Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.
In our modern age of pacifism it’s hard to imagine that most of human history has celebrated warfare; the crushing of the enemies of religions, empires and emperors, kings and queens and nation states; the extolling of manly virtues in courage, endurance and warrior spirit, the technology of it all.
As a result it’s quite a shock to run across people who advocate that good things come out of war, to such an extent that societies and individuals should not automatically shy away from it in favour of endless peace, especially when the latter is a chimera anyway.
Yet one of those advocates, the author of a book called the Bronze Age Mindset has published an article specifically about the Ukraine-Russia war, On the Abuse of War, wherein he deals with various critics who ask why he’s not supporting Western involvement in it.
Much was made of the trauma of Vietnam Vets returning home, especially by Hollywood, but in fact they adapted back into society much as their predecessors had. There was PTSD for many, but again it was overblown by US entertainment and MSM industries, as they do with most issues.
Less noticed is that the American veterans of the twenty year War On Terror have returned not so much with PTSD than a hell of a lot of cynicism about their society and what they fought for.
This week a “veteran” foreign volunteer for the Ukraine conflict returned to the United States from his vacation and was promptly beaten up by an African-American gentleman on the technofuturist state-of-the-art New York City subways. I can think of no better illustration of the meaning of the liberal world order and the NATO-sphere than this.
Lest you think he’s just being racist he’s scathing about the racist appeals, both explicit and implicit, of the Ukraine-Russia war
Most of those who attack my “pacifism” are more hostile and lowbrow. They ask, Why are we not defending Aryan Ukraine with its sunny wheat fields against the “Asiatic orc hordes” of Russia? After all, Ukraine even has a yellow and blue flag like sister Aryan nation Sweden. It is “Whyte” whereas Russia is definitely “not Whyte, not Western.” Strangely enough such views, formerly to be found only on white nationalist forums, are repeated also by some EU and NATO officials. I suppose even they realize the “European Common Market” isn’t motivation enough for young men in Europe to get themselves blown up by Russian artillery.
Systemic racism at the very top of the EU! Echoes of the Nazis and their talk of facing down the “Asian” hordes from the Steppes.
But—since we believe in “might makes right” and “war is virtue,” why haven’t “Bronze Age Mindset followers” joined in on this excitement? …. Why at least don’t we cheerlead now for NATO, which can be the “making of Europe,” on a supposedly higher and more virtuous foundation? I know these arguments aren’t made in good faith.
He points out that he’s not encouraging any of his “Bronze Age Mindset” followers to join the Russians either, and that what he’s seeing with the Ukraine war is the revival of a lot of the bad ideas pushed during the War on Terror. But he thinks that’s just a diversionary argument and he has no time for those trying to leverage his ideas, or pointedly what they think are his ideas – “the softness of liberal modernity”, the “making of a nation” and so forth – in making a case for war (at the start of his article he quotes one of the famous passages on this from Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra).
He points out that these are old arguments, dating at least from World War 1 and discusses their rise in the wake of the 9/11 attacks among Right Wing intellectuals and “Moderate Liberals” who thought “spreading democracy” too vague and utopian. He has a bit of a laugh at the Left going apeshit on the whole Bush Nazi thing, starting with them pouncing on a letter from Leo Strauss in 1933 saying that the West was weak and needed some of the steel seen in the Nazi and Soviet politiies in order to beat them:
The left establishment has always been possessed by wild conspiracy theories, whether it was this belief that Mansfield ran a secret finishing school for Nazis and Fascists, or the Russia hysteria that started in 2015 with Trump’s campaign, or many others you see in Hollywood movies of the last few decades.
True. See also “9/11 and our conspiracy theory culture”. On the matter of the Ukraine-Russia war:
It may be hard for the European hard right and the American “altright” to accept they’ve ended up sounding a lot like their hated “Jewish neocons.”
And after all this 9/11 war, what was the result for the USA? The spilt blood of thousands of American and Iraqi lives and trillions of dollars of borrowed treasure, to deliver an Iraq that is a barely functioning civil society and an Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban 2.0?
[E]vents following that Iraq War and the war on “terror” in general show no national revitalization, but an intensification of modern weakness and rule by spiritual females…. Even after a spectacular attack on its soil, destroying historic landmarks and killing thousands of its own citizens, America couldn’t mobilize the war fervor and national enthusiasm some had hoped would redeem the spent liberal societies.
“Spiritual woman”?
A population “bulge” of obese women, single women in their thirties on SSRI’s and other mental meds, and middle aged shrews who bully their husbands—an unprecedented “bulge” of liberated but underfucked women is the “biological base” of the West’s successive hysterias since the end of Obama’s first term. This demographic is the “weight” of the much-heralded “Western world” or the “liberal world order” right now.
And you thought Vance’s “childless cat ladies” crack was bad!
As depressing as it is, no revitalization of peoples today can take place through war or militarism, or probably through anything else at all.
