It’s as if it never existed in the first place. Thirty years is a blink of an eye.

When I learned that they tore it down, I got upset. So did my brother. A physical structure that was so central to our youth and that was the location of so many of our formative experiences was gone. The school, the creek to its north and east, the sidewalk to its south that led to our homes….this was the setting of our first friendships, our first fights, first crushes, and so on. All gone. This exemplified to me the transitory nature of our society. Change is inevitable, but this one left a mark.

It must have been around 2004 or 2005, maybe 2006, when I began to grow irritated at the trend in restaurants and bars in Toronto. By this point “hipsterism” had taken over large swaths of the downtown scene. VICE Magazine, the bible of hipsterism, had its own office on West Queen West, planting its ironic flag and imprint on a city that fancies itself on the level of New York City, when it’s barely half of a Chicago.

Initially, there were charms to this rundown aesthetic. Like kudzu, it began to spread everywhere, and in forms that were nowhere as appealing as at first. For years we were getting used to (and enjoying) things looking nicer, prettier, more beautiful. Now everything was looking cheaper, flimsier, and more ugly.

Years later, a friend put this into context for me when he explained that hispterism was the Millennials’ way of tacitly accepting downward social and economic mobility.

Simultaneously, Gen X friends of mine were buying older houses in the downtown core, in areas that were marketed as “gentrifying”. These houses were pre-WW2, cost 10 times the amount that their parents paid for their own homes, and were nowhere near as nice as the houses that they grew up in. Those “gentrifying” neighbourhoods had crack dealers roaming the streets at night, and most of those same “gentrifying” neighbourhoods still do.

“Bro…..the house you grew up in was much nicer than this one. Are you still gonna be living like this when you’re 50?”

When I was thirteen, I was invited to try out for the regional footie (soccer) team, as our team was incredibly successful in the league and in tournaments across the province. Five of us from my team were invited to come out, and I was the weakest of the five. Danny, Ante, Angelo, and Dominic were all excellent players, each with their own unique skill set that set them apart from one another. My problem was that I was too physically slow.

I was cut after the first tryout. One of the coaches of the regional team, a Scottish man with a thick accent who played in the old Scottish Second Division when he was a young man, explained to me why I was cut: “Son, you have a great touch, you can pass, you can read the game well, and you have a powerful shot. Your problem is that you’re too slow. See that boy over there(he pointed to a black guy that I knew as I had played against him previously)? He’s fast. Real fast. He doesn’t know how to play, though. I can teach him how to play. I can’t teach you how to run fast.”

The coach was right. Natural ability and talent are innate and cannot be taught. I accepted his explanation without a second thought, with my father (my team’s coach) sealing the deal when he told the coach that he made the correct decision.

Janice was new to our sixth grade class. Her parents had separated, so she and her mother had to move, which meant her moving to a new school. Single-parent households were incredibly uncommon in my school at the time, and we kids were all deathly afraid of the word “divorce” (as I have mentioned previously on this Substack). We all did a good job in making our fellow students who were going through the trauma of a divorce feel as comfortable as possible around us, especially if they were new to our school.

Janice was incredibly sensitive, which made her situation even worse. She was a very thin girl, waifish in appearance. One day during gym class, she refused to come out of the girls’ changing room. After gym class, we were all wondering why she wouldn’t join us. What was odd was that the girls in class knew, but we boys didn’t know. This smelled fishy to us, and for the next few hours we were left speculating amongst ourselves as to what was going on. Janice even went to the Principal’s office, meaning that the situation had escalated.

One of the girls in our class, Michelle, ended up spilling the beans: two girls, Diane and Nancy, were talking in the change room about how their boobs were growing (both of these girls developed early). Janice was so sensitive that she thought that they were making fun of her and her appearance. The reason why she went to the Principal’s office was because she wasn’t comfortable speaking about it to our teacher as he was a male, and preferred speaking instead to a female. Our teacher, Mr. M, directed her to our female Principal, Mrs. M.

I wonder how Janice is doing these days.

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My village is located where the mountain slope makes its final drop to the flat plain below it, before it rises up across the valley on another mountain. About one and half kilometres behind my house up the mountain and to west is a minefield that is now almost completely mine-free, thanks to the efforts of the brave technicians who have been working there every summer since the end of the war in 1995. Every once in a while, a mine will explode because an animal will step on it. They can’t read the signs nor understand why some parcels of land are taped-off.

