The Abuse of War

From July 2022, originally published on the American Sun in respond to nonsense demands that I ask people to involve themselves in the Ukraine war. The article is now on the American Sun Substack at

BAP on the Abuse of War

but I’m putting it on my own as well to put all my older articles together.

European mercs enjoying themselves in Congo. That would be a good war…

Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause.

War and courage have done more great things than charity. Not your sympathy, but your bravery hath hitherto saved the victims.

“What is good?” ye ask. To be brave is good. Let the little girls say: “To be good is what is pretty, and at the same time touching.”…

…Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not with us, my brethren: here there are states.

A state? What is that? Well! open now your ears unto me, for now will I say unto you my word concerning the death of peoples.

A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.”

It is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.

Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.

Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs…

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

This week a “veteran” foreign volunteer for the Ukraine conflict returned to the United States from his vacation and was promptly beaten up by an African-American gentleman on the technofuturist state-of-the-art New York City subways. I can think of no better illustration of the meaning of the liberal world order and the NATO-sphere than this. It’s a slapstick reminder of the condition I described in my book with the term “Iron Prison,” where all overtly available outings for action are in fact meaningless frenetic motion and vacuum behavior in a playpen- sandbox thoroughly delimited and owned by other, hidden hands. It’s enough to make a normal boy become gay. The Ukraine crisis has allowed many bad, stupid ideas to return: much bad and even malicious that had been forgotten for a while is now pushed by war propagandists. I’m writing this article to warn against their lies: although I don’t like to talk about my book, they want to distort it for their own purposes, and to push their fake wars.

I am blamed lately for not supporting a supposedly vitalistic and exciting war in Ukraine and not encouraging my “followers” to volunteer for it. It isn’t just anonymous posters who attack on this line. Real-name journalists with big audience and preftige positions write tweets and thinkpieces disappointed that a supposed believer in “might is right” and “war is the hygiene of the world” didn’t join this social media hysteria. “Bronze Age Pervert and those like him write about manliness, why aren’t they celebrating the obvious not-Hollywood-greenscreen- groomed manliness of Zelensky?” Mary Harrington in Unherd gives maybe the friendliest and fairest criticism of my reluctance to tell friends to join the Ukraine brigades; but even she seems to accept the false premises that this is a real war, that it represents real adventure, that the main antagonist in my book is “modern comfort,” or that Hemingway is a “real man.”

Most of those who attack my “pacifism” are more hostile and lowbrow. They ask, Why are we not defending Aryan Ukraine with its sunny wheat fields against the “Asiatic orc hordes” of Russia? After all, Ukraine even has a yellow and blue flag like sister Aryan nation Sweden. It is “Whyte” whereas Russia is definitely “not Whyte, not Western.” Strangely enough such views, formerly to be found only on white nationalist forums, are repeated also by some EU and NATO officials. I suppose even they realize the “European Common Market” isn’t motivation enough for young men in Europe to get themselves blown up by Russian artillery. But—since we believe in “might makes right” and “war is virtue,” why haven’t “Bronze Age Mindset followers” joined in on this excitement? They’ve been put to shame by leftists who signed up to Do Something about the injustice, proving they are still a reservoir of manliness and initiative. Why at least don’t we cheerlead now for NATO, which can be the “making of Europe,” on a supposedly higher and more virtuous foundation? I know these arguments aren’t made in good faith. Even if I held the views such people claim I do, why, from their point of view, would I tell people to join the Ukrainian side? If I believed war no matter the cause or circumstance was “revitalizing,” why aren’t they blaming me also for abstaining from encouraging friends to join the Russian side?

Knowing these arguments are made in bad faith, I still wanted to write this warning, not just to friends but to many others who are interested in these matters—the nature of war in the modern world, the failures of states and peoples, and what my message regarding these things actually was in my book. I wanted to be as clear as possible so as to prevent what I believe are some genuinely malevolent people from bringing harm to naive but idealistic men who are looking for a way out of this suffocating and aged matriarchy.

