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July 23, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
01:21:08
Dreaming Is Free (If You Know Where to Look)
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Hello everyone, it is this week's Left, Right, and White.
I am Chris Roberts and I'm joined, of course, with Gregory Hood.
We've been looking forward to this one.
We are going to be doing some deep dives into some heavy hitters in terms of intellectuals of both the right and left, but today we're going to do something a little different and talk about a broader cultural trend, something which emerges most often in pop culture.
And this is a concept of double irony, which I think is something that all of us on the right really work with a lot.
Basically, double irony is leftist satire is so flat and so predictable and so bland that they'll put something forward and they think they're being clever.
Right-wingers will take it and unironically run with the satire as like, no, this is actually a good thing.
Then the leftists will engage in these long explanations about, no, don't you understand, stupid?
We're making fun of you and this is what we're trying to do to make you look foolish because this is all satire of you.
It's like, no, we get it.
We understand, but this is still better than what you believe.
Like, your worst-case dystopia scenario is preferable, and we like it.
So, we're gonna get into some of that today.
Yeah, probably the foremost example of this is Paul Verhoeven's film Starship Troopers.
Which should be distinguished from the book, obviously.
Yes, it's a very, very important point.
For right now, we're just talking about the film.
The film is Pretty obviously made to be a satire of this kind of techno-futuristic fascist state that's outlined in the novel.
Yeah, but the novel was different because, one, it was written non-ironically.
It was meant to be like, no, this is actually what I think and this is my take on civic virtue and patriotism and nationalism and why we need this.
Well, and anti-communism.
It's an anti-communist Anti-communism and also it's important to note that for those who remember the film and or the book It follows the adventures of one Johnny Rico in this worldwide Federation that's fighting against this alien species and You know you find out in the book Johnny Rico is presumably Filipino because it's referenced that his mother tongue is Tagalog It's never explicitly stated, but you know it's pretty obvious and so
The Federation in in the book.
It's not clearly.
It's not a quote-unquote racist state unless you just count the human race I mean, I guess this really is like with the we're all just one race guys type state.
Yeah, it's color.
It's colorblind fascism It's a well.
I mean already right off the bat.
I'm gonna be like no this isn't fascism.
I mean well, it's it's I mean, I didn't want to go into the weeds, but now we have to leap into it.
I mean, the thing, it's not fascist at all, because it also talks about in the book how basically the government essentially leaves you alone.
It's a far more libertarian system than what we have now.
You don't really get bothered except for the essentials of crime.
I mean, it's even stated in the book about how intrusive the governments of the mass democracies are and how less intrusive this government is.
The difference is that the ordinary person doesn't have political power unless they do government service, which is military service.
I'm not going to fight with you on the precise definition of fascism.
It's not fascist.
But in the novel, there's a worldwide government that is authoritarian.
Primacy on on the military and serving in the military and serving for the government's kind of and it is very anti-individualistic It's everybody for right big government government has your best interest and it is kind of I mean I guess not ultra nationalist since it's a worldwide government, but it's ultra Planetary yeah in a way that liberal democracies really aren't and there's also implied criticism because both in the film and in the book What's interesting about it is that, yes, they talk about the military, and they talk about service as the highest ideal, but notice that the civilians almost look down on it, because the wealthy see it as sort of a primitive thing.
Right, so in this world, there are civilians and there are citizens.
Citizens are people who have done something for the government, usually just by joining and serving in the military, and those people have the right to vote and are considered a higher class of being than civilians, who are people who have not given anything to their government and ergo, you know, cannot vote.
In the film it's even implied that you cannot get a certificate to have a child, like you need permission from the government to do that, and one of the ways, one of the simplest ways of doing it is serving in the military, etc.
So there is this kind of like You know, the sum is greater than the parts.
Yeah.
Kind of government, which is, again, is not true of liberal democracy.
And in the novel, liberal democracy is mercilessly criticized for just completely failing.
It's made clear that there was a big catastrophic sort of world war and that this like ultra-nationalistic government emerged from it sort of victorious.
