Debt is the Enemy’s Most Potent Weapon

If you’ve read the horror story on my old house, or experienced something similar yourself, you have some understanding how debt can go bad. You do not even have to be a spendthrift to fall into the trap. All that is required is to follow conventional “wisdom.” Ignore all of that. Forget interest rate comparisons, or whether or not some debt is okay. Instead, live by this:

If you can’t pay cash, you can’t afford it. No exceptions.

Now, just because you cannot afford something doesn’t mean it’s not necessary. If, for example, your family was going to starve and the only option was to put the food on a credit card, do it. But understand what this means: you don’t make enough money and you must reduce your standard of living immediately. If it isn’t a crucial need, the answer is simple: don’t buy it.

Mortgages are not an exception. The recent real estate disaster should be ample warning that real property is far more speculative than most people realized. Financing it is stupid. Conventional wisdom suggests that you shouldn’t piss money away on rent, but this fails to take into account the other disadvantages of buying a home on credit.

If your home goes underwater, you cannot move out of it. This means you may be stuck in neighborhood that is going downhill. You may be unable to move to pursue more lucrative job opportunities in other markets. Even if you are above water, moving is now far more difficult because the home must be sold first and the financing must be dealt with. As in my circumstances, a financed home can also by screwed by insurance providers, because the lender requires you to purchase that insurance, no matter what it costs.

A home that you own outright is far less of a burden. Insurance is optional. Renting it out is usually profitable even in the worst of circumstances. Selling it is easier, and you have no set number you must reach in order to make a deal.

Car loans are no exception. People will excuse their extravagance by claiming that older cars require expensive repairs. This is the rationalization hamster spinning in overtime to justify an emotional decision in favor of the new car.

I owned a 2002 Ford Explorer I bought in 2011 for $4500. It was a hunk of junk with nearly 200,000 miles on it. The tailgate was broken, the electrical system was a disaster and the motor was temperamental. In the worst year, expense wise, I paid about $1000 in repair bills. Sounds like a lot? Consider the average new car is in the $30,000 range and requires a payment of over $550 per month for 72 months at around 5% interest.  In one year, you would have paid for the beater-mobile and its repair bills. You’d still have 5 more years of payments to go, too. And then, at the end of it, you’re still going to start paying repair bills anyway. When the Explorer became too obnoxious, I got rid of it for about what I paid for it. Crappy cars have minimal depreciation, because even their scrap value isn’t far off from what you paid for it.

That doesn’t mean you must drive a jalopy, mind you. If you have $30,000 in cash and you want that shiny new car, by all means, treat yourself to the luxury. You can afford it. Same thing with that modern home and its granite countertops. If you have the cash, go for it if you think it makes sense.

After driving the jalopy Explorer around for a few years, I financed a newer truck. This was a mistake. It wasn’t long before I regretted it. The tax bill from the deed-in-lieu on my rental property meant it had to go. At least I had put money down and bought a basic model, so escaping the loan wasn’t terribly difficult, but that was a matter of good fortune, nothing more. I am negotiating a deal on a vehicle I will own outright, should we reach terms. It is a modest 2011 with 70,000 miles on it. But it will be mine, and not the bank’s property. I will have some cash leftover to handle my tax bill.

What happens if you cannot afford a jalopy in cash? The answer to that is you cannot afford a car. When I was in my early 20s, I rode a bicycle 10 miles to work every morning. No insurance, gas, car payment or any of that. In America, we are accustomed to thinking of cars as a need when they are really a luxury item.

Credit cards and consumer good financing are the worst. I had a neighbor who financed most of his furniture, then financed his front yard. Then you have those rent-a-centers and, to top it all off, rent-to-own car rims. You should get a credit card or two for credit-building purposes, but not to obtain debt. Oddly enough, insurance companies and some HR departments use credit scores to evaluate you in ways that have nothing to do with debt (this should be illegal, but it isn’t, presently). So satisfy this by getting a few credit cards and never carrying a balance on them.

One of the few good decisions I ever made regarding debt was never running up balances on credit cards. I keep them for emergencies only.

My readers might ask: what if I’m already in debt? Get out, quickly. Sell high-dollar items that you don’t need. Trade down for a lower-end vehicle. Pay dispensable income toward the debt instead of vacations or new consumer goods you don’t need. Most people will find, as I did, that most debt can be dispensed with rapidly if you have self-discipline and live in a spartan fashion.

When bribing my old tenant to leave the property, she left dozens of bags full of consumer goods that were utterly worthless. Little signs that said something to the effect of “this is a happy home” painted on a piece of particle board by some factory worker in China. You see these things for $10 at Target. They aren’t worth $0.25 in a garage sale.  There were pieces of worthless furniture, falling apart even thought they were only a few years old. Bags of full of clothes that she probably only wore once or twice were everywhere.

