2,484 words
Over the past years, I’ve made some efforts to keep fit and educate myself in the manly arts. So far, I’ve been able to slim down, quit smoking, quit porn, moderate my caffeine and alcohol intake, develop an upper body physique which is best described as “not too shabby,” learn the basics of unarmed and armed combat, attain a minimum of skill with a pistol and rifle, and now I’m looking into developing skills as an outdoorsman.
Self-improvement, I find, is a practical application of Right-wing, reactionary thought in this degenerated modern age. One cannot ride the tiger without strength and wherewithal and these things begin in the body. Self-purification of the poisons of modernity is vital. Gaining the strength to endure the onslaught and the courage to stand athwart the forces of evil begins with the strength to deadlift 200 lbs and stand athwart an axe kick to the head (but not just standing there like a dumbass, waiting to get punched. Keep your goddamn hands up, Jeelvy, or I’ll staple them to your fucking forehead!)
One thing one notices about self-improvement is that first of all, it’s bloody hard. Second of all, it’s bloody expensive. Third of all, it takes a good deal of mental energy to break the inertia of sitting in a comfortable armchair after work. Fourth of all, self-improvement is a team effort – no man is an island, and yet we live like bugmen, alienated from each other and therefore weaker, as we cannot tap into the vast power reserve of the local community, or the gang of men set to doing cool things when we are personally exhausted. These are all solvable problems, obstacles which can be overcome and in no way constitute excuses for not engaging in self-improvement, though problems nevertheless, whose solution drains resources and energy which could be used elsewhere.
Now, what if I told you that back in the day, my father received weapons training, unarmed and armed combat training, physical fitness and survival lessons, and the necessary discipline to keep developing those skills for free, with older men tasked solely with motivating him and breaking his inertia, and with men his own age positioned to bond with him and each other in order to create a powerful team which could together solve various problems. In short, my father was conscripted into the military.
Back in 2014, an overweight, chain-smoking, borderline alcoholic bearing my name would have wagged his nicotine-stained finger at you, pointing out that conscription is a violation of the non-aggression principle, that the conscripts are not there of their own free will and that their labor is expropriated by the government for its nefarious purposes. The consent of the conscripts (or lack thereof) would have been the main point of contention. There’s a meme going around of libertarians allegedly asking ‘what if the child consents?’ There’s a version of that going on here. What if the 18-year-old man, still a child in many ways, withdraws consent? A child cannot consent, but he also cannot signal lack of consent for a course of action determined to be in his best interest. Much as though they protest, our children will eat their green vegetables and brush their teeth before bed. They do not get to not consent to eating vegetables and brushing their teeth. I believe there is no doubt that parents tend to know better than children, and that older men tend to know better than younger men, with exceptions I’ve talked about elsewhere on this very site. So, how’s that for a perspective flip – compulsory military service is not an imposition on your freedoms, but rather a gift given to you by the state, in spite of your pig-headed insistence on growing ever fatter, playing ever stupider video games, and watching ever more degenerate porn. It’s your dad forcing you to eat an apple instead of an aspartame sandwich.
The libertarian retort to this is that it is paternalism and that they’re a strahng, independant citizen who don’t need no state and that any imposition against them is morally indefensible. What is often missed is that the relationship between the state and the subject is a two-way street, that paternalism is reciprocal with patriotism.
It’s easier to think of this in feudal terms. The local lord needs an army, for which he trains his freeholders and peasants in the arts of war, at his own expense. For this service, for giving them the skills and weapons to be strong men, they owe him loyalty and fealty. The lord himself is a vassal of the king, to whom he has similar obligations as the freeholder to the lord, to serve in his army, to be loyal, to contribute to his coffers, and the king is himself obligated to protect the lord and his lands and his people, to provide aid in times of war and peace. The life of a king is a life of obligation and duty.
