Western Promises

3,758 words

I don’t believe anyone reading this needs a recapitulation of all of the nasty things going on in the West today. However, what we will be discussing requires us to keep these many ingresses against white people in mind, so let us briefly repeat: White people are facing demographic displacement in their own countries. The main factors of this demographic displacement are: the importation of foreign, high-fertility, hostile racial and ethnic groups into white people’s ancestral homelands; the subsidization of their proliferation by means of wealth transfers from the white population. Additionally, it is being perpetrated by cultural support for such displacement and breeding by the government, as well as cultural suppression of white fertility and flourishing through a combination of brainwashing, demoralization, guilt, and deconstruction of pro-natalist, pro-fertility cultural norms and technologies among white people. At the same time, non-white replacers are encouraged to engage in crimes and attacks on white people, motivated by racial grievance, envy, and plain hatred of whites. The end result of these policies is the replacement of white populations in the West by non-whites and the destruction of white civilization, with planet-spanning consequences.

With all of this in mind — the horrible aesthetics of the West looming over it all, the alienation and lack of meaning in modern life, the consistent drop in living standards, and increasingly totalitarian rule — the Western dissident, the man within the maelstrom, looks for a way out — any way out. Anything outside the maelstrom seems attractive, by dint of freedom from the storm and gales. Of course, he understands why the vast black, brown, and yellow hordes of teeming biomass are clamoring the enter the West: To them, it’s a horn of plenty in welfare checks, preferential employment, and legalized rape of white women. But here and there among the new arrivals’ dirt-colored faces are the pale visages of Eastern Europeans struggling to enter the West as skilled workers: Polish plumbers, Estonian programmers, Croatian MMA fighters, even the elusive Macedonian esoteric racist writing for Counter-Currents. Why are these people trying to move West, or at least integrate themselves into the West’s economic system? What could possibly possess them to want to board this sinking ship? Can’t they see the maelstrom?

Short answer: no. However, that “no” must be qualified; even the most delusional Easterner can see the problems in the West. What we lack sometimes are the eyes to see with, or what I like to call the ideological framework for perceiving the world. At other times, it’s a matter of perspective. When your own situation is dire, sometimes even a sinking ship can look attractive.

Imagine that you are a bright young man from Eastern Europe. Your origins could have been humble or somewhat loftier; your father could have either been (or more precisely, have at some time been) a factory worker or a commercial agent for the same factory. You grew up in the 1990s and know what it means to lack the basic necessities of life. Your family scrimped and saved, though, and made it through. You went to school and were a bright kid; one of the best, even. You were told that good school performance was essential, but somehow it always makes your life harder. At some point you noticed that your underqualified and undertrained teachers resented you for your intellect. You had good friends — or good enough, at least. As you entered adolescence, you started to notice that even though every adult you met has nothing but praise for you and won’t shut up about how smart you are, all of society seems geared to somehow subtly reject you in some strange way.

You were awkward with women, but then again, who isn’t? But this was the first concrete evidence you had that the world did not function as your mother and teachers told you it would: the girls did not like you; they preferred the violent, uncultured thugs who squatted around the playground smoking, drinking plastic jug vodka, and wearing shiny tracksuits. It didn’t sit well with you. You also noticed that it wasn’t just the girls who preferred these guys’ company. Your male friends, even the ones you grew up playing football with, thought they were cool and wanted to be like them. Lacking the anti-social instinct, all they managed to do was embarrass themselves after getting drunk on plastic jug vodka, but you got the message: You were lame and those guys were cool, and nothing the adults would say would make any difference. It was almost as if this society was deliberately setting you up to fail.

Since this was the ‘90s, computers were just starting to pop up here and there. Your father had a weird friend, whom you call “uncle,” because this is Eastern Europe and all of your father’s friends are your uncles. He was either a rail-thin chainsmoker drinking 15 coffees a day or a 250-pound chain smoker eating ten pizzas a day. He’s a strange person who worships a strange deity known as the Commodore 64. In any case, on one of your birthdays he assembled a computer for you and a brave new world was opened. And things were very different in this world. It was a world where guys like you were respected. I’m not talking about the Internet; I’m talking about the West. The computer, the television, and other media became a window into this strange world where men like you looked down on the shiny tracksuit guys as low-class thugs. Slowly, you began to dream about someday living there.

You can buy Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence from Imperium Press here.