For her, they weren’t worth the effort to move them, yet if you tallied up the retail price of the items, there were thousands of dollars in knickknacks. What if you could spend that money on paying debt down, or creating savings and investments?

Dispensing with consumer crap feels good. All of that stuff you have carries a psychological weight. You have to store it, find places for it, deal with it when you move. That is in the back of your subconscious whenever you contemplate moving for that lucrative job, or leaving for the weekend and locking your door. Your possessions wind up owning you.

The modern economy is in terrible shape. If you are younger, as I am, you need to be lean, mean and prepared to follow the winds of the economy immediately when opportunity presents itself. You will fail, otherwise, unless you are well-connected to the ruling class.

And that ruling class wants you to fail. They want to destroy you. Debt is their weapon. Serfs were tied to the land, forced to work for their masters and give up the fruits of their harvests. They were in bondage. If you have debt, you are also in bondage. You are also a serf. The only difference is that you consented to become a serf. This is intentional. They are resurrecting serfdom and using debt to do it. At some point this may become involuntary, but for now it is still an opt-in process. Don’t turn on the TV and become enamored with beautiful cars. HGTV is bullshit; you don’t need granite countertops and hand-scraped wood floors. Certainly, you don’t need 5000 square feet of McMansion for a family of three. If you buy these things with debt, by assured that your descendants will till the land as slaves.

Government is in debt. Companies are in debt. Individuals are in debt and the lunacy has gone so far that our currency is, essentially, debt-money.

In the future, I have no doubt that modern America will be held up as a nation of fools, selling themselves voluntarily into the chains offered to enslave them.

What Can We Do?

Mark, a friend of mine, has asked me on occasion what we can do to support Western civilization, how we can defend it from its ideological enemies. For the longest time, I could not answer him. Today, the solution finally hit me.

If you remember the ruckus where Sarah Hoyt and Ace disagreed vehemently on the proper course of action with regards to the treacherous Republican party, you will also remember Ace’s proposed solution. Still, it seemed almost knee-jerk, even if I agreed strongly with it.

The logic is simple. When a Progressive proposes something loony, like a $15 minimum wage,  do not counter with a rational argument against it, for that is rudely dismissed by the Left as racist, sexist, classist or what have you. Instead, ask them why it should not be $50 an hour, or $100 an hour. Do this seriously, not sarcastically. Masquerade as one of them and frame it in their emotional style. What, do you want the poor to starve? Is it fair that they do not get paid the same? Why should a lawyer drive around in his Rolls while the single mother of color has to work two jobs?

Ace’s intent is to accelerate the inevitable economic reckoning that we all know is coming. A collapse is inevitable by this point, but we wish to quicken its arrival, so we can shorten the period that follows and minimize the damage it causes.

It occurred to me today that there is another, perhaps more important reason for doing this. The Achilles heel of ideological subversion is a tendency to subvert itself once its enemies have been consumed. We’ve all seen it. It is almost axiomatic, like a scene from the Lost in Space movie remake: the Left eat their wounded. They are prone to ideological cannibalism. The way forward is clear: pretend defeat and watch our enemies destroy themselves.

By letting them think the Evil Right Wing Racists have been defeated, the Left will busy themselves with ideological purity. Then the Insufficiently Left will become the new class enemies. The Bourgeois give way to the Petty Bourgeois, and thence to the Kulaks. Ideological subversion never ends. Those who wish the minimum wage to be $20 will be denounced as racist and hateful because they do not support a $500 minimum wage. Bakeries which do not provide discounts on cakes for gays will be evil capitalist oppressors. The alliance of Radical Islam and Militant Leftism will fall apart. Those who do not support a tax on white skin will be seen as racist. Questioning slavery reparation payments will be seen as morally equivalent to the KKK. Increasingly radicalized components of the Left will subvert their less-insane counterparts, just as they have done to us.

In many ways, #GamerGate is evidence that this tactic can work. Most of #GamerGate’s supporters are actually relatively Left leaning. But they are the Insufficiently Left, and have now been attacked by their own erstwhile compatriots. We want to encourage this further, to fracture the Left by denying them the Evil Right Wing Boogeyman to unify against. Our people can easily wear the uniforms of the enemy, as it were, and encourage more fracturing by pretending to be the most ardent Social Justice Warriors, policing for ideological purity.