Well, it's, yeah, it's not even so much ultra-nationalistic because, I mean, one thing that I would emphasize here is there's not a lot of talk about Certainly, there's no talk of race.
Aside from, like, I think they talk about fighting the Chinese at some point or something like that.
Right, but that was in the old world.
Yeah, right.
We're appealing to national traditions so much as a different conception of the political and a different conception of what it is to lead a good life and what it is to be a good person.
It's not so much as falling back on Look at our great and noble history and look at the history of our evil enemies.
These are universal ways of looking at human life and mass democracy had it wrong in terms of its fundamental premises.
Right.
So, that's the novel, and the film is a satire of all of these things.
The film is clearly trying to make fun of this ridiculous future state in which not everybody gets to vote and not everybody gets to have kids.
Ridiculous in scare quotes.
Right, right, right.
It's clearly a satire of that.
The novel is excellent and you should read the novel and think about it.
I mean, there's a lot in it that, I mean...
I'll drop this clip.
I mean, should the franchise be earned?
Yes.
Yes.
I mean, I'll flatly state that absolutely right now.
Like, do you think everyone should just get?
No, of course not.
And one thing that in the book, one of the more, and this is in the movie too, and I'll just say it bluntly.
When he says that voting is using force.
You're using political force.
And when you cast a vote, what you're saying is that I want men with guns to enforce this political opinion against other people.
Voting is an act of force.
It is an act of aggression in some ways.
And if that is what you're doing, you should have to earn it in some ways.
So do I think the franchise should be earned?
Am I openly aligning with this So that's our point of double irony.
The film Starship Troopers is a satire of the book, and a lot of lefties love it for that.
I know everybody involved in Chapo Trap House, which is like the foremost Bernie Bro podcast, they absolutely love the film Starship Troopers because they think it is the most on-point, brilliant satire of right-wing jugheads ever made.
And the point Greg and I are making is that he and I, and plenty of other people on the right, are aware that the film is making fun of us, but we unironically like it.
Well, and it's also, it's, I mean- Or I guess double irony, like it.
You know, we're not impressed.
We don't see what's wrong with the satire.
Right, right.
This satirized version of our beliefs and our idea of utopia looks really good.
And it's unironically better than what we have today.
The stupid parts in the movie, a lot of things that were deliberately inserted.
So, for example, in the film there's this whole dumb psychic plot where people are psychic for some reason and that becomes a big thing.
That's not in the book at all.
That's nonsense.
That was obviously just inserted to be ridiculous, so throw that out the window.
The stuff about suddenly these The military, you know, for being futuristic and everything else, they sort of just kind of like blunder into combat, firing wildly with weapons that don't look very futuristic compared to what we have now.
In the book, of course, there's this very long and detailed description of like power armor and tactics and all these... Battle mechs that they have... Right, and all this crazy... Yeah, it's like really in-depth and obviously there's a lot of thought... Well, they have field artillery with Like nuclear components, right?
And so, too, which is really cool.
Obviously, the film makes it look like almost a parody of what you think about World War One, where it's like, oh, just keep, you know, launching cavalry charging against like machine guns or something.
And then, of course, also in the film, and this is kind of weird, but you would think it's almost like a set her the less point of view.
You have men and women showering together and serving together, and there's no gender lines in the military, and for some reason nobody thinks this could cause problems, whereas in the book it's like, no, this is obviously a stupid idea.
There are distinctions between men and women in the different roles they serve.
Interestingly enough in the book, I think women are preferred as pilots.
Because their short-term reactions are better, or something like that.
So it's not sexist in the sense of, like, women are stupid!
It's more of a sense of, like, no, they're better at different things.
And also, obviously, if you put men and women together in high-stress, intimate situations, that might have an impact on group cohesion if you're trying to get something done.
Ride the wave of that trauma bonding.
Right.
In Verhoeven's defense actually, regarding everybody in the novel is wearing battle mechs,
which for those of you who aren't sci-fi nerds, is like what you see at the end of the third
Matrix film.
It's basically like you're inside a larger robotic version of a human, on your wrist and
stuff you've got rockets.
This is like a sci-fi trope power armor essentially.
