Counter-Currents
2,091 words
How to Stay Calm in the Event of a Thermonuclear War
As was the case with this column two weeks ago, this will be an all Russia-Ukraine edition. Whereas I usually strive to make this feature a humorously depressing hodgepodge of everything that’s wrong in the official picture that’s being painted of our world, it occurred to me that the perpetually unspooling goofiness I spotlight in these columns is merely a running commentary on the cultural effluvium that billowed forth when the Second World War’s victors claimed the right to dictate not only everything that’s good and evil under the Sun; they also reserved the exclusive right to decide who gets punished and rewarded for it.
In other words, 80 years later, everything is still Hitler and Jews merely because that’s where the movie franchise left off before the abrupt release of this sequel that’s currently playing in theaters. Everything that has been codified as right and wrong in modern society is a direct result of the fact that the Allies were more efficient killers than the Axis powers. So every time I go off on another jag about idiotic concepts such as systemic racism and white privilege and the puzzling idea that it’s possible to be transgender but impossible to be transracial, even though race isn’t real — and if you disagree, then the only possible reason is because you are a hate-filled failure of a human being — I am merely offering a running commentary on a fraudulent and destructive “social construct” that’s been slapped together by the ruthless victors of the deadliest conflict in human history.
Although land and resources are undoubtedly the spoils of victory, perhaps the longest-lasting benefit of winning a war is that you are able to seize an almost exclusive claim on semantics.
As painful as it might be to ponder, this world may be filled with nothing but bullshitters and the fools who listen to them.
So for the time being, the only possible upside I can see to all this after all the bodies have been cremated and the radiation has returned to comfortable levels is that we may wind up with an entirely new rulebook, and everything we’ve been arguing about since 1945 will seem quaintly obsolete.
What’s more important to you: being correct about who’s the more sympathetic combatant, or how this conflict will directly affect your life?
I’m not taking sides in this war because I don’t see anything good coming out of it. In this regard, I suspect I am an outlier.
Confirmation bias, ingroup affinity, carefully curated propaganda, the cheap meme-ification of all discourse, and the fact that the true pandemic appears to be a global outbreak of Dunning-Kruger have pooled their considerable forces like a team of comic-book action heroes to result in nearly everyone, from geopolitical analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations to corpulent dim-bulbs who get their politics from action movies, appearing to have already decided which side is in the right and which side is in the wrong in this imminent global bonfire which is still in the kindling phases.
As someone who suspects that all human notions of right and wrong are linked to one’s survival instinct, my “take” is that anything that makes life bad for me and my loved ones is wrong. And my gut instinct is that what’s unfolding in the world right now isn’t a video game from which you can walk away at any time; it will have a palpable negative impact on the lives of nearly everyone, friend or foe, you and me and your cousin Myrtle . . . everyone except those who financially profit from wars.
So there are no good guys or bad guys in a war that is likely to be bad for me and those I care about, no matter who wins.
As materialistic and soulless as this may seem to some, I believe that all wars have far more to do with land and resources than they do with ideology, but if the warmongers were honest and told the soldiers, “I’m sending you off to get your guts blown into the rubble-strewn streets of a foreign land so I can buy my seventh mansion,” no one would be willing to risk their lives, so they usually pat them on the head with some noble little lie before shoving them off to slaughter.
It’s not a surprise to see everyone, after learning nothing from history, immediately claiming the magical ability to discern exactly what’s going on in Ukraine right now and why.
But what I find a trifle bit baffling, if not downright stroke-inducing, about the past few weeks is how few people have stepped away from the off-track betting pool that modern politics have become to consider how much worse life is likely to get in the short and long run.
Perhaps treating it all like some reality show where the winner will be determined by social-media likes and dislikes is a way of coping.
What if — perish the thought — your calculated and incisive e-take on the situation has absolutely no effect on the outcome?
If you’re lying bleeding in the middle of the street amidst a food riot because someone shot you in the chest over the last stale dinner roll, will you really get that much satisfaction out of exclaiming, “I told you America was working on bioweapons with Ukraine!” as you draw your dying breath?
Priorities, people.
I’ve written about the psychological battering everyone has taken over the past couple of years. What seems creepily absent from nearly all of the public commentary since Putin rolled into Ukraine is an articulated feeling of, “Holy shit, a possible global war coming on the heels of everything else will have a multiplier effect. This isn’t just another log on the fire, this is a thermobaric bomb that leaves a smoking crater where once stood a firepit.”
