Kodos
09-05-2008, 04:13 AM
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-occupy-and-govern-foreign.html
I hate to interrupt a series, but I'm slightly worried that the titles alone of the last two posts may have scared away some of UR's red-state readers.
Obviously, if you read all the way to the bottom of the screen, let alone the rest of the blog, you realize that I am desperately fond of America, especially its middle or "flyover" section, although this fondness is based on little more than Mrs. Moldbug's Ohioan relations. And since we can expect Sarah Palin, by simple extrapolation, to be a serious candidate for UN Secretary-General by at least 2017 (perhaps indeed our first actual ruling SecGen, a prospect obviously fantastic but nonetheless enticing), I had better talk no more trash about the lady.
But I still reserve the right to refer to the red-staters, collective, as "Amerikaners." Like their lexical analogues, the Amerikaners are a cultural group of European stock, but their present-day traditions cannot be easily connected with any group in modern Europe. We cannot say this of the Universalist Eloi of the coasts, whose connection to the English Dissenters and their secular, liberal heirs has been continuous since day one. For example, American traditionalist or "fundamentalist" Christianity, which is nominally Protestant but seems almost Catholic next to the thoroughly Quakerized blue states, has historical roots which are quite obscure and thoroughly American. And besides, I can't imagine any Amerikaner who wouldn't dig this.
The future is what it is. No one can predict it. But if we could ask the future questions, and it actually answered back, and we could somehow know that it wasn't lying, we could become far more confident in our expectations. If I had some such magic 8-ball, my question would be: when will the Amerikaners decide that they've had enough?
Sixty (60) percent of American voters call themselves "conservative." Voting as an organized, disciplined bloc, it should be straightforward for them to defeat and destroy the remaining 40 - let's say 20% Eloi, 20% Morlock. Moreover, if such a majority demands a comprehensive reconstruction of government, not just a cosmetic change among a few ceremonial officials who have no real executive authority, the Eloi and Morlocks can hardly resist them. Especially since the American military class is, almost by definition, Amerikaner.
In retrospect, any such reconstruction would be accepted by all, of whatever caste. The Eloi will see the light, as they always do. As Osama put it: they like the strong horse. In an Amerikaner republic, Eloi will elbow each other out of the way to eat overpriced American food, wear marked-up knockoffs of American prole clothes, live in actual old American buildings, etc, etc.
Of course the Eloi already do these things. But in our New Albion, they will do them with flags, God and guns. (Possibly even Confederate flags.) And the Morlocks will be forced to deal - as they already are. (Although once the bar is reset, I suspect that less force will be required.)
New Albion will expose and exhume ad nauseam the crimes of the old regime, its predecessor USG. Its satellite states in Britain, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa will receive full independence under classical international law. The substance of the change will be obvious. The old progressive history books will be recalled. New reactionary ones will appear. (No burning or banning is necessary. Few Albioners will have the time or energy for 20th-century progressive cant.) And Sarah Palin will put together a small edition of her family's wise old Alaska sayings, bound in red, white and blue, which fits nicely in the lapel of your blazer.
You may, or may not, be thankful that this is not going to happen. It is not going to happen because the Amerikaners are not organized enough to make it happen. Given infinite time, they will certainly get organized, which is why I say "when" rather than "if." But time is not on the Amerikaners' side. Their horse has been weakening for the last century.
The Amerikaners' problem is that they're governed by their enemies, the progressives, who have converted democratic politics into a reality show and rule through the extended civil service. The civil service is nominally responsible to the elected arms, but the latter would have to put up a terrible fight to even touch them. And progressives fight the peril of a "populist" democratic reaction with two slow, but inevitably lethal, strangulation tactics: subsidized progressive education, and Morlock voter importation.
The last quasi-successful Amerikaner reaction was the "Return to Normalcy" of the 1920s. Considering the royal ass-whupping the Amerikaners have been taking since then, "normalcy" (which, in classic Amerikaner style, is not even a word) is an awful mild description of the converse. But not even a gentle, Harding-Coolidge style restoration is a real possibility today.
