Little Ideas of Freedom beat the Big Idea of Justice in the Cold War. Did History end or did the Free World search for the Big Idol?
Francis Fukuyama’s End-of-History thesis struck a nerve at the end of the Cold War, not so much due to its originality or depth but its succinctness in conveying what many were sensing in the moment of great change. Despite the protestations of hardline anti-communist types(like Patrick Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, and George Will) who’d insisted that the USSR was playing possum in the Gorbachev years and gearing up for another round of East-West conflict, the collapse of the Soviet Union turned out to be total and irrevocable. The West had truly prevailed in the Cold War. Some might argue that the West didn’t so much win as the Soviet Union just gave up on its failed project.
Some things die of their own accord, indeed no less true of right-wing systems. Franco’s Spain was spared by the Allies in World War II — it had remained mostly neutral and rebuffed Hitler’s entreaties during the war — lasted into the late 1970s. It was not defeated militarily but was rejected almost immediately by the Spanish people following the death of Francisco Franco. In some ways, it was even stranger than the fall of communism because, whereas communist systems struggled to stock shelves with basic consumer goods, Spain under Franco’s dictatorship had done remarkably well with steady economic growth and considerable social & cultural freedoms — though authoritarian, most Spaniards were left alone as long as they weren’t bomb throwers. Yet, more than a decade before the fall of communism, Spain underwent a quiet revolution without violence, perhaps anticipating similar transformations in the communist East. (It must be noted that Franco’s Spain wasn’t fascist but Catholic-Monarchist, a combination of traditionalism and entrepreneurialism, with the latter producing a middle class addicted to consumerism that invariably favored social liberalization.)
In the end, it didn’t matter that Spain turned away from the right while Eastern Europe turned away from the left; what mattered is they converged in the middle, the supposed consensus of the Liberal Democratic Model, or the End of History. In either case, it came down to autocracy vs democracy, dogma vs liberality, the collective vs individuality. Indeed, rightist Spain and leftist Eastern Europe were uncannily alike in many ways, not least in their shared cultural conservatism, though both camps had lively cultural undergrounds that dabbled in the Avant-garde. (To some extent, the authorities tolerated and even promoted a degree of experimental art as a safety-valve and to signal to the West that cultural freedom was alive and well, be it in Spain or Poland.) But then, with the fading of intellectual modernism in the second half of the 20th century, the real challenge came from Hollywood and American-style pop music that embodied popular taste and freedom with American characteristics.
Between the quiet revolution in Spain and quiet-enough revolutions in Eastern Europe, both toward liberal democracy, China too underwent profound(and mostly peaceful) changes, moving away from a strict command economy and ideological dogma toward economic, social, and cultural freedoms for the Chinese people to remake themselves as individuals and free agents than as unwavering soldiers of the revolution. Even though the political structures remained intact in China, it too fell within the model of the End of History narrative.
The strange aspect of the End of History is that it ended with a whimper than a bang. The ‘bang’ in this sense could have been rhetorical than militaristic. Consider. Had the Soviet side won the Cold War without firing a shot, with the West conceding that Moscow’s version of socialism is the best model for the world, there would have been a Big Bang of ideological proclamations emanating from the communist world, or endless explanations on how the Moses-Christ of communism, Karl Marx, had been right all along about history, society, economics, morality, and world affairs. Communism would have been extolled as the god-that-succeeded.
In contrast, while there was plenty of fanfare in the West(and in liberated Eastern Europe and parts of Russia as well) about the mostly peaceful collapse of communism into rubble at the feet of the Western edifice still standing tall, proud, and prosperous, there was no overarching ideological interpretation of events.
The lack owed to the West being without an official ideology or the Big All-Encompassing Idea. What ‘liberal democracy’ meant was the rule of law(impartial to ideology, e.g. a secular person has just as many protections as a religious person and vice versa), protection of rights(for all individuals regardless of one’s creed, from the far right to the far left), and a lively process whereby the future of society would be shaped by participation of all interest groups, with social and political trends constantly in a state of flux. Liberal Democracy was sort of like Mao’s brief experiment known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the difference being that, whereas Mao had the ultimate authority to call it off, the liberal democratic West(and its emulators) enshrined those individual-personal-human rights into the law. Thus, even if your favored party wasn’t in power, your basic rights as a citizen were assured, and your side had a chance of gaining power in the near future.
So, whereas the communist bloc stood for the one Big Idea that claimed to have figured it all out and knew full well how the future would advance toward a socialist scientific-materialist utopia, the Liberal West stood for allowing all sides to contend and breathe freely, contributing their voices, perspectives, and advices for consideration. From this constant lively and vibrant democratic interplay, the system would, over time, favor better ideas over inferior ones, inexorably reforming and building toward a better society.
In contrast to the communist bloc, the rejection of the one-size-fits-all ideology in the West allowed for more freedom for problems to be aired and for different policies to be proposed. The West wasn’t only about supply-and-demand in economics but name-and-fix in politics. All orders have problems, but nothing can be done about them unless they can be named. The monopoly of information in the communist bloc propped up over-optimism to justify the system, thereby suppressing honest discussion of real problems. Also, as every problem was approached from the Marxist-Leninist or Maoist angle, the proposals and supposed solutions were often irrelevant or useless(or made the problems even worse).
We’re used to seeing the Big beat the Little. A heavyweight boxer will demolish a flyweight. A giant wrestler will squash a midget wrestler. And the Big Idea of monotheism with its all-powerful God vanquished pagan myths with many ‘little’ gods. And in their heyday, the communists were sure History was on their side, and one reason why so many intellectuals were captivated by Marxism, even if doubtful of the Soviet experiment, owed to its totalizing and comprehensive theory of everything. It seemed to be for social science what E = mc² was to physical science.
Intellectuals live in a world of ideas and have a tendency to impose their concepts on reality than adapt them in accordance to reality. It’s long been a form of academic hubris, the conceit that the sage-kings with proper training and reflection better comprehend the underlying basis of reality.
Marx’s claim of scientific materialism added fuel to the intellectual conceit through the pretense that it was based on impeccable observations and analyses of the actual world than on castles-in-the-air utopianizing. As DAS KAPITAL was full of statistics and formulations, one could make believe that the great man had meticulously figured it out and knew what he was talking about, i.e. his Big Ideas was indubitably grounded in reality when, in truth, it was another case of an idea being imposed on reality.
Given the claim of ‘scientific materialism’, even many intellectuals and officials in the West, despite their skepticism and even fear of the Bolshevik experiment, leaned toward Marxism as a kind of guide if not as a blueprint. It gained sway over key segments of the Western intelligentsia, artists & critics, activists, and even politicians & bureaucrats. It was to them a secular version of what Christianity had been to much of Western Civilization, i.e. even those opposed to theocracy and open to non-religious ideas held steadfast to Christianity as the guiding light of spirituality and morality.
The West found itself especially vulnerable during the Great Depression when the liberal democratic imperialist powers of the West seemed drained and exhausted, not only by the effects of the Great War(or World War I) and economic duress but by a kind of civilizational fatigue and cultural morass. Gone for good was the aristocratic order that had provided a semblance of stability to much of Europe. Fading was the authority of the church. Liberal democracy’s appeal to liberty and personal freedom sounded hollow when so many people were out of work, when the entire economy was bankrupt, and furthermore, the culture seemed rudderless and even degenerate when so many people couldn’t afford bread.
In the US prior to the Great Crash of 1929, at least the cultural decadence was buoyed by economic exuberance, which made the excesses seem rather fun. Generally, you can have decadence-and-good-times or sobriety-and-bad-times to maintain social stability, but decadence-and-bad-times is a deadly mix, which was the undoing of Weimar Germany: material deterioration and cultural degradation. Western Europe was in bad straits following World War I, but there was the United States as the new dominant power with a surging economy in the 1920s and enough capital to infuse financial blood into the UK, France, and Germany across the Atlantic. But, when the US economy also collapsed, the liberal democratic imperialist model begin to lose self-confidence.
Could it be that Marx had been right all along, that capitalism would be destroyed by its own contradictions? If so, how would the transition happen toward socialism? The Bolshevik way with its violent purges and wholesale war on the existing order? Or in a more peaceful manner with progressive parties gaining power and gradually nationalizing the economy at the expense of the oligarchic class? To many intellectuals, it seemed the future was socialist, either by way of violence or democratic means, whereby the Popular Front of progressives, socialists, anarchists, and communists would gain power through elections and then gradually but steadily impose new controls that emphasized collective efforts over private enterprise that fueled inequalities.
The other anti-liberal-democratic camp was dominated by the fascist movements that rejected the linear theory of history progressing from capitalism to socialism. Instead, the fascists favored the mix-and-match approach that absorbed what they deemed to be the most useful aspects of capitalism and socialism, traditionalism and modernism. To the fascists, the Left overly prioritized the economic and materialist at the expense of all else. To the Left, the fascists were little more than the desperate tools, or the last gasp, of the capitalist class to hold onto its wealth and privileges by hiring a bunch of thugs to beat up the opposition. In truth, however, the popular appeal of fascism in Italy and Germany owed to the widespread perception that it represented the will of the people. Unlike communism(and capitalism) that pitted one class against another, fascism bound them together for shared national interest and destiny.
FDR’s New Deal was a strange kind of beast. Some on the Left supported it as a path to eventual socialism, whereas many Liberals and even some Conservatives supported or tolerated it as a bulwark against communism, i.e. better the New Deal than Bolshevism. As for the many educated liberals who didn’t want to get their hands ‘dirty’ in business, the expansive bureaucracy provided job opportunities. For the capitalist class, it was deemed better to concede somewhat to the impoverished working class than lose everything in a violent revolution.
Yet, in some ways, the New Deal America was no less militarist than National Socialist Germany as the supposedly progressive FDR had dreams of empire, American hegemony, unprecedented military expenditures and expeditions, and the war industry as the savior of the US economy. Ultimately, America’s entry into the war was fueled by racial animus against the ‘Japs’ as nearly as virulent as Nazi Germany’s campaign against the Jews, going far beyond ‘Japan attacked us and must face justice’; the wartime propaganda made the Japanese out to be subhuman rodents that must be culled off the face of the earth.
In this sense, despite all the ideological dichotomy of World War II that pitted the Liberal-Leftist allies against the Far-Right Fascists, the fact remains that FDR’s America was considerably animated by militarism, imperialism, and ‘racism’. Ironically, the right-wing military types gained tremendous power and influence under FDR’s warmongering economy and would play a key role in the intensification of Cold War tensions. (Especially as the American Right was losing grip socially and culturally at home, they clung to relevance by projecting all their domestic frustrations onto the communist enemy.)
Anyway, in the dark interwar years when both Western Europe and the US were mired in economic crises with no end in sight, communism and fascism represented seemed as viable alternatives, for reasons economic and otherwise. True, propaganda(along with willful gullibility) was a key factor, some reports truer than others about surges in the Soviet economy and German revival under Hitler; the fascination was as ‘spiritual’ as material, i.e. while Germany and Russia, despite economic challenges of their own, felt they were being led by the guiding light of History in the right direction. In other words, while the Soviet economy despite its rapid growth remained considerably smaller than the US economy, it was on the right side of History, whereas the US, for all its accumulated wealth, faced crisis after crisis as capitalism had run its course to a dead-end.
Likewise, even though it took some years for the German economy to produce results, many Germans(and outside observers) believed in its recovery.
Much of national morale relies on psychology, and both Soviet Communism and National Socialism, through a combination of feverish propaganda and fervent practice, imbued their orders with a sense of purpose and unity, as if everyone was part of a grand project of revolution or renewal. They were one-directional or focal. Communism made the people feel they were marching in unison toward the same destiny. Fascism made people feel that their energies were converging into a greater united will(as embodied by the great leader, the savior of the nation); therefore, whatever hardships and challenges before Russia and Germany would be met with exuberance by populations energized by revolution or rejuvenation.
Material conditions for the average worker in the USSR couldn’t have been better than those for their counterparts in the West, but the Russian masses seemed united and motivated with a sense of purpose. They weren’t just wage laborers producing stuff for capitalist owners to profit from but creating a socialist order, a workers’ paradise.
Morale and psychology aren’t everything but can prove decisive in the balance of events. When two sports teams of equal talent face off, the one with the coach better at inspiring his players gain the edge. It certainly seemed so in the Franco-German War of 1940. The French military was at least the equal of the German one in manpower and materials, but French society, from top to bottom, had become divided, fearful, and anxiety-ridden. The French right loathed the French left and vice versa. The left didn’t want to fight for the capitalists, and plenty of French rightists would have preferred defeat to the Germans than continued rule under the ‘socialists’. In a state of paralysis, France was ripe for defeat and recriminations than ready for unity of purpose.
The prevailing mood among the liberal democratic imperialist powers was marked with pessimism. The leaders appeared weak, the elites seemed corrupt or self-interested, the culture seemed sick or confused, and the spirit of the times seemed unconfident, exhausted, and/or deracinated, dissipated and even self-loathing, as if on suicide watch. There was no overriding ideology to point in the right direction, no great leader(as the Man of the Hour) to fix the gridlock, set things straight, and get the nation moving once again. The socio-cultural malaise and political uncertainty wouldn’t have mattered so much in good times, but there was a sense of economic crisis, cultural rot, and political distrust(horizontally across competing parties as well as vertically between the elites and the masses, with the beleaguered middle class caught between).
In such times of crisis for the liberal democratic imperialist West, the radical orders captivated by Big Ideas, communism and fascism, seemed to be moving in the opposite direction, one of health and strength. How could liberal democracies compete and survive under these conditions?
One safety valve for the top two liberal democracies/republics in Europe, Great Britain and France, was empire with its exploitable manpower and resources, but the imperial enterprise could as easily be a drain as a gain. Furthermore, the ‘darky’ natives were growing more restless by the day, especially if agitated by leaders inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution and its declaration of anti-imperialism.
The biggest liberal democracy, the United States, had the advantage(like Russia) of being an empire-sized country, therefore without anxiety about the natives rising up — besides, the primitive natives in North America had been thoroughly vanquished to the point of permanent passivity. However, even the US seemed to have lost its momentum. Historically, it had suffered economic setbacks many times but always recovered quickly. There was also the mythos of rugged individualism that the hardy and resourceful American can dig himself out of any hole with that boundless frontier spirit of his.
However, the US of 1929 was no longer a place where one could claim a piece of territory and live off the land. The majority of Americans had left the rural sector and relied on complex organizations and heavy industries to earn a living.
So, when the Great Depression hit, the only hope for many Americans was strong leadership at the top, triggering fears among conservatives that the future might be communism and among liberals that the future might be fascism.
Jonah Goldberg provocatively called the New Deal a kind of ‘liberal fascism’, and its psychological impact was considerable. Even though the New Deal’s public spending didn’t go far enough to jump-start the economy(like in National Socialist Germany), its ambitious rhetoric conveyed the impression that ‘something’ was being attempted by the powers-that-be, leading to three successive elections prior to America’s entry into the war. The New Deal, if not exactly a Big Idea on the scale of communism or fascism, was at least Big Talk.
If Hitler hadn’t embarked on the invasion of Russia(that was soon followed by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor), the 20th century might have been profoundly different. Instead of a two-way Cold War, there might have been a three-way Cold War with the main players being The Anglo Liberal-Democratic-Imperialist Order mainly represented by the British Empire and the empire-sized America, the Soviet Union, and European Fascism. Had Hitler kept the peace with Russia, nearly all of continental Europe would have been allied with, ruled by, or neutral-cooperative(like Sweden) with National Socialist Germany. And the great majority of Europeans would have preferred fascist rule over communist rule, though many would surely have pined for liberal democracy(despite its setbacks and lack of prestige in the interwar period). For sure, all of Central Europe and most of Eastern Europe would have been allied with Germany.