Moving on to the nation-state, while the personal loyalties to a lord and king are diluted and the edifice of the army is more mercenary than Männerbund, one can still conceive of reciprocal loyalty between a man and a people – loyalty to pluralities is nothing new – I am loyal to my family and they to me, I am a man of my neighborhood and the ‘hood will protect me. It doesn’t scale well, but it’s not all bad. The nation, out of interest in its security will take the young men and turn them into fine weapons of war, which are nevertheless flexible and can be rapidly beaten into ploughshares when times of peace abound. Conscription was, after all, invented in nationalist France. It grates against my patrician sensibilities to have merchant and priest class men hold weapons, but one can scarcely deny the strength of a nation which can mobilize its entire adult male population. Nationalism, of course, has many problems which make it unsustainable in the long run, but that’s a topic for a different post.
Paternalism in peacetime takes the form of ensuring that the people are gainfully employed and have skin in the game when it comes to the state. One of the first policies of Lee Kuan Yew’s government in Singapore was to allow Singaporeans to purchase their public-owned housing, for a very simple reason: Singapore was threatened by invasion from Malaysia, and Singaporeans needed a reason to fight. Having a house, having land and a family means having a stake in the state, means having a reason to take up arms, kill and die under the banner of said state. This usually means abandoning efficiency or GDP growth as a goal of the economy in favor of making sure that as many men as possible are gainfully employed homeowners who father children.
This was well known to King Henry VIII who cut down to size the mercantile absentee landlords who wanted to destroy the commons and dispossess the peasantry. In a move I wish to see repeated by Chairman Yang against the various Bezos-type robber barons of today, he explicitly prohibited the destruction of his manpower reserve in the name of “economic efficiency.”
His efforts, alas, were not continued under subsequent rulers, and the enclosure movement was completed by Roundhead and Whig parliaments, especially following the Glorious (bankers’) Revolution. England’s peasantry was corralled and herded into the cities to become the alienated and ailing proletariat – men whose land was stolen from them were now free to destroy their bodies with back-breaking and lung-blackening labor to enrich the industrialists and bankers. The dignity of man and strength of the state have not recovered and will not until the collapse of modernity.
While the doilies and priests LARPing as rulers in Washington might like to imagine otherwise, there is no such thing as a strong military without strong men who have skin in the game, and I explore this logistical chokepoint of the American hegemony in my article on the American Sardaukar, which, as time passes, I am certain is the most important piece of prose I’ve written in my life. In short – America’s warrior caste is getting shafted by the American empire’s economic policy, and this will be the downfall of the American empire.
Economic paternalism ensures reciprocal patriotism from the people, as long as they see their government as their own and they’re not coddled – jobs, not welfare; land, not food stamps are what cultivate loyalty. Whether service to the state in a military fashion or a reduction of the cost of enforcement through community self-policing, paternalism returns significant dividends to the wise ruler. Of course, this all requires a strong state, which we don’t have anywhere in the West, but rather we have a state apparatus which is used to shore up private interests and strip-mine the commons, just like in the good old days.
Moving forward in time and space, we come to the state which plucked my father from his hedonistic, college boy existence and turned him into a fierce warrior and paladin of justice, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This ostensibly dictatorial and inhumane regime took young men from all six constituent republics and gave them the skills necessary to dismember Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
The professional Yugoslav National Army was dominated by ethnic Serbs, but almost every adult male in Yugoslavia was trained and a reservist. On top of that, there existed Territorial Defense forces in each of the Republics, functioning as a Home Guard, and the armies of the breakaway Yugoslav states were built around these organizations. These skills and resources, given by the federal government in Belgrade to the men and nations which made up Yugoslavia were ultimately the means by which Yugoslavia died – fuck-you power which gave the Slovenes and then the Croats utilized to . . . well, say “fuck you” to Belgrade. You’ll hear many tales of Western support for Slovenia and Croatia, and such support definitely existed, but ultimately, the men pulling the triggers were homegrown Slovenes and Croats.
I find it telling that the socialist and Jewy Yugoslav regime, as well as the various socialist (and Jewy) socialist regimes in Eastern Europe nevertheless had a minimum of paternalistic instinct and trained their young men to be warriors, as opposed to the prevailing regimes in the west which seek to train young men to be jizz-stained, sugar-addicted defeatists.