I would much rather endure the mild discomfort of being wrong about this than have to withstand the mental and material ravages I would face if I’m right, but my sense is that everything we thought was really, really, really bad over the past couple of years will get really, really worse: the economy, the gaslighting, the censorship, the inability to order a simple cup of coffee without fumbling delays and stuttering complications, the utter lack of social cohesion — all of it much worse.
This isn’t some demented wish of mine, nor some weak admission of defeat. If you spot thunderclouds on the horizon, is it being “blackpilled” to say, “Hey, there seems to be a storm coming”?
You can buy Jim Goad’s The Redneck Manifesto here.
It is absolutely essential for humans to have hope — so essential that the Reverend Jesse Jackson had it backwards. You don’t “keep hope alive”; it keeps you alive. But there’s a difference between having a positive attitude and denying that you’re about five seconds away from being hit by a freight train. Maybe the best thing is to step away from the train rather than insist that it had no right to plow over you. Then, once you’re safe, you can work on regulating the railroad industry.
Can we all agree that optics don’t matter after a thermonuclear war? We may be facing a time when food and shelter take priority over ideological quibbling. Why take a side in a war that is almost certain to make life worse for everyone?
I realize that many will take comfort in the idea that things such as microaggressions will be seen as the trifles of a pampered society that didn’t realize it was getting ready to crash head-on into a wall. Suddenly gender pronouns don’t seem nearly as important as finding uncontaminated drinking water. But I do find myself wondering how many people who cheer for a societal collapse would be able to handle the reality of it for more than 12 hours.
“Well, at least we won’t have Drag Time Story Hour!” Okay, then, I hope that makes your radiation sickness more manageable.
Of course, I run the risk of exaggerating the severity of what’s unfolding. But the overwhelming saber-rattling in the Western media and those who obey its every autosuggestion will only escalate rather than defuse this situation. Not good. Not good at all.
In the space of only a few weeks, everything that was already bad has gotten worse.
All the rules about inclusion and cultural tolerance have been jettisoned in favor of galloping, murderous, near-genocidal anti-Russian sentiment. Suddenly, it’s not hate speech nor a terroristic threat to openly call for the deaths of world leaders or the soldiers who do their bidding — provided that they’re Russian. Orchestras are banning Tchaikovsky. Milan University attempted to ban the teaching of Dostoevsky because of Putin. New Hampshire has outlawed the sale of Russian-made alcoholic beverages. American corporations are pulling out of Russia. YouTube has demonetized all Russian users and will purge any content “denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events,” although I doubt this policy covers black crime. Even Russian cats are being “othered.”
Facebook, which would ban you for even mild vaccine skepticism not long ago, is now allowing praise for the Azov Battalion’s “role in defending Ukraine . . . as part of the Ukraine’s National Guard.” It doesn’t matter that Azov Batallion’s first commander claimed that although he and his men weren’t “Nazis,” Ukraine had been ordained to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade . . . against Semite-led Untermenschen” and that everything they stand for is unremittingly anti-woke.
Assets of entire nations, rather than those of individual dissident thinkers, are now being seized.
An unholy collusion between the CIA and Big Tech claim the right, according to Tucker Carlson, to “curate everything you learn about the war being fought in your name in Ukraine and censor anyone who disagrees with them, and the censorship is increasing.”
As if the supply chain wasn’t already smashed beyond recognition, looming food shortages may ultimately result in Holodomor 2: Global Edition.
If you think immigration and the refugee crisis weren’t bad enough already, a global war would make The Camp of the Saints seem benign.
And if this indeed becomes a global conflict, two huge differences between the Second World War and today are the apocalyptically devastating modern weaponry and the speed at which disinformation can travel.
Imagine a world where there is even less truth than there was in the last ten years. Where there is far less truth than in the past two years. We’ll never really know the truth behind the endless torture porn that forms all war propaganda. Both sides are controlling information too carefully for us to ever really know whether it was Russia or Ukraine who fired missiles on Belarus to drag them into the war. We won’t know who exactly shot at the children’s hospital, or how the bleeding pregnant lady wound up trapped under the smoldering rubble. And, exactly like the Second World War, we are kept entirely in the dark about the hopelessly complicated power struggles and failed negotiations that led up to the war.
We’ve all been force-plunged into a vast and bottomless quagmire of bullshit where the following is all true, but none of it makes sense: The CIA has been training this rabidly nationalistic Ukrainian “insurgency” to “kill Russians,” but all the media is telling you is that Putin woke up one day and decided to be a dick. Israel’s Prime Minister has told Ukraine’s Jewish President to surrender. Putin’s Russia is suddenly being unquestionably accepted as the ultimate evil by people who still worship Stalin. Jewish oligarchs are funding both sides in this reputed war of de-Nazification.