RETURN OF THE NEOCON THEOLOGY OF WAR

The Ukraine crisis has allowed many bad ideas from the early 2000’s and late 1990’s to return. Although the true cause of this hysteria is the sequel to the terrible WuhanGRIDs fears, and maybe a need to escape these fears, nevertheless, this true cause is obscure or forbidden to pedestrian intelligentsia. A population “bulge” of obese women, single women in their thirties on SSRI’s and other mental meds, and middle aged shrews who bully their husbands—an unprecedented “bulge” of liberated but underfucked women is the “biological base” of the West’s successive hysterias since the end of Obama’s first term. This demographic is the “weight” of the much-heralded “Western world” or the “liberal world order” right now. Many pundits are oblivious to this emotional sewer as engine of our lives, and are instead busy rehashing the stupid justifications for war that were promoted just after 9/11.

When I wrote Bronze Age Mindset one of the first readers, my good friend the Bureaucrat, warned me that I would be attacked especially for the last aphorism. He thought that our friends—the only audience I really cared about when writing it, because I didn’t think more than 500-1000 copies would even be produced—would react badly to this and call me a Frankist; which some right wing Orthodox Jews had already been doing for a long time. The message “descend into sin to save the world” he said, this would be too much for many on our side who are traditionalists; or too much for any really who most of all want to see some type of strong moral life reestablished in the civilized world. But, he thought, this Frankist-Carpocratian- Gnostic message of “redemption through violation and atrocity,” shared also by some Buddhist sects, this might be too much and make me more marginal than I even was. Since then, some very few on the right have attacked me for this short passage, but they attacked stupidly, so I’ve ignored it: for example, they claim I want to make “right wing porn.” Of course it’s not about the content, or about the inherent worth of sin, none of that concerns me, any more than the value of running the drug trade means you love drugs or think they’re good; because I wasn’t making a religious or a moral or a lifestyle point. It has to do with my opinion that sinews of this Hades world of our time are in the underworld and that it is by grasping the chokepoints of the underworld that victory will be found. I didn’t write the book to tell the average good man in the well-running state how to live well; I wrote it to tell my strange friends, who live in failing states, what it is that opposes them and how to begin to fight it. But overall, very few critics have latched on to this last aphorism of the book or tried to think about it. It was easier for them to try to pigeonhole me into a “might is right, war makes all good” view, which they don’t understand either.

Since I published the book I’ve mostly refused to talk about it or give interviews because I wrote it to be self-explanatory. I am also simply a humble internet humorist poaster and I think it’s too self-important to explain yourself and so on. I break this habit now for the first time in writing to warn friends of a false interpretation that tries to use what I said, which became more popular than I thought it would, to promote stupid wars and actually to get friends physically harmed. This false interpretation is a half truth that can be made to sound very convincing, and it goes something like this: we live in a world where manliness is undervalued and adventure next to impossible. Good times have brought comfort to the people and softened them, so they don’t see the need for hard virtues anymore. Vice and softness and effeminacy are instead promoted and allowed to flourish. Amid the weakening and vice of the world, only war and militarism can revitalize nations. It can shake peoples out of their anomie and give them a higher goal to strive for in common: it can be the “making of a nation.” War can replace the softness of liberal modernity and give pride of place to cunning and strength again. Whether the cause of modern weakness is that it elevates a weak type of man over the rest, or allows us all to become spiritually and physically flabby, or both, is unimportant; war and more war, even regardless of the cause, can be solution to both these problems and be the path to national greatness as well as individual self-perfection. I am making now maybe maximal and half- poetic case, but degrees of this argument are possible, and can even be made to sound half- moderate.

This is an old argument, from before World War I. Since then it’s been repeated by many both on right and left but also by so-called moderate liberals seeking to “defend liberalism.” So although the quotation at beginning of this article, from Nietzsche, is often used to bring some prestige to this point, it need not be a hard right claim: communists and “liberal democrats” have made it too. It’s the point Bill Kristol and others used sometimes to repeat in private and semi-private around the time of the Iraq War, to people who they knew would find the cause of spreading democracy dumb or utopian, and to others who didn’t care about their ethnic particularism. I think many today are unaware of how strong this argument was among intellectuals around 2001 or so; one shouldn’t react emotionally to it just because Kristol held it, because he was not alone. And also, I don’t think his promotion of this argument was cynical; I think he believed it when he said it. People today are mostly unable to be cynical or hypocrites; even when they contradict themselves, they do it “ethically” and believe they are saying in good faith today what they were against yesterday. Many other books of the time and after make similar arguments: for example Robert Kaplan’s Imperial Grunts, and many such. There is a letter by Leo Strauss to Karl Lowith written in 1933; although the letter itself is an unabashed defense of Fascism that’s very hard to talk around, Harvey Mansfield defended it with the argument you see here: “Strauss was not a fascist, he was only saying that liberal democracies of the time were weak and needed some of that same sense of resolve you saw in right and left wing extremist regimes.” At the time things like this led to lurid theories by the likes of Shadia Drury and others that the Straussians and “neocons” were crypto-Fascists, cynically advancing the cause of “Nazi” Strauss and “Hitler’s Lawyer Carl Schmitt” in a conspiracy to take over the White House. The left establishment has always been possessed by wild conspiracy theories, whether it was this belief that Mansfield ran a secret finishing school for Nazis and Fascists, or the Russia hysteria that started in 2015 with Trump’s campaign, or many others you see in Hollywood movies of the last few decades. Of course there was no conspiracy, and people like Mansfield and Kristol genuinely believed the argument just made, that liberal democracy is often unable to defend itself against the energetic vitalism of right- and left-wing authoritarian regimes, and needed some of that steel of war virtue to be able to mobilize in its own defense; an argument that many leftists and left- liberals also now make themselves when it comes to facing down Russia.