Similarly, the socialist Yugoslav state sought to have full employment, often in make-work professions. This was inefficient, but it kept the people from descending into hedonism and despair and it engendered into them a sort of civic nationalism, which today manifests itself as Yugonostalgia – a yearning for the good old days of full employment. The East Germans have a similar phenomenon – Ostalgie – yearning for the socialist DDR which similarly, had full employment.
Now, to be honest, one of the rationales behind the Yugoslav conscription program was the rather insipidly stupid idea that the various ethnic identities of the men would be melded into a Yugoslav, civic nationalist identity in the crucible of military service. It didn’t work. Men who’d named each other brother not a year before were shooting at each other with the rancor typical of animals threatened by an invasive species. Ethnic identity triumphed over civic identity.
It took ten days for Slovenian ethnic identity to reassert itself after 50 years of Yugoslav civic identity. Yugoslav civic identity was shattered to pieces along with the many historic buildings in old town Dubrovnik. It was uprooted and told to go fuck itself along with the Serbs of Krajina. It was revealed as at best a dangerous fantasy, at worst a cruel lie in the carnage that was the Bosnian war and in an anticlimactic fashion typical of my long-suffering homeland, repudiated in the 1991 Macedonian independence referendum. That which the regime thought would strengthen and keep it alive ultimately killed it, and good riddance. Yugoslavia was Wilsonian insanity even when ruled by a monarch, let alone in its socialist disposition.
Alas, individualism has triumphed, and most countries in the Balkans do not have compulsory military service, though this could be our edge against the great powers of the world. The heavily mountainous terrain of the Balkans, as well as the defiant and violent disposition of our men can be leveraged in hypothetical asymmetric conflicts against foes superior in logistics and firepower. Think of Afghanistan, but with densely forested mountains, Taliban which are about a standard deviation higher in IQ and operating not out of religious fervor, but sheer contempt for outsiders.
Our leaders, however, feel the need to virtue signal to the stuffed shirts in Brussels and Washington about how modern and democratic they are. And so our men crumble and decay, and this decay is worsened by the paranoid, hedonistic, and violent tendencies of Balkanians. Our ancient cultures disappear in a whirlwind of alcohol, sports betting, and despair, while our societal elites compete with each other to be the best ethnomasochist, the most obedient lickspittle to the Brussels Horror and the most effeminate bugman drinking the most overpriced liquid crap which purports to be coffee.
Ultimately, I suspect that only outright political agonism will put enough steel in our spines for us to reclaim our rightful role of hill-dwelling, cultured savages. Thankfully, the morons in Washington and their even stupider puppets in Brussels seem intent on poking the sleeping dog of the Balkan warrior spirit.
This article was born in a split second, the moment I forked over the last of my monthly salary and a wee bit of my savings to my combat sports trainer, but it was a long time coming. I’ve always wondered what really shook me free of my libertarianism and I think that it was ultimately this song, describing the plight of Newfoundland’s fishermen in the wake of fishing grounds depletions by industrial trawler ships. I have nothing to do with fishermen – my family’s ancestral home is a mountain town engaged in mining, sheep herding, and apple orchards. But each line of the song is a knife in my gut, each stanza a rope around the throat. David Coffin’s melancholy baritone and the weepy accordion don’t help. Friends, I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve shed many manly tears listening to this song about men I’ve never met, in a land I’ve never been to.
Overfishing is a classic example of the “rape of the commons” shtick that the moneyed bastards masquerading as leaders do to enrich themselves at the expense of men who “filled their dories twice a day, they fished their poor, sweet lives away.” The best of serious thought is born in the heart and that tempest of anger kindled by a song broke through the pig-headed whiggery of my youth. My great-great-grandfather, the town headman who, for as long as he could, protected his people from the predations of capitalists, would surely approve.
14 comments
Thanks for the insightful and, I think, ultimately quite timely article. As someone who thinks of themself as a Southron first and an American as a distant, distant second, I also greatly appreciated your article on America’s Sardaukar as well. In fact, I have on several occasions been in some heated debates with younger friends of mine that eagerly enlisted in the US Army or Marines, becoming, in effect janissaries for the overland federal empire that hates them as white Southern male but will gladly let them die in its service. My own objections to being a soldier for ZOG aside, I share your belief in the nearly inherent good or at least the usefulness of compulsory military service for men.
