Populism To Counter De-Nationalized Elites?, UAE To Buy a Chunk of Prime Egyptian Real Estate, Gaza in Rochdale, "Hindu Supremacy", Chernobyl as Non-Human Paradise?
Hit the like button at the top or bottom of this page to like this entry. Use the share and/or re-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
And please don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so already!
I have been working very, very hard on the next entry of the Spanish Civil War series. I know it's late, but it's going to be quite an entertaining read.
I remember watching and listening to George Galloway in the early 2000s and thinking something along the lines of “this slimy Bolshevik is among the lowest forms of human being, even by politician standards.” Now I’m reading about his current activities and, well, at least he has the virtue of being consistent.
"always end up getting the same policies to them (yes, this is a gross generalization..please forgive me)" No need; your generalisation is spot on. In 21st c. Western liberalism:
* The MSM Myth:.... vote Left and you get Left; vote Right and you get Right
* The Reality:....Yes, you still have a pluralist electoral democracy but just as a kind of plaything....part of the media entertainment industry. Meanwhile the real government is a permanent and almost unchallengeable techno-bureaucracy constantly topped up by 'experts' emerging from its 'one-party' universities.
* The Managerial State...."Unsurprisingly, neither governmental bureaucracies and quangos nor other civil institutions keep statistics on the political leanings of their employees. But there are clues. Unherd columnist Peter Franklin reflecting on his own experience of working in two UK government departments comments: “How many of the civil servants that most closely serve this Conservative government are actually Leftwing? Well....I would say approximately all of them”. And it’s not just the UK. Research in the US context finds that “the political beliefs of the median federal government employee lie to the left not only of the median Republican, but also the median Democrat”. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing
George Galloway's success in Rochdale is ominous for political stability in the UK but given the miserable condition of the country we can hardly be surprised.
Galloway, like Corbyn, has pioneered the Anglophone version of Islamogauchist politics which will bring nothing but harm to Britain.
However, to be fair Galloway's politics needs to be assessed on a spectrum. Plenty of mainstream British figures prepared the way for Galloway above all the governments that presided over mass migration from the Commonwealth and that latter implemented multiculturalism.
Galloway's opportunism over Palestine itself is far from exceptional. The UK used identity politics on a grand scale when governing the empire. In Palestine itself during the Mandate the British sponsored hardliners to assume leadership within the Arab community, closed the country to Jewish mass migration in the 30s to appease Palestinian opinion, abstained on the vote at the UN on partition and actively supported the Transjordanian and Egyptian attack in 1948. Now the former metropole finds its tranquility disturbed by the sectarian obsessions of Third World migrants seeking to ensure that British foreign policy prioritises the concerns of the ummah al-Islamiyya still further.
Ultimately Gallowa's success reflects poorly on British Labour. They neglected the constituency, abandoned the working classes, put forward poor quality candidates. Now they are stuck with Galloway back in the Commons.
Westminster's problem is now acute. Identity politics for the Muslim community will generate comparable political forces for the English themselves. I do not foresee an Anglican Taliban, but some form of Anglo nationalism may yet emerge in response to current developmets. The implications of that would be truly explosive. We live in truly interesting times.
Savarkar was right about a common enemy binding people together. For that reason some form of white racial politics in the West is all but inevitable. Just a matter of time and diversity.
The damage to DNA from elevated background radiation would cause increased cancers and birth defects. As the authors suggest, the cancers would not be much of a problem if they took enough time to develop that the animals still had time to reproduce.
As for birth defects, also not a problem for animals as long as the proportion from each litter stays small: the defective babies simply die.
Birth defects and cancers are uniquely problematic for humans only, because we live much longer, fear death even if it occurs decades after our prime breeding age, and cherish all our offspring and struggle to keep them alive even if they would be otherwise nonviable.
When you stop anthropomorphizing in your analysis, it is no surprise at all that animals thrive in the wilderness surrounding Chernobyl.
Edit: Niccolo himself is guilty of anthropomorphizing when he suggests that getting cancer must make life suck for the animals. All animals get sick and die from something, unless they are eaten alive by a predator. I'm not sure they would notice or care whether their final illness was cancer or a respiratory infection or starvation.
Ed Bradley, the 60 Minutes corespondent, died fairly early of cancer. I always wondered whether it was because he's gone to the Chernobyl zone to do a segment, and it includes one of those shots where he says, "Now we can't stay in this location for long, because radiation levels are dangerously high..."