But if you look through pundit debates of the early 2000’s, you see serious engagement with this view by varieties of neocons and liberals. On the other hand, it may be hard for the European hard right and the American “altright” to accept they’ve ended up sounding a lot like their hated “Jewish neocons.” At the time they were ready to dismiss these arguments with the claim that they were cynically advanced to get American intellectuals and virile men to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of Zionism; on the other hand they reject the idea that also this war fervor against Russia now may be cynically used by some for ulterior political aims. But anyway, cynicism aside, what of the substantive claim here? Kristol’s use of this point isn’t enough to discredit it, because many smarter and better people have made it too: and again I say it’s even possible, actually likely, that he and other neocons were genuine when speaking this belief and not possessed of as much ulterior motive or cynicism as their opponents attribute to them.

But events following that Iraq War and the war on “terror” in general show no national revitalization, but an intensification of modern weakness and rule by spiritual females. Now after my banning from Twatter and other social media, some thought they could safely claim that my book meant just this same, and continue the failed arguments of that time. But it’s not what my book is about at all, and it’s a wrong claim about the world and about war. As depressing as it is, no revitalization of peoples today can take place through war or militarism, or probably through anything else at all.

The reasons why the American war efforts failed to mobilize American virtue or lead to preconditions of “national greatness” are interesting but in any case debatable and less important than the obvious historical fact of this failure. I suspect it had something to do with the war being fake. It was never a war but a pointless and enervating police action. Winning the war would have meant mobilizing hundreds of thousands of American men for a close-quarters assault on Waziristan, which America could have won but at the cost of tens of thousands or more dead. And of course they were never going to do that. Assange but many others said the United States and NATO had no intention of winning the Afghan war: and whether this drawn- out pointless farce of patrols and “supporting the central government” was meant to launder money, as they say, or whether it was carried out just out of stupidity, again it doesn’t matter. Even after a spectacular attack on its soil, destroying historic landmarks and killing thousands of its own citizens, America couldn’t mobilize the war fervor and national enthusiasm some had hoped would redeem the spent liberal societies.

But why they hope this? If rulership remains the same people, there isn’t any event, any cultural shift, any change in system, any opportunity for war and peace that will lead to a transformation of national spirit and morals. In this case whatever was done worked in opposite direction. The supposed “War on Terror” didn’t lead America to put higher value on men of war and manliness, but allowed the opposite kind of person to secure position in American government and society even faster: some of the worst of it came early, with formal changes in chain of command and succession procedure just after 9/11. America’s military had already been purged in the Tailhook Scandal: alpha males had been banned from military leadership. That purge, a real Bolshevik purge of the military, was probably one of the most important and most forgotten events of the last thirty years. The purging of the right men from the military and from the leadership of American society has meant that no revitalization is possible until the new leadership is removed. The 9/11 crisis perversely allowed America to treat manly soldiers as expendable while piously and impotently praising and thanking their “service” in the abstract. Sam Finlay’s book Breakfast with the Dirt Cult shows the betrayal of its fighting men and their fighting spirit, in parallel with the betrayal of its men in civilian society. Whatever new males did advance as a result of this war were astroturfed “This is the Girl” types: Tom Cotton, Eyepatch McCain, and other performing actors of unusual face who were flunkies for the security state. Other examples include Generals Crying Milley and the buffoonish cretin “Mad Dog” Mattis, whose gullibility in supporting the faddish scam Ponzi scheme of Theranos—only because it had a woman CEO playacting as the female Steve Jobs —shows the real measure and intellect of this gerontocratic “war elite.” Worst of all, the Bush administration, driven into a swamp by these delusions of the rhetoric national revitalization and national greatness, led inevitably to the Obama phenomenon. War fervor in America led to the entrenchment of passive-aggressive, feminized priestly technocracy, not to the nation finding its origins again, or a new cadre of manly leaders.

