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John Brown and #BlackLivesMatter

John Brown was a terrorist who hoped to incite broader slave rebellions within the Southern states. One of the reasons why his acts were politically significant was because his actions were condoned and supported by abolitionist newspapers and public opinion at the time. He had broad cultural and financial support throughout the North, even when he committed mass murders against civilians.

Almost instinctively, Americans return to old methods which worked in the past in order to grasp for more power over their fellow citizens. This is one of the problems that democracy often runs into: it’s more cost-effective just to kill and terrorize the other side than it is to perpetually electioneer against them. To paraphrase Stalin, “no man, no votes.” And if you can’t achieve your political ends through the conventional legal process, as in the Civil War, it’s sometimes just more direct to go to war with the people who are obstructing your political program until you’ve cracked the resistance.

Given that America is yet again full of people who are recalcitrant against some of the more radical proposals put forth by the left, it makes sense for it to support violent ‘protesters’ and terror forces to soften up the population and provoke violent reprisals such as the shooting by Dylan Roof, and the counter-reprisal by “Bryce Williams” the ex-television anchor. When people know that they have a mass of supporters behind them who will countenance terror attacks, they’ll do it — especially if the state refuses to crack down on incitement speech or participates in the incitement itself.

This is also one of the weaknesses in a cultural system which enshrines absolute free speech in law and custom — which, it should be said, the American state has always been capable of banning speech that it doesn’t like during wartime, especially during the Revolutionary, Civil, and World wars. So it’s silly to make an appeal to tradition or law in saying that the state has its hands tied with respect to the restriction of speech dangerous to public order.

By inflaming this cycle of attack, reprisal, and counter-reprisal, the press behaves how it usually behaves, which is to recklessly provoke a war which might otherwise be avoided. Popular government means government by passion over reason — whatever evokes great, popular outpourings of emotion is what turns into policy. Violent acts are exciting and pleasurable to participate in vicariously, which is why action movies, video games, and comic books are so popular. Media activists can have all the joy of participating in violence without any of the personal risk. This is destabilizing (which is why incitement is a crime), but the particular form of the crime makes it difficult for the state to muster enough cohesion within itself to halt the process.

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The European ‘Refugee Crisis’ Is Funny

The reason why it’s funny is because the tired, hungry, greedy masses are just calling Europe’s bluff about universal human rights — which includes universal pensions for everyone, free housing according to the needs of the individual, and complete autonomy in social matters.

Adding to the comedy is that many of the people fleeing are fleeing the consequences of Washington’s haphazard foreign policy in Syria, Egypt, and Libya. The idea was to spread liberal democracy to those places. It seems that, having tasted a little democracy, the people prefer the German variety which provides a big payoff in return for nothing.

It puts state administrators in a difficult position. They can’t say that mere neediness or lack of formal citizenship is not enough of a reason to lavish welfare benefits on someone, because that same principle is what the native citizenry leans on in order to justify their entitlements from the state. Practically, it’s not possible for those states to provide the same level of benefits in perpetuity to everyone in the entire world who manages to hop onto a train in the Schengen area. But it’s important for the moral mythology that binds together post-modern culture to not just pretend that it’s possible, but to do everything to demonstrate that the people believe that the state can be a savior to the world — that it can end not just war but suffering also.

Liberals consider it responsible and humanitarian to say pious things about caring for the wretched masses, even though as individuals none of them bear either the cost or the responsibility for the health of their countries. It costs nothing to say something pious about the refugees, but it’s quite risky — and in some cases illegal — to stand up and say that states can’t provide free lunches to everyone everywhere in perpetuity with no conditions attached.

The other funny part is that Europe’s relative prosperity is entirely temporary. During and after World War II, Europe itself had a European refugee crisis. Without the interest or capacity to maintain and expand a market economy or to defend itself, it won’t be capable of serving its messianic illusions about itself and its ability to rescue all the unhappy people of the world.

The drama isn’t entirely about the refugees themselves and their problems. It’s more about maintaining the culture of radical autonomy and freedom without obligations (apart from high taxes and obedience to every niggling regulation) for the native Europeans. By saying that there is no difference between a German and a Syrian, it liberates the German from the obligations which previously characterized a German — namely the preservation of kinder, kirche, and küche, the obedience to the Christian moral order.

To the state, it’s more important to demonstrate that it doesn’t discriminate between citizens and potential citizens. From its institutional perspective, they’re all just social security numbers that need benefits checks. According to the beautiful models used by the economists, all of those numbers represent rational economic actors who will respond to incentives in a way that can be meaningfully averaged over an enormous population and large periods of time. Even if people don’t really believe this in their everyday lives or through their revealed behavior, it’s more important to act as if they believe, and one way to do that is to insist on swamping the continent with barbarians.