How much more bullshit, death, duplicity, censorship, icy sanctimony, and deprivation can you stand? The virus thing, the fake race riots, and now this are like successive kicks to the head.
I don’t think there will be any “winning” in this. For anyone.
So for now, I think the most important thing is to acknowledge the quantum leap in wretchedness the entire global situation has taken. This may be more collectively traumatizing than anything any of us has endured previously.
It won’t matter if you ultimately have the most accurate “take” on the complex forces that led to this situation if you’re dead and unable to gloat about it. So for the time being, I suggest you make sure you have food and shelter, and a way of clubbing to death anyone who seeks to snatch them from you.
If things ever get better, then you can dazzle us with your stunning grasp of geopolitics.
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29 comments
You have got it all wrong, Jim. The problem with nuclear war is the ensuing climate change, not radiation. https://mobile.twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/1502756345509994498
I don’t plan on surviving a full scale nuclear exchange, and can only hope there is no limited ‘tactical’ use of nuclear weapons over the Ukraine, as cold war doctrine might dictate. But if this is the end, it will be with a crescendo of black warfare in American cities. Philly, LA, Houston, Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, DC, New Orleans. Mostly black men killed by the thousand every month while the rest of the country is too traumatized by the last two years to barely notice. That is what America offers. The way I see it, perfect synchronicity with the Ukraine.
It is true that people who have no impact on the war are taking sides and offering their analysis when they have no knowledge of geopolitics. However, what has truly shaken me to the bone is how intensely this war has divided the dissident right. I have never seen the vitriol of the insults and ad hominem attacks marshalled by both sides. When, the important thing to me is how are we, as a White Race, are going to survive this.
On the one hand of this dilemma we have people on the dissident right who perhaps support Ukraine because they may sympathise with the Azov battalion. In fact, Ms Olena Semenyaka was featured twice in CC. This is concerning, since there are allegations (which could be Russian propaganda) that they are being financed and trained by the CIA: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202203/1254217.shtml.
On the other hand, you have people who believe that Ukraine and the Azov battalion are being used as pawns by the Globalist elites (Davos, WEF, whatever you want to call them) and that a defeat of this side is a win for Nationalism (at least the Civic variety).
As you rightly wrote, there is no point in arguing who is right. The way I see it, arguing about who is right is a waste of time and it weakens our unity. The way I see it is this: regardless of which side is right, Russia already won; now they will take Ukraine completely. The West’s economic sanctions will lead to hyperinflation and an inflationary recession (the definition of a depression). I think we better accept it.
So what we should be discussing now is how do we (as individuals and as a race) can survive and advance from this upheaval. In addition to storing non-perishables and guns, as you suggested, I would also suggest living below our means and accumulating as much Bitcoin as possible. At a social level, depressions usually lead to more social upheavals: so the day of racial secession might be nigh.
This is a people’s World, not a politician s World, it’s the people that suffer under the politicians directives when in fact it’s not their country it’s their populations and they’re only employees of the state, yet their choices cause everyday suffering to the populations. Give us peace in the World for every citizen of every country, everyone should unite in a peace march in every City of the World and let the Government’s see the feelings, power and sentiment of those that really matter, the citizens, and get an end to this War and needless suffering
I’ve been telling people for years: you’ll never go hungry if you just keep swallowing the bullshit.
Even if I didn’t know what is happening, for me to take the same side as Biden, Clinton’s, DNC, RNC, Soros, the American MSM, and the entire GloboHomo would be a madness. And if they prevail. They are coming after you too!
That’s silly. The only relevant question is what is right.
By capturing Ukraine and incorporating it into NATO, Ukraine could then potentially serve as a much, much closer missile launching site for NATO missiles pointed at Russia. The Ukrainian border is less than 500km from Moscow, for example. Can you blame the Russians for freaking out? I certainly can’t.
For Russia, Ukraine is an existential matter. For the USA, it is only an asset that can be easily sacrificed for the greater objective of surrounding and neutralizing Russia so as to achieve nuclear primacy and ensure is own hegemony.
Why is it “silly”? It is called similarity theory, or group identification … ‘birds of a feather’ in plain English.
Regardless: it is over. The only relevant question is “what do we do now to survive and prosper as a race”.