THE AIMS AGAINST US IN THE WAR ON RUSSIA

In World War II Franco achieved a great aim for himself when he sent the Falangist National Socialists to die in Russia. He fulfilled his obligations and debts to Hitler with the volunteer Spanish Blue Division, while maintaining plausible neutrality. On the other hand he got rid of the most fanatical rightists in Spain, who were thorn in his side, a political threat, and an embarrassment. This case is special, “it is as it is”: neither side could have acted any different. If I had been in Spain at the time maybe I would have joined this division as well, because I saw Barbarossa as a crusade on Eastern front against the uprising of the lower orders of the human spirit. But anyway: I say certain factions in the American state and in NATO seek to do to the new “hard right,” or to “our sphere of things” or call it what you will, to do to us what Franco did to the Falangists. The word “factions” must be emphasized: those who I believe are promoting this don’t have control of the American government and must contend with other factions who want different things, or don’t understand their intentions. It’s very hard to speak of a unified policy of any modern western state. Still, I think this has been planned for some time: a perpetual war on Russia’s border, which will harass and degrade—so they believe— their opponent Putin, but also waste this new threat of the “altright,” or call it what you will, waste us in a grinding industrial conflict from which the vast majority will not return.

I offer now my own “conspiracy theory”; I am reluctant to do this because even when “psychological operations” are real, I think it may even be better to ignore them and argue the enemy’s case on its own merits. That said, consider that Ukrainian girls in particular have been very active in the “altright” sphere since the early 2010’s. Olena Semenyaka is one such name; much of “altright” discourse took place in Facebook slapfights between this Ukrainian nationalist and the Russian nationalist “Nina Byzantina,” formerly married to Richard Spencer. Recently there is glut of “hot Ukrainian girls” in Washington DC think tank, NGO and State Department world: Alina Polyakova is another example.The “attractive blonde woman” propagandist is one of the Ukrainian regime’s most frequent weapons now both on social media and in DC political world. That representatives of an ethnic lobby for a nation in which the United States government is interested are entrenched within the incestuous political life of the capital isn’t remarkable on its own. But that these same women have been active, under their own names or anonymous accounts, on the American “Altright” from well before 2015 is.

Since at least 2010 I’ve witnessed the periodic infestation, in typical coordinated social media campaigns, of “Whyte Nationalist Feminist” accounts in the hard right sphere, with consistent messaging of blonde girls in wheat fields, statements on the purity of white womanhood and its vulnerability, combined with hysterical doom-mongering over racial annihilation, violation, and lurid publication of interracial violence and rape. One such account was called Voice of Europe, later revealed to be run by a section of British police. In general some of us have tried to steer people away from this kind of messaging, which is so ineffective that it amounts basically to enemy propaganda. I know of no historical power that advertised its nubile women in this fashion, as a statement of the worth of their people or race or anything of the sort. It’s inconceivable that either Soviet Russia or National Socialist Germany would engage in such messaging, which screams weakness, brittleness: “we are weak victims with beautiful women; come take our women.” To the contrary, these regimes posted vigorous images young muscular naked men, because that is actually threatening and frustrating to the enemy. When I do it, I am called gay in screeching replies, very often by these same so-called “white nationalist feminists.” You’d think after years of repeating these attacks they’d know it doesn’t work against me, but they continue doing it. The purpose of this malicious messaging has always been clear to us, even before this Ukraine crisis: to enrage sexually frustrated young men, to drive them to despair and violent rage, and to create a hyperemotional environment where ideological “women of purity” control the messaging. Although I can’t prove it, I have seen enough circumstantial evidence also that the same women are running propaganda racebaiting pornography accounts under different names (which they often boost on their main with the pretext of opposing them).