It is fascinating that Indian-Americans are so financially successful, considering how poor their home country is. Is it possible the best Indians are emigrating to the west (or more specifically America, where they have more opportunities than their countrymen living in Asian ghettos in the North of England)? Is there a subsequent hollowing-out of talent and ability in India?
I am reminded of an issue I used to read about back in the 1990s, I think. Because of US incentives and immigration loopholes, Philippine nurses and other health professionals were encouraged to come to America, bringing their skills with them. All fine and dandy for us Americans, but apparently there was real concern this was damaging the Philippine health system. I haven’t heard anything about that for some years. I wonder whether the anticipated debilitation of the Philippine health system ever occurred.
BTW, if you travel by car in the western US, you will find that virtually any motel you stay in along the major highways is run by Indians. Are they all from the same towns or provinces? Are they somehow related? How is it a single immigrant group has so dominated this specific American industry? I am intrigued by that question.
Ive googled chernobyl wildlife on and off over the years. It seems like the radiation effects different animals to different degrees. Mammals seem to get on OK, birds seem to get it the worst; albinism, severe cataracts. Firebugs as well; they have a very distinct pattern on them that looks like one of those African masks. Lots of weird abnormalities, discoloration, deformed/missing limbs, antennae. I figure it might have to do with the fact they can fly directly onto that steel shell over reactor 4. Plus I'm not sure how well the cleanup crew got into the tree tops in 1986?
I agree that the west will get more "subcon." Apparently, when TX governor Abbott was making a scene about the border a few weeks ago, he was simultaneously negotiating in India for more H1B(?) migrants. Afa Putin weaponising immigration, I heard that he is actually taking african immigrants into Russia and then sending them into W. Europe via Finland? Funny if true.
Shk Tahnoon (head of ADQ) is considered an extremely savvy and ruthless operator - even in a family notorious for ruthlessness. I doubt they’re doing it out of charity.
I do not know a whole lot about British politics and know nothing about citizen Galloway, but I do find it a tad cynical that everyone is up in arms because a single politician who seems to openly speaking for Palestine made it through. In the sea of ones parroting the whole Israeli shtick.
In essence, he's taking the populist route. The fact that people dislike that one in three of the population that gent is trying to sway his way is Muslim, but the premise is the same: find something that bothers that population, and hit the shit out of that something till it gets you somewhere. It goes both ways.
Attractive as is this explanation, pitting populism vs denationalized elites, it misses the mark.
At a superficial level, it appears bang on: yes, elections appear to change nothing and fail to reverse policies few middle-class people favor, immigration being a prime example; yes, the elites are increasingly distant from the people they rule over (not 'represent', at least not any longer), pushing policies such as Net Zero, carbon taxes, meat-free diets, mandated experimental injections, 'you'll own nothing', unsustainable national and individual debt levels, CBDCs, massive homelessness and associated street crime, and flooding society with highly addictive/debilitating drugs.
The problem with this analysis is when it comes to defining what we see today strictly in terms of a denationalized elite vs a nation-conscious citizenry. To be sure, the elites do resemble a denationalized class, a class of people who feel at home almost anywhere the elite gather at least within the western world. However, one can similarly characterize the various populists as a class who have much more in common with each other across national boundaries than with their respective national elites. Rebellious truckers/farmers in Europe drew much inspiration from, and evince great solidarity with, the Canadian truckers who tried, and failed (at least to date), to halt the rising dictatorship of Dear Leader Justin. Similarly, the Covid Coup gave rise to a profound level of solidarity across borders among the disaffected who found themselves pitted against an indifferent, not to say overtly hostile, power-mad elite determined to force-march us all into their brave new Great Reset world.
It's true that those of us aware of the nature of the ongoing civilizational struggle seek some refuge in the humanistic values reflected in national identity and populist expression. But it would be a mistake to therefore ground this movement in nationalistic roots. It is, rather, a conflict embedded deeply within western civilization that can be expressed as a tug-of-war between the forces of collectivism, always expressed in terms of elite-led totalitarianism, and an ethos of individualism that crafted out of the Enlightenment the tools of constitutional democracy, whether of the republican or parliamentary forms of representative government.