I mean it. Start an account on Social Media masquerading as a Progressive. Feign acceptance of the most extreme brands of Leftism. Establish a persona and police the SJWs for instances of racism, sexism, etc. It will not be difficult to find, since many of them actually are closet racists and misogynists. Frame your arguments emotionally. Stir the pot and watch them consume themselves. Invade their “safe spaces” and encourage their self-destruction. Wear the uniform of the enemy wherever you find him, and then embarrass him.

We must feign defeat. Through that, we will achieve victory.

It also makes me wonder if the Communists were truly defeated in the 80s and early 90s. Is it possible they have done to us what I now propose to do to them?

Food for thought.

Join the Troll Army Today. Find the enemy and embarrass him. Let none escape the wrath of their own kind.

The Cleansing Fire of History

Armchair historians are wont to romanticize the past, at times. There is a temptation to think it would have been better to live in this era, or that one. On that note, one of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotations is this one:

“Then we must go higher. We must go to him whose office it is to put down tyrants and give life to dying kingdoms. We must call on the Emperor.”

“There is no Emperor.”

“No Emperor…” began Merlin…. He sat still for some minutes wrestling with a world which he had never envisaged.

It captures a defining trait of Western Civilization: its focus on change. When you study Chinese history, you see a remarkably static system. Ruling dynasties come and go. Barbarians invade from time-to-time, but the bureaucracy conquers them all in time. Eventually, it conquered the very notion of a throne entirely. Communist China was always Chinese first, and Communist second, something that fractured its relationship with other Communist states.

Ancient Egypt, Sumeria (and its successors, Akkadia, Babylonia, Assyria, Chaldea…) were similar in this regard. For three thousand years, Egypt changed but little. India, likewise, possesses a level of appreciation for the static, sometimes fracturing, sometimes unifying, but always India.

The West is different than all of them in this respect, and it is both the source of Western Civilization’s strength and its great weakness. Its history is full of moments like the one C.S. Lewis describes in the mind of Merlin: a shock that what seemed static, was not.

Imagine residing in Constantinople in 1204, with the Crusaders camped outside, throwing their taunts at the Imperial defenders. Could any of those residents truly imagine that soon their city would burn? For nearly 1000 years, it had been the capital of the Roman Empire, inviolate, wealthy beyond avarice, the Queen of Cities ruling over nations.

The next day the survivors must have felt like Merlin did, asking what had become of their Emperor and his Empire, as they trudged into the distance, chained and left to bondage.

This day is coming for America. It is coming soon. The cleansing fire that sweeps old growth forests, and makes way for the new, is on its way. Historians, amateur and otherwise, can sense the tide of history moving. The slash-burn of the West had begun. As Rome fell, as Byzantium vanished, as the British Empire crumbled, so now comes our turn.

But don’t despair. Something new will rise from the remains. That is what defines the West. That is what has always defined it. New growth replaces the old. Reinvention and recycling have been our ways since at least the quasi-mythical times of Agamemnon and his Trojan War. It is both sad and hopeful, a source for maudlin and thing to celebrate.

Soon, the time will come when they will call for the Feds, and no one will answer. Someone will wonder where they have gone and why they have left. Like Merlin, they will wrestle with a world they did not envisage.

The Changing Face of Evil

Today’s post is short but not sweet. Vox comments on an abomination of the worst order: the murder of infants. No, this is not an anti-abortion post, although most of my readers understand that I do not approve of that practice.

No, this is “ethical experts” declaring that smothering a newborn infant is not only justifiable, but a potential good to society. Where abortion covers thorny moral territory, where there are cases it might even be defended as a lesser evil (I do not defend it as such, but I can understand the argument), the deliberate murder of infants has no possible justification. The debatable moral Rubicon has been crossed well before that point. This is the worst sort of evil conceivable. It is a violation of what makes us human and even the mere thought of it is enough to produce physical revulsion.

This is my son, Jacob. He is less than 6 months old. If someone harmed him, using justification of this nature… well, let us say that I am well armed.

What sort of person can look at a child and think “killing him would be fine, ethically.” The changing face of evil has emerged from the shadows. It walks openly among us.

Total Ideological Warfare

There was a historical story I came across when I was young, and it stuck with me. In it Jamukha, a sworn compatriot of Genghis Khan, rebelled against his master. For a time, the war went badly for Genghis Khan, for his former blood brother was an astute tactician and won many battles. Genghis proved to be the better strategist, however, and in the manner of Fabius Maximus against Hannibal, outlasted his enemy. When Jamukha was captured, betrayed by his own followers, Genghis Khan proved merciful. The Mongol lord offered to renew the blood bond between them and forget all that had transpired. Jamukha wanted no part of this and asked to be executed in bloodless manner, as befitted his station. Genghis Khan granted the request and had him rolled in carpet and trampled to death.

The movie Gladiator explores the concept further:

Quintus: People should know when they are conquered.
Maximus: Would you, Quintus? Would I?