Writing about Israel is like being a deer or a bear that wanders onto one of these minefields: the reward (food) is greatly outweighed by the risk (getting blown up). Best policy for people like me who have no skin in the game is to simply avoid it. At the same time, we humans are a curious sort, prone to exploration and to inviting danger. I’ll take the risk of stepping on a mine as I think now is a good time to discuss what has been happening lately in Israel and to it because it is important not just regionally, but globally as well, for reasons that I will outline in this essay.

I cannot think of an international subject more divisive than Israel. To write about invites immediate condemnation from one side or another, sometimes two or more sides. Trying to strike an objective balance will result in the writer being accused of partisanship, downplaying certain behaviours from one side or the other, being in the pay of someone, some group, or some country, or having your views completely misconstrued in the most irrational of manners. To trot out a very-tired adjective, the subject is incredibly toxic. This is why so many people choose to ignore it; you cannot win and will certainly alienate people by engaging with it. With that in mind, I am going to be stupid and walk through the minefield to see if I can get to the other side in one whole piece. I will tempt fate.

Ethno-State Israel

The first place where I usually get into trouble is when I tell people that I support Jews having a state of their own (and the Palestinians should have their own as well). Being an ethno-nationalist who believes that the nation-state is the best form of societal organization in our modern world, I extend this to all other ethnic groups on principle, provided that they can demonstrate the ability to govern themselves accordingly (among other caveats). For example, I wish the Kurds would have their own state too, but principle often runs head first in the wall of reality, with only one remaining standing at the end.

“They should have given them a state in Germany or Poland or the USSR”, is a somewhat common refrain I hear from people who sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians. They have a point, but what’s done is done. Take it up with the Brits.

It is impossible to talk about Israel without someone bringing up their continued occupation of the West Bank, occupation-turned-annexation of the Golan Heights, expansion of Jerusalem’s borders, and the hermetic-sealing off of the Gaza Strip. This has been a constant throughout my life, an issue that appears to all of us as intractable. This perceived permanence discourages many to engage with the subject, and not just for the reasons I outlined earlier in this essay. Palestinians in the West Bank have been walled off and ghettoized……my Jewish friend Ophir lamenting to me the horrible state of affairs that they live under. On the other hand, my friend Shlomo tells me how his parents moved to the suburbs of East Jerusalem, because real estate there is so much cheaper than in comparison to the West. I will ask that we park the bulk of the discussion around the occupation for now, and possibly re-visit it another time.

A fair description of today’s Israel would be that it is a quasi-Spartan highly-mobilized ultra-nationalist state with a strong tech sector (especially in cyber security) and a very dynamic population. This only scratches the surface, and doesn’t tell the whole story.

In the early days of the modern State of Israel, socialist/pro-labour politics dominated the nascent country, one coloured by the presence of many kibbutzes that shared leftist views.1 It wasn’t a coincidence that Israel was initially backed by Stalin’s USSR, and that it was armed by communist Czechoslovakia in 1948 as it fought Arabs both local and from the surrounding neighbourhood.2 Socialist Zionism was the guiding philosophy during those first decades of independence. Even though many went on to claim that they supported a bi-national state, ethnic cleansing of Palestinians did occur from the get-go. "It's either us or them", the argument went, as the Palestinians and their fellow Arabs viewed this new state as a forceful imposition of the West, meaning that Israelis knew that if given the chance, their state would be destroyed by those displaced by it.

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After almost a decade, the eyesore that has blighted the revitalized Zapadna Obala (western shore/waterfront) of Split’s harbour is finally coming down.

This hotel complex once belonged to a former mayor of this city, one whose businesses went bankrupt, and property developments like this one ending up in receivership. Courts move slowly here, but they do produce results (not always good ones). The site took on a sense of permanence due to the longevity of its limbo, so when I went out for a walk yesterday morning to enjoy the perfect weather, I was taken aback by the demolition that had finally begun.

The boardwalk to the left of the photo above is just out of view, but it is used by many to enjoy the view, to get exercise, or to simply sit in the cafes that populate it next to the very turquoise Adriatic Sea. People are out here all day and all night, especially during tourist season.

I was taking photos of the demolition to share with friends and family, both local and international, because everybody always asks about it due to how much of an eyesore it has become. As I was taking photos and sending them over Whatsapp, I laughed to myself because I noticed the ubiquitous presence of the Umarelli:

………..men of retirement age who spend their time watching construction sites, especially roadworks – stereotypically with hands clasped behind their back and offering unwanted advice to the workers.^[1] Its literal meaning is "little man" (also umaréin).^[2] The term is employed as lighthearted mockery or self-deprecation.