One problem with saying, essentially, “whatever my enemy dislikes, I approve,” is that your enemy can get something right sometimes.
You see this thinking in our spheres; Judaism (enemy #1 for most) is at odds with Islam, therefore, in the”lazy” thinker’s mind, Islam must be benign.
And the reciprocal (from the Judeo-Christian conservative angle): Islam is inimical to Judaism, and Islam is clearly against us, so Israel must be the good guy.
In other words, Islam can be right about Judaism and still be bad itself. Judaism can have valid criticisms about Islam and still be bad itself.
If Soros says, “I support eating a balanced meal, ” I don’t just reactionarily rush out to McDonald’s. If I do, I’m malleable and foolish. (And if he knows I’m like that, he may just be telling me a truth to steer me toward ultimate harm, knowing my reactionary tendencies.
The Russian Military looked at the maps of the Caucasus region, the Don Basin etc and concluded that they have to slice off a piece of Ukraine to protect their territory. 200,000 soldiers are never deployed lightly by such serious men. Putin as a CinC may have a lot less power over such decisions than you think. The Falklands War for example was kinda forced on Thatcher by the Admirals in the Royal Navy if you look closely at the decisions that were made. The Admirals very very carefully made sure she made the right decision. You forget how powerful these military guys can be. Chamberlain was effectively removed in a military coup and replaced by Churchill by High ranking reservists who also sat in Parliament as MPs. Putin might look like an Autocrator but his Generals have a huge say in policy.
No photo caption for this story? It’s a shot from The Day After. I’m sure you were in school in ‘83 too, Greg. I clearly recall my classmates looking numbed the day after the movie. We do not need to repeat that era.
May I suggest The Screwtape Letters. We are heading to a ww3 situation.
Also, Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags. It encapsulates the lull before the war got really horrendous, for the hitherto pampered Brits. The parallels in the story to today are numerous.
Jim, this is maybe the best thing you’ve ever written. Inside of it is the answer: we are being funneled into making the ultimate decision. And it’s not politics or race or anything other than the biggest truth of all. Jesus said, you’re either for me or against me. There is no choosing to be Switzerland.
Help the Ukrainians leave the war zone – http://help-me-run.xyz/
There is a radio show that begs for money for persecuted Jews, day after day, and it always feels off. These constant requests for money and Bitcoin for Ukrainians on this site feels that way, too. WTF?
I didn’t support pre-emptive strikes in 2002 and I don’t support them in 2022. Nonetheless, as Jim points out, this is a lose-lose situation. First and foremost, European people are dying, as if our TFR wasn’t low enough. Second, Russia (and its friends such as Hungary) had built up considerable soft power over the years, influencing mainstream debate. That’s all gone and anyone vaguely sympathetic to Russia and/our point of view (e.g. Tucker Carlson) has been discredited wholesale. You’re either on the side of globo-homo or you’re a baby killer. Third, there’s real world implications: oil and wheat prices skyrocket, which leads to famines in Africa, which leads to mass migration into Europe, etc. I guess if you’re an accelerationist, you’ve got your black swan, congratulations.
I suppose “European people are dying” doesn’t include the “Eastern hordes.” Since 2014, about 9,000 civilians have been killed in the Donbas, a Russian-speaking breakaway republic. The captured Ukrainian soldiers are forced to observe the monument to the children killed by the Ukrainian indiscriminate shelling in the eight-year-long low-level conflict. Nobody else is to blame but the Ukrainian puppet regime, and predominantly the NATO/U.S.
The standard Russian talking points claim that in Donbas, the shells only go one way. As if the separatists set up shop by writing letters to the editor and walk around with flowers in their gun barrels. Donetsk and Luhansk are Russian ops. Russia is therefore to blame.
Well, the word is out. No Ukrainian paramilitary wants to be caught alive by the Donbas militia. There must be more to that than just an “artillery duel.”
A topographical rendering of Mariupol featuring the industrial complex there and the slag heaps next to the steelmills would show you something out of a hellscape already. Add tanks, infantry artillery and, you get Helmsdeep, Mt Doom, Somme, Tobruk, Vicksburg, Yorktown, Bataan, Iwojima… The scenes are apocalyptic before. It’ll be known as the Battle of Azov Sea.
That military hardware is in large part the former property of the Ukrainian military, procured by those Russian separatists in the Ukrainian military, at the flashpoint of Maidan-induced hostilities. Putin didn’t have to to much arm-twisting in the Donbass.
This was a paywall tier article right here.