Thus, there would have been three great power blocs, though, to be sure, continental Europe under fascist hegemony would have been relatively lacking in resources, especially in energy that the US-UK and USSR had plenty of in the form of national or imperial assets.
Throughout much of Russia’s history, its Eurasian geography had been a disadvantage, exposing it to invasions from the Mongols & Muslims while distancing it from Western progress, but the great advantage was Russia could eventually expand eastward and gain huge swaths of territory rich in natural resources. As for the British, they’d mastered the seas to dominate sea routes and set up colonies to extract resources. Germany was blocked eastward by Russia and blocked westward by the British navy. Large populations of Germans did settle in Russia and the US but failed to dominate them.
Given these factors, fascist Europe would have lacked the advantages of the Soviet Union and the British Empire & USA. Still, it was a densely populated region with tremendous pools of talent, deep rich cultures, and seemingly boundless creativity. Also, had there been peace, however fraught with tensions, among fascist Europe, the USSR, and the Anglosphere, they could have all learned to co-exist, as indeed the US and the USSR did during the Cold War, i.e. ideologically opposed but diplomatically engaged with even some mutually beneficial economic ties. Had Hitler maintained the peace with the USSR and arrived at a cease-fire or peace agreement with the UK(on the realization that neither side could win), fascist Europe would have been a major player not only at the political, economic, and military level but at the cultural and ideological one.
In a way, fascist Europe would have been caught between the bigger powers of the Anglosphere(USA and British Empire combined) and the USSR, but the situation could have been played to its advantage, much like Turkey’s use of geopolitics. Turkey, hemmed in among the EU, Russia, the Caucasus, and the Near East, has been able to play all sides against one another. Likewise, fascist Europe could have played the East against the West and vice versa. It could have been the third wheel that neither the Anglo-West nor the Russo-East wanted but had to contend with. In time, both the Anglo-West and Russo-East might have come to appreciate fascist Europe as a bulwark against the other. In a way, the Cold War was dangerous because the capitalist West and the communist East directly faced one another, not least across the Berlin Wall.
Even though fascism has usually been designated as a far-right ideology, in many ways it was bi-ideological or ‘bideological’, drawing from both leftist and rightist streams. If the far-left is about pushing humanity into the utopian future(whatever the cost), then the far-right should be about ultra-reactionarism, or doggedly preserving the norms, traditions, customs, values, and attitudes of the past.
Yet, fascism, while also drawing from tradition, pushed toward modernity and science/technology. Its intention wasn’t to turn back the clock and stop progress but to balance progress with what were deemed as timeless and eternal core values, themes, and essences of particular socio-cultural-ethnic orders. It rejected the idea that there was a single all-purpose theory that summed up everything and directed humanity into a deterministic future. It was polythematic than monothematic.
As such, fascism had advantages over communism as would later be revealed in the Cold War. Unlike communism that could manage mega-public projects but failed to incentivize initiative, thereby suppressing the spirit of enterprise, fascism could have had a powerful public-statist sector while allowing for market dynamics of supply-and-demand among countless economic actors.
Thus, if communism, relying only on the public sector, was hobbled in the long-term competition with the West that developed both a powerful public sector and vibrant private sector, fascism could have competed neck-and-neck with the liberal-democratic-imperialist capitalist West. National Socialism wasn’t only socialist, just like FDR’s New Deal, though decried as ‘socialist’ by conservative/capitalist elements, had no aims to stamp out the private sector.
The rise of quasi-fascist systems in East Asia during the Cold War provides a clue as to what a three-way Cold War might have resembled. Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea were all politically autocratic but experienced rapid economic growth, outpacing communist nations and even managing to catch up to the West in key indicators. Like autocratic Germany in the 19th Century, they proved that the liberal democratic model was not necessary for economic progress. Indeed, pre-war Japan had already proved this as it went from feudalism to modern industrialism under a broadly neo-aristocratic system — the old samurai caste had been replaced with a new class of ruling elites who rejected much of Western liberalism.
An even clearer illustration of what fascism might have been like had it avoided the nemesis of World War II is the rise of China and revival of Russia after the Cold War. After the failures of Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberal reforms(glasnost) and Boris Yeltsin’s shock-therapy capitalism, Russia under Vladimir Putin embarked on a more balanced approach that increased the state’s role in the economy in the name of public interest and national security. It set the ground for Russia’s rebound from utter destitution and humiliation. As for China, it never had a Gorbachev moment. Deng Xiaoping, though a liberalizer in the context of post-Maoist reforms, was no sucker for Western overtures, perhaps due to the not-too-distant memory when China was duped by foreign powers time and time again. “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.” Thus, China was able to avoid the unrealistic optimism of the Gorbachev years and the reckless abandon of the Yeltsin years. Still, the realists around Deng acknowledged that the capitalist world had advanced far ahead of the communist world. Also, the old Marxist-Leninist view of capitalism and imperialism being joined at the hip(not least to prevent the industrial rise of the non-West) became outdated, especially as East Asian nations like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, along with Singapore and Hong Kong, thrived and built modern societies via capitalism. One thing Deng’s China agreed with Gorbachev’s Soviet Union was that Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism-Maoism no longer provided all the answers, possibly provided no answer at all as the 21st century dawned.
In this light, the extent of the transformation in China came to be underappreciated in some circles because of the continuity of CCP rule, i.e. the anti-China elements in the West could still pretend that the ‘commies’ were in control and that nothing had fundamentally changed. Yet, in real terms, the revolution beginning with Deng was as almost as profound, if not more so, than what had happened with the communist victory in 1949.
But then, the revolution in the West itself has been overlooked because of the continuity of its political system. As a Constitutional Republic, it may appear as the same ole America in body and spirit. But, such an assumption overlooks the shocking transformations since the end of the Cold War. While the US was always a dynamic and rapidly changing society, there were certain constants from its birth to around the end of the Cold War. It was essentially a country represented and led by White Christians, especially Anglo-Germanic types. It all ended in a silent revolution. The total transformation of the US into a Judeocentric Zionist-gangster-supremacist empire was finalized under Bill Clinton, who delivered the US to the Jews as much as Boris Yeltsin delivered Russia to them. But because the elections went on as usual in regular cycles, Americans could lull themselves into believing they lived in an organic continuation of Historic America.
Anyway, the rise of China and resurgence of Russia as major world players offer hints as to what the world might have been had European fascism survived as a political project. As we all know, the fascist hour was lost when Germany invaded Russia(which emboldened Japan to strike at the US), whereupon the big powers all ganged up on Germany, Japan, and Italy for total destruction.
The fascist side lost in the grand struggle due to a deficit in manpower and materials. (Granted, one could argue that fascism’s cult of personality led to a blind trust in the Great Leader as the ultimate arbiter of the nation’s destiny, but then, democracies have also been reckless in decision-making pertaining to war, like when Great Britain foolishly got itself involved in World War I and World War II, both of which could easily have been avoided; and the Spanish-American War and the Iraq War were also products of demagoguery, made possible with the complicity of the so-called ‘free press’.)
But, what if Hitler hadn’t taken the plunge with Operation Barbarossa? What if Germany and Japan had tempered one another’s ambitions instead, thereby avoiding fatal missteps? (As Germany and Japan lacked depth in manpower and resources, at least compared to the US and USSR, neither could ill-afford to get entangled in extended conflicts.) Apart from the ideal scenario of the German-Soviet peace remaining intact, a long-term positive would have been Germany maintaining close relations with KMT-ruled China. Indeed, Chiang Kai-Shek viewed European fascism with some promise. He was staunchly anti-communist but wary of the liberal-democratic-imperialist West that had led in the carving up of China. Given the history of the Opium Wars and extraterritoriality forced upon China by the Western powers, he was in no mood to trust the British or the Americans despite maintaining constructive engagements with them. He appreciated Russia’s anti-imperialism but had seen Bolshevism first hand during his stay in the Soviet Union. At this juncture in history, Germany made the ideal partner for China.
For starters, Germany had been forced to relinquish its colonies in China in World War I. Thus, China and Germany had no territorial disputes. Also, both Hitler and Chiang preferred tradition as well as modernity instead of radicalism of the International Left. Both sides regarded communism as the great enemy. And given the crises of the times, both emphasized serious and all-embracing themes and disdained cultural decadence. When Weimar Germany was in a state of despair, what did the decadents and degenerates do but party and wallow in obscenity? Likewise, when China was burdened with grave challenges, what did the decadent Chinese do but indulge themselves in the Western quarters?
Besides, China was fascinated by the fact that National Socialist Germany, despite the defeat, humiliation, and dismemberment of its empire, was able to spring back so dramatically under Hitler who employed a kind of statist-capitalism. To their mutual benefit, Sino-German relations were promising in the early years of Hitler’s reign. Alas, when Germany had to choose between China and Japan, it chose the latter, in retrospect a fatal mistake. Had Germany remained closer to China and lent it support, Japan would have thought twice about its ambitions in China, and the prevention of an all-out war between Japan and China would have made a war between Japan and the United States most unlikely. With close ties with Germany, KMT-ruled China might have risen as a quasi-fascist power.
Ironically, despite China’s recent celebration of its victory over ‘fascism’, the power of current China owes to its adoption of the fascist model. It gave up on doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism-Maoism and adopted features of the capitalist market economy, the worth of which has been incontestably proven by historical practice, while at the same time maintaining tight central political control lest the country turn into the rule by profit-centric oligarchs with no higher vision than self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, even if it means selling the country down the river, especially true if they tend to be of another ethnic group(as has been illustrated by Jewish oligarchic power in interwar Germany, 1990s Russia, and the post-WASP America). And if Maoist China was about endless campaigns against the past and ‘old thoughts’, post-Maoist quasi-fascist China balances modernization and change with respect for heritage and history.
The failure of fascism could be sourced to its decision in favor of imperialism. It turned out to be a double whammy, at once antagonizing the liberal-democratic-imperialist West and alienating what would later be labeled the Third World(and today referred to by some as the ‘Global South’). The advantage of the Soviet Union in the long run was its anti-imperialist position. Not only did it inspire much of the world(especially increasingly idealistic whites and aggrieved nonwhites) to look to revolutionary Russia as an inspiration and counterweight to capitalist-imperialism but, in an odd way, made the imperialist powers less worried about the threat of communism. Ironically, communism’s anti-imperialism sent a message to the capitalist-imperialists that it wasn’t playing the game of conquer-the-world. It meant one less competitor in the game of global dominance. Sure, there was the specter of the Soviet Union leading the world to rise up against capitalist-imperialist oppressors, but prior to Russia’s emergence as the other superpower following World War II, it was mostly rhetoric and hardly reality, with the capitalist-imperialist West’s grip on its colonies seemingly secure. Therefore, the liberal-democratic-imperialist powers were more anxious of the fascist powers as competitors in the game of empire.
To a large extent, World War II was a war between established empires and aspiring empires. Perhaps, the Anglo fear of the German threat was foolish given Hitler’s admiration of and hope for an alliance with Great Britain: Britain as the global empire partnered with Germany as continental hegemon.
But then, there was the element of Anglo paranoia about Germany. Also, the age-old British habitual policy of balance-of-powers on the Continent. There was also British snobbery about the brutish thick-skulled Teutons. And the significant factor of Jewish Influence with its financial claws in the Anglo ruling elites, as well as the anxiety of British genteel hypocrisy that found Hitler’s politics overly vulgar, uncouth, and brazen, thereby giving the game away as to the nature of white rule. The British, while presiding over a white dominant(or even supremacist) empire, wanted their ‘wog’ subjects to believe that the empire where the sun never sets wasn’t about oppression, subjugation, and exploitation but about the enlightened white man doing his utmost to lift the rest of humanity to a higher plane. Similarly, white dominant/supremacist US also preferred to see itself as a nation defined by freedom and equal justice. It was more difficult to maintain the hypocrisy when Hitler brazenly blurted out that the ‘Aryans’ are indeed the greatest race, exemplified by the awesome racial achievements of the Anglos and Germanics in Northern Europe, North America, and their overseas empires. Likewise today, the US prides itself as a democratic republic where all are equal in justice and representation while hypocritically sucking up to the Jews as the rightful chosen-master race whom everyone must bow down to. Jews appreciate the policy but want it kept quiet, which is why Netanyahu and Trump, in all their brazenness, are making some Jews very nervous. Netanyahu the Jewish Hitler and Trump(apparently ‘literally worse than Hitler’) are vulgarly bragging about how super-rich Jews and awesome Israel have the ethno-spiritual right to rule over goyim.
By being pro-imperialist, the fascist powers were seen as potential upstart rivals by the established empires, thus preventing trust and cooperation to develop between the fascist camp and the liberal-democratic-imperialist camp. But it also prevented fascism’s potential future partnership with the non-West. Imagine if National Socialist Germany had maintained close relations with KMT-ruled China and warned Japan against further encroachment on Chinese territory. It would have been a defender of nationalism against imperialism. Tragically, however, Hitler championed German nationalism as an eventual launchpad for colonization of non-Germanic peoples.
In politics, it’s smart to play both sides. If you can’t play one side, then at least play the other side. But it won’t do to lose both sides. When Hitler attacked Russia, Germany was once again caught in a two-front war. Furthermore, National Socialist Germany’s upstart imperialism derailed the possibility of alliance with both the established empires(that eyed Germany’s ambitions warily) and the non-West that, beneath the surface, was simmering with rage and resentment. No matter how much Hitler reached out to the Anglos, they regarded him as a pathological liar, Teutonic vulgarian, a demagogic psychopath, and imperialist rival, or the kind of man no self-respecting British gentleman would deign to shake hands with.
Given the times(of seemingly endless Western global dominance), it’s understandable why Hitler failed to see the potential advantage of siding with the emergent Third World as a global player, but his very ideology filled his worldview with contempt and disdain for the ‘wogs’. If Hitler had such a low opinion of Slavs, a white people, imagine his feelings about nonwhites. Ultimately, Germany did form an alliance with one non-white nation, Japan, but the latter’s own imperialism also pitted it against both the liberal-democratic-imperialist West and the non-West. Ever so schizo, Japan was at once a wannabe-white imitation-imperialist power and the defender of Asia from the white imperialists, ultimately fooling no one but itself. The West regarded Japan as a rival while Asians regarded it as an invader; even in Southeast Asia where the Japanese were initially greeted as liberators, the welcome was short-lived given Japan’s contempt for the lesser-Asians and desperation to build up defenses against inevitable Western counter-attack, leading to ruthless exploitation of the natives. Sadly, Germany’s one non-white ally turned out to be a curse than a blessing.
Some will surely argue that fascism was destined to fail in world affairs because of its imperialist outlook, but racial supremacism wasn’t intrinsic to fascism. Benito Mussolini found Hitler’s ‘Aryanist’ theories to be ridiculous, and Italian Fascism had considerable Jewish membership before the Pact of Steel wherein Italy threw in its lot with Germany as the likely hegemon of Continental Europe. It’s true that Mussolini sought colonies in Libya and Ethiopia, but those actions followed in the footsteps of the liberal-democratic-imperialist powers. After all, Great Britain and France were the biggest empires around the world. The Dutch ruled Indonesia. The United States expanded westward and then against Mexico in a series of campaigns to build an empire-country. The West also encouraged and flattered Japan to participate in the carving up of China, the taking of Taiwan and Korea. So, the notion of World War II being a conflict between freedom-loving liberators vs iron-booted empire builders is something of a joke. Mussolini’s empire building didn’t come from fascism but from the political norms of the time, i.e. great powers had empires. To keep up with the great powers, Italy wanted a slice of the pie as well.
