If we are against war, what do we propose? What has worked for thousands of years every time a country has come into conflict with a stronger opponent. You show that you’re capable of inflicting appreciable losses on that opponent, and then you initiate peace negotiations. You offer a compromise. You lose something, but it’s better than a devastating war.
That’s what Czechoslovakia should have done in 1938. Fight and then negotiate. It might have lost a few districts, but it would have retained its defenses, its war industry, most of its fortifications, and its national self-confidence.
After all, the Finns did the same thing against the Soviet Union. If they had decided not to compromise and fight to the last Finn, there would be no Finns today. The Finnish nation would no longer exist. But the Finns, after valiant resistance, chose to compromise with Stalin, and that compromise brought them freedom, democracy and economic prosperity.
If anyone today advises the Ukrainians to do otherwise, they are quite ordinary criminals. Especially when he’s not willing to send his own boys to their deaths and the weapons depots are emptied. That Ukrainians want to fight? Yeah, they want to fight so badly that they had to cancel the election so they wouldn’t vote to make concessions to Russia a second time.
If Ukraine was completely abandoned and completely without allies, it would be a thousand times better off than it is now.
Twilight of the morons
The twilight of social media influencers is upon us. Artificial intelligences are just as good as they are, we read in the press. And it’s true. Corporations don’t need to support fickle and sometimes willful social media starlets anymore, they can make them in a computer. For now, only a few of the richest companies have the money to do it; in a few years, it will be a widely available technology. The age of influencers is over before it has properly begun. In terms of the development of civilization, this is incredibly positive news. Crouching in front of the camera is no longer paying more than working, at least in one area.
And it won’t end in one area. What advantage does the average CNN or New York Times editor have over artificial intelligence? He can’t spout phrases any better than a computer. By the way, the same is true of most politicians. Why not replace them? Wouldn’t it be better to have an artificial Lara Croft character instead of Ms. Kamala Harris? She wouldn’t be any dumber.
There will be a few real personalities left who can be original, they are not afraid, there is a real story behind them…but the class of professional propaganda stars will disappear. It won’t be a shame. One of our civilization’s few self-correcting mechanisms still works.
Note, by the way, that the solution is not an appeal to morality or an attempt to restore some historical order. It was brought about by technological progress. And so it will be with everything. If Western civilization gets out of its current predicament, it will be through the way forward. Not by going backwards.
On pornography and migration
An interesting article on a Czech server about African and Muslim migration to Europe. It draws out a connection that may not be quite the root cause, but may have contributed significantly to the migration explosion. Sometime around 2012, pornography rolled from video tapes into the online space. Suddenly, every mobile phone had easy access to it. The whole world could view blonde European porn stars, and less intelligent residents of other regions could get the impression that this was the real Europe. Two to three years later, a migration wave consisting almost entirely of young men was underway. One of the main motivations was the easy availability of women.
Of course, pornography cannot be the only cause, but it may have contributed. It may have made it easier for agitators and smuggling NGOs to persuade young men to venture out into the world.
We come across it again and again. A free life can only be led within a single circle of civilisation with tightly closed borders and the absolute certainty that only those who respect the rules will enter.
On double standards
I return again to the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Why does it scare us so much more than any other dictatorship? In a certain generation, because it was the only dictatorship we knew closely in Czechoslovakia. We thought of German Nazism as something once and for all dead, and the Third World was too far away.
But at the same time, what I called in one essay “stunted redneckism” played a role in this. Even when people talk about rebellion, somewhere inside they are still bowing down to the bosses. If a prince slaps a peasant, it’s okay. When a peasant slaps a prince, we’re offended. When the king hangs a serf, we don’t care. When serfs hang the king, centuries later we still see it as a misfortune. Burning heretics is normal and right (as some of my Catholic friends still believe), but if heretics burn an inquisitor, it is the most abominable barbarity of Czech history.
And then we complain about double standards. But we have it in us!
Deceived by the West
Professor Ivo Budil:
“The integration into the West after 1989 was a mystification and a ruse, as a result of which we were gradually deprived of political and economic sovereignty, technological ingenuity, cultural creativity, intellectual depth, all-round education and moral integrity. Understanding, accepting and reversing the consequences of this development requires mental strength, courage and charisma beyond the capacity of ordinary mortals. It is also for this reason that the patriotic scene cannot agree on the personalities of its leaders in the long run. A collaborator with the current regime need only surrender reason and indulge in his worst qualities disguised by noble platitudes. The degradation of the human being is always easier than its cultivation. To race in vices is more tempting than to compete in virtues. However, national existence is only meaningful if we can declare at any time in the most difficult crisis: This is the moment for which we have matured over the centuries of our history. Now is the moment to prove ourselves and to show the world that our defining ourselves as a modern and free political nation was no mere historical joke.”