The fatal flaw in the democratic mind of the Amerikaner, or "conservative," is that he believes that his country's political system basically works and is the best in the world. It has just gone slightly off the rails in the last few decades. But it can be set right with a minor corrective operation, ie, replacing a few ceremonial officials with good, clean-minded, child-bearing Amerikaners.
This belief system, which has no correlation with reality, is at the heart of "conservatism." It shows no sign of going away. The fatal allure of insisting that right-wing conservatism is really the true democratic liberalism, the other having strayed, is an irresistible anglerfish lure. (The Rev. Dabney will set you straight.)
Therefore, the Amerikaners are unlikely to organize and act effectively until their electoral position has declined to the point at which a democratic restoration is not only nontrivial, but in fact impossible. At this point, USG will have imported tens if not hundreds of millions of new Third World residents. It will be obvious that military government is the only route to any kind of American restoration. The inevitable alternative is a North America indistinguishable from the rest of the Third World.
Have you been to the Third World? The armed forces will have to act. Let's hope they can all get it together to be on the same side.
A military restoration may have some advantages over a democratic one. For one, the issue of democracy is settled at the start, or at least should be. A transition from democracy to democracy may have some nontrivial restorative effects, but come on, people. Ideally this needs to be done just once.
Any transition of sovereign responsibility to the military, however temporary, is dangerous. Guns kill people, etc. And just from an aesthetic standpoint, it is much more elegant, and seems much more final, for constitutional democracy to terminate itself democratically and constitutionally. Pass an amendment which transfers sovereignty to the new authorities, and the game is over. The security forces will certainly be enthusiastic in their obedience.
But for Amerikaners, who are already second-class citizens in their own country (it is a testament to the level of morphine in the drip that only 16% of Americans believe that an Obama administration will "favor blacks over whites" - what is he, Ward Connerly on a diet? But not that any other administration would differ...) the problem is pertinent enough that it should probably be pursued in parallel, like the Manhattan Project.
A democratic reaction is the uranium bomb. A military reaction is the plutonium bomb. Two great tastes that go great together. Today, we'll be working on the plutonium side of the building.
How do you start a military coup? Start twenty years ago. Form informal groups of reactionary cadets in the military academies. Stay in touch with one another. Ally for promotion. And do nothing else until the moment is right; then strike irresistibly and with decisive force. Rocket science it ain't. Edward Luttwak's little book is a little dated, but it may still be useful.
Obviously, I can't do anything to assist (or hinder) this process. Perhaps there are already small Mencist cells forming at West Point. But probably not. Since UR specializes in candid and historically informed discussions of government policy, though, it certainly can't hurt to discuss a subject which I'd like to think would interest most military men at the moment.
Today, we'll look at the problem of occupying and governing a foreign country. I think it would be fun to use real countries, circa now, for our case study. Let's call these countries "Great Britain" and "Iran." If Britain wished to occupy and govern Iran, let's say starting in early 2010 (it's always good to have some time to prepare), how would it go about doing so? Assume, for the purposes of the problem, that Iran cannot build a nuclear weapon by then.
Of course, the conventional wisdom is that it would be completely impossible for Great Britain to occupy and govern Iran. It is even unthinkable for the US military to occupy and govern Iran. The US can't even really handle Afghanistan, and it is much bigger and tougher than the UK. And when you look at what happened when Britain tried to occupy and govern a single city in Iraq - Basra - we see that the conventional wisdom is, as usual, exactly right.
So let's say that our occupier is not the present government of the British Isles - ie, Whitehall - but a successor regime, Young Britain. Young Britain has declared independence from the United States, withdrawn from the "international community," discarded Whitehall and its Hanoverian sham-kings, and restored the Stuart line under Joseph Wenzel, with his father Alois as Prince Regent. Otherwise, its military and financial resources are unchanged.