With the Ukraine crisis the purpose of this messaging for the last ten years has become to me more or less clear. Consider first of all the bizarre fact that some of these Ukrainian Valkyries have since 2011 or so not only entrenched themselves simultaneously in Washington DC and in the online discourse of the American altright—weird enough on its own—but have become so close to the Altright that they invited many prominent members on trips to Ukraine. Please take a moment to step back and see how strange this is. The costs of flights, lodging, and so on are considerable for one person, let alone however many they’ve invited. Ukraine is not a rich country: where did this money come from? I’ve never heard of this happening on the right. We meet each other when we can but we don’t fly each other out to expenses-paid fact-finding tours. This feels like an organizational project to court influence and develop relationships. Has the American government, directly or indirectly, been paying to cultivate a relationship between the Ukrainian government and the American “altright”?

Some factions within the American government have an interest in promoting nationalism in small nations, to use as a weapon against bigger powers. An example is Bridge Colby’s recent book Strategy of Denial, where the simple aim is discussed of using small nations, like Ukraine and Taiwan, against bigger powers without having to use American troops. Colby and the faction he is part of doesn’t control American policy, but they have some influence on it; Victoria Nuland, the point man for laundering fake anti-Trump “Russia hoax” propaganda through Ukrainian security agencies so it could enter the intelligence record, is his former boss at CNAS. Why potato Ukrainians and Taiwanese are willing to let themselves be used as kamikazes in unwinnable wars just so people like Nuland can have careers is a matter for another time. My concern here is that this faction or people within it probably outsourced a double-prong propaganda campaign. The first purpose would be to intensify neo-Nazi and white nationalist propaganda in the Ukraine, because they know that fighting fervor can only come from something much stronger than the diluted civil religion promoted by America and the EU now. A second purpose would be to have white nationalist elements in Ukraine cultivate a relationship with the American Altright. The intention here would be in Franco style to solve two problems at same time: the troublesome Altright will kill itself off “dying heroically” to “hold back the dark Asiatic orc hordes of Bolshevism,” playacting as if it’s 1942 Stalingrad. I have no way to know of course if the gold-braid wheat-field girls from Ukraine have been led together to the American Altright by this particular faction in the United States government, or if there is any centralized coordinated action at all; it may be simply that alliances of convenience developed over time or at the last minute. In the end, however, the effect is the same. As with neocon “national greatness” propaganda in the early 2000’s this is another attempt to use hard right vitalism, and to take advantage of the same spirit that has in recent years led to newfound appreciation for Ernst Junger, Nietzsche, Mishima, and Celine; to redirect or rather abuse this enthusiasm into service for the American government, and even, in this latest variation, into self-destruction.

I’ve made this case to friends in private and some have told me that if anyone falls for the likes of Olena Semenyaka and the other Ukrainian potato pretend-Valkyries’ lures, they deserve what happens to them. I don’t agree. There are a lot of young, inexperienced, naive and very emotional guys who, even if intelligent, may in a moment of confusion fall for such traps. I’m writing this in part to convince them not to self-sacrifice on behalf of such ghouls. The problem with these two types of misuse of Nietzschean vitalism on behalf of modern countries and states is just that: these are impostor states to begin with. Some European rightists as well as various journalists, to attack my position on the war in Ukraine, and because I encouraged Ukrainian friends to defect and refuse to fight, have at times brought up this supposed “inconsistency”: “Bronze Age Pervert supports war and adventure, war as the hygiene of the world. But he doesn’t support signing up to fight in this war as it happens now, he doesn’t support defending your homeland.” To this I would respond with a resolute “Yes.” And I would give the same advice to Russian friends, even though I support their cause, if I thought they were to be conscripted. There is no inconsistency: Yes to war and struggle for us; No—to anything that has to do with the modern state. War and preparation for war on behalf of what then, and in what circumstances? The mistake or dishonesty of using Nietzsche’s well- known claim about the revitalizing effects of war is in ignoring his other claims about the character of the modern state. But it’s not enough simply to point this out; maybe I need to spell some of it out.