The word umarell is credited to Bologna-based writer Daniel Masotti who described its meaning as:

“Umarells are people, retired or otherwise, who have very little to do all day and justify their existence by interfering in – or helping with – the existence of others, and by doing so, perhaps, making themselves feel useful. Umarells are everywhere, you just have to notice them. You can find them at a crossroads where there's just been an accident, or in a packed bus arguing with someone who barely jostled them, or in line at the post office, the bank, the land registry office… Be careful, because each of us harbours a bit of umarell spirit within ourselves, you just have to be aware of it.”

Since then, its definition has become much more narrow, specific to the older men watching the activities on construction sites.

My grandfather was one of these. In fact, he was the very definition of an umarell.

When Yugoslav dictator Tito opened up the country’s borders in 1961, Western Germany took the opportunity to import cheap labour from the country to power its Wirtschaftswunder. My grandfather was one of the first people from Yugoslavia to leave for work on the baustelle (construction site) in Western Germany, making his way for Wiesbaden near Frankfurt. He began as an ordinary labourer and worked all over the country, from Mainz to Karlsruhe, Cologne, and all points in between. He eventually became a crane operator, and spent the last almost 20 years of his work life in West Berlin.

Just before he retired in 1993, I went with my mother and brother to visit him and my grandmother in West Berlin. He excitedly took us to the work site he was then stationed at, the one that would end his career as a crane operator. He delighted in the opportunity to show us how easily he climbed the ladder twelve stories up to where the cabin of the crane that he controlled. It looked something like this one:

My grandfather retired to the suburbs of Croatia’s capital, Zagreb, which has been a continuous construction site since he left West Germany. When he was 80, we were told not by our family, but by some cousins nearby how he was brought home one early evening by police after breaking into a construction site and climbing the ladder up the crane. I guess he wanted to relive his glory days one last time.

He never mentioned this to us, but we found it hilarious.

He was very much an umarell in that he would visit construction sites nearby, hold his hands behind his back, offer up suggestions to the workers on site as to how they should be doing their jobs, while telling them how it was done in his day. Irritating pensioner? Or charming old man? I guess it all depended on who was on the receving end of his advice.

Men will literally go to a loud construction site, stand there for hours and watch, give unsolicited advice to the workers there, and tell them how they used to do it back in their day instead of going to therapy……and this is good and right.

The Italians have learned to celebrate these men:

In 2015 in the Adriatic city of Riccione, the city paid 11,000 EUR to pensioners to observe construction work that was taking place there:

Among other things, the senior citizens were to count the number of trucks on the municipal construction sites. Purpose: to control deliveries and prevent theft.

Some are even celebrated and rewarded:

The first award: In 2015, the village of San Lazzaro di Savena (near Bologna) gave its first award to a retired person. The senior Franco Bonini becomes "Umarell of the Year". His prize: a day as a site manager on a municipal building site. 

What began as a term of mockery grew into one of endearment. This shows a respect for the elderly, something that is disappearing quickly in many places in the West.

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My friend Bob likes to tell the story about how he and four other guys were headed out to a nightclub one evening, far away from our sleepy suburb. Bob was 20 at the time, as were two others (I was still underage and not with them). They were on their way to pick up Tony, the last one to join them for the evening, so Bob, Mario, and Joey decided to hide in the back of the van for some reason that made sense only to them that night. John was driving, and told Tony upon him climbing in that “Joey can’t make it tonight”. Tony immediately replied: “Fuck yeah. I can’t stand that loser, anyway. He’s just really, really annoying.”

And with that one sentence, the night was completely ruined.

How do you, as Tony, come back from that? Tony apologized sincerely and profusely, but what we say in confidence to someone else, not knowing that others are in earshot, betrays what we truly feel about some one or something.

How do you, as Joey, recover from that? I never found out and never had the chance to ask him, not certain that I ever would anyway. Tony was a very cool guy then, and cool is the currency of the 19 year old that both Joey and Tony were that night.

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Contrary to what many people seem to believe these days, running head first into a brick wall is actually a very bad idea for the very obvious reason that you are already imagining.

Testing limits, whether they be physical, mental, or emotional, is human nature. Babies will put anything into their mouths that they can grasp. Endurance runners will stretch their bodies to see if they can add another mile to their previous record tally.

Some of these tests are performed within reason, in full knowledge of what you are convinced that you can accomplish, what you have previously experienced when testing yourself, and what you have learned from others who have tried similar things.