While everyone’s having their geopolitical circle jerk I think Jim really puts things into perspective just how much this is going to be bad for everyone. It’s not just that this war sucks but that it’s happening right after Covid and the state-sanctioned BLM and antifa terrorism that went on the summer of 2020. The foreshadowed food shortages is very disturbing. It’s just too much to handle: plague, war, famine… three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. There’s also the fact that for the millennials and older readers that this seems so surreal that the post-history time of the 90’s when the worst thing in the world back then was POTUS lying about getting randy with some bimbo Jewess intern ended just over two decades ago. It’s hard to fathom just how suddenly the world went to hell in a handbasket.
Just a brilliant ‘take’ on all the problems facing us, topped off with whipped cream and a cherry. And Goad is becoming more adept at his Proustian writing style, making one single sentence or two into an entire paragraph — because that is really how intelligent humans think and write, and try to figure out how to express the complexity other humans have created for us.
Myself, I still have two 24-count packages of canned tuna (through Amazon) and jars of quick oats stored from the beginning of the ‘pandemic’ which began in early 2020. When I heard on the TV then that grocery shelves in Milan, Italy were becoming bare then, I figured if the economic centre of Italy was already affected, I’d better get on the train. Bon Voyage, my friends.
The only encouraging words from Ukraine in this post is that there is this thing called the Azov ‘Battalion, or whatever’, that believes in Nationalism, though they are a little too far out and may get their entire effort derailed, because our political types in this country find their ideology offensive and will cease sending any help to this devasted country, whose people look a lot like us before our immigration crisis.
Bravo, Goad, for pointing out these realities under the froth of Politics.
“We may be facing a time when food and shelter take priority over ideological quibbling.”
Is that a good thing or a bad thing ? The way I see it , that would be OK, back to what really matters.
” Why take a side in a war that is almost certain to make life worse for everyone?”
The keyword here is “everyone “, let it rain the same over the wicked and the righteous alike. At the present moment it will only get worse and worse for us, and maybe some ghetto blacks killing each other in turf wars in the liberal paradise.
Psychopathy is not always a mental illness (in many cases it is indeed, connected to genetics or traumatic events), sometimes it’s an adaptation, a way to cope.
Good article Jim, but I dare to say it’s a little bit over cautious. If the whole world is crazy enough to blow itself to pieces , so be it. We (or some of us) will survive and go on. That’s hope, it’s role is not necessarily to keep me (us) alive but what I (we) stand for.
I’m not so downbeat. There’s nothing in human nature that will destroy itself completely. nor, I believe, will it ever do so inadvertently. What human nature does is periodically create a heck of a mess which then gets cleaned up and, by that means, the system is reset. Have you never smashed a computer mouse to smithereens when it doesn’t work properly? It’s exactly the same principle with Russia smashing up the Ukraine or the Serbians smashing up Yugoslavia. It’s the easiest way to start afresh.
The Donbass provinces will get independence. Russia may get away with creating a Black Sea corridor for the Russian people in what is currently Ukraine (if enough of the Ukrainians are driven out in the next few weeks). The western part of Ukraine will carry on being Ukraine. The audience will drift away once the show is over. And that will be that.
“As painful as it might be to ponder, this world may be filled with nothing but bullshitters and the fools who listen to them.”
This is definitely not true. It is true that so far, the reasonable people have not found ways to keep the less reasonable out of power for long. But that doesn’t preclude the possibility that there is a practical way. I will admit that precious few people talk about this, which doesn’t bode well. People tend to constrain their solutions to essentially what we have now, but with “our guys” in charge.
The point that you make that I wholeheartedly agree with is there is potential for truly awful days ahead. Days that we, in our pampered lives, can’t really fathom. I hope these can be avoided.
Yet it’s also true that such a thing would reduce people’s tolerance for some types of foolishness, though they might simply run to different forms of it. Perhaps the best outcome would happen if enough bad stuff happens that it wakes people up early enough to make substantive changes before the worst.
Stylistically an excellent article, but logically not really conclusive.
”Why take a side in a war that is almost certain to make life worse for everyone?”
The fact that this war makes life worse and we are drowned in bullshit is not an objection to analyze the situation, to argue about how it came about nor even to take sides.
Quite the contrary, we should ask what went wrong, and which lessons we still haven’t learned from previous conflicts. This would lead us directly to the conclusion that countries whose borders have been artificially drawn, without respect to nationalities, ethnicity and cultural sensibilities are bound to fail and will ultimately disintegrate – peacefully in the best case, bloody in others.
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