WHAT I ACTUALLY SAY IN MY BOOK ON WAR

The attempt to coopt the vehement youth of the right into self-sacrificing itself in Ukraine is an intelligent if extremely malicious plan of some factions of the American state. I am reluctant to call it evil, but if that word means anything, it applies to this case as to similar where the attempt to hurt others serves almost no purpose and represents what Schopenhauer called active malice or active wickedness, the delight simply in seeing harm done with no real other benefit. Why is so? Compare this program to what may seem similar from decades past, to what often goes by the name “Gladio” during the Cold War, variations of which I’ve supported and even hypothetically recommended. Operation Gladio refers to the attempt by the CIA to use the hard right after World War II in Europe as a weapon against the Soviets, offensively or defensively in form of “stay-behind” networks and armies that would carry out terrorist and guerrilla attacks in event of a Soviet occupation of Europe. From the point of view of left- and liberal-conspiracists this is evidence of the CIA’s secret fascist character. They make much of this, or of Operation Paperclip, while ignoring far more important cooperation with the Soviets such as Lend-Lease, the alliance in the war itself, and the alliance after the war against European colonial empires where America and the CIA and State Department especially often worked together with the Soviets to remove European civilization from the third world.

In fact the extent of “Gladio” has always been overstated, both by the left and by its own supporters in the CIA or journalists adjacent to it. Many of the stay-behind armies in Europe were spontaneous organizations by the local right wing, and these were in fact opposed by the CIA, which tried to replace local versions with its own. In some cases as in north Italy outright conflict broke out, because locals moved to disband the CIA impostor version of the stay- behind army. In general Gladio was as much an attempt to corral the right wing as to use it; it was not an attempt to empower it. Just as NATO’s job was and is to “keep the Germans down, the Russians out and the Americans in,” in that order, the primary purpose of Gladio was to delimit and surveil the right wing.

That being said, one shouldn’t go too far—as conspiracy podcasters on both the left and the right always do—in exaggerating the power and competence and foresight of intelligence agencies. During the Cold War, the European right were very much aware of the nature of the CIA and of the purpose of Gladio, but still chose to cooperate in many cases because they saw a pragmatic benefit and thought (sometimes rightly) that they could take advantage of the CIA, not the other way around. In general conspiracy theories about the CIA or the machinations of other intelligence services forget that their targets also have agency and can outmaneuver them. The KGB, which has a record of competence and sophistication far above the CIA’s, was itself in many cases still outwitted by its targets. One notable case is the KGB’s extensive infiltration of organized crime and other ethnic gangs, such as the Chechens toward the end of the Soviet Union, discussed in Paul Klebnikov’s The Godfather of the Kremlin. The infiltration and funding of Chechen and other gangs went so well that these gangs ended up temporarily on top, taking the money, resources, and information provided and using it for themselves. It took two physical wars and Putin’s crushing of Chechnya at the end of the 1990’s to dislodge these networks; KGB “infiltration” did nothing here but turn a nuisance into a monster against itself.

Something similar happened with Soviet involvement in Africa. Much of the African dictatorial “intelligentsia,” or rather familist circles, were educated in Russia and the East Bloc; many can speak Russian even now. This was true for much of the ANC in South Africa (which, as it happens, got most of its funding from Sweden, not the Soviets). Just think the kompromat that Soviets had on some of these men; and their nations got funding, advisors, and many other things from the Soviets. This could lead one to assume that the likes of Julius Nyerere and other “Afro-Marxists” were owned agents of the Soviets doing their bidding, but this would be wrong. In fact the “Afro” part ended up being a lot more important than the “Marxist.” Far from the Soviet Union, and with little actual enforcement mechanism, in the end the dictators said “thank you very much,” took the money and the resources and did mostly what they wanted. They replaced “Marxism” with “Afro-Marxism,” which, as students of the Brazzaville School of Economics know, translates into “you give me that,” or a tribal-based spoilage system. In fact given the tribal character of power in Africa, they didn’t even have another path available to them.

This is a persistent fact across history that is lost on people who believe e.g., that Viktor Orban hiring an American lobbyist or PR agent for a project or an ad campaign means that he’s now part of the International Zionist program because the lobbyist happened to have been Jewish. Besides being a disgrace to principle of “follow the money,” which very few people have the judgment to do well, this turn of mind assumes centralized control, foresight of all consequences, near omniscience and omnipotence of political actors who in the end actually have very little foresight and also very little ability to enforce. It is most of all the story of China’s historically inept “foreign policy”: based around rituals of gift giving and displays of generosity to foreign nations and tribes, rituals that were assumed to indicate a patron-client relationship and actual obeisance; but where no such thing followed. In fact China was frequently conquered or sacked by foreigners who felt insulted when the gift-giving stopped. Such things are frequent in imperial history in general though; the East India Company didn’t especially want extensive territorial conquests in India, which were expensive to maintain and didn’t necessarily bring more profit; but it was presented with faits accomplis when local British generals, seeking glory and conquest rather than profit, engaged in battles and took territory against their wishes. They had no way to control so well whatever happened far away and locally. The target, agent, employee or the cat’s paw got the upper hand, and in cases like these, far away from home, did so rather easily.