Peculiar notions of honor surround war. Joseph E. Johnston surrendered to William T. Sherman in the Civil War. For the rest of his life, Johnston remained the closest of friends with Sherman, who had been thought of as brutal and cruel to the South. The friendship was so great that Johnston, himself an ancient man by this time, insisted on being a pallbearer at Sherman’s funeral, a thing contributing to his own death shortly thereafter.

Both the surrender of a tenacious opponent and the valiant struggle to the end of hopeless defenders are honored in the annals of military history. We admire the former for knowing when to quit and fighting honorably. We admire the latter for courage and conviction. Jamukha could have lied to Genghis, feigned submission, then moved against him again. But he would not, preferring to die on his own terms.

Honor of this sort began to die in the modern age. Warfare lost its personal component as the ranges grew greater. With the advent of the Total War doctrine, an entire state would mobilize in order to pursue the war. While devastating wars were nothing new, the industrialization of the business made it impersonal. Nothing was off limits. Propaganda made its appearance, which was basically the industrialization of ideology. Wars were fought for complete psychological, economic, and military dominance on a level unparalleled in history.

To say the World Wars were devastating affairs is a cosmic understatement. But the unwitting casualty of this affair was the extinction of the honorable opponent. A few still existed in World War II. Erwin Rommel was well-regarded as a good man and a cunning leader. Yamamoto was similarly regarded as a naval leader. But they were aberrations, throwbacks to an earlier age. Total War meant that you had to demonize your opponent in the press, propaganda meant that the enemy must be regarded as evil and devoid of all virtue. View propaganda posters on all sides of the conflict and you will see the same thing: the enemy was nearly demonic.

Total War also produced an unwillingness to pursue such violence in the future. With the advent of atomic weapons the possibility existed to not only defeat and subjugate your enemy, but to annihilate the Earth along with it. Even the lunatics running the Communist world did not want that.

Propaganda, however, continued its evolution. Indeed, it soon supplanted violence entirely as the primary means of waging war. Vox wrote a screed on the subject here. Propaganda is Total War on the moral and psychological levels, and it requires a complete dismissal of the honorable systems that tacitly governed war previously. To the modern Social Justice Warrior, the enemy cannot possess honor because he is the enemy. Francis commented further on how the radical progressive agenda (using gays as a mask) has become a complete and total annihilation of Christian belief systems. This is Total Ideological War, and it has become more destructive to the West than any number of Japanese bombs or Nazi warplanes. It has evolved from its primitive beginnings in the 20th century to embrace all forms of media. You are bombarded with it in everything from TV commercials to ads on your smartphone.

This commercial is modern Feminist propaganda, wherein a crying bald man calls his Empowered Female Agent ™ for help. Think on how many similar commercials you’ve seen.

Once you have dehumanized your enemy, stripped him of honor, you can justify any action toward him, including complete ideological annihilation. You have no reason to accept a negotiated truce, nor obey one should you decide to. When the media asks why the Right doesn’t support an increase in background check activity for firearms it is because of this. They know, deep down, that the truce will not be obeyed by the Left. Progressives will take that strong point, then demand the surrender of the next thing. If the Right thought the Left had honor, and that an agreement would be upheld, they might be willing to find compromise.

Indeed, compromise might even be possible on the Gay marriage issue, if the Left were interested in a negotiated settlement. Naturally, they are not. They are practicing Total Ideological Warfare. Understand this: they will not stop until Christianity has been eradicated. They will not rest until men are slaves or do not even exist. There will be no peace until Whites are extinct or second-class citizens. War will not end until Western civilization has not only been destroyed, but its entire history has been burned and forgotten, until it has been erased from memory. Don’t believe me? Look up #KillAllMen on Tumblr. Even the male Social Justice Warriors are in on this:

This is your enemy. If he’s willing to off himself in an effort to win the war, what do you think he will do to you? This is the ideological equivalent of a suicide bomber.

Folks, you are facing a war of annihilation. For now, it has restricted itself to the ideological level. But this is only because, for the moment, our side still holds enough physical weaponry to make the issue contentious for them. Mark my words, the moment they believe they have physical supremacy, they will annihilate you. Not only you, but everything even tangentially related to you. Your religion will be erased, your books burned, your history lost, your bodies killed, and your genes wiped out.

This is Total Ideological War. Like civilian installations were bombed in World War II, like mass murder across the globe in that war, there is no neutrality, no sideline and no honorable surrender. Choose a side and defend yourself accordingly.