I am also, like you, a fitness, martial arts and firearms enthusiast – but all of those things, as you point out, represent expenses that we and other young men would not have to incur (especially with regard to martial arts/unarmed combat training and ammunition for keeping up marksmanship skills) if there was still a required national reservist system in place in the States, even as bad as compulsory service in America’s foreign excursions to deprive other peoples of their national autonomy (often in the interests of a certain “greatest ally” that shall not be named by anyone with political clout).
As I joke amongst friends and family, “when the South is free and ours is an independent, sovereign state” I will be the first one to cast a vote for a draft. Martial skills and physical training are a source of great personal pride for a man and a source of great stength and utility for his people. In saner times perhaps we won’t have to come out of pocket quite so much to stay in fighting shape, but until then it is a worthy investment and at least some kind of a partial isurance policy against what are likely going to be very “interesting times” in the future.
It wasn’t just inefficient, it didn’t work. Not only there was no full employment but unemployment was so high in 1965 that borders were opened so that some million workers went to Western Germany. Even without them in the next 25 years unemployment was still higher than in western Europe.
Can you give me an example of ethnomasochism? Because every balkan nationalist accuses its own elites of being “autoshovinistic”(which seems like a synonim of ethnomasochist). But if every elite is ethnomasochist, who gains?
I have an idea I never expressed before but it goes like this: states can be classified by the way they developed. The way they developed shaped their societies and the way the national idea was defines. One can divide european countries this way:
– traditional monarchies who lasted many centuries and where the state was born first and the nation after it and by it: Portugal, Spain, France, United Kingdom, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden. Here the monarch in some way created a nation unified by the crown. These states don’t have different ethnicities and are very homogenous. Spain has more regional identities, they don’t count as real ethnicities nowadays. The first 4 are the traditional sea empires who defined the modern era with discoveries and inventions.
– remnants of land empires: Austria (Russia is a different story, it’s still an empire in a way)
– small historic states: Belgium, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Switzerland. Small and landlocked between bigger countries, they concentrated on avoiding conflicts and maintening independence and prosperity. Switzerland is a special case, with its direct democracy and many small cantons.
– 19th century created nation-states: Germany and Italy. They are something in between the traditional monarchies of the west and the nation-states of the East. Italy is more a geographical expression than a nation-state but it mainteined an impressive stability considering its diversity.
– ethnic states created after WWI: all the countries created from the destruction of German, Austrian and Ottoman empires. These are the poorer countries with the least amount of political stability. Obsessed with borders and who did what to whom, these are places no one would want to live in. Visegrad countries are closing the gap with the west albeit in a slow pace, while the balkans are the black hole of Europe.
While Yugoslavia was probably a bas idea, the alternatives would have involved border wars sooner or later.
“Similarly, the socialist Yugoslav state sought to have full employment, often in make-work professions. This was inefficient, but it kept the people from descending into hedonism and despair and it engendered into them a sort of civic nationalism”
No! You can’t borrow capital at competitive prices just to create workfare. Everybody who tried this game finished up in the back pocket of the Jewish finance (New York or Moscow alike). Everybody get busted.
Frankly, I don’t think you ever stepped in a socialist factory. Sorry.
Otherwise you would have seen the backwardness, rigidity of command, theft, irresponsibility, anarchy, the morons from the communist party or the syndicate, all the dirty games, everything. And more than that, the wasted good work of the good hard working people. And more than that the good hardworking people living poorly because every moron had the right to waste precious resources in make work jobs.
It didn’t work and never will.
Well, of course it didn’t work. Socialism is an incredibly stupid system. However, it remains true that without employment, people descend into auto-destruction and hedonism. Sadly, most people are outright unemployable in a modern economy.
Not all the people are descending in hedonism. There are many good hard working people who have more work than they can bear.
When the Americans are decrying the taxes, they don’t know how bad the socialism really can be. In Romania the state takes 75-80% of everything people make!!