Kemal Ataturk’s Turkey was proto- or quasi-fascist, and it focused on nationalism and accepted the fate of the defunct Ottoman Empire. Italian Fascism could have taken the same path, but Mussolini wanted what the other European powers had, and the biggest imperialists were liberal-democratic(or so-called in self-justification as they were really capitalist-oligarchic).
Indeed, the rise of China and revival of Russia demonstrate that fascism need not be imperialist or racial-supremacist. The current political-economic forms of Russia and China are closer to the fascist model than to the communist or ‘liberal-democratic’ but they favor nationalism over imperialism(now almost solely practiced by ‘liberal-democratic’ Jewish-supremacist oligarchies of the Zionic West) and have good working relations with the ‘Global South’, the kind that National Socialist Germany briefly maintained with KMT-ruled China before cutting off ties and throwing in its lot with Imperial Japan. The current Chinese and Russian examples illustrate how fascism or at least quasi-fascism can dispense with imperialism in favor of nationalism and reject supremacism in favor of humanism. Nationalism in this case, of course, means preservation of one’s own nation and the respect for the integrity of other nations instead of using one’s national power as springboard for global aggression, the project that derailed the supremacist-nationalism of Hitler’s agenda.
It’s worth reminding ourselves that imperialist and supremacist attitudes didn’t originate with fascism but from the imperial projects of the monarcho- and/or bourgeois-capitalist empires; fascism merely adopted them as a late-comer in the global great game.
That said, the game of empire became truly charged with the rise of National Socialist Germany. If Mussolini’s imperialism was the run-of-the-mill variety where European powers gobbled up parts of the non-white world(and besides, the great powers knew that Italy was a middling power at best, in other words, hardly a threat despite Il Duce’s bluster), Hitler’s imperialism was different given Germany’s powerhouse industrial base. Even though the racial aspect of Western Imperialism was undeniable, the imperial project was conceived as essentially civilizational, i.e. the West, with more advanced civilizations, naturally expanded its power across backward civilizations or cultures, justified as either the law of history(whereby the stronger rule the weaker) or a kind of crusade to uplift the world, with Christian missionaries and Enlightenment progressive types joining in the mission, albeit not without moral criticism.
In contrast, Hitler’s worldview was race-centric to the core, which left less room for idealism, magnanimity, and sentimentalism. If Western Imperialism dangled the hope, however disingenuous, that the whole project might come to an end when the non-West finally learned and caught up to the West, the Nazi Worldview held that the Iron Laws of the Races were immutable, permanent, and eternal, e.g. the ‘Aryans’ were the rightful master race while other races were best suited for helot-servitude to the ‘Aryans’. It was too brazen and extreme even for the race-based imperialists of the West. If Hitler was right about the permanent ‘clash of the races’, then there was no hope for a future vision of mutual understanding and respect among the races. Instead, the races would always be at war, and the superior ‘Aryans’ could only muster the will to conquer and control the lesser races OR lose the will and dissolve in the common mud-stew of humanity being cooked up by the Jews.
Even more problematic for the National Socialists was that their imperialism resembled that of the Spartans. If other Greek city-states enslaved foreign barbarians, the Spartans enslaved fellow Greeks, a practice that made them something of a pariah in the Hellenic World. Likewise, the Nazi Empire entirely comprised the territories of other Europeans. In certain cases, it was understandable. After all, France declared war on Germany, not vice versa. And Germany invaded Norway to preempt a similar move by Great Britain. Furthermore, the Germans didn’t regard the French or the Scandinavians as lesser-humans who should be exploited like cattle. But as the German empire stretched eastward with the invasion of Russia, the Germans not only treated the Slavic subjects harshly but even worse than how European Imperialists treated the ‘wogs’. Once Hitler began to colonize other European territories, Mussolini followed suit by taking Albania and then Greece. Thus, European fascism made a fine mess of alienating many Europeans, who naturally came to yearn for liberation from fascism that became synonymous with foreign rule.
Because Hitler’s Germany eclipsed Mussolini’s Italy as the premier fascist power, its brand of fascism came to define the movement and lead it to destruction. Even as Mussolini emulated the imperialist hubris of the established dominant powers, he rejected the radical racism of Nazi Germany, thereby holding a more humane promise for fascism. Tragically, Hitler’s own brand of fascist foreign policy planted the seeds of destruction.
Even as Germany rebounded and grew stronger by the day, it alienated more and more of the outside world. In abandoning China as a potential ally, Germany lost the possibility of developing ties with the non-white anti-imperialist camp. And Hitler’s Iron Law of the Races made it impossible for National Socialism to develop a humanist side that might have softened its most radical and ruthless inclinations. As such, Germany found itself hurtling ever closer to a war and then a bigger war, finally to a world war that militarily destroyed the fascist project, its many positive achievements along with its evil excesses.
Even though history cannot be treated as a giant laboratory given so many variables and extenuating circumstances, the future of China and Russia may suggest how the fascist project might have panned out in the second half of the 20th century had war been avoided(especially between Germany and the USSR & between Japan and the US). While the outcomes of wars are usually spun in favor of the ultimate winner(usually as the deserving ‘good guy’), victory has often been decided by something other than ‘better ideas’. Were the Mongols better than the civilizations they conquered? Were the Spartans better than the Athenians? Were the Romans better than the Greco-Macedonians? Turks better than the Greeks in morality and values? Did Mao’s victory in the Civil War prove that communism is superior? North Vietnam prevailed in war but lost the peace; it later adopted market economics. Too often in history, the ‘bad guys’ won simply on the basis of having more manpower, material, and fighting will/spirit. If some professional fighter beats you up in a parking lot, is he better than you as a human being?
Americans like to believe that the US is the most powerful country in the world because the American Way is the best way, able to produce the biggest economy that produces the best technology and can afford the mightiest military. But has the US always been the good guy in all of its wars? Didn’t the US wrest the southwest territories from Mexico simply because it could? It was about muscles, not morality.
Not that Americans haven’t always found some ‘moral’ rationalizations for their victories. Even though absolutist France’s support was crucial in the American Revolutionary War, the victory was spun as the inevitable triumph of freedom over tyranny. Even though the American Civil War involved issues as or even more important than slavery, the outcome was spun as a moral victory in favor of freedom. As for Manifest Destiny(or the destruction of the American Indians), the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish-American War, they were spun as inevitable and even necessary triumphs of progress and productivity against savagery, backwardness, or civilizational decline of the Latin World(and, of course, to save the poor Cubans and Filipinos from Spanish exploitation). Somehow, the Americans were always the ‘good guys’ with ‘better ideas’, which is why History chose them as the deserving winners. But of course, it was just the victors writing history as self-justification, a constant theme throughout history to maintain the illusion that the ‘good guys’ ultimately triumph with God or History on their side. Had Germany and Japan prevailed, they would have done the same thing.
Therefore, it would be misguided to assume that fascism lost the war because the ‘bad guys’ naturally lose in History, like in a Hollywood movie. That said, there was an element of poetic justice in the defeat of the Germans, Italians, and Japanese as they were full of militarist-imperial bombast and delusional with their own sense of invincibility and inevitability, as if the war gods were on their side. Today, such hubris infects the US and Israel.
Anyway, with fascism out of the picture, the second half of the 20th Century came down to what people like Fukuyama deemed the final conflict of History: Liberal-Democracy vs Communism. At least rhetorically, the liberal democracies were no longer imperialist, not least because European powers lost most of their empires in the two decades following World War II. The US played an ambiguous role, sometimes supporting the European Imperialist powers(especially if their opposition was communist) but gradually siding with the national liberation struggles, either out of American idealism, realpolitik, or neo-imperialist ambitions. The US also ended its racial discriminatory policies against blacks, again out of a combination of idealism, propaganda imperatives in the Cold War, and idolatry(as blacks were becoming prominent in sports and pop music, the two main obsessions of Americans). Naturally, the communist bloc accused the US of taking over as the New Imperialists, albeit with the ‘human face’ of democracy-building. Predictably, the US shot back and accused the Communist World as totalitarian, repressive, and imperialist in its own right, especially when Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and later into Afghanistan.
Still, the idea among political scholars was that the US and the USSR were divided on political solutions than on fundamental assumptions, i.e. American liberalism and Soviet leftism were based on the Enlightenment principles of reason, universal justice, equality before the law, and humanist ethos. For all their betrayals of their own stated ideals, they were both moving toward the ultimate goal of a more just society, the difference being that one emphasized individual liberty, property rights, and capitalism while the other emphasized collective spirit, public ownership, and socialism.
In contrast, fascism had to be rejected because its fundamentals were at odds with the Enlightenment. It was supposedly about tyrannical power, irrational passions(and manipulations), imperialist hubris, and racial hierarchies with contempt for humanism. But if fascism was so tyrannical, why was it so popular in Italy and Germany? Why did people prefer quasi-fascist rule in Spain and Eastern Europe(before it was invaded by Soviet armies) over communism and willy-nilly ‘liberal democratic’ experiments? And was fascism really wrong about the irrational nature of modern politics? How rational or scientific was Marxism really? Didn’t Marxism-Leninism become a cultish secular religion in the communist world? And haven’t elections in the West been more about mass deception and manipulations(bought with big money from the oligarchs) than reasoned debate? (Ironically, new schools of ‘progressivism’ beginning in the Sixties began to attack the Enlightenment itself as a ploy of justifying Western Imperialism. “We think, therefore we must rule.”)
True, a system should be as rational and empirical as possible, but any honest observer would have to admit that politics, even or especially in so-called ‘liberal democracies’, have been more at the mercy of irrational urges than rational thought. Think of the Obama cult and the Trump cult; and, what kind of rational system props up a senile fool like Joe Biden, with the supposed open and free media pretending that Biden is sharp as a tack… and then running with the ‘joy’ campaign of Kamala Harris? Yeah, really rational. And one wonders about the rationality of mass cult movements like BLM and GloboHomo(or ecstatic celebration of sodomy and genital-mutilation).
Thus, fascism’s take on the irrational aspects of politics cannot be invalidated. What really matters is what is to be done with this understanding. Try to make the system more rational or exploit the inherent irrationality of the system for all it’s worth. For example, germs are natural and all around and cannot be eradicated. Still, they can be managed or allowed to spread. Mussolini and Hitler, with their irrational personality-cults played to the hilt, obviously didn’t make wise choices.
It is actually possible for fascism to be premised on Enlightenment principles, indeed more so than most ideologies, because its pagan-polytheistic worldview allows for multiple approaches in search of solutions. It lacks the monomania of communism that excessively focuses on economics and class conflict.
As long as fascism rejects imperialism(and related racial supremacism), its social reforms can be more effective than in so-called liberal democracies that, over time, dispense with nationalism in favor of globalism. Fascism, by focusing on national needs, is likely to be more effective in addressing the needs of the ethnic folk, given that Enlightenment principles are best administered at the national level.
In contrast, the globalist tentacles of liberal democracies extend their reach way beyond national borders, burdening the system with the management of the world. Take Europe, for instance. When European nations focused on national needs following the end of World War II, they recovered quickly, resulting in greater freedom and more goods for everyone. The EU project was risky, but even that was doable if restricted within the borders of Europe.
But ‘liberal democracy’ was said to be ‘open’ and ‘inclusive’, and the EU project soon turned into a shameless cuckery to the US(controlled by anti-white Jews) and the dissolution of borders with the Middle East and Africa(and even Asia and Latin America). The record has made it clear that Enlightenment values cannot be proselytized and practiced at the global scale, especially with races and cultures less adept at appreciating the underpinning ideas and emotions of those values.
There’s two ways of assessing the second half of the 20th Century. Either fascism met its total doom in World War II or it remained the strongest power in the world. It all depends on the politics of accusation and denial. The communist bloc said the American-led West was really a new form of fascism, with the US acting like Nazis in Vietnam, made worse with the collaboration of capitalist Europeans. Also, the US propped up all these right-wing dictatorships in Asia and Latin America that were supposedly ‘fascist’ in one way or another.
Meanwhile, the US said Soviet Communism is just Red Fascism, and that the totalitarianism of the Soviets was hardly different from that of the Nazis. As the famous intellectual Susan Sontag opined in the Eighties, Soviet communism was just ‘fascism with a human face’.
In all these denunciations, the ‘fascists’ were always the other guys. To the East, the West was ‘fascist’. To the West, East was ‘fascist’. If we take both camps at their words, all the world was ‘fascist’. So, the evil ideology that was vanquished by the combined might of the capitalist world and the communist world was apparently alive and well, of course depending on whom you asked.
Even now, everyone is a ‘fascist’ from one perspective or another. Conservatives will say Democrats are ‘fascists’, and ‘progressives’ will say Republicans are ‘fascists’. When ‘my side’ censors the other side, it’s not ‘fascism’, but it is totally ‘fascist’ when it’s vice versa.
These recriminations are ridiculous but not without a certain logic. Fascism, in being more honest about the nature of power, opened itself to accusations of obsession with power. In truth, all systems have been obsessed with power but veiled their impulses with rhetorical flourishes about ‘human rights’, ‘freedom’ and the ‘rule of law’. Consider how Global Jewish Supremacism masks its obsessive agenda to conquer, control, and dominate the world with declarations of ‘open society’, ‘rule of law’, ‘justice’, and ‘democracy’, like when it employed the dirtiest tricks in the book to destroy Ukraine and Syria. Netanyahu the rhetorical chameleon, though allied with the most extremist racial supremacists in Israel, will come to the US and justify his call for US-Israel War on Iran on grounds of ‘human rights’ for women & homosexuals and in the name of American national security against Islamic terrorism, even though the biggest Islamic terrorists have been sponsored by the Jewish-controlled West, mostly to harass Russia, China, Shia Iran, and Arabs who remain defiant of Zionist-US hegemonism.
The politics on fascism is like Schrödinger’s cat. Fascism is at once all-too-alive-and-everywhere AND totally-dead-and-discredited. We’re to believe that fascism was so evil that humanity as a whole came together to destroy it forever, yet half of the country that voted for the other political party is ‘fascist’. Antifa types claim to fight fascism, but their critics say Antifa is itself ‘fascist’. Thus, ‘fascism’ is like Michael in HALLOWEEN or Count Dracula. The bogeyman you kill but always comes back to haunt you forever.
But for the sake of Big History, let’s go with the narrative of fascism’s demise in World War II, whereupon the future was to be decided by the two superpowers, US and USSR, with values grounded in humanist Enlightenment principles, i.e. more or less agreed on universal justice but disagreeing on means and ends. The communist side opted for collectivist socialism where all would be equal in means and justice, whereas the capitalist side opted for individualism and personal liberty as keystones of a prosperous, free, and just order.
The communists had the overarching monumental idea, a Marxist-Leninist monotheory that had figured it all out, a prophecy merely awaiting practice. All must unite under this Idea and march toward the inevitable and ‘scientific’ end. The tomes of Marx and Lenin were to be regarded as sacred texts, like secular bibles. Marx, Engels, and Lenin(and for a time Stalin) weren’t merely social scientists, economists, intellectuals, and/or political activists but godheads of the movement. They were to communism what Moses-Elijah-Isiah were to the Hebrews, what Jesus-Peter-Paul were to the Christians. In the communist vision, all had to be subsumed into the Marxist-Leninist formula.