Suicidal Pilots, Obama, and the Stigma of Being Wrong

In the course of my daily affairs, I am wont to get into debates on various intellectual, political and religious matters. Over many years of this sort of thing, it has become clear to me that admitting error is increasingly seen as an admission of weakness. Indeed, if you say the words “I was wrong” it is entirely likely that those you debate with will hang the error over your head at every opportunity. When you discuss another matter, they will bring up that time you admitted you were wrong in an effort to discredit your opinion. If someone else posts on the original topic, they will remind the newcomer that once upon a time, someone else was wrong (therefore they must be right). Leftists are prone to fits of logic chopping just to convince themselves that they are never in error. In one example, I provided the dictionary definition of a word, and still the Leftist insisted that my definition was wrong.

I frequent the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. Indeed, I have lurked there for many years. And in that venue there is D.J. Allyn, who is a liberal. To be fair to Deej, he is of the relatively moderate variety. His opinions are less egregious than those of his more radical compatriots and, on rare occasion, I have even found myself in agreement with him. Yet recently we found ourselves as debate opponents again, on the matter of the Germanwings pilot who crashed his airliner. Except this time, I was an unwilling participant. I desired a friendly discussion, some speculative banter (for it was too early to know with any certainty what had happened) not the kerfuffle followed.

Shortly after the plane crashed hit the media, I opened a thread with the following sentence: “$10 says the pilot of the Germanwings aircraft was a Muzzie.”

There was some banter, as the Rotties are a rowdy bunch. None of them were willing to take the wager, for the odds of airline mass murder being related to Muslim activity was far too great for their taste. Deej, however, chimed in claiming that airline suicides are rarely due to Muslim activity and that my wager was entirely unjustified. Not only was I wrong, he said, but I should never have speculated on the matter in the first place. To keep a long story short, there was a lot of back and forth in which Deej repeatedly claimed that speculation on the issue was premature, damaging and unjustified. Furthermore, he claimed, I and other Rotties seemed to have a special desire for the pilot to be Muslim. I need not remind my readers that I have no desire to see Muslim terrorism in any form, much less related to the airline industry. The claim was disingenuous, and yet he continually repeated it, over and over. He wrote several screeds nearly as lengthy as this post on a $10 wager.

Activity like this is frequent on the political Left, and even makes itself known often enough on the Right. A “normal” individual, for whatever utility that word has these days, would have simply taken the $10 wager if he disagreed with my speculation, much like how individuals will exchange friendly beer wagers before a major sporting event. If, after the fat lady sung, the pilot had been a Muslim convert, I would have taken my winnings at the bar and probably bought the next round as a peace offering, for the next time it could be me paying up. And if, as seems to be the case here (but is yet unconfirmed), I was in the wrong, I would have happily bought a few beers for the victor and cleared my wager.

After it was all said and done, Deej hit on the topic again, calling me out by name, when another Rottie speculated likewise. He could not let the matter go. Even supposing the debate were serious business, and being wrong in a private forum carried some great negative consequence, it should still have behooved him to be magnanimous to the defeated, to be a sporting fellow as it were. Instead, without any confirmation yet that he was even correct, he continually attempted to grind my nose in it.

Now, normally I would have chalked it up to another liberal doing his liberal thing on the internet. But, on the very same day, another individual acted similarly in a different private forum. In fact, this individual, (who I will keep anonymous for now — we will call him John), claimed that to take a stand on any matter was a violation of proper skepticism. That nothing is certainly true, one should be skeptical of everything, and one must always leave margin for error. He feared being wrong so terribly that he defined covering your ass more completely than any politician I have ever heard of. He was confused that I had no fear of being wrong, and would frequently take stands on various matters and openly ask to be proven wrong.

My friend who runs the Cult State blog was as confused about this as I was, as John is a mutual acquaintance of ours. Like me, he is a programmer by day. If you know anything about programming, you know that it is a business fraught with error. You will be wrong multiple times every single day. In fact, this is how you work your way through typical programming problems. Write code, test code, fix errors, go back to step one. Every programmer worth his salt will ask for a test environment before he even begins work. Being wrong is an educational process. Usually bad software is written by individuals who cannot admit error, who cover their asses instead of saying “nope, I was wrong there. I’ll fix it and send you an updated version.” Yet management often tells us programmers not to admit the error, because somehow it makes them look bad. We both tried to explain this to John, but he thought we were lunatics for openly taking stands and inviting the possibility of error.

My friend said it thusly:

I’d hate to see John on Github.

Like a thousand comments about how he wanted to code a line but was unsure because he was afraid it might have been wrong… and not a single committed line.