The terms Communism and Fascism do sound a bit dated for the current situation. After all, the former, with its emphases on partisan control and internationalism, miss the insights of the latter with its merging of national consciousness and state/corporate control. And indeed, what we are witnessing is neither Communism nor Fascism, neither Stalin nor Hitler, but a merging of the two. Had Hitler been less of a fanatical nationalist, this alliance might have been realized 85 years ago. In which case, the civilizational conflict we are now witnessing may have been joined in the last century, with America and the British Empire on the other side.
Defining 'our' side in terms of nationalism not only fails to accurately describe what is happening, it plays into the rhetoric of the other side, allowing them command of all the heights of society while defining their opponents, us, as neo-Hitlerite fascists, while at the same time separating us into our respective nationalities, and thus unable to confront what is truly a cross-border civilizational enemy.
I apologize if my ideas seem half-baked. Indeed, they are. They arose as I was reading your article. But they are based on many years of observation. And I suppose they are necessarily reflective of my own journey. More than three decades ago, at age thirty-five, I rather proudly regarded myself as a minor member of what I recognized as an emerging cosmopolitan internationalistic elite, a bilingual journalist at home in North America, Asia and Europe, indeed, as a 'global citizen'.
Fortunately for my psyche, I had, by earlier intensive reading of Orwell, innocculated myself against collectivist tyranny, ie. leftism. And so, while that cosmopolitan elite drifted left into collectivism, I became estranged from it, and recognize it for what it is.
I think that the nationalism/populism versus globalism binary is too simplistic.
In the past both nationalism and populism drew on the energies of concrete communities with distinct ways of life. Today they increasingly express the disatisfaction of a demoralised, anomic, post-national biomass that no longer sustains any real community to begin with. The masses are deterritorialised by immersion in a digital culture that is developed from afar. They are demoralised by sociolytic policies (above all the disappearance of the traditional family) and are also increasingly deracinated at a granular level by cultural fusion and miscegnation.
Thus populism seeks to recover or reconstitute community rather than merely assert it.
Hit the like button at the top or bottom of this page to like this entry. Use the share and/or re-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
And please don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so already!
I have been working very, very hard on the next entry of the Spanish Civil War series. I know it's late, but it's going to be quite an entertaining read.
I remember watching and listening to George Galloway in the early 2000s and thinking something along the lines of “this slimy Bolshevik is among the lowest forms of human being, even by politician standards.” Now I’m reading about his current activities and, well, at least he has the virtue of being consistent.
"always end up getting the same policies to them (yes, this is a gross generalization..please forgive me)" No need; your generalisation is spot on. In 21st c. Western liberalism:
* The MSM Myth:.... vote Left and you get Left; vote Right and you get Right
* The Reality:....Yes, you still have a pluralist electoral democracy but just as a kind of plaything....part of the media entertainment industry. Meanwhile the real government is a permanent and almost unchallengeable techno-bureaucracy constantly topped up by 'experts' emerging from its 'one-party' universities.
* The Managerial State...."Unsurprisingly, neither governmental bureaucracies and quangos nor other civil institutions keep statistics on the political leanings of their employees. But there are clues. Unherd columnist Peter Franklin reflecting on his own experience of working in two UK government departments comments: “How many of the civil servants that most closely serve this Conservative government are actually Leftwing? Well....I would say approximately all of them”. And it’s not just the UK. Research in the US context finds that “the political beliefs of the median federal government employee lie to the left not only of the median Republican, but also the median Democrat”. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/carry-on-governing
Worth noting that Galloway has already declared himself 'the Member for Gaza'. No one to my knowledge has called him out for this...
Imagine, for example, if an MP declared himself the 'Member for Tel Aviv' or even the 'Member for Kabul'...
European elites serve Washington. They have yet to 'graduate' into being globalists in the practical sense.
George Galloway's success in Rochdale is ominous for political stability in the UK but given the miserable condition of the country we can hardly be surprised.
Galloway, like Corbyn, has pioneered the Anglophone version of Islamogauchist politics which will bring nothing but harm to Britain.
However, to be fair Galloway's politics needs to be assessed on a spectrum. Plenty of mainstream British figures prepared the way for Galloway above all the governments that presided over mass migration from the Commonwealth and that latter implemented multiculturalism.