There was nothing comparable to such an all-encompassing mono-theory in the Liberal Democratic camp. There were capitalist intellectuals and theorists, but they were mostly focused on economics and left non-economic issues and problems to others to critique and/or solve. For all the talk of Mammon worship among greedy businessmen, capitalism(contra communism) wasn’t meant to be a substitute religion in the secular world, notwithstanding certain schools of ultra-libertarianism(and related Ayn-Randian Objectivism) that would mythologize free enterprise and the great businessmen as demigod-like objects of near-worship. For the most part, capitalism addressed the economic sphere. If a communist was supposed to learn about economics, social science, morality, philosophy, arts & culture, and even ‘spirituality’ from Marxism-Leninism, a capitalist thinker mainly focused on economic matters. On other matters, it was better to consult a priest, ideologue, philosopher, activist, or maybe a novelist. In other words, Adam Smith and capitalist proponents never claimed to have an answer for everything, even though free market theory certainly did intersect with and profoundly impacted other areas of life. For instance, capitalism would be unworkable without the theory of contracts, though the emphasis would be legalistic and utilitarian than moral or spiritual.
Capitalism, despite its primacy in the creation of the modern world, had yet to develop a mind and soul, at least from the Marxist perspective. It was a Big Force in unwitting search for the Big Idea that would finally bring balance to the world. For the meaning of life in the capitalist world, one had to look to other areas, which explains the centrality of the church in American History. Capitalism fueled the stomach, Christianity the heart.
Also, as capitalism wasn’t an iron-clad ideology deemed irreproachable(except in ultra-libertarian circles), its problems could be debated and critiqued, and the system could accommodate certain socialistic policies, thereby moving the West toward a mixed economy deemed more humane and sustainable. Some hoped that the West and East would eventually merge, with the West becoming somewhat more socialist and the East(Soviet Bloc) becoming somewhat more capitalist. The problem for the Communist East was that Marxism-Leninism was far more than an economic theory; it was sacred text, the dialectical-end-of-history interweaving all the threads of social science, economics, history, morality, justice, culture, and the future destiny of man. (What irony that Fukuyama would apply Hegelian dialectics as Marx had done, albeit with the opposite conclusion.)
Given the political context of communism, notwithstanding limited market reforms in countries such as Hungary and Yugoslavia, it was a far greater challenge to argue in favor of bourgeois capitalism than for people in the West to argue for socialism. It was often tantamount to secular blasphemy, especially as ‘bourgeois’ was the worst possible label under communism — even fascism was understood as the last gasp of the bourgeoisie.
An advantage of the Big Idea communist world was that all the sectors, fields, and endeavors of society were unified into a whole, marching as one into the future. The downside was that the political center took on all the burdens and challenges of society. The state, as the embodiment of the one and only Big Idea, had to run the economy, provide all the goods and services, decide on matters of arts & culture, impose its notions of the good, serve as the ‘spiritual’ guide, and come up with all the answers to a whole range of problems. There was unity of purpose but an excess of obligations for the system to shoulder.
In contrast, the Liberal Democratic Capitalist West was seen, at least from the leftist(and fascist) perspective, as beset with divisions and ‘contradictions’. The capitalists were supposedly only concerned with profits and their egotism and privilege. The Church was an outdated institution that no longer provided answers in the modern world. The arts grew decadent under the patronage of the bourgeoisie that cared more about trends and fashions than about deeper purpose and meaning of life. Pop Culture was mostly mindless opiate for the masses to keep them distracted from reality and its burdens/limits. The military industrial complex was supposedly run by crypto-far-right types who wanted more wars and higher stock prices for amoral corporations. And unlike in the communist East, the ongoing class politics in the West threatened to tear society apart. And as there were so many schools of thought under ‘liberal’ principles of free speech, the ones that got the most hearing were those favored by the oligarchic media and presses. Furthermore, too many ideas meant that the people could never be unified on any one Great Idea that would propel humanity forward. Thus, there was a void of unity and purpose in the capitalist world. For all its advances in production and wealth, indeed ahead of the communist East, the leftist critique held that the masses under capitalism felt empty inside, divided by class, ethnicity, and age. And it all seemed to come to a head in 1968, especially in France that was rocked by massive youth protests in May. Life had never been better in France than in the postwar era, but many educated youths seemed to demand something radically different. Even though capitalists expanded the economy and improved living standards, the radicals had captured much of culture and intellectual life in Liberal Democracies. For many in the West, Marxism was like a secular substitute for Christianity, i.e. even if dubious about political communism, they were partial to ‘spiritual’ Marxism. There was a hunger for some Big Idea to tie all the threads together in an increasingly ‘alienated’ society despite its growing wealth. Besides, was capitalism’s edge in wealth creation really due to superior productivity? Or, as the communists argued, did it owe to neo-imperialist exploitation of the Third World, i.e. even though Old Imperialism was over, the West maintained control over the non-West through the monopoly of technologies, trade routes, and military prowess, as well as coups and political subversion(to place puppets in positions of power).
If the more puritanical types in the West opted for Marxism as the new biblical text, the more hedonistic types rebelled against the ‘Protestant Work Ethic’ aspect of capitalism and its petite-bourgeois anxieties, as conveyed by the Fun-ism of the Beatles song: “She’s Leaving Home”.
She (We never thought of ourselves)
Is leaving (Never a thought for ourselves)
Home (We struggled hard all our lives to get by)
She’s leaving home after living alone (Bye-bye)
For so many years
She (What did we do that was wrong?)
Is having (We didn’t know it was wrong)
Fun (Fun is the one thing that money can’t buy)
Something inside that was always denied (Bye-bye)
For so many years
In the late Sixties, there was a real fear among the Western elites that the communist side might gain the edge. The West was richer but increasingly divided in the absence of an all-encompassing grand idea. In the Soviet Union, regardless of one’s age, ethnicity or race, regionality, level of education, and etc., the impression was that all were united in Marxism-Leninism as an interpretation of the past, present necessity, and future guide. The predominance of the Big Idea relied on heavy doses of indoctrination, propaganda, and repression, but the communist world, for all its problems, seemed stable and unified.
In contrast, the US appeared to be unraveling from racial tensions, political divisions, and the generation gap. Even though the Civil Rights Movement was hailed as a triumph, it unleashed many dark and savage black energies, and the white reaction suggested that the US was not what it claimed to be. The Vietnam War made it worse, pitting the young against the older generations. And the various ethnic groups, especially the Jews, were growing restless and agitating for ‘change’. Meanwhile, the Anglo-American-Germanic establishment seemed to have lost the script, and the Old Narrative was blowing in the wind.
While the US never had a Big Idea — the founding principles were about the freedom to pursue one’s happiness/purpose/meaning than everyone being agreed on the one true idea — , it did have a Grand Narrative of sorts. It went thus: The great Anglos, Germanics, and other Northern Europeans arrived in North America, a great wilderness with some red savages running around half-naked with stone-age tools; these white folks, with vision, ingenuity, sweat, and sacrifice, built a magnificent country and, intentionally or not, showed the world how it should be done; in their great achievement, there was no single over-arching idea but there was the freedom to dream and make dreams come true; therefore, racial minorities and immigrant groups should look to Anglo-Americans and other Northern-European-stock Americans as the historical and cultural core of the country and assimilate on those grounds. And this formula more or less worked well into the post World War II era; but then, everything began to change in the Sixties. Similar changes affected Europe as well.
Figures like Richard Nixon and Charles De Gaulle feared that all might be lost as the West seemed headed for division, decadence, and ultimately self-destruction. Given Europe’s far greater homogeneity in the Sixties, it could well have avoided the political crisis engulfing the US, but ideology mattered far more there, with leftist organizations and parties having far greater sway, especially in the aftermath of World War II when the Grand Narrative held that the evil of Nazism/Fascism was defeated by the great heroic sacrifices of Soviet Union, a view that has crippled the parties of the Right in Europe to this very day.
Thus, even though Europe had no immediate reason for mass civil unrest, unlike the US with its large black population and ascendant Jewish elements(especially as so many Jews were either killed in World War II or left the continent thereafter), there was the festering power and prestige of leftist ideology that, in the Sixties, combined with youth-centered counterculture, to wreak havoc all across Europe. Also, the generational crisis was deeper than in the US, where its World War II generation could take credit for having defeated Japanese Militarism and Nazi Imperialism. In contrast, simmering beneath the surface of postwar recovery and prosperity was the sense that the older generations had disgraced themselves in having failed to defend their nations against Nazi Germany or, worse, having collaborated with it. The fact that post-war Europe was allied with the United States, perceived by many as carrying out a neo-imperialist genocide in Vietnam, was yet another strike against the older generations in the eyes of radical youth. Events grew so dire in France that De Gaulle left for Germany(of all places) for security, and it seemed the entire Western Enterprise would come tumbling down. Besides, if Americans took to consumerism as second nature, there was a certain hesitance among Europeans on both the left and the right who regarded it as a disposal and all-too-American affront to either European culture or socialist ethos.
Not that the communist bloc didn’t have problems of their own. In an irony of ironies, in the year when radical leftists everywhere were railing against capitalism and American Imperialism, the Czechs were moving toward dissolution of the communist system, triggering an invasion by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. Prague Spring soon led to a Prague Winter.
In the long run, the failure of Prague Spring was just as pivotal as the failure of May 68. Though different in scope and aspiration, both signaled that the era of Big Ideas was coming to an end. May 68 ultimately failed because the New Left was too muddled and confused to put forth a unified idea, as well as too addicted to capitalist consumer/pop culture. The Beatles plus Che Guevara didn’t make much sense, neither did Mao plus the Rolling Stones.
And the crushing of Prague Spring was something of a Pyrrhic victory for the communist bloc. It laid bare the true source of communist power and unity: When push came to shove, naked force, brutal and swift, was what held the system together. The Soviet Idea, for all its promises, relied on the barrel of the gun. Those in search for the Big Idea in May 68 failed to find it. Those seeking to escape the Big Idea in the Prague Spring at least succeeded in definitively convincing most Western Europeans that Marxism-Leninism was not the answer, with even the most ardent Western apologists of the Soviet system(if only as the lesser evil) losing hope.
The West weathered the socio-cultural and political eruptions of the Sixties. In a way, the fact that there were so many of these ‘liberation’ movements ensured that the radical energies would remain frayed and dissipate over time. Blacks had their own thing, and soon, other racial and ethnic minorities emulated the Civil Rights Movement, not only the American Indians and ‘Chicanos’ but certain white ethnic groups, like the Italian-Americans who drew lessons for their grievance politics from Jews and blacks, i.e. disrespect for the Italian-American community was akin to ‘racism’ and ‘antisemitism’, LOL. The feminist movement focused mainly on white/Jewish upper-middle class women, while the ‘gay’ liberation thing forged its own path. While the various ‘liberation’ movements were loosely linked in a broad ‘progressive’ coalition, they were usually more divergent than united in their aims.
From the communist perspective, all these pushes for ‘liberation’ were the result of capitalism lagging the communist world in social progress. In contrast to the capitalist world that was belatedly dealing with these issues related to ‘oppression’, ‘repression’, ‘tyranny’, and ‘exploitation’, the communist world had eradicated all the social evils in one fell swoop back in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution. Overnight, backward Russia was the guarantor of women’s equal rights with men. In other words, no need for feminism as communism ensured that men and women were comrades at work and at home. And in an instant, New Russia renounced its imperialist policies and stood with international humanity against imperialist exploitation. No need for a labor movement as the entire state was now geared to serve the workers. No need for the various identity politics that would sprout like mushrooms in the West as the Soviet policy guaranteed equal dignity and rights for all groups within the republic. And no need for youth angst and culture as communism vanquished the old social controls that prevented the young from following their dreams as free and liberated comrades. (Of course, reality was quite something else, but communists convinced themselves that all the evils had been slayed in a single moment of revolutionary will.) Communism as the Big Idea apparently wielded the Axe of History and severed the heads of the snakes of reaction.
In contrast, the capitalist world was finally catching up on matters of justice for women and nonwhites in the various ‘liberation’ struggles of the Sixties. As the capitalist system was fundamentally exploitative and unjust, progress could only come in fits and starts without attaining true fulfilment, a ‘historicoitus interruptus’.
It was the difference between a true revolution based on a Big Idea and a series of half-baked social reforms based on little ideas of petty interests that were blind to the bigger picture of humanity.
Still, the appeal of the Big Idea began to fade in the Soviet Union in the 1970s as economic stagnation set it. Also, the various movements, small or limited on their own, began to profoundly transform society in the West. From the Western perspective, these mini-revolutions or radical reforms, though slower in attaining social change, were preferable to the sudden wholesale carnage brought about by revolution. Ultimately, a revolution, for all its noble intentions, requires a great concentration of power to achieve its goals. Thus, at the structural level, it turns into ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss.’ The liberator becomes the oppressor, the rebel becomes the tyrant.
Also, the all-powerful state must be taken at its word. If it says the New Order is a Worker’s Paradise where everyone is happy and everything is fine, you must nod along or else. As such, the basis of the order becomes blind faith and trust. Racial minorities are not supposed to question if indeed racial oppression has been abolished. They must believe it. Women are not supposed to ask if indeed they’re equal with men. Doing so might be ‘counter-revolutionary’.
Also, a revolution implies a lack of agency among the people, i.e. the progress was done for them by a vanguard of radical elites who seized power and granted rights and freedoms to the heretofore oppressed masses.
In contrast, the social reform model, though slower in progress, operates in an environment where power isn’t fully concentrated. Also, as each group pursues its own interests, it gains agency and a certain independence. As they don’t expect everything to be done for them by the all-powerful state, they must compete on their own and stake their claim.
Thus, if the various ‘liberated’ groups in the communist world were passive, with faith and trust in the system that supposedly looked out for them and mustn’t be questioned, the ‘liberation’ movements in the West were active, more demanding and critical of power.
This was especially true of the ‘gay’ movement as both the capitalist and the communist worlds regarded homosexuality as a kind of mental sickness or sexual perversion, so much so that homosexuality was often associated with fascism despite the fact that neither the Italian Fascists and National Socialists had a high regard for the homos(to say the least). The idea was that homosexuality, a sexual perversion, rhymes with fascism, a political perversion, and both were linked somehow through the culture of sadomasochism and bondage.
Anyway, despite the communist world representing leftist revolution and radical progress while the capitalist world represented everything from ambivalent liberalism to rigid conservatism, there were far more active social and cultural changes in the West than in the East. For all the talk of liberation and progress, the communist world was about the people doing what they were told to do, whereas the capitalist world, for all of its associations, fair or not, with rightist interests(especially of the rich, the church, and the traditionalists), underwent endless cycles of social activism and cultural shifts, also caused by new trends in arts and culture, often popular culture. It seemed the combined force of little ideas and little interests were leaving the Big Idea East in the dust when it came to social, cultural, and economic vitality.
Granted, one could argue that the triumph of the capitalist West in the Cold War had far less to do with the various social/cultural mini-revolutions(which certainly had their corrosive and degrading aspects) than to its economic engine and edge in science/technology. In other words, had the communist world enacted just enough economic reforms to allow for market dynamics and individual enterprise, it might have done just as well as the West. Consider post-Maoist China that’s been surging in various areas of industry and economy in general. Since the end of the Cold War, China hasn’t had a single multi-party election. There is no independent feminist movement that could challenge the state. China’s ethnic minorities aren’t allowed to agitate in the mode of Identity Politics(as understood in the West). Yet, all of China, from the Han Chinese to the various minorities, have experienced tremendous socio-economic change at all levels.