[snip] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-occupy-and-govern-foreign.html
I hate to interrupt a series, but I'm slightly worried that the titles alone of the last two posts may have scared away some of UR's red-state readers.
Obviously, if you read all the way to the bottom of the screen, let alone the rest of the blog, you realize that I am desperately fond of America, especially its middle or "flyover" section, although this fondness is based on little more than Mrs. Moldbug's Ohioan relations. And since we can expect Sarah Palin, by simple extrapolation, to be a serious candidate for UN Secretary-General by at least 2017 (perhaps indeed our first actual ruling SecGen, a prospect obviously fantastic but nonetheless enticing), I had better talk no more trash about the lady.
But I still reserve the right to refer to the red-staters, collective, as "Amerikaners." Like their lexical analogues, the Amerikaners are a cultural group of European stock, but their present-day traditions cannot be easily connected with any group in modern Europe. We cannot say this of the Universalist Eloi of the coasts, whose connection to the English Dissenters and their secular, liberal heirs has been continuous since day one. For example, American traditionalist or "fundamentalist" Christianity, which is nominally Protestant but seems almost Catholic next to the thoroughly Quakerized blue states, has historical roots which are quite obscure and thoroughly American. And besides, I can't imagine any Amerikaner who wouldn't dig this.
The future is what it is. No one can predict it. But if we could ask the future questions, and it actually answered back, and we could somehow know that it wasn't lying, we could become far more confident in our expectations. If I had some such magic 8-ball, my question would be: when will the Amerikaners decide that they've had enough?
Sixty (60) percent of American voters call themselves "conservative." Voting as an organized, disciplined bloc, it should be straightforward for them to defeat and destroy the remaining 40 - let's say 20% Eloi, 20% Morlock. Moreover, if such a majority demands a comprehensive reconstruction of government, not just a cosmetic change among a few ceremonial officials who have no real executive authority, the Eloi and Morlocks can hardly resist them. Especially since the American military class is, almost by definition, Amerikaner.
In retrospect, any such reconstruction would be accepted by all, of whatever caste. The Eloi will see the light, as they always do. As Osama put it: they like the strong horse. In an Amerikaner republic, Eloi will elbow each other out of the way to eat overpriced American food, wear marked-up knockoffs of American prole clothes, live in actual old American buildings, etc, etc.
Of course the Eloi already do these things. But in our New Albion, they will do them with flags, God and guns. (Possibly even Confederate flags.) And the Morlocks will be forced to deal - as they already are. (Although once the bar is reset, I suspect that less force will be required.)
New Albion will expose and exhume ad nauseam the crimes of the old regime, its predecessor USG. Its satellite states in Britain, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa will receive full independence under classical international law. The substance of the change will be obvious. The old progressive history books will be recalled. New reactionary ones will appear. (No burning or banning is necessary. Few Albioners will have the time or energy for 20th-century progressive cant.) And Sarah Palin will put together a small edition of her family's wise old Alaska sayings, bound in red, white and blue, which fits nicely in the lapel of your blazer.
You may, or may not, be thankful that this is not going to happen. It is not going to happen because the Amerikaners are not organized enough to make it happen. Given infinite time, they will certainly get organized, which is why I say "when" rather than "if." But time is not on the Amerikaners' side. Their horse has been weakening for the last century.
The Amerikaners' problem is that they're governed by their enemies, the progressives, who have converted democratic politics into a reality show and rule through the extended civil service. The civil service is nominally responsible to the elected arms, but the latter would have to put up a terrible fight to even touch them. And progressives fight the peril of a "populist" democratic reaction with two slow, but inevitably lethal, strangulation tactics: subsidized progressive education, and Morlock voter importation.
The last quasi-successful Amerikaner reaction was the "Return to Normalcy" of the 1920s. Considering the royal ass-whupping the Amerikaners have been taking since then, "normalcy" (which, in classic Amerikaner style, is not even a word) is an awful mild description of the converse. But not even a gentle, Harding-Coolidge style restoration is a real possibility today.