However, I believe that Verhoeven just didn't do that in his film because that would be
I believe that Verhoeven just didn't do that in his film because that would be really expensive
really expensive to make all of that stuff and then filming it would be really difficult.
to make all of that stuff and then filming it would be really difficult, especially since
Especially since it's in the novel, when they're in these battle mechs, they like jump off
it's in the novel when they're in these battle mechs, they like jump off of planets like
of planets like into the stratosphere and then come back down and stuff.
into the stratosphere and then come back down and stuff.
Filming that would be really, really challenging.
You note about how the battle scenes in the film are really kind of like World War I,
World War II, everybody seems to have a submachine gun and they're just like charging blindly
forward at the enemy.
Well, that again just makes for good cinema and Verhoeven was definitely drawing a lot
of those scenes from classic World War II movies and stuff.
Intricate tactical breakdowns of how you would assault this position as described in the
book.
It might be difficult to film.
I think it'd be really challenging to film.
Yeah, it's way better to just have this huge mass of people just charging at these giant spiders.
The enemy alien race in both the novel and the film are alien enormous arachnids, which is definitely a metaphor for communism.
And to that end, as far as anti-communist novels go, Starship Troopers has to be one of the best ones.
I mean, it really does make you proud to be a human.
You see all of these competent soldiers and engineers and pilots and all of this stuff and existential conflict with this evil, distant Intergalactic form of communism in, you know, the shape of spiders, which all human beings hate spiders.
It's just a natural disgust.
Like, it's so on point.
Well, here's the interesting thing, too, in the book.
You know, they get into, and I don't want to go too much into the book, because I think the book actually does deserve to be taken seriously.
I mean, look, it's not like in-depth political philosophy, but it's like, here are some interesting ideas you can talk about with your friends.
You know, a 600-page manifesto of something.
But Starship Troopers, as a sci-fi book, and with all the kind of middle-brow way it advances these ideas, you're going to get more out of that than you will at a political science class at most American universities.
And that's not because I'm fanboying out about Starship Troopers, it's because A lot of the people who teach at these universities are authentic morons, and you're better off not going.
So, and I say this as somebody who, you know, stumbled through and stumbled through in a four-year hangover and like still managed to come out okay as far as with these people, but these, as far as The idea of communism, the Federation clearly, as you say, it's not the individual above all.
And the point of the book is that putting the individual above all is a very flawed way of looking at the world and a flawed way of being human.
But it also gets to something that, unfortunately, the American right is really known for, which is the left is defined by collectivism and the right is defined by individualism.
And it's like, no, you idiots, there's more to it than that.
The idea of serving something greater than yourself doesn't make you a communist, and in this I wouldn't even say it really even makes you a statist.
I mean the idea of service to the state giving you power is important, but the state to some extent lets you opt out in a way that our system Doesn't.
I mean, if you just want to be some guy who makes money, the Federation lets you do that.
And you kind of get looked down on by the military, but you don't get, like, driven into a camp or beaten or something.
I mean, the only thing they seem to be really draconian on is crime.
What else to say?
Libertarians are so into efficiency, this market-efficiency Uber-Aulis worldview, and I guess what's implied, at least in the novel, is maybe the most efficient way of fighting intergalactic communism is to have a powerful state with a really intense military, and look, if that's what it If that's what it takes to defeat global communism, that's fine.
I'm not just gonna, like, autistically purity spiral and say, oh, well, if we lose our individualism in order to defeat communism, well then, we should just lose and we should just die as individuals.
I really think that that's just so crazy.
That's, I mean, we are bleeding into a little of, that's what Buckley said, defending I don't think Buckley was entirely wrong in doing that.
the Cold War and we did see how that kind of stayed with it.
I just think that...
I don't think Buckley was entirely wrong in doing that.
This idea that we can at no point allow big government to help us in big projects or
existential battles I think is really ludicrous. Well it also comes down to one,
what's the the underlying foundation of what you're trying to defend.
I mean, you're not saying we're, you know, Starship Troopers or something more broadly like that.
You're not saying, oh, we're going to have big government for the duration so we can defend individualism in the long run.