You wouldn’t survive a day in open source, John.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized this has infected every facet of American society. Obama and Hillary, after the Benghazi affair, could have admitted error. They could have said “we didn’t realize the threat was as serious as it was. We’re sorry, we just didn’t see it coming.” Once upon a time in American history, this would have been accepted. The euphemism “shit happens” applies to leadership more than most fields. But they understand, like Deej and John do, that to admit error today is to invite attack from their own erstwhile allies. Furthermore, the attack will be merciless, repeated endlessly. There will be no shaking of hands, no “good game” at the end of the affair. Instead, it will continue forever. As Francis over at Liberty’s Torch tells us, even surrendering, groveling and apologizing is insufficient to placate them. They desire nothing less than unconditional surrender in all things. Negotiated truce is impossible. Once weakness, which they see as coextensive with error, has been admitted, it is eternal.

Yet, as humans, they categorically must be wrong at times. Humans are imperfect beings. Imperfect beings make mistakes. QED. This means that what they are really doing is celebrating the art of lying. No, they are not merely lying because they have weighed the options in their minds and decided that lying is the lesser evil, a choice every human has made at some point in his life. They are elevating lying to be a good. They are not sinning, and repenting of the sin, they are sinning and proudly declaring “I have sinned, therefore I am good, I am stronger and better because of my sin.” And they do this with an angle of proving their own superiority, not to you and I, dear reader, for we know they lie and they know that we know of their lies, but rather they do this to prove it to themselves, so that they may feel good about themselves. This is the terrible harvest the worship of Self Esteem has brought us.

If the Germanwings pilot turns out to be an Atheist or an Evangelical Christian or some other thing, I will go back to my thread and offer beers to anyone who took my wager and say “my speculation was wrong.” If Deej turns out to be wrong, I expect he will be silent, or try to spin it somehow that he is still right (he wasn’t a “real” Muslim, or some such). Getting a liberal, even of the moderate camp, to say the words “I was wrong” is as monumental a task as building the Great Pyramids.

Meanwhile, I must go back to coding Javascript. I expect I will say “I was wrong” at least two or three times today. And that’s if I’m lucky.

Nations, States, and the Disunited States

Bear with me on this one, in order to get to the point, some definitions are required along the way. Also, this touches on a lot of racial subjects. It is not for the faint of heart. If you know me, you understand I mean no harm by this. I speak plainly, even where the truth is unpleasant to some, or even myself.

Today it is common to conflate the words “nation” and “state” with one another. Some will say that America is a nation, others will refer to it as a state. Still another group, often the slightly more educated, will refer to it as a nation-state. Of the three terms, the only one which is currently applicable is state, and even then I suspect it will not remain as such for long.

To understand the difference, we must go back to the Latin root for nation, natio, which means “birth.” In this, a nation is understood as your birth people; the culture, race and society into which you were born and raised. Nation, then, is more ethnic than not, but yet not quite the same thing. State, on the other hand, is derived from the Latin word status, which should be commonly understood since the original meaning is extant in modern English. It commonly referred to the status of land ownership. It is also closely related with a Germanic word stadt, the meanings of which became intertwined in English, with its Germanic and Norman French parentage. In Germanic tongues, it meant specifically an estate or a land holding (also called a steading). In other words, a state is merely whatever entity holds the land and its contents, human or otherwise.

Now, a nation-state is where the two are coextensive. It is where a state is composed mostly or entirely of a single nation or ethnicity/culture. Consider Greece, which is mostly full of Greeks. This is a nation-state. Spain, on the other hand, is not. In Spain, the Catalans form a separate nation within the Spanish state. The Catalans seem to have no great desire to join the Spanish nation, and even their status as part of the Spanish state is contentious.

A State which is not a nation-state is, effectively, an empire or a hegemony. There are numerous examples of such in history, where one people rule another, or two or more peoples form a confederation out of common interest. We refer to ancient Western culture as “Greco-Roman” for the reason that, though the Romans were ascendant militarily, Greek culture and architecture predominated alongside of it. It was a synthesis of two nations, that of the ancient Latins with the ancient Greeks, ruling over conquered nations.

Nations can sometimes merge or be subsumed. The Gauls were conquered by Rome and eventually adopted the habits, language, and manners of Romans. They joined the Roman nation. In the United States, the original colonies were not merely English, as is commonly understood, but were a synthesis of English, Dutch, German, French and even Scottish nationals. They came together, adopting English as the common tongue (though the Plattdeutsch-speaking Amish are a throwback to this period), and created a new nation from the combination. Nations can also lose identity and split apart, which is the subject of this article. So nations are not static affairs any more than states are.