In this light, what’s often hailed as vibrant in the West may not always be a sign of health. Take BLM, which was ‘vibrant’ alright. Besides, if a ‘liberal democracy’ is supposed to foster the courage and wherewithal to speak the truth, how was it that the US and even parts of Europe totally glommed onto the BLM lie, the notion that blacks die in higher rates because KKKops are roaming around to kill saintly and innocent blacks? But then, was it a failing of liberal democracy or a sign that the West is neither liberal nor democratic but more like a Jewish Supremacy oligarchy that maintains the facade to conceal the true nature of the beast?
Even though the fall of Saigon a year after Nixon’s resignation signaled what appeared to be the nadir of the American Empire, history thereafter leaned in favor of the capitalist camp. The loss of South Vietnam actually removed a wedge from American politics, thereby allowing for increased unity among American people, so many of whom had been divided between pro-war and anti-war camps. The Watergate scandal, though shocking to many, could be spun as a sign of a healthy democracy, i.e. the rule of law had the final say and even the president was removed for his abuses.
And even though communism seemed on the march until the late 1970s, with Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Nicaragua joining the socialist camp, along with Soviet Union’s military involvement in Afghanistan, it only added further burdens to the already strained Soviet economy. African communist states were total jokes and a constant drain on Soviet resources. Afghanistan would turn into another ‘Vietnam’, this time for the USSR. It was also exploited to foment anti-Soviet sentiments in the Muslim world. (As for Nicaragua, the CIA cleverly used proxies, the Contras, to destabilize the Marxist regime, thereby preventing direct involvement of the US that might have led to heightened political agitation.)
Iran was a fiasco for the US, but the Islamic Republic denounced both capitalist-imperialism and communist-imperialism.
Furthermore, the victory of the communists in Vietnam, once hailed by progressives and radicals worldwide, became a sour note with communist repression in former South Vietnam, followed by the Boat People tragedy. Even more horrific was the communist mass-killings in Cambodia, a kind of nation-wide Jim Jones experiment. And then, the brief but intense Sino-Vietnam War sent a message that all was not well in the communist world. Vietnam chose the Soviet Union, and China chose the US, leading to the perverse cooperation between Peking and the CIA in the support of Khmer Rouge remnants to harass the Vietnamese occupying forces in Phnom Penh.
Even though the Soviet Union and China avoided direct conflict after the clashes in the late Sixties, their global competition in the Third World split communist influence into separate spheres.
Furthermore, as Sino-American ties grew diplomatically and economically, it was increasingly difficult to distinguish what was what. If China was developing relations with the US at the economic level, was Chinese influence communist or capitalist? Were the Chinese coming to spread revolution or to do business(as extension of its business ties with the US and overseas capitalist Chinese)?
Another huge blow to the communist camp was the rise of East Asian satellites of the US. If Western Europe was more prosperous than Eastern Europe because of its neo-imperialist exploitation of the non-white world, then why was non-white East Asia rising rapidly under capitalism? Some of these societies even seemed to be catching up to the West. Japan had already done so, even surpassing all European countries in GDP, seemingly even threatening US economic predominance in the 1980s.
Prior to the rapid rises of Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore(and Hong Kong then under British rule), East Asia was usually discussed as part of the Third World, hopelessly mired in poverty, corruption, and backwardness. Given these problems, many Western intellectuals thought communism was preferable at least in establishing order and a functional command economy. It’s been noted that North Korea, despite total destruction in the Korean War(which soon turned into a Sino-US War in Korea) and half the population, had more industry than South Korea until the early 1970s. Many Westerners hoped that Vietnam would do better under communist rule than under the utterly corrupt and kleptocratic rule of Saigon during the war. Yet, Japan proved not to be the exception. In time, East Asian capitalist countries, under far-seeing autocrats, more or less began to clean up their acts, get things in order, and concentrate national energies on real growth. For several decades, capitalist Asia became the fastest growing part of the world economy, certainly noticed by China that began to emulate the model of Hong Kong and especially Singapore. In the non-Western world, this was perhaps the greatest threat to the Marxist-Leninist interpretation that capitalism was synonymous with imperialism and that the non-West would perpetually be exploited by the West, minus some socialist revolution.
Still, the main reason for the triumph of the West had something to do with the maturation of the boomers in America. Granted, regardless of which generation, the United States had the advantage of a dynamic private sector independent of the state. Even with a dysfunctional gridlocked government or idiot presidents at the helm, much of America would have carried on with innovation, production, distribution, transportation, communication, and etc. Americans didn’t need to look over their shoulders at government diktats to do their thing, modest or big in scale. You don’t need Congress or the Department of Energy to run Taco Bells or KFC’s. So, despite all the political failures of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter, much of American simply carried on, something that couldn’t be said of the command economic structures of the Soviet Union that, beholden to the Big Idea of Marxism-Leninism, couldn’t get much done without top-down decision-making. Thus, even though American politics seemed to be in crisis and even decay through much of the Sixties and Seventies, the majority of Americans continued to do their own thing in so many fields. Granted, such freedoms hardly guaranteed success in many parts of the world. Most of Latin America, democratic or dictatorial, had large private sectors that provided leeway for individuals, but their societies were mired in weak national character, corruption, criminality, and lack of vision. Some nations had people of good character and work ethic but were limited in territory and resources. Western Europe and non-communist East Asia did the best they could under far-from-ideal conditions, especially with Germany and Japan becoming economic giants in their own right.
American synergy(or convergence of advantages) was almost unique in history. The US was founded and developed by people with superior national character(of mostly Northern Protestant Europeans far advanced in most fields than their Southern European Catholic and Eastern European Orthodox counterparts), and even immigrants of different ethnic backgrounds over time assimilated to the original founding American Ideal. The dark side of Americanism was a kind of Americult, or America as the biggest cult movement in history, whereby immigrants from various countries arrived to cast away their identities and cultures in favor of liberty and money, in themselves insufficient to lend meaning to life. The bright side was that Americans, old and new, as free individuals would be expected to go out into the world and make something of themselves, maybe even do something big and amazing. Furthermore, the US had seemingly boundless territory and resources for ambitious individuals to try their luck.
For all their profound differences, it was this commonality of land and resources that made the US and the USSR(and Imperial Russia before it) an interesting study in comparison and contrast. Russians, with a far deeper history, could have done everything that the Americans did. One thing for sure, both countries had grown big by claiming mostly empty territories and grabbing lands from weaker rivals: the various Turkic tribes for Russia and backward Mexico for the US.
But the American Spirit thing proved to be more dynamic than the Russian Soul thing, at least in building a productive modern economy and a ‘happening’ society. The quintessential American was Thomas Edison, the ‘inventor’ of the light bulb. In contrast, Russians seemed resigned to dwelling in the dark.
The Bolshevik Revolution catapulted Russia in a whole new direction, and when Stalin embarked on rapid industrialization, roughly coinciding with the crisis years for capitalism, some even predicted that the Soviet Union would surpass the West and become the premier industrial state, as well as the most advanced social experiment in history.
Given what happened with the Cold War, most observers retrospectively agreed that communism was doomed one way or another. But then, what if World War II hadn’t happened, and the Soviet Union didn’t lose 20 to 27 million lives, so many young men dead and failing to contribute to Russia in the coming years. The Soviet experiment might have been a great deal more successful. Suppose the US had suffered similarly in the war, entire cities devastated and tens of millions dead. Would its economy have grown so rapidly?
While Russia was the most heavily damaged country by the biggest war in history, the US mainland remained untouched and, if anything, reaped an unparalleled economic boom from the war.
Even though World War II made the Soviet Union the other superpower — the German threat was gone forever, and Eastern Europe fell into the communist camp — but, the losses were far greater than the gains and, furthermore, propping up Warsaw Pact nations proved to be burdensome. Still, the failure of communism cannot be blamed on history alone. After all, the Chinese suffered greatly under Mao’s series of hare-brained schemes, but such tragedies didn’t stand in the way of rapid growth under a new system.
The combination of American land & resources, American demographics & character(largely Northern European and relatively more fair-minded), and American spirit & freedom proved to be a winning combination in the Cold War. U.S. History in the 20th Century showed that Americans can weather the storm and persist even under bad, corrupt, uninspired, and/or confused leadership, and why? Because so much of American life and activity have existed outside government and state control. Thus, it didn’t matter that most American Presidents were mediocrities and second-raters funded and controlled by oligarchs. Leaders could be weak because the overall system was sound and sturdy and safeguarded, more or less, the rights and freedoms of Americans.
Then, it was hardly surprising that Americans and the American Way survived the Great Depression despite the death knells about the end of capitalism and/or the liberal bourgeois democratic order.
That said, the Depression taught Americans that the private sector isn’t enough to weather the worst crises. While the US economy did chug along even with one-fourth of Americans out of work during the Depression, the statist role came into focus as essential. During a crisis(and to prevent future crises), a strong and committed central government was seen as necessary, not least because the private sector, though the backbone of the US economy, could cause great harm to itself, the whole country, and the entire world with unfettered greed and irrational exuberance in get-rich-quick schemes. Yet, instead of going the full socialist path, the idea was to expand the state’s role without extinguishing the spirit and freedoms that provided fuel for the US economy.
The full bloom of the American Economy happened with the advent of the boomers who comprised the largest demographic group in American history, which alone made a huge difference as a working and consuming population. They were also the best educated generation in US history, producing a far larger number of college graduates with advanced skills. If the great majority of earlier generations were educated and trained for farm work, factory labor, or clerical skills, the boomer generation produced a bumper crop in many specialized areas.
Also, the econo-centrism(often at odds with family-centrism) of the boomer generation utilized the skills and talents of women as well as of men, leading to short term gain but long-term pain(that we see today).
Granted, the boomer impact on the economy was somewhat delayed. A larger number of them, in contrast to their parents who’d prioritized essential needs in times of economic duress and war, sought meaning in life and majored in the humanities and, as such, didn’t immediately enter the productive economy. Also, youth culture, greater leisure, and higher education all worked to prolong the stage of maturation.
Of the two sets of boomers, the second probably played a bigger role in the economy. The first batch of boomers, say roughly from 1946 to 1957, or the Boomkins, tended to be more idealistic, intellectual, and philosophical, not least because they’d spent their childhood when youth culture hadn’t totally taken over. Many of them came to adulthood in the Sixties and were defined by the Counterculture, Anti-War activism, Pro-War patriotism, search of meaning, and/or excitement with unprecedented changes in culture, attitudes, and values. Given the tumultuousness of the times, many older folks surely wrote the generation off as useless, spoiled, and stupid. Yet, the fact remained that the boomers represented the largest and the best educated generation who, once past their immaturities, were poised to play an epochal role in US history. Besides, not all the Boomkins were into weird stuff, and plenty followed the paths of the likes of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas who’d come to largely define American Movies since the 1970s.
But, the biggest impact likely came from the second batch of boomers, those born roughly from 1958 to 1964, or the Boomlets. Unlike the earlier Boomkins, the Boomlets came of age in a much changed world. There was less need for them to get all excited(and even crazy) about new fashions and trends, no need to go looking for meaning in the manner of Counterculture radicals and romantics. Steve Jobs straddled between the Boomkins and the Boomlets, sharing some of the ‘radical’ attitudes of the former but the practical and business-minded outlook of the latter; Jobs reached the age of twenty in 1975, when the Sixties craze was mostly forgotten, the year when Spielberg’s JAWS commanded the popular imagination.
The ingenuity of the boomlets mattered especially because the US was falling behind in many of the fields that had once made ‘the business of America is business’. In areas such as automobiles, televisions, cameras, and etc., other countries, especially Germany and Japan(but also other East Asian nations), were either catching up or soon to surpass the US in quality and quantity.
The Boomkins hadn’t managed to keep the US far afield of the world in many key industries, and so, the future would be determined by high-tech, and this is where the Boomlets excelled, leaving the Soviet Union far behind in computers and the like. The USSR had reasonably competed with the West in steel production and heavy industry, but high-tech and advanced computing were something else. The large population of Boomlets, as or even better educated than the Boomkins, unleashed their energies in the creation of a new economy.
Also, what seemed so excessive and even crazy about the Sixties paid dividends in the long run. While it led to a lot of destructive tendencies and wasted energies, it also loosened up the imagination, creativity, and youthful initiative, a great boon in the high tech sector(though not so much in finance, the playground of the ‘yuppies’, where the ‘creativity’ led to all kinds of tricks that toyed with the economy without inhibition). The tech wizards weren’t driven by some Big Idea. Each had his little idea that he just might do something big and change the world. The communist world offered excellent education in science/math that was as challenging as anything in the West. Yet, the top-down system trapped in the Big Idea failed to take full advantage of the talents hamstrung by a command economy that discouraged initiative.
It wasn’t just the exciting innovations of ‘creative-destruction’(that grabbed the headlines) but the cumulation of countless minor things that made the Western economies far more energetic and productive, keeping store shelves stocked with items, something so basic but unreliable under communism.
Ironically, what undid communism was its growing moderation and tolerance. Contrary to the notion that communism fell due to excessive repression, it began to fall apart because it grew less so. Some systems operate on a zero-sum binary, like prisons for instance, which can only function with strict discipline or else fall apart. The very nature of communism demanded iron discipline and fanatical commitment. Because communism lacked individual material incentives, it could function in only two ways: (1) Zealous idealism that replaced material incentives with ‘moral incentives’, i.e. whatever hardships faced by the people, they should take pride in building a social future of the workers’ paradise. (2) Brutal threat of punishment; produce this amount of steel or else it’s the Gulag.
Fever and Fear. In other words, the golden carrot on the horizon or draconian punishment. This worked for a couple of generations under Stalin, and its effect carried over into the Sixties. Many Soviet citizens were true believers, and many were weaned on the ideology from cradle. Marxism-Leninism’s intellectualism appealed to the educated, and the masses of illiterate, semi-literate, or ill-educated masses just soaked it up like children believing in Santa Claus.
But over time, the Soviet system began to moderate and do away with Stalinism and its over-the-top propaganda and harsh measures. The forced-labor camps were gone, and so were the frenzy and terror with which the masses were driven toward herculean goals. Thus, working conditions became far more humane and decent. Workers were expected to achieve what was humanly possible instead of being pushed to the limits. But given the system provided lifetime job security, free housing, and other essential needs, there was little incentive to do more than what was necessary. Over time, workers slacked off, especially with hardly any punishment for laziness and hardly any reward for diligence. As the saying went, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”
And, the Marxist-Leninist fever had subsided. Many still accepted the dogma but minus the zeal. Most Soviets were communist in the sense that most Americans were ‘Christian’. It was the prevailing credo but not a daily driver of behavior. As things moderated, people began to think more in terms of the good life centered on consumer goods and popular culture, but the communist side simply couldn’t keep up with Elvis Presley, Cadillac sedans(even affordable to some Negroes, usually the pimps), Coca-Cola, TV, record albums, and blue jeans.
The absence of ideological fever hardly mattered in the West because there were lots of material incentives in the competitive economy, which was largely independent of the state. In the communist system, where politics and economics were one, the loss of faith in the dogma was a death knell over time. (The closest thing to communism experienced in the West was perhaps the Era of Prohibition when the state, in a fever pitch of moral puritanism, shut down an entire private sector. It probably made Americans far warier of state controls.)
