Saturday Commentary and Review #77

Corisca Aflame, Ukraine's Far Right and Neo-Nazi Forces, US Economic Threats Towards China, Dave Rubin and Conservatism, the 10 Biggest Books of the 1970s

I have been somewhat harsh on UnHerd these past few weeks due to the infiltration of neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists demanding ‘action’ on Ukraine on the site. Allowing these types a voice makes UnHerd more “Standard Fare” than anything else. Regardless of this fact, the publication still cranks out interesting and informative content, which is why I am sharing two pieces from them with you this week.

The French Mediterranean island of Corsica has been flying very low under on the radar for decades now. It wasn’t always the case. Having produced Napoleon Bonaparte, it became the scene for a national liberation/terrorist movement during the Cold War, and also the setting for The French Connection, in which the Sicilian Mafia partnered up with heroin cookers from Corsica to export the finished product to the massive market known as the United States of America. Since then, it has gone rather quiet.

For anyone with any knowledge of France, the idea that it is not a homogeneous country in terms of culture and history is well-known. There is a massive gulf between the Bretons and those in the Languedoc, for example. The Normans are culturally closer to the Walloons than to the Mediterranean-laid back culture of French Provencals.

France underwent a grand centralization in order to iron out these differences to create national unity. The French language (based around Ile de France) won out. Cultural differences remain. Nevertheless, the project overall has been a success.

But not everywhere. Despite the noticeable differences between north and south mentioned above, Corsica is REALLY different. Their language is much closer to the Italian spoken in Sardinia, and their culture is very clannish, based around extended families, akin to that of Sicily. These differences have also informed their politics, with two strains dominant: those seeking greater autonomy within France, and those seeking complete independence. John Lichfield explains why Corsica is once again in the news, and at the worst possible time for President Macron.

The spark:

Yvan Colonna, a Corsican terrorist and shepherd, was once regarded by the French state as its Public Enemy Number One. Paris is now praying that he will stay alive.

Colonna, 61, has been in a coma for a fortnight after being savagely beaten in France’s highest security jail by another inmate — an Islamist terrorist. Since he was beaten and suffocated almost to death, anti-French riots have engulfed several Corsican towns. If he dies, local politicians warn, the violence could explode into a “generalised revolt”.

The latest riot, in the northern town Bastia on Sunday, was the most violent event in the Mediterranean island for decades. At least 7,000 people — equivalent to one in nine of the town’s population — laid siege to government buildings.

The prefecture, the local tax office and the post office were all set alight. More than 650 Molotov cocktails, as well as pétanque balls and agricultural bird-scaring rockets, were hurled or fired at riot police. They replied with more than 4,000 stun grenades, before running out of ammunition and being forced to retreat to their barracks. One gendarme was shot in the neck with a hunting rifle.

The complaint:

In 2017 the Macron government offered steps towards greater autonomy (without using that word). But its proposals were blocked as unconstitutional by the centre-right majority in the upper house of the French parliament, the Sénat. Nothing much has happened since then.

So frustration has built, especially among many young Corsicans who look back to the “independence struggle” of the Eighties and Nineties as a golden age. They have embraced the identity politics of the 21st century: unlike their parents, they reject any element of “shared” French-Corsican identity. They see themselves as the oppressed colonial subjects of France.

Many of Sunday’s protesters were students or school children — although most of the violence came from a roaming band of 100 or so older people wearing black hoods. For these younger generations, Colonna, a convicted murderer, is a folk hero — a Corsican version of Bobby Sands.

Adding fuel to the fire was that Colonna’s attacker was an Islamist:

There is, however, another reason why Colonna’s near-death has caused such a furious and violent reaction. Part of the much-splintered Corsican nationalist movement is anti-Muslim. Many other Corsican separatists accuse France of being more tolerant of Muslims than Corsicans.