School soon ended. Now, your father the factory worker was adamant that you must not spend your life breaking your back so that “commie cocksuckers” or “pigdog oligarchs” would keep getting richer and richer, so he worked hard to send you to college in the big city. Since this is Eastern Europe, there were no quaint little college towns, and the most prestigious universities are all in the nation’s capital. Even though it’s a sorry little Podunk place in global terms, the inhumanly grey Communist architecture sprawling for kilometers around is still more impressive than what you’re used to. The people are of significantly higher quality as well. While you were “the smart guy” back home, here you find that there are other “smart people.” Some share your interests. There is even a place or two for you in the big city. For the first time in a long time, you are not alone. You have friends, and there are even girls who like you. For whatever reason, they don’t find the guys squatting around in shiny tracksuits all that attractive, but prefer the company of someone like you. There’s one in particular who you think you can spend the rest of your life with, maybe even raise a family. For the time being, though, you focus on your studies.

You start noticing something strange about the big city: Even though people here are better off than people in your blighted hometown, they’re still destitute — maybe not barely scraping by, but not exactly living well, either. And while they may look down on the guys with the shiny tracksuits, you can’t help but notice that the guys in the shiny tracksuits drive the best cars and have oodles of young women wrapped around their fingers. What’s more, you notice more and more that even at your university, people get good grades, internships, and academic positions not because they’re qualified, but because they’re part of this or that patronage network, usually connected to one or another political party. One or two of your professors are inspirational educators and have admirable minds, but the rest appear strangely underwhelming despite their intellect (when they have it), as if there’s something off about them. Gradually you learn that the ostensible meritocracy of university life is another sham, and that the je ne sais quoi which made you suspect your professors is moral cowardice or imbecility. They’re little more than fig-leaf intellectuals for the government or some influence group, or sometimes an outright mafia organization headed by one of the “pigdog oligarchs” your father was fond of cussing out.

One day, a friend approached you with an offer. It could have been a job after graduation, or better grades next semester, or entry to a program that will fast-track you to an academic position – it doesn’t really matter. He offered you this in exchange for coming with him to a meeting of a political party’s local chapter and joining it. You remembered that your old man called this party’s bosses “commie cocksuckers” if they were Left-wing, and “pigdog oligarchs” if they were on the Right. You politely decline. Your friend asked you to reconsider, and there’s something strange in his tone. You declined once again. Your friend dropped the subject. Nothing happened — or at least nothing immediately detectable. However, you noticed that the system treated you with an increased degree of coldness, as if you were some foreign tissue it had to eject. All administrative tasks became harder, participating in academic life became difficult, trying to find employment grew ever harder. Meanwhile, your peers who accepted that and similar offers were on track to become professors, or were landing lucrative government and big company jobs right out of college. You graduated and were unable to find a job, and thus found yourself returning to your hometown, where your job prospects were even lower.

After some time job hunting, however, you found employment in a small private company and returned to the capital. Your boss was an amiable fellow, a dedicated professional and fair-minded man. He had spent some time working in Germany, or Sweden, or maybe the United States when he was younger. He ran a tight ship, but you were re a hard worker and a quick study, so he was impressed and soon you found yourself promoted. It was almost unbelievable. For the first time in your life, there was an older man in a position of authority who finally accorded you a measure of respect for your efforts. Feeling somewhat confident in your ability to support a family, you hit up your old flame from college. Good news: She was still single and still into you. You married her. You had a baby. You took out a massive homeowner’s loan at 15% interest to purchase a shoebox apartment — but who cares? This is the way God intended it to be: man, woman, child.

One day, your boss came to work in a foul mood. The company had been doing well, expanding its accounts and employing new people. You were doing well, too: You had become a department head and had four people under you, most of whom were bright young lads like you. You treat them sternly, but fairly. The young lads were gossiping about some woman around the coffee machine one day when your boss suddenly called you to his office. He’d been relying on your input and advice for some time. Before you could even open your mouth to ask what’s up, he launched into an angry tirade about “commie cocksuckers” and “pigdog oligarchs.” He was three brandies and a pair of overalls short of turning into your father. Once he got the initial rage out of his system, you started to piece together what happened. The company had apparently gotten so successful that it caught the attention of the pigdog oligarchs and commie cocksuckers (who were the same people all this time). Your boss was given an ultimatum: Either sell to the pigdog oligarchs and let the company be ruined as they fill it to the brim with their own cronies, or refuse and have it ruined by their commie cocksucker friends in government — who’ll also make sure that he and the entire management team is sent to prison and personally ruined.