As such he doesn’t waste time arguing about the reasons why America failed, at least in terms of conventional stuff like strategy, war goals, or even the profits of the Military Industrial Complex that still excite much of the Left – and an increasing chunk of the Right. Instead he points out that nothing really changed because the rulers didn’t change:
If rulership remains the same people, there isn’t any event, any cultural shift, any change in system, any opportunity for war and peace that will lead to a transformation of national spirit and morals. In this case whatever was done worked in the opposite direction. The supposed “War on Terror” didn’t lead America to put higher value on men of war and manliness, but allowed the opposite kind of person to secure positions in American government and society even faster
He delves into the forgotten history of preceding events like the 1991 Tailhook scandal, which turned into an excuse to purge the US military (not just US Naval aviation) of despised “alpha” men in leadership roles (“a real Bolshevik purge of the military”). Such men were still welcome to fight and die, but not lead.
As such he has no time for all the arguments and inticements for fighting this war – on either the Ukrainian or Russian side. There’s a scathing but funny section on Hot “Ukrainian Valkyries” pushing White Nationalism on social media. He thinks this is all just more attempts by Liberals (of both Left and Right varieties) to get the “Right” (“Altright”, “Far-Right”, “Hard Right”, etc) to fight for them to preserve their rule, with the added benefit of shipping troublemakers off-shore, like Franco sending his Falangist National Socialists to die for the Nazis in Russia. He also argues that this is more a group-think effort than a conspiracy theory because the latter…
… assumes centralized control, foresight of all consequences, near omniscience and omnipotence of political actors who in the end actually have very little foresight and also very little ability to enforce.
…
Reluctant to admit incompetence, the CIA is often eager to take credit for events that spun out of its control, even if it then appears “evil.” It’s preferable to look like a Bond villain than an ineffectual bungler.
As such he ridicules past efforts like the CIA’s Gladio program, so behated by the Left, and holds instead that what we see are faction fights with varying degrees of influence on Western governments, especially the US.
In any case he doesn’t want any Right-Winger of any shade to fight in the Ukraine war or support it in any way because he thinks the real enemies are at home:
[T]he most important thing for ending the suffocating slavery of our time is the end of unipolar power is another reason I oppose the hijacked west’s meddling in the Ukraine war and want to see NATO fail; but to be fair, I would also advise Russian friends to refuse to fight for their side in this particular conflict.
…
Nothing I recommended involves “service to the homeland,” or to modern states or nations, which I consider egalitarian monstrosities, defunct, sclerotic and senile and ultimately obsolete.
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Books to follow-up on:
Imperial Grunts – Robert Kaplan
Breakfast with the Dirt Cult – Sam Finlay
Strategy of Denial – Bridge Colby
The Godfather of the Kremlin – Paul Klebnikov
No Minister 
You just don’t get it, do you?
NATO is a beaucratic boondoggle whose raison d’etre ceased to exist with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
However beaureacratic boondoggles do not go quietly and before long NATO was bombing the crap out of Yugoslavia – where the democratically elected president would be tried in the Hague for trying to preserve his sovereeign nation’s integrity against the depredations of the Clintons, Richard Holbrook and the EU.
Further crimes followed includiing the wonton destruction of Libya, a crime against humanity the likes of which wwe haven’t seen since WW2
NATO is a rogue organization, which has doubled in size since the fall of the USSR, by annexing former nations of the eastern block.
Its attempted annexation of Ukraine at the expense of the people who actually live there is a step too far and if it takes a nuclear war to stop them so be it
Like all Russians Andrei , you talk big, but if your leadership so much as waves a finger near the big red button, or goes for the chemical weapon, Russia will be a parking lot in the blink of an eye.
And it will be a cheap parking lot, not even asphalted, made of mud , the natural state of Russia.
Park your Audi all day for 20 kopeks!
Oh, and I suspect your nukes are like your tanks, shit!, or have you purchased them from North Korea with your worthless rubles.
I see the Rouble has collapsed, Russian bonds are now worthless and you are China’s bitch as you cant pay for anything as you cant get US dollars.
Don’t you have better things to do with your life than trying to flame Andrei with invective, Rossco?
The bigger crime, as well you know Andrei, is what the Russian Marxist elites , and the other criminals who now run the place, have done to the ordinary people of Russia.
And as we know also, it is not the fact they murdered people, numbered in the tens if not 50 millions, it is in the enslavement of their minds.
That enslavement has put hundreds of millions of people into despair, wasting human capital, and destroying hope for a better life, which as we know is the definition of civilization.
Ergo, and by the conclusion of a logical argument, this is the greater crime.
Further, from that argument, the destruction of Russia is justified as the civilisation that will rise from the ashes may well be better than anything that preceded in over 1000 years of the sorry story that is Russia.
I don’t think Putin has killed 50 million people. Stop being weird.
Rossco thinks Russia is still the USSR. He reminds me of those Japanese soldiers who hid in the jungle after World War 2 and refused to believe the war was over and Japan had lost.
E2T, the Russian Marxist elites starting with Lenin, Trotsky, , Stalin killed approx 50m starting with their own revolution, then moving onto the captured territories, and the onto to 1930 Ukraine where farm collectivsation killed millions through hunger.
The Ukrainians have not forgotten that travesty.
Putin himself up to the war probably up to 5000, since the war well over1 m killed and maimed.