It was unsurprising, then, that they seized upon the fact that Colonna’s assailant, Franck Elong Abe, 36, is a Cameroon-born Islamist, who was originally arrested by US forces in Afghanistan and transferred to a series of French jails. Abe also had a record of violence against other prisoners, but was nevertheless made the overseer of the gym at the high security prison near Arles. According to French media reports, he was at one time friendly with Colonna and they played table-tennis together.

Their relationship was not to last. On March 2, Abe beat and suffocated Colonna when they were left alone by prison guards for eight minutes. His motive remains unclear, though reports suggest that Colonna may have made insulting remarks about Islam.

Whatever the truth, some of the rioters in Corsican towns accuse the French authorities of allowing Abe to kill Colonna — or at the very least of culpable negligence. The march in Bastia on Sunday assembled behind a banner reading in Corsican, “French state assassins”.

Paul-François Paoli said: “The fact that he is an Islamist poured oil on the fire… It suggests to some people that the French prison service is kinder to Islamist terrorists than to Corsican nationalists… And it’s not a big step from thinking that there was a plot to eliminate him. And those Corsicans who already made Colonna a hero now have an excuse to make him into a martyr.”

It was only a few years ago that Corsican nationalists sacked a mosque on the island.

The paradox of offering greater autonomy to a “France Indivisible”:

The Macron government is offering to resume progress towards a more autonomous status for Corsica, but the centralising French constitution — which speaks of “one indivisible” republic — puts limitations on what can peacefully happen.  But while polls in the past have suggested that only a small minority of Corsica’s 350,000 people want complete independence — not least because the island’s public services and transport links are heavily subsidised by French mainland taxpayers — support for greater autonomy is growing.

France has picked up the tried-and-tested British method of ‘muddling through’ problems, hoping that they fizzle out. They have done this with their Muslim-dominant urban landscapes, and will probably try to do the same again with Corsica.

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One of the very interesting sideshows of this war in Ukraine is how western media, always desperate to paint anyone one millimetre right-of-centre as a fascist or Nazi (and happy to get them fired from their employment in the process through cancellation), is now actively downplaying the presence of actual Nazis in Europe on the ground in Ukraine, to the point of siding with them. If Nazism is the ultimate evil, the Secular Satanism, it follows that we should side with those seeking to crush them (in this case, Russia). My readers are smart enough to know and realize that they are full of shit, and that this conflict only highlights how full of shit they are.

At the same time, the notion that Ukraine is a fascist state is rather ridiculous as well. It is a patchwork of regional oligarchies, in competition with one another, sponsored by the USA. It has all the trappings of a democracy, but is rather deficient in practise, having banned quite a lot of media, and having banned opposition parties (purportedly tied to the Russian minority) as of today. Even with these limitations, it is a far cry from fascism. Fascist parties are not very well represented in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament).

It is in Russia’s interest to inflate the fascist nature of Ukraine much as it is in the interest of anti-Russian forces to minimize it. In this case, the answer lies in the middle. The lovely and talented Aris Roussinos has deftly tackled this subject and illuminates the question of Nazism/Fascism in Ukraine for our benefit.

But the Russian claim is false: Ukraine is a genuine liberal-democratic state, though an imperfect one, with free elections that produce significant changes of power, including the election, in 2019, of the liberal-populist reformer, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ukraine is, unequivocally, not a Nazi state: the Russian casus belli is a lie. And yet, there is a danger that the understandable desire by Ukrainian and Western commentators not to provide ammunition for Russian propaganda has led to an over-correction — and one that may not ultimately serve Ukraine’s best interests. 

Yet:

During one recent news bulletin on BBC Radio 4, the correspondent referred to “Putin’s baseless claim that the Ukrainian state supports Nazis”. This is, itself, disinformation: it is an observable fact, which the BBC itself has previously reported on accurately and well, that the Ukrainian state has, since 2014, provided funding, weapons and other forms of support to extreme Right-wing militias, including neo-Nazi ones. This is not a new or controversial observation. Back in 2019, I spent time in Ukraine interviewing senior figures in the constellation of state-backed extreme Right-wing groups for Harper’s magazine; they were all quite open about their ideology and plans for the future. 