Galloway's opportunism over Palestine itself is far from exceptional. The UK used identity politics on a grand scale when governing the empire. In Palestine itself during the Mandate the British sponsored hardliners to assume leadership within the Arab community, closed the country to Jewish mass migration in the 30s to appease Palestinian opinion, abstained on the vote at the UN on partition and actively supported the Transjordanian and Egyptian attack in 1948. Now the former metropole finds its tranquility disturbed by the sectarian obsessions of Third World migrants seeking to ensure that British foreign policy prioritises the concerns of the ummah al-Islamiyya still further.
Ultimately Gallowa's success reflects poorly on British Labour. They neglected the constituency, abandoned the working classes, put forward poor quality candidates. Now they are stuck with Galloway back in the Commons.
Westminster's problem is now acute. Identity politics for the Muslim community will generate comparable political forces for the English themselves. I do not foresee an Anglican Taliban, but some form of Anglo nationalism may yet emerge in response to current developmets. The implications of that would be truly explosive. We live in truly interesting times.
Savarkar was right about a common enemy binding people together. For that reason some form of white racial politics in the West is all but inevitable. Just a matter of time and diversity.
The damage to DNA from elevated background radiation would cause increased cancers and birth defects. As the authors suggest, the cancers would not be much of a problem if they took enough time to develop that the animals still had time to reproduce.
As for birth defects, also not a problem for animals as long as the proportion from each litter stays small: the defective babies simply die.
Birth defects and cancers are uniquely problematic for humans only, because we live much longer, fear death even if it occurs decades after our prime breeding age, and cherish all our offspring and struggle to keep them alive even if they would be otherwise nonviable.
When you stop anthropomorphizing in your analysis, it is no surprise at all that animals thrive in the wilderness surrounding Chernobyl.
Edit: Niccolo himself is guilty of anthropomorphizing when he suggests that getting cancer must make life suck for the animals. All animals get sick and die from something, unless they are eaten alive by a predator. I'm not sure they would notice or care whether their final illness was cancer or a respiratory infection or starvation.
Would Palestinians from Gaza qualify for asylum in accordance with the UN convention on refugees?
There was a kerfuffle a few years back when AOC's chief of staff wore a T-shirt featuring an Indian nationalist whose anti-British sentiments had led him, Irish-style and Boer-style, to basically taking Hitler's side in WWII. https://forward.com/fast-forward/427361/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-nazi-adolf-hitler-subhas-chandra-bose/
Ed Bradley, the 60 Minutes corespondent, died fairly early of cancer. I always wondered whether it was because he's gone to the Chernobyl zone to do a segment, and it includes one of those shots where he says, "Now we can't stay in this location for long, because radiation levels are dangerously high..."
It is fascinating that Indian-Americans are so financially successful, considering how poor their home country is. Is it possible the best Indians are emigrating to the west (or more specifically America, where they have more opportunities than their countrymen living in Asian ghettos in the North of England)? Is there a subsequent hollowing-out of talent and ability in India?
I am reminded of an issue I used to read about back in the 1990s, I think. Because of US incentives and immigration loopholes, Philippine nurses and other health professionals were encouraged to come to America, bringing their skills with them. All fine and dandy for us Americans, but apparently there was real concern this was damaging the Philippine health system. I haven’t heard anything about that for some years. I wonder whether the anticipated debilitation of the Philippine health system ever occurred.
BTW, if you travel by car in the western US, you will find that virtually any motel you stay in along the major highways is run by Indians. Are they all from the same towns or provinces? Are they somehow related? How is it a single immigrant group has so dominated this specific American industry? I am intrigued by that question.
Ive googled chernobyl wildlife on and off over the years. It seems like the radiation effects different animals to different degrees. Mammals seem to get on OK, birds seem to get it the worst; albinism, severe cataracts. Firebugs as well; they have a very distinct pattern on them that looks like one of those African masks. Lots of weird abnormalities, discoloration, deformed/missing limbs, antennae. I figure it might have to do with the fact they can fly directly onto that steel shell over reactor 4. Plus I'm not sure how well the cleanup crew got into the tree tops in 1986?
I agree that the west will get more "subcon." Apparently, when TX governor Abbott was making a scene about the border a few weeks ago, he was simultaneously negotiating in India for more H1B(?) migrants. Afa Putin weaponising immigration, I heard that he is actually taking african immigrants into Russia and then sending them into W. Europe via Finland? Funny if true.
Shk Tahnoon (head of ADQ) is considered an extremely savvy and ruthless operator - even in a family notorious for ruthlessness. I doubt they’re doing it out of charity.