Your boss was not a compliant man and didn’t respond well to threats. He goes on a lengthy speech about how his time in the West taught him not to be afraid of bullies and that quality will always win in the end. He vowed to “set the fucking place on fire” before selling. You wanted to disagree, but found that you couldn’t. By God, you had built the company right alongside him; no fucking way were you selling or folding.

Your boss finally found his blood pressure medication and you girded your loins for war. It was a laughable notion. Within a week, the company was bogged down in inspections, lawsuits, compliance issues, zoning disputes — every legal and administrative headache imaginable is hurled at it. The bank wouldn’t return your boss’ calls when he desperately asked them for new lines of credit. Your suppliers mysteriously missed deadlines. Your clients started withdrawing from decade-long business relationships. Your boss finally ended up selling the company for pennies on the dollar to the pigdog oligarchs he railed against. You were fired to make way for one guy you could swear you saw squatting and drinking vodka from a plastic jug on the street not five years before. About two months later, your boss’ wife invited you to his funeral: He was killed by three men in shiny tracksuits, presumably in a mugging gone wrong — or so the police would have her believe. She didn’t, of course, but knew better than to make waves. She had children, you know, and so did you.

You were then jobless and that massive loan wouldn’t pay itself, nor could your children feed and clothe themselves. You thought you had been building your life on a firm foundation, but it was always water and sand. But you remembered what you learned from TV and online. You remembered what your boss said. In the West, quality will always win in the end. You tried to be humble about it, but slowly you realized that your sense of unease and alienation from society had been precisely that: Quality being suppressed to make way for trash.

You visited your parents, and when your father started ranting about the commie cocksuckers and pigdog oligarchs, for the first time in your life you actually listened to him. The old Communists were okay, but at some point in the ‘80s, the current commie cocksuckers took over and joined forces with state security and organized crime. From this unholy trinity came the privatization of state companies in the ‘90s, which allowed a handful of men — the pigdog oligarchs — to become very rich while impoverishing the country. This coalition of criminals, state security, and apparatchiks kept the population teetering on the edge of starvation to maintain political control, parasiting upon it. Anyone who possessed any positive quality must be either coopted or destroyed. The oligarchs controlled all economic assets, the apparatchiks controlled the government, and the state security kept it all together. All cultural life had to be put into the service of this kleptocracy, and of course glorify its members’ crass, mafia tastes. Hence, domestic cultural production was dominated by plastic gypsy women with fake tits and low-IQ thugs whose greatest ambition in life was to drive a fast car, take lots of drugs, and fuck many plastic gypsy women with fake tits. If you looked under the hood of the pop-cultural institutions, they were all, directly or indirectly, controlled by state security and the oligarchs.

You were surrounded by shit and living in shit because anything less was a threat to the power of these post-Communist bottom feeders. More and more, you realized that to keep on living in your country meant being a slave to these disgusting people. You would have killed them a thousand times over, but you couldn’t, and besides, you had your children to think of. You mentioned moving to the West. Your mother protested — taking her grandchildren away from her was cruel, but your father was silent. He took another swing of brandy and managed to grunt out something about “there being law out West.” He probably didn’t like the idea of being far from his grandchildren, either, but unlike your mother, he didn’t have the luxury of thinking with his heart. You took a swig of brandy yourself — the old man brews the best damn brandy in the world, and you’ll punch anyone who claims otherwise — but you had to think of your children as well. They must not grow up, like you did, in this open-air prison.

You can buy Tito Perdue’s Materials for All Future Historians here.

And so you moved to the West. You found that you were once again a respected professional, but here, there was nobody coming to destroy the company. You could build your life on a solid foundation. You were free from the commies and oligarchs. Not that they minded. Your country was suffering because all the talented men and women were emigrating, but to them, every person with an IQ over 120 and even a shred of moral integrity was a threat. Yes, things would continue deteriorating, but firstly, these people weren’t that bright, and secondly, being rich in a poor country was even better than in a rich country (at least by some metrics). As long as you and the other limp-wristed intellectuals like you were abroad and not still there, demanding a measure of civilization, they were right as rain.