You're defending something different.
You're defending something broader.
You're defending a different idea of what it is to be human.
And the other thing is that You know, it's a who-not-what question.
If you say, oh, big government and statism and everything else, I'm less interested in the form of what the government is than who's controlling it.
The state is a tool.
And a lot of right-wing American conservative political philosophy, I would say deliberately so, is nonsense because it focuses so much on This is a hammer.
Look what the hammer can do.
The hammer is destructive.
The hammer can do all these things.
And it's like, yeah, but the person who's holding the hammer is what's important.
Right.
Not all big governments are the same.
And again, dipping into the double irony here of the big government of the Federation and Starship Troopers seems a lot better than LBJ's big government that was used to fight the Cold War.
Right.
Not all big governments are just big governments.
And that's the end of the story.
I find this It's just so bizarre to me that people think that's a really effective way of viewing the world or understanding government or politics.
It's just so strange.
It's just so bizarre to me that people think that's a really effective way of viewing the
Right.
world or understanding government or politics.
It's just so strange.
Right.
But let's get into the movie itself because one of the interesting things about the film
and again this tells you a lot.
I think this is another concept I want you guys to be looking for in pop culture, where the white protagonist with, I mean, I'll just say it, kind of stereotypical, like, Aryan features, right?
Yeah, because in the film the protagonist is not Filipino.
Well, in the book, yeah.
Excuse me, in the book he is Filipino, but in the film he is a white Argentine with blue eyes and an incredible jawline.
Right.
This is, and you see this in games and other things too, this is a way of letting the audience know who's the real bad guy.
I think I've seen this in a lot of different things where the very fact that you have this person put forward as the protagonist is a signal that you're supposed to see this as satire, you're supposed to see this as something bad.
And the fact that they change the protagonist To do this.
Tells you a lot because if you had had the exact same movie with a Filipino protagonist...
I mean, it doesn't work as satire anyway, but it wouldn't have worked at all, because people would be like, well, wait a minute, what's the problem here?
Because, I mean, if you just see how it works, you'd be saying, okay, this works fine.
It's just because, like Pavlov's dogs, you've just been trained to know that, okay, white is bad, and white in strength is bad, and white in efficiency is bad.
So therefore, if you have a white protagonist and you have a government that's doing things and winning victories, Accomplishing stuff, the audience knows that something's wrong and you need to react badly against this.
But that's why they have to have the protagonist be the race he is, otherwise it wouldn't work.
Which again, double irony, we're really okay with that too.
We're aware of why this change was made, but we're really comfortable with replacing a Filipino protagonist with a really hyper-masculine white guy.
Right.
And I think that a lot of the things that the film says are bad, particularly the famous lecture, which we've all seen on YouTube and everything else, where they talk about the history of moral philosophy class, where they talk about the underpinnings of the system.
They talk about the idea of the veterans taking control, and I'm less impressed, frankly, about the idea of veterans per se taking control.
There have been some excellent stuff in conservative circles over the last week about the Banality of a lot of the veteran brand, you know, Black Rifle Coffee and all this kind of stuff, this kind of like faux patriotic, faux nationalist, where it's just sort of this empty symbolism where you're not defending anything.
Because the point of the military is to defend something.
I mean, the value is not the military per se.
It's what it's defending.
Right.
And that's something that gets lost a lot of times, but... Well, it's the same thing with the state, right?
It doesn't matter how big the state is.
It matters what it's doing.
The military in and of itself isn't necessarily good or bad.
It depends on what the military is doing.
Right.
I mean, this is something at least Marx got right about the role of the state.
The state isn't just a given.
It defends specific interests and a specific class.
So you've got to be asking, what is it defending and what class is it defending?
I mean, that determines whether it's good or bad.
We just have different ideas.
Yes, I think that marks as far as like what it should be defending.
Quite, yeah.
But in the film, here you have this state and it's just sort of implied that because the cities are clean, Because they're able to do these things with technology, because there's propaganda where it's vaguely implied—well, not vaguely implied, but it's said like, oh, you should work to defend your country, you should work to defend your planet, you should work to defend this stuff.