The fatal flaw in the democratic mind of the Amerikaner, or "conservative," is that he believes that his country's political system basically works and is the best in the world. It has just gone slightly off the rails in the last few decades. But it can be set right with a minor corrective operation, ie, replacing a few ceremonial officials with good, clean-minded, child-bearing Amerikaners.
This belief system, which has no correlation with reality, is at the heart of "conservatism." It shows no sign of going away. The fatal allure of insisting that right-wing conservatism is really the true democratic liberalism, the other having strayed, is an irresistible anglerfish lure. (The Rev. Dabney will set you straight.)
Therefore, the Amerikaners are unlikely to organize and act effectively until their electoral position has declined to the point at which a democratic restoration is not only nontrivial, but in fact impossible. At this point, USG will have imported tens if not hundreds of millions of new Third World residents. It will be obvious that military government is the only route to any kind of American restoration. The inevitable alternative is a North America indistinguishable from the rest of the Third World.
Have you been to the Third World? The armed forces will have to act. Let's hope they can all get it together to be on the same side.
A military restoration may have some advantages over a democratic one. For one, the issue of democracy is settled at the start, or at least should be. A transition from democracy to democracy may have some nontrivial restorative effects, but come on, people. Ideally this needs to be done just once.
Any transition of sovereign responsibility to the military, however temporary, is dangerous. Guns kill people, etc. And just from an aesthetic standpoint, it is much more elegant, and seems much more final, for constitutional democracy to terminate itself democratically and constitutionally. Pass an amendment which transfers sovereignty to the new authorities, and the game is over. The security forces will certainly be enthusiastic in their obedience.
But for Amerikaners, who are already second-class citizens in their own country (it is a testament to the level of morphine in the drip that only 16% of Americans believe that an Obama administration will "favor blacks over whites" - what is he, Ward Connerly on a diet? But not that any other administration would differ...) the problem is pertinent enough that it should probably be pursued in parallel, like the Manhattan Project.
A democratic reaction is the uranium bomb. A military reaction is the plutonium bomb. Two great tastes that go great together. Today, we'll be working on the plutonium side of the building.
How do you start a military coup? Start twenty years ago. Form informal groups of reactionary cadets in the military academies. Stay in touch with one another. Ally for promotion. And do nothing else until the moment is right; then strike irresistibly and with decisive force. Rocket science it ain't. Edward Luttwak's little book is a little dated, but it may still be useful.
Obviously, I can't do anything to assist (or hinder) this process. Perhaps there are already small Mencist cells forming at West Point. But probably not. Since UR specializes in candid and historically informed discussions of government policy, though, it certainly can't hurt to discuss a subject which I'd like to think would interest most military men at the moment.
Today, we'll look at the problem of occupying and governing a foreign country. I think it would be fun to use real countries, circa now, for our case study. Let's call these countries "Great Britain" and "Iran." If Britain wished to occupy and govern Iran, let's say starting in early 2010 (it's always good to have some time to prepare), how would it go about doing so? Assume, for the purposes of the problem, that Iran cannot build a nuclear weapon by then.
Of course, the conventional wisdom is that it would be completely impossible for Great Britain to occupy and govern Iran. It is even unthinkable for the US military to occupy and govern Iran. The US can't even really handle Afghanistan, and it is much bigger and tougher than the UK. And when you look at what happened when Britain tried to occupy and govern a single city in Iraq - Basra - we see that the conventional wisdom is, as usual, exactly right.
So let's say that our occupier is not the present government of the British Isles - ie, Whitehall - but a successor regime, Young Britain. Young Britain has declared independence from the United States, withdrawn from the "international community," discarded Whitehall and its Hanoverian sham-kings, and restored the Stuart line under Joseph Wenzel, with his father Alois as Prince Regent. Otherwise, its military and financial resources are unchanged.
[snip] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-occupy-and-govern-foreign.html