Nations are not strictly ethnic, however. There are examples of nations where multiple ethnicities regard themselves as the same nation. Ethiopia was formed from a synthesis of Black Africans with early, pre-Moslem Arab settlers, and their language is a Semitic one. There are also examples where a people who are ethnically the same differ on cultural or religious matters and regard themselves as separate. A case of the latter is the extreme division between Croatians, Serbians and Bosnians, who are otherwise ethnically identical and speak more or less the same language. That being said, ethnicity tends to relate to nationality even if the two are not precisely the same.

The United States of America isn’t united. It is no longer even a collection of states. Originally, the Articles of Confederation were closer to an alliance than a Federal Government. Even the with the adoption of the Constitution, the states bordered on near-independence, especially by the standards of the day in which European nations were strongly centralized. Today, there is no doubt that the Federal Government reigns supreme, the matter having been definitively settled in 1865.

Yet even as the state became more unified, the nation became less so. America today is comprised of several nations, some of which, like the Catalans in Spain, are hostile to sharing power with individuals of other nations. A common example of this can be seen in the Michael Brown affair, in which White policemen are seen as enemies of the Black nation. Black police officers are often seen as traitors to their own people. White officers involved in an incident with a Black suspect are regarded as immediately guilty. Black identity supersedes any American identity. Many Hispanics retain national identity as well, though some of them have also eschewed it. Muslims tend to retain their Arab, Turkish or Iranian nationality.

This is not a new phenomenon in American history. African Slaves always formed a separate nation which was originally separate and distinct, but possessed no real power. It became the basis of Black national identity. This need not have ended badly, however. Many White Americans possess Native American ancestry of varying degree. I certainly do, though it is not that high (I think my grandmother was 1/4 Cherokee). But my identity is not rooted in this. I am American, regardless of my contributing genes. That is my nation. It could have become this way with those of African extraction, also. Indeed, to be fair, it did with many, but not a majority.

Blacks did not join in great numbers because, for a long time, the stigma of slavery and Jim Crow explicitly prevented this. The end of slavery and Jim Crow should have ended the division, but Lyndon Johnson and his Great Society actually wound up exacerbating it. If melting had happened in the regular course of human affairs, in a century or two, most Americans would have some African ancestry in their personal woodpile. It would be a thing we might discuss over dinner, and that would be the end of the matter, because we would have been one nation and genetic percentages would be relatively unimportant. But something happened which broke the “melting pot” model which had worked since English, Dutch, French and German settlers decided to merge together: Identity Politics.

You can trace that to the Irish immigration of the 1850s and 1860s. The potato famine and the resulting economic damage to Ireland produced mass immigration to America. Prior to this, immigration tended to be rather random, comprising of individuals from random European countries, of which Ireland was merely one of many. If Britain tended to predominate as a source, it was not by much and was merely an accident of language.

But Irish immigration after the famine was a massive wave, so massive, in fact, that Irish immigrants formed a major part of the Union army in the Civil War. Wealthy magnates and politicians encouraged this, wishing to capitalize on cheap Irish labor (sounds familiar, right?). So Irish people did not immediately assimilate into the American nation as the random immigrants had. Instead, they created the first ghettos outside of slave barracks, communities comprised of a separate nation. This was encouraged by political figures who made the Irish out to be some kind of boogeyman.

Oh, the Irish eventually melted in anyway, but it was a long and difficult process for America and for the immigrants, one which left permanent marks on the culture (the term “paddy wagons” should give one an idea). Even today, those with Irish ancestry tend to have an usual amount of pride in this fact, far more so than those with English or German ancestry. If this phenomenon had ended with the Irish, it would have been an anomaly in American history and things would have soon returned to normal.

But it didn’t. This pattern of encouraging separate nations, then taking advantage of them, continued. Most American nationals would have been horrified at this, but in those days, America was still largely rural, and the experience wasn’t really real for them. It is no coincidence that Socialism and all its ills was introduced to America during this time. Creating class warfare was a great way to separate people and keep them separate. What was done to the Irish over a century ago is repeated today with Blacks, Hispanics and others. This should also demolish the notion that only “people of color” (as SocJus calls them) have suffered ills and discrimination in American history. The Irish really had a rough time of it, right up until the early 20th century.

On the heels of the Irish came the Italians. Like the Irish, they brought separate communities with them. Also like the Irish, they brought their own national brand of crime to America, too. Where the Irish criminals were generally disorderly, the Italian criminals were refined and “organized” but no less lethal for this. Like the Irish, their assimilation was anomalous and left permanent marks on the culture. If folks of Irish descent are unusually proud of this, the Italian folk are more so. They are right to be proud, for it was not easy for them.

In fact, the shared Catholic religion of the Irish and the Italians was, at first, looked on with suspicion by the largely Protestant populace of America. They worried that the Pope would soon be master of America. And, in those days, Protestant-Catholic violence was still relatively common in Europe (the last vestiges of which were represented, predictably, in Ireland). So they were not entirely unjustified in their worry.