Other tests are performed because the individual is both stupid and full of themselves. One such individual is Kanye West.

Great artists1 are outliers by their very nature, so it is perfectly natural that many of them will be megalomaniacal and messianic. In fact, it is important that some great artists be this way, otherwise the clarity of vision that allows them to produce great art would be absent. We normies must grant them this right, because it is an integral component of their personality. We accept their self-righteousness and persistence of thought, and in return we receive a masterwork. This is a fair trade.

For those who have been following the Kanye West saga, his zeal in confronting those that he claims are oppressing him (in this case, Jews) more than suggests a man on a mission; it screams it out loud. Kanye has stumbled onto a ‘truth’ that he is now evangelizing, one in which he plays the central role: the persecuted hero. Only he (and God Almighty) can deliver us “the truth” and only he can save us from “them”. It only follows that he has announced his second run for President of the United States of America.

Kanye is down bad. His downward trajectory can be traced to the death of his mother from plastic surgery at the age of 58 in 2007, a death he blames partially on himself and partially on the entertainment industry. It was at this point that media began to report on his somewhat erratic and/or eccentric behaviour, although it may have manifested itself earlier (and there are people who will know if this is the case). A very public and disastrous marriage to plastic celebrity Kim Kardashian was followed by the also public spectacle of her “dating” (read: fucking) an incredibly ugly man named Pete Davidson, the intention being to ridicule Kanye in front of the whole world. The mother of his children was, in his eyes, being devoured by a hideous creature for all to see in order to ‘teach him a lesson’.

The United States of America has fought two holy wars. The first was against itself from 1861 to 1865 so that slavery could be ended. The second was against Nazi Germany where the USA defeated the forces of global fascism all by itself, thus ending the Holocaust. Black slaves were set free in the First Holy War, while Jews were rescued from extermination in the Second Holy War. Even though the descriptions of each conflict are incredibly over-the-top simplifications, they serve to illustrate the prevailing liberal narrative of both, with each war being foundational as to why the USA is the way it is today. To dispute these accepted truths is to violate what America bases its contemporary world-mission on, inviting personal sanction for whoever dares to do so. Each of these “truths” is a brick wall foundation, and Kanye ran head first into the second one.

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I often get criticized for coming across as too pessimistic (the young kids call it ‘blackpilling’), too negative, and lacking in ideas on how to make things better. This is a very fair criticism, but I will still try to mitigate it by explaining myself as follows:

It took me a very long time to realize that when I write, I am writing for myself, to myself, to help me understand the world around me. This might come across as selfish, but it is not intended to be so. The amount of information that the normal person is bombarded with daily would seem unreal to his or her own great-grandfather. For those of us who are terminally online new junkies, it becomes exponential.

Writing allows me to work out not just how to process this deluge of information, but also how to categorize it mentally, how to spot patterns in it, and how to anticipate what will come next. If I can make sense of something during this effort, it is a success.

Over the years I have learned to take a more ‘big picture’ view of the world around me, and not to get too lost in the details, even though “details can kill you”, as an ex-boss of mine in my consulting days hammered into my head. It’s this big picture approach that allows me to somewhat detach myself from the ups and downs of the news cycle. I credit Oswald Spengler for this, along with the fatalism that I have inherited from my own cultural upbringing. “Optimism is cowardice!”, insisted Spengler.1

Many of you have thanked me for doing a not bad job in attempting to objectively analyze events from time to time on this Substack. Unfortunately, many others feel a sense of dejection thanks to these analyses. It is not my intention to demoralize, and I myself am not at all demoralized either.

Being Catholic, I expect things to be bad as I know that utopia is impossible in this world, even if I am commanded by God to try and make this place a bit better every day by living my best Christian life and leading by example. Add this my Spenglerian approach to history and politics and you will now understand why I am not as down as you might be.

Even though I have written a lot over these past two years, I never want to tell readers what to think nor how to act. I do not think that it would be proper to do that. If I persuade readers while working things out in my head for myself, it serves as a data point that I am not TOTALLY insane. I am certain that many of you long-time readers have been able to detect that my essays include elements where I am testing thoughts out to see if they have merit and/or validity. This is the main reason why my essays on Substack should never be treated as a final version.

With this in mind, I want to communicate to you that it is not all doom and gloom out there, and that we do live in a world of beauty and opportunity despite being engulfed in a permanent negative feedback loop. I apologize to those who think that I aim to demoralize with my writing, as nothing could be further from the truth.