I do not know a whole lot about British politics and know nothing about citizen Galloway, but I do find it a tad cynical that everyone is up in arms because a single politician who seems to openly speaking for Palestine made it through. In the sea of ones parroting the whole Israeli shtick.
In essence, he's taking the populist route. The fact that people dislike that one in three of the population that gent is trying to sway his way is Muslim, but the premise is the same: find something that bothers that population, and hit the shit out of that something till it gets you somewhere. It goes both ways.
Attractive as is this explanation, pitting populism vs denationalized elites, it misses the mark.
At a superficial level, it appears bang on: yes, elections appear to change nothing and fail to reverse policies few middle-class people favor, immigration being a prime example; yes, the elites are increasingly distant from the people they rule over (not 'represent', at least not any longer), pushing policies such as Net Zero, carbon taxes, meat-free diets, mandated experimental injections, 'you'll own nothing', unsustainable national and individual debt levels, CBDCs, massive homelessness and associated street crime, and flooding society with highly addictive/debilitating drugs.
The problem with this analysis is when it comes to defining what we see today strictly in terms of a denationalized elite vs a nation-conscious citizenry. To be sure, the elites do resemble a denationalized class, a class of people who feel at home almost anywhere the elite gather at least within the western world. However, one can similarly characterize the various populists as a class who have much more in common with each other across national boundaries than with their respective national elites. Rebellious truckers/farmers in Europe drew much inspiration from, and evince great solidarity with, the Canadian truckers who tried, and failed (at least to date), to halt the rising dictatorship of Dear Leader Justin. Similarly, the Covid Coup gave rise to a profound level of solidarity across borders among the disaffected who found themselves pitted against an indifferent, not to say overtly hostile, power-mad elite determined to force-march us all into their brave new Great Reset world.
It's true that those of us aware of the nature of the ongoing civilizational struggle seek some refuge in the humanistic values reflected in national identity and populist expression. But it would be a mistake to therefore ground this movement in nationalistic roots. It is, rather, a conflict embedded deeply within western civilization that can be expressed as a tug-of-war between the forces of collectivism, always expressed in terms of elite-led totalitarianism, and an ethos of individualism that crafted out of the Enlightenment the tools of constitutional democracy, whether of the republican or parliamentary forms of representative government.
The terms Communism and Fascism do sound a bit dated for the current situation. After all, the former, with its emphases on partisan control and internationalism, miss the insights of the latter with its merging of national consciousness and state/corporate control. And indeed, what we are witnessing is neither Communism nor Fascism, neither Stalin nor Hitler, but a merging of the two. Had Hitler been less of a fanatical nationalist, this alliance might have been realized 85 years ago. In which case, the civilizational conflict we are now witnessing may have been joined in the last century, with America and the British Empire on the other side.
Defining 'our' side in terms of nationalism not only fails to accurately describe what is happening, it plays into the rhetoric of the other side, allowing them command of all the heights of society while defining their opponents, us, as neo-Hitlerite fascists, while at the same time separating us into our respective nationalities, and thus unable to confront what is truly a cross-border civilizational enemy.
I apologize if my ideas seem half-baked. Indeed, they are. They arose as I was reading your article. But they are based on many years of observation. And I suppose they are necessarily reflective of my own journey. More than three decades ago, at age thirty-five, I rather proudly regarded myself as a minor member of what I recognized as an emerging cosmopolitan internationalistic elite, a bilingual journalist at home in North America, Asia and Europe, indeed, as a 'global citizen'.
Fortunately for my psyche, I had, by earlier intensive reading of Orwell, innocculated myself against collectivist tyranny, ie. leftism. And so, while that cosmopolitan elite drifted left into collectivism, I became estranged from it, and recognize it for what it is.
I think that the nationalism/populism versus globalism binary is too simplistic.
In the past both nationalism and populism drew on the energies of concrete communities with distinct ways of life. Today they increasingly express the disatisfaction of a demoralised, anomic, post-national biomass that no longer sustains any real community to begin with. The masses are deterritorialised by immersion in a digital culture that is developed from afar. They are demoralised by sociolytic policies (above all the disappearance of the traditional family) and are also increasingly deracinated at a granular level by cultural fusion and miscegnation.
Thus populism seeks to recover or reconstitute community rather than merely assert it.