David Millibrand makes this connection directly:

Mr Miliband said there needed to be more “burden-sharing” and said UN rules drawn up after Britain took in thousands of refugees fleeing the Nazis should now apply to Africans and Asians, Press Association reports.

Britain was at the forefront of writing the conventions and writing the protocols that established legal rights for refugees. A lot of the legal theory came out of the UK.
“The reasons we did so were good in the the 40s and 50s and they are good today. What applied to Europeans then should apply to Africans and Asians today. We cannot say UN conventions apply to one group of people and not to others.”

Of course, it’s an entirely different situation, and there’s no reason why governments should be bound by broad brush legal analogies. But taking in the refugees is important to these states because it maintains the legitimacy of the United Nations in particular and the new international system in general. Acting to preserve that international system would, itself, undermine the principles that it runs on.

The refugees are just taking Europe to the logical conclusions of its own philosophy. The Europeans say that all people are equal and that everyone deserves dignity delivered in the form of a welfare check. So the refugees show up and demand to be treated well by the Europeans, heedless that it’s impossible, with the Europeans being obligated to act as if they believe in the impossible.

The bureaucrat-heroes of the story believe that they have to stand up to populist rumbling in order to preserve ‘European values’ which only date to the mid-19th century and mostly consists of blue jeans, bad rock & roll, Yugo-style protected manufacture, and welfare checks.

What started as a noble dream of universal elevation has turned into a funny spectacle of aging Europeans dreaming of having their adult diapers changed by dutiful Syrians, who will contribute to the market economy — and the state social security system that lives off of it — in a way that they were never able to do in their home countries.

Most European countries are not going to be able to pull themselves out of the current course, in which the right thinking people invite foreigners to sack their own countries while preventing the organization of any defense.

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Humane, Egalitarian Terror

In an egalitarian world in which authority expects everyone to consider themselves the moral equals of everyone else on the planet, what critics call ‘pathological altruism’ is actually entirely rational.

If all people must be treated equally by the laws and their fellow men (except in certain aberrant situations in which the person is ‘sick’ enough to commit a crime that must be treated by the medical-prison complex), then the general population will tend to support humane causes which confer dignity and material support to all people from around the world. Statements like ‘All human life is sacred’ become non-objectionable, even official statements of dogma.

This developed in part due to the terror of World War II. If millions of people could be liquidated by bombs and industrial prison camps — because enemy lives were seen as equally worthless, with the people identified with popular governments — then ‘the people’ came to be rightfully concerned with supporting humane governments in the interest of avoiding retaliatory herd-culling.

So, when modern people participate in anti-war movements supposedly on behalf of oppressed foreigners, they may just be marching to save their own skins. Typical people under popular governments know that foreigners will hold them accountable for the actions of their governments in a way that would have been unimaginable in most periods of history in which there was a clear delineation between rulers and ruled, and war was often a more ceremonial-ritual affair than one of mass war between entire populations.

This leads to an international pacifism which seems a bit crazy in the light of the historical behavior of states. Decolonization as a foreign policy priority became important in part due to fear of direct competition between major states. Even competition between the American and Soviet blocs in the third world was muted for fear of provoking conflicts which could be more destructive than World War II.

The contemporary mass immigration issue in part owes its origins to the pervasive belief in egalitarianism and the desire of statesmen to avoid nuclear war. It becomes very difficult to maintain an official belief that all people are equal while telling billions of foreigners from the third world that they have no right to enter European countries which are themselves run as egalitarian benefit-houses for the general welfare.

The same intellectual classes that must be maintained to create that egalitarian pig-house, like aristocrats hungry for honor in war, have a strong tendency to extend their authority to the rest of the world, especially when they’re not restrained by others with more level heads. If you run out of domestic pigs for your utilitarian pighouse, you have to start importing them from somewhere else to keep the engines humming.

To say that some people are not equal to others is to undermine the entire basis of the postwar state, which uses humanitarianism to justify its right to rule in a similar way that old kings used theories of divine right to justify their authority.

Humanitarianism results from this terror of mass violence which the dream of popular government has always melted into. Attempting to excise this self-defense mechanism from popular government will just result in the usual bloody and pointless consequences. The root of the problem is the identification of the people with the state. When you make that separation, it becomes much easier to avoid such extreme religious commitments to the egalitarian upkeep of all peoples everywhere.

It’s a mistake to call this international altruism ‘crazy’ or a pollutant introduced by foreign agitators. It serves a purpose, the intellectuals who put it into place knew what they were doing, and Westerners tend to support it because it’s much less altruistic than it seems. It serves a self-protective purpose for the populations in question.