Communism’s decline posed a problem for the ideological narrative. Could the Big Idea really be beaten by the little idea(or little ideas, lots of them)? After all, ‘liberal democracy’ never meant everyone had to be social liberal or a Liberal in the partisan sense. It meant a society of freedom and tolerance where all views, creeds, and interests could vie for influence: Religious and secular, liberal and conservative, capitalist and socialist, moralist and libertine, black-white-brown-etc. While liberal democracy may eventually favor liberalism over conservatism, even triumphant liberalism, if genuine, continues to tolerate and protect un- or anti-liberal views and values. Thus, a truly Big Idea was impossible in a liberal democracy.
Furthermore, even if a large private sector and regular elections characterized virtually all liberal democracies, capitalism focused on economic issues and elections sometimes favored the center-right, sometimes the center-left, sometimes just the center. One might argue FREEDOM was the Big Idea of liberal democracies, but the notion was too generic and vague to constitute a meaningful ideology. The same goes for INDIVIDUALISM. As an individual, one could be anything: a libertarian, social-democrat, anarchist, apolitical hedonist, traditional Catholic, Zionist, Satanist, or etc. (In a way, the fading of communist power can be construed as a repeat of the fading of theocratic Christianity. At one time, church power, as the embodiment of the Big Idea of Godliness, permeated and affected all aspects of life, from politics to economics to science and the arts, but over time the various endeavors gained ‘secular’ independence from church controls. However, the church could survive as a spiritual institution even as it lost authority over the material world. The problem for communism was its validity was staked on scientific materialism, therefore its failure in the material world left it no place to retreat.)
If the Cold War was indeed a titanic struggle, it was between the Big Idea of Communism and the Big Reality of Americanism. Even in the absence of the Big Idea, there was the undeniable Big Reality of American military might, productivity of capitalism(US-Germany-Japan-etc.), and relative freedoms that people enjoyed. A big talker who has less is bound to lose to a small talker who has more, at least if the latter has enough time and space to expand his wealth and power way beyond the former. Besides, why talk when you can sing and dominate the world with your form of pop culture? Big Brother lost to Big Idol(or the big tent of little idols). As an empire of sight-and-sounds, the capitalist world was unbeatable in its dynamism, even though the sheer amount of cultural trash it produced over the years may have sowed the seeds of its own destruction.
To a large extent, the power of the capitalist camp owed to American power and wealth. A hypothetical Cold War that pitted the Soviet Camp against only Western Europe might not have been so decisive in favor of capitalism. The same goes for the rapid rise of Japan and East Asian ‘tigers’ in the post-war era. For all their economic dynamism, they relied heavily on the US for trade routes(that kept raw materials flowing) and markets.
Granted, the same could be said of the communist camp. Without the USSR with its vast territories, resources, and manpower, would communism have amounted to much of a threat? What was communist Albania on its own?
Still, the crucial role of America demonstrated that it wasn’t just the liberal-democratic idea/system but its application upon the best real estate in the world.
Official narratives can lead us into the fallacy of correlation-is-causation. Because of America’s ‘revolutionary’ or republican foundations and semblance of liberal-democracy, the great success of American Power has been attributed to its political and legal systems. But was ‘liberal democracy’ really the indispensable reason for the rise of America? If so, why didn’t democratic systems have the same impact on Latin America that remained far behind in every field? Wasn’t it more the relative homogeneity of race and the ‘national character’ of this racial stock, as well as its innate talents, that catapulted America toward great wealth and power? Consider how Canada and Australia, without undergoing ‘revolutionary’ separation from the British Empire, also did very well. Given their coldness or dryness, neither Canada nor Australia could support the population of the United States and grow into a great power, but on a per capita basis, they were roughly equal to the US.
Now, some may argue that despite their loyalty to the ‘constitutional monarchy’ of Great Britain, Canada and Australis had liberal-democratic institutions just the same that allowed for political representation, property rights, and the rule of law, i.e. countries don’t need total sovereignty to have liberal democratic systems, e.g. the vassal states of the EU and East Asia that do the bidding of Uncle Sam remain ‘liberal democracies’. If anything, a kind of enlightened imperialism can guarantee liberal freedoms and rights against the tyranny of communism or native reaction, like in Hong Kong where individuals enjoyed far more freedoms than the Chinese under Mao.
Given the evidence of the 20th century, it’s reasonable to conclude that liberal democracy works better than communism, at least if it governs a people of sound ‘national character’ united in identity and shared destiny. But then, communism suppressed private property, material incentives, and individual initiative. Could a non-liberal-democratic system that allowed for private property, material incentives, and individual initiative have done just as well in America? Consider the rise of Germany and Japan in the 19th century and early 20th century. Both were autocratic but achieved spectacular success in a short period of time. The potential of the Japanese was stifled by its island territory, mostly poor in resources. But suppose the autocratic Japanese had the land and resources the size of America at their disposal. Might they not have achieved almost as much as the Americans given their character, intelligence, and commitment? It might be even truer of the Germans. Suppose it was the autocratic Germans, not the ‘liberal’ Anglos, who’d first settled North America and expanded westward. Would this hypothetical autocratic German-America have achieved any less than the historical liberal-democratic Anglo-America? If liberal democracy was the key to advancement and growth, how does one explain the rapid expansion of the German economy in the 19th century, its industry surpassing that of Great Britain despite Germany’s imperial holdings being far smaller than those of the British. It was said the Austro-Hungarian Empire had a more ‘liberal’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ atmosphere, especially around Vienna, but it was Prussian-led Germany that came to greatness.
Now, one may argue that, true, the Germans and Japanese caught up very fast in the 19th century and early 20th century, but they were merely emulating the liberal democratic powers that had led the way in exploration and progress in all areas, political, scientific, technological, social, and etc. Perhaps, it was this ‘liberal’ spirit that drove the Anglos to explore the seas in search of new lands and opportunities while autocratic Teutons mostly stayed home growing potatoes and making sauerkraut.
Or was the reason more geographical than cultural? British, an island nation, facing the vastness of the Atlantic, was naturally bound to be more exploratory. It certainly was the case of Spain and Portugal that led the way, and those civilizations were hardly ‘liberal-democratic’.
In contrast, Germany, a Central European civilization hemmed in between French power and Russian power, naturally expended more of its energies toward territorial security.
At any rate, autocratic Germany proved that, even without so-called ‘liberal democracy’, an order can bring forth an efficient, relatively clean, and conscientious bureaucracy. More amazingly, autocratic Germany led the way in socialist reforms that provided safety nets for its working population, something ‘liberal democratic’ Britain and the US lagged behind in.
It’s worth noting that autocracies are closer to democracies than to totalitarian models. Communism was inherently totalitarian, not necessarily in the omniscience of Big Brother but in the monomania of ideology pertaining to all facets of life. In contrast, autocracies often resembled liberal democracies in most respects but for controls over key aspects of politics and/or culture. Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore intuited as much upon embarking on the Singaporean project. To maximize advancement in technology and expansion of trade, there had to be individual freedom, material incentives, and property rights. Yet, the system didn’t need to be ‘liberal democratic’ with divisive elections, partisan wrangling, and bought-off politicians in order to safeguard such liberties and rights.
Some would argue that liberal democracies are essential to rooting out corruption, with various parties airing the dirty laundry of their rivals. It sounds good on paper and sometimes works in practice, but what is one to make of Greece and Southern Italy, both members of the ‘liberal democratic’ camp but hopelessly mired in corruption? And increasingly, what of the US and UK where virtually all the parties have been bought by the same bunch of global-tribal network of Jewish Supremacists? Whether it’s Biden or Trump, the Epstein scandal remains swept under the rug. And the media, controlled by the same tribe, continue to carry water for supremacist-imperialist Israel.
Even in a functional multi-party system, the various parties hide their own corruption while exposing only that of their rivals. Still, if A exposes B and if B exposes A, the people eventually realize what’s rotten with both A and B. But, what if A and B, far from being independent political parties, serve as uni-party puppets of the Global Combine of Tribal Supremacist oligarchs? Then, both A and B will be unlikely to expose each other’s dirty laundry lest it embarrass and enrage the machinations of the true masters.
In some ways, might ‘liberal democracies’ perpetuate corruption by fostering a political culture in which one half of the population votes not so much FOR its own side but AGAINST the other side? Suppose both parties are corrupt and useless, but one half of the country deems the other half of the country as ‘evil’. Simply for the sake of favoring the lesser evil, the people will keep voting for a bunch of corrupt a**holes. The GOP’s message to its voter base is essentially, “Yeah, our politicians may be worthless, but you could end up with worse, the Democrats, a bunch of crypto-commies!”, and of course, the GBP(gay-black-party or the Democratic Party)’s message to its voter base amounts to, “Yeah, we suck pretty bad, but the alternative is rule-by-far-right-‘fascists’ of the GOP!” If you don’t surrender to Dracula, Frankenstein will stomp you, or If you don’t surrender to Frankenstein, Dracula will bite you.
So, we have people voting not so much FOR the likes of Dubya and the Don but AGAINST the likes of Gore, Obama, and Hillary, and vice versa. Needless to say, the Jewish oligarchs are happy because, ‘left’ or ‘right’, virtually all such politicians are cuck maggots of Zion. Thus, both parties mutually buttress each other’s corruption via fear politics. “I’m only corrupt, but my opponent is an inhuman monster!”
In a way, in order to present an abstract and universal formula for the American success story, especially in conflict with Soviet Communism(and its Chinese variant), Americans sold their achievements short. A complex series of processes and multitude of key factors were subsumed into an argument for ‘liberal democracy’ and unfettered affluence. No doubt this had considerable appeal throughout much of the world yearning for personal freedoms/rights, economic opportunities, and an abundance of consumer goods.
Yet, it tended to overlook the racial, ethnic, moral, spiritual, and geographical factors, as well as the negative strikes against American History, like the ruthless exploitation of the land, the erasure of indigenous peoples & cultures, and slavery of blacks(though this particular omission was later emphasized, not least as a sign of American progress).
It’s no wonder that, more often than not, the various attempts to transplant the American Way to other countries ended in failure. In many cases, the introduction of freedoms and rights tended to favor the most corrupt and ruthless elements of society, like when the Sicilian Mafia made a comeback under the auspices of America’s ‘liberalization’ of Italy upon the defeat of Fascism. People without good ‘national character’ will invariably use increased freedom to cheat and steal more. The American Republic was built by a people of notable ‘national character’, something usually overlooked by democratization projects.
But then, Americans came to sidestep the issue of ‘national character’ for its ‘racist’ implications or ‘cultural bias’, which might sound offensive to both nonwhites(or ethnic whites such as Italian-Americans) and whites indoctrinated with ‘anti-racism’ that held it was discriminatory to posit that some cultural values/attitudes were better adept at modernity than others.
It was even more troublesome when it came to race, given that race is immutable whereas culture can be reformed.
So, in the spirit of universal justice and freedom, the US empire propped up the willfully naive notion that just about any people could adopt the American Way(though ironically also chanting about American Exceptionalism, meaning no people could ever hope to match the Americans).
The other feature of the American Way, though enticing, also posed problems in relation to parts of the world deemed backward. Potato chips, soda pop, ice cream, hamburgers, beer, and etc. were all very nice, but to paraphrase Jesus, “Man doesn’t live on snacks alone”; and to paraphrase Max Weber, “Man doesn’t build an economy for goodies alone”, Northern European capitalism was fueled not only by greed and pleasure but ethos of virtue and self-denial.
All the shiny consumer goods showered on South Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other countries hardly inspired fundamental reforms and social improvements. Rather, the natives just looked to the US as Mammon bursting with chocolate bars and soft drinks. As for American culture, which mostly came to mean popular culture, it actually made things worse by spreading and promoting trashy attitudes among the youth, decadence & degeneracy, gangsta styles, pornographic view of sexual relations, the cult of narcissism & vanity, obsession with deviant lifestyles, and etc.
For a while, the hedonic culture seemed liberating from the not-so-good-ole-days when the American Way was defined by Christianity, with missionaries spreading the Gospel to the heathens. Though stuffy and hypocritical, Christian missions did spread some positive values and attitudes around the world, indeed the kind that had imbued meaning and moral-spiritual compass to generations of American farmers and workers who built the great new country.
However, what seemed healthy and liberating for a time — Elvis the Presley was, after all, a good Southern Boy and loved his mama — eventually turned into utter degeneracy, and it really began to show in the streets of Saigon where Americanism became synonymous with sex and drugs. In the case of Iran, a heavily Islamic society, Shah’s Americanization efforts roused up lots of opposition, not only from the Muslims but from leftists who saw it as cultural imperialism. When all else failed, Americans only knew how to blow up stuff, like Colonel Kilgore in APOCALYPSE NOW.
A fascist interpretation of American History might have produced a fuller and more multi-faceted explanation of its successes and failures, at the very least something more persuasive than ‘muh liberal democracy’. Certain leftist academics presented more variables but then usually in a negative light. They’d mention the racial aspects of American History but merely dismissed it as ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacism’, failing to acknowledge its advantages in homogeneity, unity, and ‘national character’(developed to a high degree by the Northern Europeans). As for the formative cultural factors, they were usually dismissed as Old Time Religion, patriarchy, outdated values, sexual repression, and/or white-bread crap. Few really wanted to address topics like the Protestant Work Ethic. Maybe, it might offend the Catholics. Also, any positive discussion of whiteness as identity and culture might offend the Jews who were seeking domination of their own by demoting white prestige in the context of the ‘proposition nation’.
Virtual restrictions on an honest discussion of race and culture has rendered Americanism into a shallowness. If race and culture are mentioned at all, they must be within the context of how the US progressed from bad white ‘racism’ to wonderful Diversity and Inclusion(which is really a form of Intrusion). The improvement is always said to have been in moving away from white domination toward a ‘multi-cultural’(which really means multi-racial) society. It’s considered bad form for whites in the US and Europe to advise non-white folks on the relative flaws and problems of their own cultures.
Thus, American advice is narrowly focused on legal theory, political process, and economic growth while pretending that racial and cultural factors are negligible in history. Leftists and Marxist-types are apt to focus on issues of class and/or imperialist history to explain any gulf between the West and the Non-West while usually overlooking cultural factors and always dismissing racial factors. Liberal types pretend that other societies can make progress by adopting ‘progressive’ values and supposedly ‘tolerant’ attitudes, but how the worship of GloboHomo may improve a Third World country boggles the mind, especially when the ‘gay’ thing went from a plea for tolerance to a demand for reverence.
Or, the Liberal guide is all about the cosmo-globo version of individualism, as if Third World countries could catch up to modern standards if young ones imitate American pop idols and if women reject ‘patriarchy’ and turn into skanks(and wave the ‘gay’ flag as a symbol of global unity under Jewish-global US hegemony).
Then, there are Conservative types who tend to focus on the American lifestyle, like when the US contractors in Afghanistan installed shopping malls with escalators. You see, if Afghan women in veils stand on escalators in a shopping mall, maybe good ole American magic will rub off on them. George W. Bush apparently believed not only Americans but Afghans too must go shopping in the post-9/11 world.
There’s been no attempt to assess the racial talents(and limits) of a people or how their culture could be used to both modernize and stabilize society during the transition. Just the mindless promotion of the American Way based on the willfully naive and wastefully expensive proposition that the American Way is for everyone. Talk about putting the cart before the horse. A rich man indulging himself is the product, not the cause, of his wealth creation. A poor person imitating such ‘gangsta’ hijinks as emblems of success and prosperity would be mistaking the easy gravy for the hard-earned meat.