Please note the following as to when reporting on the nature of Azov stopped:

Over the past few years, Bellingcat researchers have explored Azov’s outreach effort to American white nationalists and its funding by the Ukrainian state to teach “patriotic education” and to support demobilised veterans; it has looked into Azov’s hosting of neo-Nazi black metal music festivals, and its support of the exiled, anti-Putin Russian neo-Nazi group Wotanjugend — practitioners of a very marginal form of esoteric Nazism, who share space with Azov in their Kyiv headquarters, fight alongside them in the front line, and have also played a role translating and disseminating a Russian-language version of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. Unfortunately, Bellingcat’s invaluable coverage of Ukraine’s extreme-Right ecosystem has not been updated since the current hostilities began, despite the war with Russia providing these groups with something of a renaissance.

Background:

The Azov movement was founded in 2014 by Andriy Biletsky, former leader of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine, during the battle for control of Kyiv’s central Independence Square during the Maidan Revolution against the country’s Russia-leaning, elected president Viktor Yanukovych. Back in 2010, Biletsky claimed that it would one day be Ukraine’s role to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led untermenschen“. The revolution, and the war which followed, would give him the national stage for which he had so long craved.

Alongside other far-Right groups, such as Right Sector, the nascent Azov movement played an outside role in the fighting against Ukrainian security police which left 121 dead and secured the success of the revolution. Acquiring control of a large property, just off Independence Square, from the Ministry of Defence, Azov turned the building, now named Cossack House, into its Kyiv headquarters and recruiting centre. Though Azov has since toned down its rhetoric, and many of its fighters may be non-ideological and simply attracted by its martial reputation, its activists are often to be seen covered in tattoos of SS totenkopfs and lightning bolt runes, or sporting the Sonnenrad or Black Sun symbol of esoteric Nazism. Derived from a pattern created for Himmler at Wewelsburg castle in Germany, chosen as an occultic Camelot for senior SS officers, the Sonnenrad is like the Wolfsangel rune of the SS Das Reich division one of Azov’s official symbols, worn on their unit patches and on the shields behind which their fighters parade in evocative torchlit ceremonies.

These are the Neo-Nazis that we are told aren’t real Neo-Nazis, unlike middle class Flyover Americans who object to Critical Race Theory being taught to their children. They treat us like idiots.

More on state and international support:

Both Ukrainian human rights activists and leaders of rival extreme Right-wing groups have complained to me, in interviews, about the unfair advantage Avakov’s patronage gave the Azov movement in establishing its dominant role in Ukraine’s Rightwing sphere — including official functions as election observers and state-sanctioned auxiliary police. Ukraine is not a Nazi state, but the Ukrainian state’s support — for whatever reasons, valid or otherwise — of neo-Nazi or Nazi-aligned groups makes the country an outlier in Europe. The continent has many extreme Right-wing groups, but only in Ukraine do they possess their own tank and artillery units, with the state’s support.

This awkwardly close relationship between a liberal-democratic state supported by the West and armed proponents of a very different ideology has caused some discomfort in the past for Ukraine’s Western backers. The US Congress has gone back and forth in recent years on whether Azov should be blocked from receiving American arms shipments, with Democrat lawmakers even urging in 2019 that Azov be listed as a global terrorist organisation. In interviews, Semenyaka complained to me that this unease was a result of their listening to Russian propaganda, and insisted that American cooperation with Azov would be beneficial for both parties.

What is bewildering to me is what do these Azov leaders think? Are they under the impression that they won’t be crushed once the USA turns its attention away from Ukraine? What is their longer game and how do they seriously plan to achieve their goals? There is no way in hell that the USA and Europe will allow such a militant force free reign in a European country.

Please do read the article as Aris has provided me too much to excerpt.

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Ever since Obama announced the US “Pivot to Asia”, I have been left wondering how this would come about as the Russians had yet to be put down. Would it be stalled until Russia was brought under heel? Would a detente with Russia come first? Or would the USA, in a fit of imperial hubris, seek to confront both?