Those with hedonistic and auto-destructive tendencies will not get depressed because they lack some backbreaking work. I keep the opposite to be true.
The workfare system will only exterminate those who work hard only to reproduce the unemployable.
There is so much back breaking real work. The problem is that the majority of people prefer an easy life and a metric ton of bad choices.
It is so much to say about the root cause. How this corrupt system came to be. Who made the rules for the negative promotion. What can really be done in the current framework.
Thank you Nicholas.
It was an interesting and meandering article.
Please bear with with my reply. It will be a little long, because I was there.
As for Singapore, it is an interesting case, but not quite as you (or the article at the link) represents.
Singapore’s break with Malaysia was peaceful (apart from race, Malay and Chinese) riots.
In my school days there, this would be re-enacted in the playground, nobody much got hurt, but the general pattern was Malays and (most) Indians on one side, Chinese, a few Indians, and the fewer Eurasians and Europeans on the other.
The Malay polity in Malaysia did not like the split, but the worst they did was to threaten to cut the causeway and, at times, the water supply (parallel with the causeway).
There was never a threat of invasion.
During earlier times, however, there was a threat of invasion of both Malaysia and Singapore, even before the split, and that came from a different malay population, those running the new Javanese (and to some extent Sumatran) empire known as Indonesia.
They did intend to invade, saying that both Malaysia and Singapore were creations of the Brit. Empire. The CIA and malay Indonesians put an end to that with mass-slaughter and the replacement of Soekarno with Suharto, in 1965, before my time, but the remnant paranoia re. that, among people my parents knew, is among my earlier memories.
The perpetual ruling party in post-indepence Singapore is called the People’s Action Party.
They were originally members of the Second International (possibly one of the world’s most useless things), and kicked, or kiked, out because of it..
Their original logo will was a direct copy from the British Union of Fascists.
The main driver of universal conscription was the domino theory of the spread of communism, not fear of an invasion from Malaysia.
More, many of the Malays still lived in trad. villages. They were not squatters living in garbage. I always enjoyed my visits to schoolfriends in such places.
They had legal ownership.
The PAP started throwing up giant blocks of flats, at first, it was a rental system. Only much later did the resident owner idea arise.
As for their having gardens, they never have! What a strange thing to claim.
Reply to myself, as the only poster here with direct experience of Singapore and having been educated for the best part of five years there, I know that of which I speak.
.I don’t think that Mark. E. Smith deserves an enconomiun on this site, but he was very interesting, and more for than against.
Reply to myself, as the only poster here with direct experience of Singapore and having been educated for the best part of five years there, I know that of which I speak.
.I don’t think that Mark. E. Smith deserves an enconomiun on this site, but he was very interesting, and more for than against, the North will Rise Again, in this case, north of England. However, it seems to me, that Pakis control many of the Norhern cities now, so to ‘rise again’ is as nonsensical as ‘The South will rise again’ in the USA, only worse.
Still, I commend some works of The Fall, and dead Mark E. to CC. he despised .the left of now from long ago.
Excuse my omissions
The PAP was kicked out of the Second International because they locked up ”all members of fellow-member parties.
They also used to stage minor internal terror incidents, bombs with red flags on clean rubbish dumps, where children (as I) like to play, and I am sure many other readers will recall similar play. I saw the occasional red flag, never touched, would see the articles about other children dead from it, but later, after adulthood, I always think it was a govt. campaign. Nobody else would have the chance to set it up, Singapore was already very totalitarian.
Before the split, Singaporean (and Malaysian) authorities sent several shiploads of ethnic Chinese Communists to China, of their fates, I have read a little on it, but for a history Ph. D., it would be a great topic.
I would like to make some points about Yugoslavia (and you, Nicholas, as much as I, never really knew it), but have to sleep.
Great article, it’s always nice to see people make changes to their lives.
This only thing I dispute is:
“One cannot ride the tiger without strength and wherewithal and these things begin in the body”
No, these things begin with the mind.
And to really strengthen and balance you mind you must meditate, everyday.