It was a tough lesson for many Russians following the fall of the Soviet Union. Freed from old controls, they adopted the superficial aspects of Americanism in fashion and pop culture but to no avail as Russian society sunk only deeper into a morass of degeneracy and drug use. The rule is ‘get paid, get laid’, not ‘get laid, get paid’, a case of putting the cart before the horse. But the promoters of Americanism often sell the glamour of hedonic excess without addressing the complex dynamics of racial, cultural, historical, and other factors that led to American prosperity. Blacks in particular seem to believe money will fall from the sky if they imitate rich celebrities adorned with bling and flashing their cash.
The Cold War showed how a Big Idea can hinder history with a Procrustean compulsion to force everything into its mold. In a burst of revolutionary zeal, communism sure could sprint but couldn’t sustain a marathon. Therefore, Americans could take pride in their liberal democracy that guaranteed all ideas, expressions, and interests to participate and contribute to the system, thus forming and sustaining a mosaic of inspirations, talents, and meanings. A whole lot of working parts working in unison may pack more force than one giant cog. (Some may argue that fascism was another Big Idea, but it was more like a Little Big Idea, i.e. like the ‘liberal democratic’ West, it allowed for a great range of social and cultural freedoms independent of the state, the role of which was to safeguard and enforce the core themes of the civilization. In other words, do what you want in your personal life but always remember you’re part of a race, ethnos, history, and heritage. As such, fascism could even allow for democratic processes as long as the primacy of national themes that transcend individual interests are upheld. In this sense, Israel at its best has been a fascist-democracy, a nation with multi-party elections but with all sides agreeing that Israel must be a Jewish State for the Jewish people and culture. The tragedy of Israel is it was built on Palestinian land and, furthermore, went from nationalism to imperialism, a fatal misstep that also undid National Socialism in the long run.)
But, as the years pass, the ‘liberal democratic’ West(and Japan and its East Asian imitators especially) are growing hollower by the day. The eighties and nineties witnessed great economic booms, but what was America really about? The current West is defined by apathy, degeneracy, or idiot passions in want of meaning, e.g. ‘wokeness’, ‘muh Israel’, or Negrolatry.
In a way, the Cold War had been good for the West in providing some ‘evil’ to direct its energies against, i.e. the West could define itself against tyrannical totalitarianism and ruthless utopianism. Thus, even in the absence of real meaning, the mere defense of Freedom seemed a noble cause against the ‘Evil Empire’. And the religiously-inclined in the West(and in Poland especially) saw the struggle as a spiritual war between the Christian West(despite Europe turning virtually post-religious) and Godless communism that worshiped the false gods of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. The Big Enemy lent clarity to what the West stood for despite the many social, cultural, and political contradictions.
Also, the West came under both leftist and rightist pressures to balance itself against the threat of totalitarianism. Under leftist pressure, the West did away with racial discrimination and spent more to alleviate poverty. Under rightist pressure, the West, while growing more tolerant, fell short of celebrating degeneracy. Even ascendant Jews understood that the West had to maintain its reputation as an essentially moral civilization in the Culture War aspect of the Cold War.
But once the Soviet Camp was gone, so was the pressure in the West to maintain any semblance of unity and decency. The West not only indulged in vices but even promoted them as the New Normal in ‘virtue’ in astounding acts of moral and cultural inversion. Entire city blocks reserved for month-long celebrations of sodomy might not have gone over so well during the Cold War. The Soviet Union could have said to its citizens and satellites, “The West offers more consumer goods, but look how it celebrates perverts and freaks.” Also, had the Cold War continued, it’s unlikely that Jews would have pushed for insane levels of mass immigration and migration, especially to Europe. While communism was internationalist in ideology, it was also nationalist in sentiment and practice. The sight of London and Paris filling up with waves upon waves of Third World folks would certainly NOT have helped the West in the Cold War. Even a poor sap living under communism with envy for Western goodies might have thought twice about welcoming the Western system if it leads to Africanization, Arabization, and Islamization, ironically enough along with sodomic ‘fruitcakery’.
Even a confused person values what he has in relation to a prisoner. In the movie MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON, Robin Williams’ character Vladimir grows disillusioned with American life but is then reminded of his freedom, a privilege than a right in the Soviet Union.
But suppose all the prisons are gone, and freedom can be taken for granted. (Indeed, Vladimir’s frustration with New York in Paul Mazursky’s movie anticipated the post-Cold War dilemma. For him, too many Americans have no appreciation for freedom that they take for granted and often abuse, whereas freedom is as precious as gold under communist repression.) Freedom, minus the foil of totalitarian repression, loses its luster and is prone to be indulged. Thus, freedom becomes inflated and spread around like the US dollar(as the End-of-History currency).
Furthermore, a new kind of struggle arises, that between freedom vs freedom, or ‘our freedom’ versus ‘their freedom’. If the Cold War was about the Free World vs Communist tyranny, the so-called ‘new cold war’ is about Western freedom vs Russian freedom, or what themes and objectives are prioritized under their respective freedoms. In the West, freedom favors Jewish supremacy, Negrolatry, GloboHomo, White Guilt, and ‘woke’ D.E.I policies, whereas in Russia, freedom favors themes and interests that emphasize Russian history, heritage, and culture. Freedom of deracination vs freedom of ‘nationation’. What both cases illustrate is that freedom is never distributed and practiced to represent all sides equally but to favor some groups over others. For example, while Palestinian-Americans certainly have the right of free speech, the US prioritizes Jewish interests and Zionism over Palestinian considerations. Thus, Palestinian-American freedom operates at a bare minimum, whereas Jewish-American freedom is maximized to sustain Jewish supremacy. Likewise, while homosexuals have the bare minimum of freedom to meet one another and indulge in homo-fecal penetration in Russia, their vanity isn’t maximized as an object of adulation. When Jews bitch about ‘autocracy’ in Russia, they are really taking issue with how Russian use of freedom deviates from the Jewish use of freedom in the West where the top priorities are Jew-Worship, Negrolatry, and Holy-Homo-celebration.
China is less free than Russia, but it too offers a great deal of personal and social freedoms, and thus, the US vs China too is also about ‘our freedom’ vs ‘their freedom’ than about freedom vs. tyranny.
Communism once served as an effective foil for the liberal democratic capitalist West, and its fall, though providing an immediate boost to Western power and prestige, may have paved the way for the West’s doom as well. Man lives cautiously in fear of death, but if death has been conquered, why shouldn’t he indulge himself? Then, it’s no surprise that the capitalist exuberance of total-and-eternal victory following the end of the Cold War turned into something sick and demented.
Samuel Huntington framed 9/11 as part of the larger phenomenon of ‘Clash of Civilizations’, but the leader of the Free World, George W. Bush, summed up Western values as the freedom to go shopping. What exactly is Western Civilization in a globalized world when it’s no longer defined by race, history, territory, and spirituality but only by the abstract principles of the ‘proposition nation’(though, oddly enough, these standards never apply to Jewish Power and Israel)? Waiting just around the corner at the beginning of the 21st century was the consecration of sodomy via ‘rainbow’ GloboHomo, making a further mockery of Western Values. So, the West should wage war on the Muslims to safeguard its idol-worship of homosexuals and trannies as the favored partners of crypto-far-right Jewish Zionists?
The fact that many in the West, especially among Conservatives, tried to cook up another ‘Cold War’ in the form of the indefinite ‘War on Terror’ was a sign of Western hollowness. Granted, civilizational anxiety had been pervasive throughout the 20th Century but also obfuscated and alleviated in good measure by various global panics and ‘existential’ fears. Increasingly, as the West began to doubt itself in terms of values, history, and civilization, its sense of worth was justified AGAINST the Other than on its own terms. World War II as the ‘Good War’ reminded the West that, for all its problems and failings, it was immeasurably better than those Evil Fascists and Militarists. The Cold War rhetoric paved over Western self-doubt with a sense of epic struggle against totalitarian tyranny.
Following the West’s victory in the Cold War was a decade of fast growth, especially with the dot.com bubble that convinced many of becoming overnight millionaires, but it all came to a bust, and there followed a crisis of confidence. Then came 9/11, traumatic but also cathartic, lending meaning to the West once again, as its freedom could no longer be taken for granted in a world where Al Qaeda terrorists were on the loose. But, there was a disingenuousness in these fulminations. Always insisting that the other guy is worse in order to prop up your image is surely a sign of insecurity. It’s like Jews constantly invoking ‘New Hitlers’, Islamic terrorism, white supremacism, the wicked Chinese, and bad Russkies as cover for their moral emptiness.
Russia in the 1990s experienced the equivalent of a hundred dot.com busts, but it embarked on a healthier path. Instead of defining Russianness in terms of an ‘existential’ struggle with the Worse Other, it dug deeper into itself to recover the themes of nationalism/patriotism, ethnic heritage, and deep culture, which triggered Jewish Power to no end as the deracination and degeneration of white nations became the key instrument of Zionic takeover and control.
Russia’s chosen path may be one reason why Russia is more adept at working with different countries, be it China, Iran, and others in the Global South. Granted, it also did everything possible to maintain good relations with the West but to no avail as the latter, hollow of soul and values, continued to define itself against the Worse Other. Deracinated and degenerate, the West boasted of its greater worth with sham-‘universalist’ themes of GloboHomo, Diversity, and Negrolatry.
In other words, despite its friendly overtures, ‘homophobic’ and ‘autocratic’ Russia was deemed unworthy of good relations with the West.
Countries like Russia, China, and Iran possess a sense of intrinsic value, that they matter as a people, culture, and history regardless of the values and beliefs of other parts of the world.
In contrast, globalized Western Europeans, Canadians, and Americans, in their utter deracination, degeneracy, and debasement, measure self-worth by pitting their supposed ‘more evolved’ and ‘progressive’ ‘liberal democracies’ against the Worse Other of ‘autocracies’ who reject the Sorosian globalist formula. It certainly explains the belligerence of the US empire, be it under the leadership of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, or Joe Biden. In order for Americans and its European flunkies to feel ‘exceptional’, they must run with narratives and panics about the Worse Other.
Even if the End of History was about little ideas beating the Big Idea, the end result, especially with globalism & ‘free trade’, deregulation of finance, the rise of the ‘uni-party’, and the Jewish capture(of the elites), meant that the West would be less about competition among the many than concentration by the few. ‘Free trade’ destroyed the power of Labor. Deregulation ensured that the financial sector would always make money, as in the aftermath of the 2008 meltdown when the very banks responsible for the crisis made off with record profits from the bail-outs. The rise of the uni-party meant that both major parties would cater to the same forces of oligarchy and the deep state. And the expansion of Jewish wealth & influence, accompanied by elevation of Jewishness as next-to-godliness, meant that Jews could focus on tribal supremacism with hardly any backlash from the goyim who either worshiped Jews as the high-IQ master race or feared them as career-or-reputation destroyers for anyone accused of ‘antisemitism’.
Even the internet revolution, which did so much to democratize communication(to the regret of the powers-that-be) and create new sources of wealth, eventually resulted in a handful of corporations monopolizing most of cyberspace, thereby gaining the leverage to enact mass censorship, as was done by Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, and etc. acting in coordination with the pro-Zionist deep state. The promise of democratic communication on the internet proved to be far more fragile than many had thought. (As to whether free speech has broadened or shrank since the Boomer takeover in the 1990s, it cuts both ways. The advent of the internet clearly expanded the range of views and expressions, but at the same time, the breadth of ‘acceptable’ views and ‘respectful’ opinions considerably narrowed. The Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties were marked by far greater media monopoly, even with the advent of Cable TV. Still, it was a time when older generations, now all gone, were still around, and their norms exerted influence on society as a whole. Thus, news back then would have pandered not only to boomer ‘meatheads’ but to Archie Bunkers, i.e. despite far fewer media outlets, a wider range of views was acceptable. Much later, however, Pat Buchanan was finally dropped from MSNBC because his views were no longer deemed ‘acceptable’ even as the internet was spreading views far more ‘extreme’ than his. Likewise, even as college campuses have grown more restrictive in curriculum and discourse, the internet has made even the likes of Nick Fuentes a household name, albeit one of notoriety.)
Furthermore, the West went from taking pride in liberal democracy’s facilitation of many little ideas to brandishing the New Normal of winner-takes-all and the cult of idolatry, mostly centered on Jews, blacks, and homosexuals. Andy Warhol once joked that everyone would have his fifteen minutes of fame, in some ways prophetic as the internet has given so many ordinary people a platform to get their message across(and even grow in fame). But over all, celebrity turned into a naked celebration of greed and pornography. For example, if the famous Rock Stars of the past, for all their narcissism, were also after some beauty and meaning, the new culture mocked all that as weak & wussy and shamelessly flaunted the basest pornographic lusts and cash & bling.
The shameless narcissism reflected the business culture as well, especially in finance that abandoned all sense of ethics. Gordon Gekko of Oliver Stone’s WALL STREET proved to be ‘prophetic’, and with the stamp of approval of both political parties, with Bill Clinton in the 90s outdoing even Reagan.
The new norms were in sync with the pornification of pop culture(even to the kiddie level with Disney serving as a grooming industry), Hollywood’s cranking out video-game-ish superhero movies with hardly any semblance of plot, cancerous spread of gambling(as the main funder of the supposedly ‘conservative’ GOP), monstrosity of ‘slut feminism’, glamorization of tattoos-piercings-green/purple-hair, promotion of drug use(and euphoric highs), and of course GloboHomo degeneracy as the new ‘spirituality’. The West had no Big Idea but erected an altar to Pig Idolatry.
Francis Fukuyama observed that Liberal Democracy could lead to rule by oligarchy, in which case the ‘End of History’ theory is ultimately useless. After all, if the History of Ideas led to the ultimate triumph of liberal democracy that however cannot even maintain its principles in the face of powers exponentially expanding under its wing, then the real winner of History is simply Power, not any set of principles. The real End of History isn’t Liberal Democracy but Jewish-Supremacist Gangsterism that bought off every lever of power and influence in the West. It has produced ‘leaders’ like Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. It has the supposedly ‘America First’ Trump bragging to the Knesset about how he’s a happy bitch to the Adelsons who love Judeo-Nazi Israel more than America. It has led to media monopoly where so-called journalists carry water for the deep state. And the emergence of the Uni-Party meant that Bush II got to destroy Iraq while Obama got to destroy Libya, Syria, and mess things up in Ukraine. And it has resulted in Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and innumerable whore politicians facing the Wailing Wall while taking it up the arse from Bibi Netanyahu.
Fukuyama warns of the dangers of oligarchy but pretends not to notice that oligarchic power is here and now, total and absolute, and utterly Jewish supremacist. It’s like someone warning of venomous snakes but pretending not to notice those who’ve been bitten and are dying. Fukuyama will not acknowledge the Zionic nature of the beast that rules the West and, furthermore, that its power derives not only from money but control of the ‘gods’, or the spiritual authority over what is ‘holy’ or ‘profane’. Under Jewish Control, revulsion about homo-fecal-penetration or tranny-penis-cutting is ‘profane’, while a bunch of homos having an orgy with ‘golden showers’ and fisting is ‘holy’.