Number three seems to the answer. I am still coming to grips with this, but it is now undeniable. In these past few weeks, we have seen the USA threaten both China and India with sanctions if they do not assist the USA in isolating Russia. Absolutely wild.

US-Russian trade is almost non-existent, which makes sanctions on Russia painless (unless if you’re European, then you’re fucked), with inflation the only threat. The opposite is the case for US-Chinese trade, a relationship in importance that dwarfs all others.

Chen Feng brings us a Chinese perspective (translated into English) on what economic sanctions, considered a form of war, would do to US-Chinese relations.

First, the majority Chinese view on the current conflict:

The war in Ukraine is in danger of igniting World War III. A gunfight with NATO cannot be excluded as a consequence of Russia’s military action. The US and NATO are avoiding military conflict on the one hand and firing on all cylinders with economic sanctions on the other. Russia’s military action is aimed at winning space for its security, while the US economic policy is aimed at destroying the Russian economy as a way to trigger regime change and even dismantle Russia.

China on its growing trade with Russia, despite US protests and threats:

China does not support Russia’s war, but it also continues to maintain normal trade ties with Russia, and Sino-Russian trade will likely increase sharply, not only by absorbing large amounts of oil and gas and wheat imports from Russia, but also by significantly increasing exports of consumer goods and industrial technology to Russia to compensate for the decline in Russia’s trade relations with the West.

China does not need to bypass sanctions when the United States has made high-profile threats against it. These are only sanctions based on US domestic law, not United Nations Security Council sanctions. The transportation of goods between Russia and China does not have to go through other countries, or only through friendly countries.

China is a sovereign state, and the US has no right or power to order China to comply with US sanctions against Russia based on domestic law. Nor can the US push sanctions against Russia through the UN Security Council.

Apart from energy, which is inseparable from Europe, Russia’s trade with Europe and the United States is only icing on the cake, while trade with China is what really counts. As long as China continues to maintain normal economic and trade ties with Russia, and even expand them, Russia’s economy will not collapse.

The Chinese are well-aware that, should the USA effect regime change in Moscow, it is next.

The Chinese view the slapping of tariffs by President Trump on Chinese goods destined for the US market as the first salvo in this economic war:

This allows only one conclusion: the US economy is far more dependent on China than US politicians can imagine.

In order to press China for concessions, the United States encouraged foreign investment to leave China and sought to drive Chinese capital away from the US stock market. It also sought to block normal economic, trade, technology and foreign student ties by using visa restrictions and catch-all investigations, measures which were all implemented to varying degrees in the Trump era.

Hurting people will not work to stop China’s progress. Banning China from using the US dollar, “confiscating” US debt from China and banning China from using SWIFT were also considered, but the cost was too great for the United States to take the risk.

The USA would only be shooting itself in the foot if it applied sanctions to the Chinese economy:

But China is not jeopardizing the survival of the United States. At the very least, the state of affairs between China and the United States has not substantially changed from the Trump era. More importantly, it is clear from the four-year trade war that extreme measures by the United States not only will fail; they will seriously harm the United States itself.

The economy is facing severe inflation, and any disruption in US-China trade will add insult to injury. A Russian-style embargo will certainly force many US manufacturers to shut down production and stores to close, directly affecting the US economy and society. The current epidemic outbreak that led to partial shutdowns in Shenzhen and Shanghai is a preview.

The seizure of Chinese assets abroad will surely cause China to seize US assets in China, which is a losing proposition given the asymmetry between Chinese exports to Europe and the United States and foreign investment in China. Foreign investment withdrawal is an even bigger money-loser, as Chinese factories and markets have been a major source of profit for major multinationals for decades. Cutting off travel would be very painful for individuals, but it would not come close to crushing China.

Banning SWIFT and the US dollar would fundamentally damage the financial credibility of the US, while the damage to China is manageable, because China still has CIPS and the RMB. Some of the CIPS transactions are still routed through SWIFT, but this is not necessary; likewise the need to transition foreign currencies from the US dollar in some places.