In the West, you sometimes come across some people screeching about globalization. You chuckle to yourself. These pampered children don’t know the first thing about hardship, about living in an open-air slave labor camp, about anything more sophisticated than a simple extractive business being destroyed by short-sighted thugs, and that this “globalization” they decry is the only reason some people — the best of the East — can escape this servitude for a better life in the West. If you even think about politics, you find yourself siding with the globalists, especially after seeing parts of the Right wax poetic about how your sad homeland, still under the yoke of the commie cocksuckers and pigdog oligarchs, is a “bastion of traditional values,” especially after the commies figured out how to gin up popular support through performative porno-nationalism. Apparently, your Western liberal friends were right when they said that conservatives are morons.

You’re under no illusions that the West has no problems. But even with all of its problems, it’s still better than going back home. Sometimes you read about people from back home complaining about the gays and loss of family values in the West. You chuckle to yourself, knowing full well these people are best described as “degenerates,” cheating on their wives with all sorts of garbage and the neighbor lady while their wives are themselves cheating on them with their bosses. Monogamy is a dirty word to them — but hey, as long as it’s heterosexual, none of it really matters. Gays or not, you live in a society where you are respected and your labor is rewarded. If there are oligarchs, they’re not morons eating the seed corn. If there is state security, it doesn’t crudely put its thumb on the scales or smother the information space with crass garbage that offends the senses. Even the commies are more whimsical than disgusting here (although still annoying). Life for you is going well.

The story I have spun for you is by no means unusual or atypical. When a talented young man from the East looks to the West, he doesn’t see the maelstrom because he’s in an even worse disaster: the gradual and slow decay of a post-Communist country, which had been completely acculturated and stripped of its high-quality human capital in the Communist period, then left to the predations and vagaries of state security and criminals afterwards. It’s no country for young men, especially if they’re men of quality. Intelligence, talent, hard work, low time preference, patience, politeness and legality are not rewarded in the East. Quite the contrary.

Naturally, this is changing in many places, mostly by those who have attempted to institute nationalist policies and purge the Communist and post-Communist ruling class. It is a long process which may not end in our lifetimes. In other places, no such attempt has been made and these places remain open-air slave camps from which the only possible escape is the globalized world. When Western liberalism comes into these countries, their natural aristocracy does not see it as globohomo trying to race-mix them out of existence, but as a great liberator from the post-Communist oligarchy. They do not see the European Union as an instrument for destroying European nationhood, but as a means to grind away the oligarchs’ wealth by exposing them to both the EU’s regulatory bodies and competition from the common market. And a lot of people in the East see the Western culture pouring into their countries not as a poison that will destroy them, but as a breath of fresh air — something that provides far greater enjoyment and edification than the crass and brutish domestic productions tailored to appear to criminal thugs and whores. In the East, Harry Potter doesn’t compete against Dostoyevsky, but against Turbo-Folk, and there’s no question as to which one is less offensive to the senses.

This is something that is and will continue to be a problem for the East. Unless it can retain its talent, it will languish and gradually lose its economic, cultural, and state capabilities. Economics is often cited as a reason for emigration, but in reality it’s far more about respect. The post-Communist societies are fundamentally sick societies which empower scum and thugs. There’s not even honor among thieves, because all the admired and successful criminals are owned by state security. I used the term kleptocracy, but it’s not even rule by thieves; it’s rule by rats, by thieves who collaborate with state security in order to rob the people and aggrandize themselves. The hierarchies are inverted: the worst rule while the best cower in the shadows and are destroyed if they manage to build a life for themselves. Andrzej Lobaczewsky called such a society a pathocracy: rule by psychopaths.

When Western dissidents look at Eastern Europe and see someone waving an EU flag or repeating progressive bullshit, they imagine that this person is either a paid shill or has been brainwashed, but more often than not, it is a person with an IQ of 120 or higher and some semblance of morality who is tired of living as a slave in an insane society. He may be hoping in vain that the EU, or America, or Harry Potter will help him attain a measure of freedom.

*  *  *

Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.

• First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
• Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “Paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.
• Third, Paywall members have the ability to edit their comments. 
• Fourth, Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)
• Fifth, Paywall members will have access to the Counter-Currents Telegram group. 

To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:

Paywall Gift Subscriptions

If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:

• your payment
• the recipient’s name
• the recipient’s email address
• your name
• your email address

To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.