This monstrous Power that controls the West hides behind a quasi-ideological ruse, marketing its various Jewish-Supremacist-gangster agendas as ‘open society’, ‘promoting democracy’, ‘fighting terror’, ‘condemning hatred’, ‘diversity-equity-inclusion’, and etc. So, Israel’s horror show in Gaza is ‘fighting terror’. Meanwhile, Viktor Orban, an elected leader is an ‘autocrat’ while Zelensky the Jewish despot is a champion of ‘democracy’.
In truth, the so-called Liberal Democratic West prefers compliant autocracies and monarchies than defiant democracies or populist states. Thus, the corrupt Arab Sheiks are propped up while even democratically elected leaders are subverted for removal for refusing the Western offer, like the US-led coup in Ukraine and the coup in preparation against Venezuela.
Indeed, the tired refrain about China’s intransigence towards evolution into a liberal democracy under market economics is mostly bogus. The real disappointment with China has far less to do with its political system than its political stance. China insists on its sovereignty, which isn’t always aligned with Jewish-Supremacist Western interests. If China remained autocratic but did the bidding of Jews at every turn, the Western elites would have no problem with China, just like they’re full of praise for the current dictatorship in Ukraine. Furthermore, even if China turned into a liberal democracy but maintained its sovereignty and defied Western interests, it would be just as vilified by the West. Notice how India, the largest democracy in the world, has the Jews and their cuck minions seething with rage over its sovereign decision to purchase Russian oil.
With the post-End-of-History being synonymous with Jewish supremacy posturing as the defender of ‘liberal democracy’, we now have the surreal spectacle of censorship by Jewish commissars appointed by Jewish oligarchs being sold as a bill of goods labeled ‘free speech’. And making GloboHomo compulsory as school curriculum and job-training, while destroying bakeries that refuse to bake cakes for ‘gay weddings’, is sold as ‘tolerance’. And promoting Negrolatry over all other races(except Jews, of course) is sold as racial ‘equality’ or ‘justice’.
Under Jewish Power, the West has become a quasi-theocracy in which the goy cuck elites profess blind faith in the Jewish commandments. Then, it’s no surprise that the entire spectrum of Western ‘leaders’ chanted in unison that Israel was ‘defending itself’ when it carried out the perfidious sneak attack on Iran, even targeting civilians and their families.
And the US continues the charade of being a neutral negotiator despite being a total whore of Zion. Amazing that Donald Trump whooped and hollered, cheering on Israel’s terrorist attacks, and then unleashed big bombs on Iran(the victim, not the instigator of the Twelve Day War), only to morph into a Man of Peace pretending to make peace between the belligerents.
In a theocracy, blasphemy laws preclude free speech, and it’s much the same in the neo-theocracy of the West, especially in the EU that routinely censors and even arrests people for having patriotic views that go against the global Zionic agenda. Just like the early Christians pleaded for tolerance from the Roman Empire but then, once in power, mandated that all Romans worship Jehovah/Jesus as the one true God(at the risk of punishment or even death), the campaigns for tolerance in the so-called Liberal West have turned into programs of compulsion. If you speak ‘blasphemous’ truths about Jews, blacks, and homos, even if backed by empirical facts, you’re likely to piss away your career and reputation. Even now when attitudes about Jewish Power are gradually but steadily shifting, the faith-and-fear factor around Jews has been so deeply ingrained that many elite or establishment types still stick with the official narrative and iconography. As they say, that bear that walks in circles in a cage is likely to walk in circles even when set free. Habit lags knowledge.
The so-called ‘liberal democratic’ West’s vulnerability to these manipulations(in want of something to follow, revere, and obey) betrays a certain hollowness in the cult of liberty and affluence, which were at once increasingly promoted and out of reach given the stagnation of the middle class and working class, as most of the benefits accrued to those at the very top whose attitudes, self-indulgence, sham morality, greed, and etc. came to define the culture of ‘liberal democracy’. How disingenuous to hog the wealth and privilege while claiming the moral high ground, especially by promoting GloboHomo, hardly a threat to elite power, to which vain and narcissistic homos cater to. According to the greedy, the most needy are the Israelis who are routinely showered with billions and supplied with arms with which to carry out a genocide.
The fact that something as silly as GloboHomo struck a ‘spiritual’ nerve among so many people(including ‘conservatives’) in the Liberal West indicated something worse than cultural decadence. A healthy society can tolerate decadence, but only a sick society venerates degeneracy.
A system that is sound and sturdy can overcome the putrid and corrupt. But when corruption isn’t merely tolerated but elevated to New Normal status, it’s a sure sign of widespread and deep corruption, indeed to the point where it’s no longer recognized for what it is. The fact that GloboHomo spread like wildfire is an indicator that decades of popular culture and casual decadence laid the groundwork for the moral/spiritual inversion. Weaken the immunity of an organism, and the germs take over and are mistaken for the organism itself. Then, no wonder that the ‘liberal democratic’ West celebrates sodomy, welcomes the great replacement(or White Nakba), canonizes black thugs as ‘saints’, insists that men with wigs are ‘women’, and pretends that Zionism’s imperialism and genocide are Jews-as-eternal-holocaust-victims-protecting themselves.
If human psychology is inherently iconographic, culture is likely to veer from humanism toward nihilism, away from individuality toward idolatry, a trajectory evident in libertarianism, which went from the defense of individual rights and liberties to fan-worship of the Great Individuals.
At the base level, libertarianism argues that every individual should be equally free to pursue his happiness; however, given that some individuals achieve far more than others, libertarianism turns into the cult-worship of the biggest celebrities, richest businessmen, and the most successful would-be gurus. Given enough time, it even begins to defend the rich and powerful using their vast wealth and influence to shut other voices down via their monopoly control over key assets. Theoretically, if some rich tycoon buys up everything to manipulate every facet of our lives, that’d be okay to libertarians because the ‘private sector’ would be involved. So, when Big Tech used its monopoly power to censor speech on social platforms, the libertarians sided with the monopoly capitalists. Big Brother is okay as long as he owns the company(that controls 90 to 99% of the internet traffic).
A similar dynamic(toward iconography over individuality) has been evident in liberalism that went from a humanist agenda of equal justice for all people to an idolatrous favoritism of certain ‘iconic’ groups uber alles, resulting in the nihilism of Jews, blacks, and homosexuals. What need for Jews, blacks, and homos to conform to the principles of universal justice when their Victim Narratives have been sacralized to the point of absurdity? Jewish Zionists slaughter women and children in Gaza, but the Western media and elites pretend it’s all about Israel defending itself from the terrorist bogeyman of Hamas. Palestinians, even the mangled bodies of dead babies, are lumped in with Hamas, whereas even the most unhinged members of the Likud Party are conflated with Jews as the eternal Holy Holocaust people.
Thus, certain key groups have come to hog the symbols of justice, just like the 1% hogs the bulk of the wealth. The end result has been the ‘nihilismization’ of morality, with Jews and blacks, merely on the basis of their identities(regardless of behavior), monopolizing morality than minding it. Donald Trump ran on populist-nationalism, the idea that the US government should be America First, but there he was in the Knesset praising the Adelsons for being Israel First. Being Jewish means never having to say you’re sorry, never having to worry about principles. Not that these principles consistently apply to little people either, as everyone is expected to violate his or her principles, be they Christian, Constitutional, patriotic, liberal, conservative, libertarian, socialist, progressive, or what-have-you, if they stand in the way of Jew-Worship and Israel-First. In the US, being Christian means signing your name on bombs to be dropped on Palestinian children while pretending that Jesus worships Netanyahu as the true messiah.
The side with the little ideas won the Cold War, but mass psychology was manipulated in favor of the Big Idol, either as icons of hyper-material success or quasi-spiritual victimhood. Even when Jews carry out a genocide, they’re always victims. Nelson Mandela was idolized under Negrolatry, but no Palestinian leader and no Palestinian child need apply because ‘sand niggers’ don’t count in the Western ‘liberal democratic’ iconography.
‘Liberation’ was a big theme in the Sixties. There was endless talk of liberation from just about everything. Over the years, ever newer categories had to be ‘liberated’. Liberation for these groups, these demographics, these individuals. Liberation from tradition. Liberation even from the Old Left. New liberation from old liberation, like when slut feminism ‘liberated’ itself from sisterhood feminism. The Cult of Liberation has become like a collective orgasm.
But ultimately, past the initial stage of euphoria, people begin to feel lost in their freedom, which can be lonely, alienating, and confusing. Travis Bickle in TAXI DRIVER is a free man in New York but without direction and meaning, a sense of belonging and purpose. An animal happily runs out of the cage but, once the thrill subsides, faces the difficult task of owning the freedom and its challenges.
Even as liberal democracies facilitated one liberation after another, unbound lives began to feel empty and lost. In time, they began to crave a kind of ‘bondation’ or ‘boundation’, not to be confused with bondage, which is coercive than a matter of choice. In ‘boundation’, one chooses what to bond with, but the very need indicates the inadequacy of freedom alone.
It explains why many boomers became born-again Christians after years in the wilderness of liberation that led to nowhere or worse. It’s like a dog that excitedly runs away from home soon founds itself lost and in search of a new master to serve. The many liberations from tradition and convention led to bursts of exuberance but were soon followed by anxiety in want of new attachments, a ‘boundation’ to new masters to serve.
Different people given their inclinations re-bonded with different things.
White ‘racist’ types often favored Zionism as the object of ‘boundation’ as a way of killing two birds with one stone. No longer allowed to be ‘racist’ in favor of whites, they opted for the permissible and even approved ‘racism’ of Zionism that favored ‘white’ Jews over ‘brown’ Palestinians, the ‘sand niggers’. Also, sucking up to Jews provided moral cover from accusations of ‘racism’: “How can I be ‘racist’ when I love the Holy Holocaust Jews, the greatest victims of all time?”
For other whites, the favored object of ‘boundation’ was Negrolatry on account of black over-representation in sports and pop music, especially rap. ‘Whigger’ males wanted some of that ‘nigga’ magic to rub off on them, and jungle-feverish white females learned to ‘twerk’ and have mulatto babies.
For many educated white professionals, the preferred ‘boundation’ was with GloboHomo as a status marker of being ‘more evolved’, especially in relation to those bigoted ‘deplorables’ or ‘white trash’(so often featured in Jewish Hollywood movies). Being bound up with Anno Sodomini, they even rationalized neo-imperialism as a ‘spiritual’ crusade against neo-heathens and neo-infidels who refused to bow down at the feet of Freddie Mercury and Elton John. It explains why upper-middle class Democrats support the Ukraine War: Hopefully, Russia will lose and roll out the pink carpet to GloboHomo veneration.
For all the status-seekers, political strivers, deep staters, hegemonist gamers, and wanna-be entrepreneurs, the word spread pretty fast: Your principles don’t amount to a plate of beans in the dog-eat-dog world of nihilism, with the only restraints(with official sanction) being ‘wokeness’ only cares about Jewish, black, & homo feelings.
As long as you dutifully recite the catechisms of Jew-Worship, GloboHomo, and Negrolatry, you’re set to go in the hunger-games of power and privilege. In this dog-eat-dog world, the Jews came out on top and were fetishized as objects of fear and awe among the elite-wanna-be’s, mostly a bunch of shabbos goyim. This neo-theocratic worship of the Jewish Gangsta now defines the core of Western Liberal Democracy.
An inspired(or very clever) synthesis of the great American Contradiction is currently far less convincing. The American Republic was founded as an anti-empire but expanded as an empire, both in North America and abroad. How does one square 1776 with 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War?
American elites, upon grappling with the dilemma, rationalized a new kind of empire, one of Freedom and Liberation.
Thus, even when the US exerted military force and economic pressures, it was to ‘liberalize’ the world. It was once half-convincing, especially when Eastern European countries freed from Soviet domination gravitated to the West for investment and advice; and, shortly before, several Asian states under US tutelage had shifted from dictatorship to democracy.
But this synthesis of Empire and Freedom could be sustained only if White Christian America was at the helm, one that was about give-and-take instead of take-and-take, the mode of the current system that is all about appeasing and indulging the whims of Jewish Supremacists whose worldview is defined by “You lowly goyim must obey and serve us superior Jews.” Sadly, many goyim accede to the Jewish Supremacist mindset and feel flattered to have the privilege of serving the rightful chosen-master race. Theirs is a dog-mentality, not unlike that of the ‘lesser’ Europeans who looked to Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich as the destined hegemon of Europe.
It used to be that Judaism was tribalist whereas Christianity was universalist. Jewishness used to be about Jews maintaining their own identity and community, generally indifferent to the goy world. In contrast, Zionism has birthed a kind of Jewish Universalism that encompasses all of humanity. Unlike Judaism that is only for Jews, Zionism appeals to all mankind to join in the movement.
However, unlike Christianity, or Islam for that matter, where all are equal in the eyes of God among the believers, the Jewish Universalism of Zionism says Jews are the most favored and blessed of God(or the Master Race on account of higher IQ) while goyim exist to appease, obey, and cater to Jews at every turn in the universal vision of ethno-spiritual inequality. Zionism is universal in the sense that it incorporates both Jews and goyim, but with a difference whereby Jews are imbued with higher value than goyim are. It goes to show that universalism need not be egalitarian. After all, even in seemingly egalitarian Christianity where all believers are precious in the eyes of God, Jesus Christ is immeasurably greater than all of humanity combined.
Labels usually outlast the things themselves. Thus, even as the Christian flame was dimming, European civilization still defined itself as the Christian West(somewhat true even to this day despite most European churches being empty shells, visited more by tourists than parishioners).
Similarly, the label of the ‘liberal democratic’ West remains despite the increasingly illiberal trends, with the ‘left’ calling for the suppression of the ‘right’, denying it even basic constitutional rights lest fascism take over, while the ‘right’ under the Trump regime justifies renewed censoriousness in the name of patriotism and, cuckishly enough, fighting ‘antisemitism’.
Milquetoast Liberals and dogmatic leftist types(of Marxist bent) claim that the current problem is essentially economic, i.e. the oligarchs have taken over, and liberal democracy can be restored with higher taxes and more redistribution. While economics is always a huge factor, the current failure also owes to social, cultural, and spiritual factors. Even if the super-rich were taxed at higher rates and all Americans got universal healthcare, the soul-emptiness and cultural hollowness of what larps as ‘liberal democracy’ will keep crying out for meaning or some grand distraction.
In a way, liberalism forgot that it relies on conservatism, i.e. liberal fire burns on conservative coals. Heat is released from materials packed with latent energy. Fire doesn’t burn on fire but on combustible matter. Conservatism guaranteed stability, unity, order, and continuity. It could be cold and obstructive to progress but also safeguard the very fuel that could be harnessed in the future. Conservatism that only hoards the coals is dark and dank, but liberalism that lights all the coals in a ceaseless mania for ‘liberation’ burns out.
The demographic crisis of modernity is a case of liberalism burning too many coals. With excessive emphasis on individuality and ‘gender equality’, everyone strives for me-me-me and fails to carry on the conservative tradition of family and continuity. Thus, liberal societies rely on more conservative societies that still produce new generations in the old fashioned way of family formation, wherein people aren’t obsessed merely with individual ‘self-fulfillment’.
When liberalism runs out of conservative coals, it relies on the importation of foreign coals from relatively conservative parts of the world.
Too often in an ideological system, much of what is essential goes unsung in recognition and gratitude. As liberalism for too long defined itself in hostile opposition to conservatism, it failed to develop a proper appreciation of their mutual dependence, just like kids who are so hung-up about breaking free of parental authority fail to realize the invaluableness of parenting.
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