The consequences for US debt would be disastrous for the US economy. In 2021, US. federal spending is about 30 percent of GDP. With federal revenues of $4.05 trillion and spending of $6.82 trillion, the deficit exceeds 30% of federal spending, and the $2.77 trillion difference is all dependent on debt financing.

De-Dollarization:

While the de-dollarization of trade between China and Russia is not a surprise, Saudi Arabia’s move is a breakthrough. The Saudi-led Middle Eastern oil exporters agreed to use the US dollar as their oil settlement currency, the most significant move to anchor the US dollar since Nixon abolished the dollar-gold standard, making the “non-standard” dollar the “oil standard” dollar and thus the benchmark settlement currency for world trade.

This led to the “gold standard” dollar becoming the “oil standard” dollar, thus becoming the benchmark currency for world trade. For various reasons, China’s imports and exports are mainly settled in US dollars, which indirectly has a “goods standard” status and is doubly robust. The RMB itself has “goods standard” characteristics and does not need any other anchor.

Saudi Arabia and China may not shift oil transactions to the yuan all of a sudden. There is no need for this. China’s large reserve of dollars can’t be left to get moldy in its hands. They have to flow to be of value.  But the yuan is gradually becoming the settlement currency of international trade, which has more significance than 1,000 nuclear bombs. This is a huge event.

The massive shift of Russian oil to China due to the European and US embargoes, coupled with Saudi Arabia’s switch to RMB settlement, may force more and more countries exporting oil to China to switch to RMB settlement. The situation brings to mind the old saying, “I don’t have to run faster than the bear – I just have to run faster than the next fellow.”

On American economic weakness in a grand, strategic sense:

The conundrum for the United States is that none of this can be stopped by cutting off economic and trade ties to China. The US is still thinking condescendingly as if the Chinese economy depended on American generosity bounty. This is wrong.  And closing the gates of the estuary won’t help when the tsunami comes.

The United States is fighting an economic war against China, but its shortcomings clash against its advantages.  The US economy is already very hollowed out and leveraged. American deindustrialization has passed the point of no return in many ways, and the ship of US prosperity during the last 30 years floats on Chinese water. The US technology and economy are still impressive, but it’s like a soccer striker who looks like he scores a lot of goals and is very polished without realizing that a great team depends on the midfield.

Lots to think about here.

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Leave it to American conservatives to discard principles they held yesterday in order to ‘own the libs’ by discarding those same principles today. They are beneath contempt, dumb, useless, and deserving of losing everything. The good news is that they are losing everything.

The cultural war now ravaging the USA has produced interesting allies of convenience, as disaffected social liberals have united with conservatives to combat ‘cancel culture’. “Wow, these guys are now on our team!”, thinks the stupid conservative, stupid as he ever was, as he waters down his own principles to the point of them reflecting all he had opposed only a few years ago.

What these idiots do not realize is that these disaffected liberals have the shortest path to victory on the culture war. If they can claw back a position or two and temper cancel culture, they’ll enthusiastically return to calling conservatives fascists/nazis/hicks/etc. Yet the conservative does not see this. Because the US conservative is a fucking idiot.

Declan Leary tackles this subject with a focus on conservatives cheering Dave Rubin renting out wombs so that he can have children:

And what about the trendy conservative ally of the week: the anti-woke liberal, who is more likely than not to be a gay political commentator (Rubin, Andrew Sullivan, Chadwick Moore, Douglas Murray, Bari Weiss, etc.)?

If there was any hope that such people belonged in the new conservative movement, Dave Rubin did away with that this week with the announcement that he and his legal husband (also named Dave) are expecting two children this coming fall. The announcement was met with effusive congratulations from some leading lights of the Very Online Right—including many whose good work suggests they ought to know better, from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s press secretary to anti-CRT crusader Christopher Rufo. Even high-profile accounts devoted to exposing the insanity of the LGBT left crossed sides to declare their approval of the Rubins’ impending procurement of two children. Et tu, @libsoftiktok?