What Is There To Be Positive About?

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(This essay was written for those disaffected with how America is run, whether they are on the left or on the right, neither Republican nor Democrat - ed.)

Film and television have trained our brains to expect narrative arcs in everything we experience, from rising action, through to a climax, and ending in a denouement. Real life is not like this at all, but many of us cannot help but to interpret at least some of our own lives in this fashion. We apply this trajectory to our high school lives, our first romantic relationships, even our careers. Thinking that we are at the centre of a story helps give our lives meaning, and we are all guilty of it from time to time.

The rise of political theatre is also hostage to this frame of reference. We are wont to perceive political developments progressing along a neat and tidy storyline, with all the ups, downs, shocks, disappointments, and celebrations that are built into traditional storytelling. At the end, our political option is the winner, and they all went home happily ever after.

2016 USA is a classic case of this: two simultaneous challenges to the status quo came out of nowhere to threaten the ruling elites. From the left, the ‘BernieBros’ promised Americans a fairer deal that included goodies like universal healthcare. From the right, #MAGA tapped into the powerful energy of the GOP base and its rejection of mass migration, de-industrialization, and open hostility to ordinary, everyday Americans emanating from the coastal elites. For #MAGA, 2016 was indeed a fairy tale; an example of ‘people power’ where the people steamrolled first their own party’s elites, and then those of the opposing party as well.

This massive surprise went to people’s heads (and to be fair, rightly so). The feeling was that the system could be reformed, the ship steered back ‘on course’, and that America genuinely could be made ‘great again’. The problem was that it was one thing to win an election, but it was a totally different thing to actually govern and lead a revolution.

And let’s be honest: a revolution is what the overwhelming majority of Trump voters in 2016 wanted. They saw a system that not only did not work for them, but was actively working against them. Trump tapped into this populist sentiment when no one else did, and rode it to the White House. Unfortunately for his supporters, Trump was no revolutionary and his presidency was a disaster thanks in part to the ruling elites subverting it, in part due to his own incapability, and also due to an Act of God. You wanted a revolutionary, instead you got a reality TV show host who was excellent on the campaign trail, but utterly out of his depth in the Oval Office. He wasn’t the first to be ill-suited for the White House, but he was the first in a long, long time that not fit and not installed by the elites.

One man cannot do it all alone. The US system is a set of checks and balances to ensure that precisely this cannot happen. That means that Trump would have to commandeer a vehicle in order to enact his agenda. The only possible vehicle that could assist him was the GOP. This party’s leadership had no desire to enact Trump’s populist revolution and immediately got to work to strangle his agenda, while using him to implement their own (e.g. Paul Ryan’s tax cut bill in 2017 or SCOTUS appointments).

What #MAGA’s main task should have been during Trump’s administration was a capture of the GOP and its repurposing to reflect his populist agenda. This did not happen, as the presence of Senator Mitch McConnell in US Senate as Minority Leader attests to. #MAGA has now had six whole years to take over the GOP and have utterly failed to do so, despite having the majority of the party base on its side. The GOP today remains the Chamber of Commerce Party, with occasional bones thrown to social conservatives to keep them on the reservation.

Since Trump’s surprise victory, the GOP has managed to not only prevent a populist right takeover of its leadership, but has also pinched just enough populist positions to continue to get mainstream Republicans like Virginia Governor Youngkin into power without alienating their funders. Trump continues to be the 800 pound elephant in the room, but other than him the GOP has tamed its populist faction (just like the Democrats have done with their own very progressive wing).

Mid-Terms: Much Ado About Nothing

It was a rather bizarre sight to see diehard Trump supporters cheering on a ‘red wave’ that never crested last night for the simple reason that so little of that wave-that-never-came-to-shore was composed of actual, serious American First candidates. These people were cheering on a political party that actively works against their interests (and who worked against their political saviour), and we can only speculate as to why they were doing so.

When you look at it objectively, none of the races for the House of Representatives were game-changers to US politics as a whole, on either side of the political aisle. In the Senate races, only two mattered: Peter Thiel’s proteges, J.D. Vance in Ohio, and Blake Masters in Arizona. As of this writing, Vance has won his Senate race, while Masters is still waiting for all the ballots to be counted. Of the 34 Senate races last night, only these two had anything to do with the 2016 populist rebellion against the ruling elites. Even if Masters manages to get into Senate, the ratio of Chamber of Commerce Republicans vs. Populists will remain heavily lopsided in favour of the former. Having two #MAGA Senators is an okay start (although I do question Vance’s sincerity), but the populist capture of the GOP is still a long way’s off.