Both the CIA (as well as other intelligence agencies) and the left—which includes much of the American establishment, possessed always by wild conspiracy theories and paranoia about “dark money”—have an interest in never acknowledging such facts. Reluctant to admit incompetence, the CIA is often eager to take credit for events that spun out of its control, even if it then appears “evil.” It’s preferable to look like a Bond villain than an ineffectual bungler. The same reasoning applies to men like Klaus Schwab and Brzezinski, who are engaged in ostentatious self-publicity stunts to sell themselves as extremely influential eminences grises, when the reality is they’re actors on the make seeking the next contract and position of prestige.

In any case, for these reasons I have always thought that a repeat of “Operation Gladio” would be the best possible thing that could happen to the right today. But I also thought the modern CIA is too stupid and malicious to allow this to happen. On my last account I suggested as much—I suggested a program to make us mercenaries in South America—and was jumped on by paranoid leftists and conspiracy addicts. They claimed the CIA or whoever sent me to become an internet addict fifteen years ago to post on forums with eleven people for years in order to “instrumentalize” “young disaffected men” to be soldiers in the Nazi Deep State’s international fascist wars on behalf of Capital. Neither I nor other frogs of any IQ above 92 post to propose “policy positions”; we realize our powerlessness. Twitter is appropriate as “samizdat” propaganda to humiliate or embarrass authorities; it’s not really useful as a platform to post unironic “what I would do as dictator” fantasies. When I or friends write things of that kind it isn’t to propose plans to the government but to show the gap between what could have been and what is, and thereby to show the petty, cretinous and in this case even malicious character of authorities today.

Yes I would be happy if we were given a (starting) budget of $100 million and given free hand to “fight communism” in Bolivia or Argentina or wherever, but the point is that these people in this government would never contemplate a reciprocal relationship like this. SS men who as part of Gladio or Gladio-like cooperation between the CIA and the hard right went to fight in the Congo, the Central African Republic, or even Vietnam: they knew they were being “instrumentalized.” But they didn’t care because they had their own aims, and knew that far from direct control, oversight, and enforceable measures, especially in the Third World, they could achieve their own aims better than NATO’s. When control was actually overt and onerous, as it was for SS men who joined the French Foreign Legion, many deserted or tried to. It’s entirely possible also that the CIA or other NATO intelligence agencies knew they were being taken advantage of to some extent, but saw it as a fair tradeoff. “We get rid of these crazy guys, they go have fun, and maybe they do something that marginally benefits us too.” As such there’s nothing sinister or wrong with this arrangement. Indeed it’s the most ancient and Aryan tradition possible, that of the Mannerbund, which has its origins in the tribe’s realization that rather than breaking and domesticating excess young males grown strong on fat and meat, it’s better to have them go off on their own in a gang to somewhere else and make trouble for others. I see nothing wrong in theory with such an arrangement today, and openly would welcome it. I’d much rather try our hand at becoming our own Rajah Brookes than the drudgery of trying to reform giant unworkable states full of middle aged batshit psychotic women. (The reform of modern states may be a noble goal, and I say so unironically, but “it’s not my thing.”) But we didn’t get this—we got, predictably, attempts to ensnare and set up young naive men to get them to go to jail. The authorities of our day are too ungenerous and, again, malicious in a petty way, to do anything like was tried even with “Gladio.” And now we also got the Ukraine crisis as a fire to which they expect suicidal moths.