Fortunately, the contribution of the Irish and Italians to America was largely positive and the feared religious violence never got off the ground. Their culture was still rooted in Western tradition and they were close enough that, though the numbers and speed of immigration made assimilation difficult, it remained within the realm of possibility. Credit must be given to them, in fact, for having defied the expectations of their political masters and largely breaking free of them. Had this sort of thing stopped here, the American nation would have survived it. Anecdotal evidence of this can be seen in the fact that most of my family recipes are Italian dishes despite us having (as far as I know), no Italian ancestry whatsoever. They became us, and we became them.

But the model of immigration coming in waves, the endless source for cheap labor, continued apace. Each one was more difficult and more distant than the last. The Italians were followed by the Chinese. Today it is Mexicans and Somalis. The cultural distance and relative size of each bloc of immigrants determines how fast they can become part of the American nation, or if they can at all. The Chinese at least come from a country with a long and proud history of civilization, and a respect for tradition, traits it shared with nascent American culture. The Somali immigrant, on the other hand, has neither.

Progressives actively discourage assimilation into the American nation, instead preaching a doctrine of diversity. What they fail to understand is that a state which is not a nation-state most resort to peacekeeping measures within its own borders. In other words, America had to become Imperial in scope just to keep the peace. Policemen started to look an awful lot like an occupying army even if, as KodeTen pointed out, they aren’t there yet. The self-appointed PC-police, on the other hand, crossed that Rubicon a long time ago.  They are the new Gestapo, except that they resort to character assassination instead of the more literal variety.

Empires often fail because the costs of occupying what is, essentially, hostile territory becomes greater than the benefits of controlling that same territory. There are portions of Detroit where cops will not go because the hostility is so great. Parts of America have been abandoned entirely due to cost. Collapse is coming.

Czechoslovakia had to split into two countries, although they at least managed to do this peacefully, despite there being relatively small differences between the two nations. In America, there is a Black nation, a Mexican nation, arguably a Puerto Rican nation and even the White European nation is fracturing into Progressive and Conservative varieties. Muslims are definitely in their own category. There is little in common between a White hipster and his rural counterpart any longer. Even the language is demonstrably different, if still mutually intelligible. Calling them all American, that is to say calling them all functionally the same is a stretch of the highest order. They often do not share religion, culture, language, race or values with one another.

These nations are often hostile to one another in varying degrees and they each understandably don’t like being told what to do by others. There is suspicion, often justified, that a Black politician will take pork from Whites (indeed, that’s why they are often elected in the first place – bring home the bacon), or vice versa, for certainly plenty of Whites do this too, extracting cheap labor from Mexican nationals while simultaneously claiming to be worried about stopping illegal immigration in order to placate Conservative Whites, a contradiction pervasive in the Republican party. Each nation looks out for its own except the White Progressives, who seem to be hellbent on national suicide instead.

Washington D.C. increasingly micromanages a hostile populace, most of which hate it actively, because it is not their nation in charge. Rural White Conservatives are not ruled by others of their nation. Mexicans are not ruled by other Mexicans, despite the fact that Mexico shows us the mixed results of that particular idea. Progressives bemoan rural Conservatives achieving office. Blacks are not ruled by other Blacks, except in shitholes like Detroit. Ironically, despite how terrible inner-city Detroit is, you hear hip-hop songs singing its praises because at least, in the minds of Black nationals, it is theirs. There is something to be said for that.

Now, don’t misunderstand me, please. Not all Blacks are Black nationals. Some are American nationals who happen to be Black (remember that nationality is not the same as ethnicity, even if there is some relation). Even some Progressives, despite all that has happened, remain fundamentally American at some level. The problem, however, is that the trend is increasingly to disassociate from American nationality and join the smaller nations. Indeed, the notion of being American is often seen as jingoistic. The idea of America has become too big, too thinly spread. Roman identity fractured into modern Europe. What will American identity fracture into?

This shows us the trajectory of America into a disunited people. Breakup of the state must soon follow, for empires have shorter lives than nation-states. France has been France for nearly 1,500 years (and China has been China for all of recorded history). The French Empire, on the other hand, was measured in decades.

I would like to hope that national divorce could be accomplished peacefully, like Czechoslovakia, but I doubt it. Like it or not, folks, war is coming. I would like to hope that an American nation could survive the wreckage, somewhere,  but even that is not clear.

Voltaire once said this of the old Holy Roman Empire:

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

I say that The United States of America is neither united, nor composed of states, nor is American. The Holy Roman Empire did not outlive Voltaire by much. I doubt the American one will outlive me at all.