What we saw last night was a standard-fare mid-term election, where a certain amount of seats in the Senate went red, some others went blue, and some seats in the House of Representatives turned blue, while others turned red. The shift between one and the other was typically inconsequential in the big picture, that being a serious reform of the US political system, something desired by populists on both the left and right in 2016.

Not only has the centre held, it has reinforced itself thanks to seeing off the milquetoast challenge of Bernie Sanders 2016, and in bigger thanks to the cross-party (and institutional) sabotage of the Trump presidency.

What Does This Mean?

What it means is politics as usual. The two factions of the Imperial ruling duopoly remain stable and not threatened by revolutionaries within their own parties any time soon. The two chambers of empire continue moving forward, with the Trump presidency a mere speedbump that is now in the rear view mirror. Turbo America it is.

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Turbo-America

“Don’t get me into a shooting war with the Russians”, Obama told his CIA Chief during the Syrian Civil War. This quote has resonance, because it testifies the fact that different parts of the massive US Government work largely independent of one another, sometimes at cross-purposes. Syria (again…

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4 years ago · 152 likes · 78 comments · Niccolo Soldo

It also means that civil war is not in the cards. The US political system, although heated at times, is based on compromise that requires bi-partisanship, something made much easier when revolutionary forces are quashed.

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No, the USA Is Not Headed Towards Civil War

(request: please read the entire piece before inevitably freaking out about my classification in the graphic above…

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4 years ago · 151 likes · 132 comments · Niccolo Soldo

What it also means is that the USA will continue to transform itself domestically as it proceeds to expand further globally.

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The Desquamation of America

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5 years ago · 48 likes · 21 comments · Niccolo Soldo

Americans, especially those on the populist right, need to realize that they live in the Empire’s Metropole, and that they are no longer a nation. They had a chance in 2016 to make the first tentative steps in returning to being a nation, but were easily defeated. America no longer belongs to you, but to its elites. These elite groups see you as a nuisance who gets in the way of profit, empire, and the transformation of the USA (and its satrapies) into a society that reflects their constantly changing values, ones that do not reflect yours.

While #MAGA failed to take over the GOP, the ruling US elites have managed to not only ‘fortify elections’, but have rendered Europe a collection of non-voting US states whose economies were ruined to help push US empire all the way to Kharkov, Ukraine, embarrassing Russia in the process.

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Hubris

Arrogance is commonly defined as the excessive pride one has in relation to others. Hubris is beyond arrogance, as it is the condition of that same excess of pride combined with an extreme self-belief in one’s own abilities, oblivious to all others. The difference between these two terms is important to understand, as it not only relates to individuals that we must deal with on a consistent basis in our lives (or worse; one or the other may describe you or I), but it is also valuable in comprehending the larger world around us, specifically international relations between states…

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4 years ago · 58 likes · 65 comments · Niccolo Soldo

Not content with that, they have also begun to strike out at China as well.

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The Eagle Takes a Bite Out of the Dragon

Chimerica is dead and buried, with Turbo-America delivering the coup de grâce last week by way of imposing export controls (read: sanctions) to purposely make it incredibly difficult for China to import or manufacture advanced computer chips, harming both Beijing’s advanced military tech development efforts and its Artificial Intelligence (AI) sector…

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3 years ago · 80 likes · 109 comments · Niccolo Soldo

The US regime is stable and has shook off internal threats to it with ease, while moving against the two big powers that it wants to cut down to size.

Populism of the left or the right does not serve the empire. This is why you, as a populist, right wing American, should view yourself as a citizen of Rome, living on the Italian peninsula some time in between the rule of EmperorsTrajan and Marcus Aurelius, unhappy with all of these Levantines washing ashore, transforming the cities stretching from Syracuse on the island of Sicily up to Mediolanum. You are not at the tail end of US Empire, but rather somewhere in the middle (possibly even at its height).

The desire to see yourself at the centre of a tumultuous era, where the end of a regime takes place reflects the psychological condition that I described at the beginning of this essay. It’s no different than the apocalyptic cults surrounding extremist Climate Change activists, or the various “end of the world” sects throughout human history. This is perfectly natural behaviour.

I am sad to report to you that the end of the USA is nowhere in sight, the regime has reinforced itself, and it is now back to business as usual.*

*no regime is permanent, and an Act of God/Black Swan event could create the conditions for real change

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