Consider for a moment the differences between the Ukraine situation and something like Gladio or similar—adventures that a rightist could have during the Cold War. Unlike a hard right adventurer heading off to the Congo, which is a high-reward low-risk opportunity, Ukraine is high-risk and low-reward. A young rightist heading off for a fight in Katanga under the leadership of white mercenaries has a high chance of survival, a high chance of getting good training and experience, of forming friendships and networking with those like him; he and his friends or group have a decent chance of profit as well. Everything is taking place away from the attention of the world and of the media; the centers of power are too far away really to control what they do. On every point the opposite is true in Ukraine. Again I don’t know if this was so carefully planned by factions in the American and western governments, or whether they just saw at the last minute a chance to corral and kill us off. But volunteers who take part in this conflict are in the world’s eye; their identities will be known not just to intelligence agencies, but to many private third party and media actors. They have no opportunity for plunder. Most of all, they’re unlikely to return re-energized and with experience because they’re unlikely to return at all. I wouldn’t call this the perfect solution for the Deep State only because I think it’s unnecessary and malicious: but apparently they’ve decided that a mutually beneficial relationship is out of the question and they would like instead to get us all killed. Whether this is because they genuinely feel so threatened, or whether it’s because they’re actively malicious people isn’t important.

My book is in fact very clear on these matters and if anyone is claiming that I support going to war as an “ennobling venture,” especially on behalf of “one’s homeland” or any modern state, they are lying. If I had wanted to, I could have used examples of conventional military heroes in the book, but I didn’t. I respect many, and there are great ones, including from the two world wars, from the Vietnam war and so on. But I didn’t use such examples, because my book is not about this or many of the other things attributed to me by people who didn’t read it or read it enraged. The only military men I praised from our time are those like Bob Denard and Mad Mike Hoare. They are people who acted outside the eye of central powers, far away from their effective control, in low-intensity conflicts that had the potential for high payoff in many ways. One must distinguish the feeling of power from actual biological power, which I define in the book as concrete material ownership of space. It’s not about performative military behavior any more than it’s about performative manliness: I go out of the way in the book, in the chapter on the genesis of certain modern homosexuals, to disparage the false and performative image of masculinity promoted by regime media, which provides the simulation of the feeling of power without actual power. There’s no ownership of space possible in Ukraine right now for a volunteer, but there was in 1960’s and 70’s Africa or similar for a mercenary or an SS man turned ronin and so on. If America would have presented a conventional military struggle that contained the possibility for ownership of space, that might be, for example, a war in north Mexico for the cartels, to secure the southwest again and the freedom and power of the American people. In that case maybe I would reconsider advice to my friends and to myself on what we do, but that’s not the struggle on offer. Can you even imagine such a struggle being on offer by a modern state? It says a lot that you can’t imagine these leaders offering something like that…

Even in my praise of mercenaries in the Third World like Denard and Hoare I had to be very qualified because the opportunity for this today is much less real and carries much more risk. Margaret Thatcher’s son tried it but was caught before the venture could be launched; something similar happened when an American group tried to take Dominica. So in the book I go out of my way to emphasize that men today need to use the fox much more than the lion. They need to become experts in trickery and deception more even more than the arts of war. The unipolar world after 1990 strangles whatever little real life was left over from before World War 2. That the most important thing for ending the suffocating slavery of our time is the end of unipolar power is another reason I oppose the hijacked west’s meddling in the Ukraine war and want to see NATO fail; but to be fair, I would also advise Russian friends to refuse to fight for their side in this particular conflict.

Again, the conflict in question here is simply too high-scrutiny and too high-risk and it wasn’t the purpose in my book to offer “directions for thrills.” I see myself and my friends as locked in a mortal struggle against a biological-historical entity that represents a cancerous form of life. My purpose is to reveal this danger to younger friends and to advise as best I could for a means to oppose it. The purpose was not to encourage performative opposition, minstrel feats of manliness or to get yourself killed in a fake “beautiful death” just to have your Masculinity Ticket punched posthumously by an admiring female journalist or some equivalent seal- clapper. Accordingly while I think preparation for war and a military element to the ongoing struggle is a necessity, I remind the reader that in the final section on practical advice, there’s only one short chapter on joining actual militaries and even there I am very wary to recommend this. I only recommend it because it can provide friendships, training, and probably because we do need friends in positions in that institution, if only to provide us information. But the path I recommend most of all is explicitly stated in the last aphorism of the book; it is also hinted at many times before that: and this is to form mafias.

Nothing I recommended involves “service to the homeland,” or to modern states or nations, which I consider egalitarian monstrosities, defunct, sclerotic and senile and ultimately obsolete; and loyalty to which would interfere with what is most important, loyalty to us, to each other, in our great work.

And the material manifestation of these works is, again, a mafia, or a series of such. Is this OK.