When I started meditating I was certain that I was just wasting my time. But the effects of meditations are extremely subtle, yet extremely powerful. However, never go into meditating expecting rewards from it. It’s very much a moment by moment thing where everything is centered on the present.
Meditating really made me realize what a normal sex-drive feels like. And it is nothing like the over-stimulated deathly pornographic panorama that is Western consumer culture. Meditating transmuted these lowly urges upwards giving me a much stronger spirit. I feel so calm and tranquil as a norm now. Anticipation does not neurotically ravage my mind anymore, as a result all my energy does into dealing with the situation and not worrying about the before or after. It really is a better way to live. But that’s jus the start. Meditation is the most important thing I do every day. I would give up exercising, reading, and socializing for meditation. Thankfully, it doesn’t work that way and you can have them all.
I wonder what evidence exists for your characterisation of the Yugoslav regime as ‘Jewy’?
While most European nations were influenced to greater or lesser extent by organised jewry after WW2, I’d suggest that none of the former Soviet states came close to matching the political and cultural influence that diaspora Jews had in the US. For evidence, compare the ethnic makeup and kinship bonds still prevalent in former Soviet states with the US, where God and capitalism have held sway for hundreds of years.
It’s telling that the first time I ever heard the phrase ‘Jew.S.A’ it was out of the mouth of a committee member of an Australian communist party. As far as I can see, Tel Aviv has had no stronger ally than the US – and this has been the case since it’s foundation.
So in considering which nation-states are ‘jewy’, I think it’s all relative..
Overall, however, I agree with the premise of your article. Illiberal states that impose military service on young men tend to produce better and more resilient men as a result.
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Excellent article.
Having gone through national service myself, I can well agree to its benefits, even if in my case the initial conscript only lasted for a year (we had mandatory repetition courses as we got older).
But, the difference between the young men at the beginning and the end of that year was palatable. From somewhat insecure high-schoolers into people who could handle weapons and the outdoors with ease.
Another aspect you briefly mentioned is the nation-building such a service provide. Being put into at room/sleeping compartment with 6-10 other young men from different parts of your nations creates a bond across a nation that absolutely noting else can match.
I don’t know if I even want to ask what the hell is being referred to here?
“There’s a meme going around of libertarians allegedly asking ‘what if the child consents?’”
Children do not and are imputed to be unable to consent .. to anything.
But the implication is spot on: children specifically, and man’s biological existence more comprehensively, utterly refute libertarianism and every other form of ontological liberalism.
Mr. Jeelvy, who are you, and where do you live? You sound like a Serb or Croat raised in Britain.
I think the title of this piece should have been “In Defense of Conscription”, as “national service”, at least in American terms, is a Marxist/progressivist/Democrat idea which rightists would do well to reject (and always have). We do enough national slave service every Tax Day.
I’ve had several family members who served in the military and in war. In theory, and especially, in an ethnostate, conscription is honorable and wise – and indeed, for the first several decades following any ethnostate’s creation, virtually mandatory. But in the current “diversity” hellhole called American Empire? It’s bad enough when young White men get sent to invade alien countries with whom they have no historical connection or ethnocultural affiliation. But at least since the disaster of war in Vietnam, these have been volunteers. Why should totally uninvolved men be forced to sacrifice themselves to an evil (((imperium)))? Just think of all the great (as well as ordinary) White men who lost their lives in the useless “world wars”. I’m not a callow libertarian, but on this matter, there is little daylight between libertarians and ethnonationalists.
Conscription wouldn’t exist to teach young men (and in the rotten androgenized US, any new conscription regime would almost certainly be extended to females; what would be the rationale for their exclusion?) useful skills, and to inculcate patriotism. It would exist to provide the occupationist regime with “cannon fodder” for their globalist wars against historic ethnonations, perhaps even including recrudescent European nationalist-led nations (yet another reason to get Amerikwa out of NATO, and quickly).
What is needed, however, is a new type of organization which can teach young White men combat/survivalist skills (at a militarily minimalist level, obviously), and can foster new friendships and networks among likeminded souls of the same race, but without involving them in foreign danger, or indoctrinating them into state multiculturalism. Who’s up for a Middle American Militia?
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