In a video posted to his YouTube channel Rubin explains in graphic detail the process by which he and the other Dave created these two children. First, though, he explains that he was so career-driven that he had never seriously considered having children. He reflects, “In a weird way I guess the gay thing kind of gives you, like, an easy out on that, because, uh, I’m not a scientitian but, uh, it’s hard for two biological men or two biological women to actually reproduce without some help.” (Hard? Does that mean they can pull it off if they really put their minds to it?)

Rubin explains further that, growing up in the Dark Age of 1980s New York, he didn’t quite think it was normal for two men to have babies together. He catches himself quickly, though: “I don’t like that word, normal.”

But the other Dave finally wore him down, and the two men jumped into a process that seems to a sane observer intensely dystopian:

These are young women who are willing to donate their eggs, and women obviously make a lot of eggs—uh, some make a lot of eggs, some don’t make eggs. But the donors are usually young and healthy, and if they want to help people that otherwise can’t have children, they can donate their eggs. So you basically go on all of these websites, there are all of these sites, and it’s sort of like Tinder or whatever app you were dating on, where you just kind of swipe through people and you say “Oh, I like the way she looks,” or “This girl had a great education,” or some combination thereof. … And, you know, there are different rates and all of these things.

That last sentence presumably refers to the amount of money Rubin would have paid to a given woman for the purchase of her eggs.

The podcaster goes on to explain that a number of eggs—18 the first time around—were taken from this woman and split into two groups, each of which would be fertilized with one of the two men’s semen. “Some of it takes, some of it doesn’t take,” but suffice to say that quite a few zygotes—biologically distinct human beings—were created in the process.

And then you need surrogates. So the surrogate, obviously, is the woman who then carries the child. So basically what we’ve got cookin’ here is that we have one baby that is from my stuff and one baby that is from David’s stuff, but they both will have the same biological mother—and we wanted them to have that sort of genetic connection. And right now there are two really fantastic women—and, you know, it’s not an easy thing to be a surrogate. This is not something people really do for money. They do it for a higher purpose, for sure. And really two absolutely amazing women are carrying our babies right now.

This is evil, plain and simple. Dave and Dave paid for the creation of roughly 18 unique, individual human beings, just so that two of them could be successfully implanted in rented wombs and delivered to their purchasers after a nine-month interval. The fate of the other 16 need not be spelled out.

The actual deal:

The same people who make a living being outraged that Lia Thomas, who is a man, is allowed to swim in the women’s races for his college cannot turn around and tell us that there’s nothing wrong with two dudes having babies together. Is there a difference between men and women, or is there not?

The normalization of homosexuality, and especially the normalization of homosexual parenthood, necessarily leads to the more radical gender ideology advancing from the left today. If men and women are perfectly interchangeable in sex, and in the role of a mother or a father—those things most closely tied to biological reality—then of course they must be interchangeable in everything else. The premises underlying the acceptance of L, G, and B logically lead to T, sooner or later.

A conservative movement that makes its peace with the former three will have to reckon with the latter—with all the torment and chaos it entails. It will also have to answer for the children who became laboratory waste so that Dave Rubin could feel just a little more fulfilled, and the two survivors forced to grow up without a mother. It will bear the weight of an order in which eggs and wombs and babies are bought, sold, and rented, and helpless children made and paid for by the sterile West are left stranded in a war zone.

I am being trite when saying this, so I apologize to everyone here, but I must do so anyway: what are these conservatives actually conserving?

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We end this week’s Substack with some very light fare: the 10 most culturally important books of the 1970s. This is not a snob’s list, but rather a cross-section of what had the biggest impact during that wild decade. Helter Skelter I read several times (being horribly interested in the murders since I was very young). I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas while in university, and quickly realized that I would tire of it by the time I was 30 (correct assessment). Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” I couldn’t finish, unlike Inherent Vice.

Without further ado, the 10 most important books of the 1970s.

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