And obviously it's done in this cartoony, simplistic way.
There's the scene—you know, they're fighting bugs, so, like, stepping on bugs, like roaches.
I don't know.
It's somehow a way of helping the war effort.
There's a little propaganda reel of school children just smashing cockroaches or something in a playground.
Right, as if that's going to work.
To show that they really support this world government and they hate bugs too.
Right.
I'm from Buenos Aires and I say kill them all.
And obviously it's cartoonish and simplistic and over the top and it's, yes, we get it.
Like, we know.
But that propaganda, that satire propaganda as absurd and simplistic and cartoony and everything else, that is more subtle and has a greater degree of truth than what you'll get from CNN or NBC or MSNBC.
Today.
It makes more sense to go outside, even now in today's reality, it makes more sense to go outside and step on roaches screaming that you're defending the world from an intergalactic insect threat.
That has a greater hold on the world as it is than screaming that Donald Trump is controlled by Russia and is plotting to install fascism, which is about what 30% of the country believes.
And this is why The quote-unquote satire of the film falls flat is because it's so obvious what they're trying to do, and yet it doesn't... the same people who are putting this forward don't see what's happening in the world we have now, where we have the same sort of propaganda, but it's more ridiculous, and instead of encouraging people to defend their country, it just tells them to hate it, to hate themselves, and to be miserable all the time.
Yeah, more than anything, to hate themselves, yeah.
So, I mean, hating yourself and hating everything about the people you came from, that seems to be the bedrock of our society now, whereas in this film, the idea of defending your species in the broadest sense, and the idea of defending certain ideas of order and hierarchy and things like that, this is taken as a good thing.
And yes, we get it, it's satire, but...
We're gonna go with it.
It's better.
So, moving on from Starship Troopers, Greg, I know something you really wanted to talk about is Warhammer 40k.
Oh yeah, this'll be a good one.
And given how litigious Games Workshop is, we'll see if we don't get sued for this.
You better be ready to give a simplistic background for this incredibly complex world we're about to jump into.
This is probably the most sprawling universe possible.
The way I'll put it... Okay, so what is Warhammer 40k?
Come on now.
Let me just read something, and this is sort of an introduction, and we'll go from there.
For more than a hundred centuries, the Emperor has sat immobile on the golden throne of Earth.
He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods and the master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies.
He is a rotting carcass, writhing invisibly with power from the dark age of technology.
He is the Icarian Lord of the Imperium, for whom a thousand souls die every day, for whom blood is drunk and flesh eaten.
Human blood and human flesh, the stuff of which the Imperium is made.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions.
It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable.
This is the tale of those times.
And I'll go on a bit more.
Forget the power of technology, science, and common humanity.
Forget the promise of progress and understanding.
For there is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter and the laughter of thirsting gods.
But the universe is a big place, and whatever happens, you will not be missed.
This is to live in the cruelest and most bloodthirsty regime imaginable.
And yet, as I know, there are lots of people out there saying For the Emperor.
The Imperium is good.
So now I'm going to back up and say what it is and why this satire, which is probably the bluntest satire I can think of, has failed so spectacularly and has now created an industry that's almost opposed to the original ideological goal of the whole setting.
So, the setting of it, broadly speaking, is that After humanity conquers the stars in the millennia to come, some bad things happen and humanity gets cut off from each other in the galaxy.
Earth devolves into a bunch of petty warlords and everything is miserable.
Then an incredibly powerful being known only as the Emperor, and we're not going to get into that or anything like that, Basically, unites the world, creates superhuman warriors and superhuman sons, known as Primarchs, goes on the Great Crusade to unite the galaxy under humanity.
And the interesting thing about him, one of the interesting things, is he puts forward the Imperial Truth, which is essentially atheism.
There are no gods.
We're going to progress with unity and science and technology and reason above all things.
So this is sort of the golden age of Reddit or something like that, if they would win.
Of course, in the setting, there actually are gods.
They all just tend to be evil, more or less.
And what ends up happening is that one of the Emperor's sons, shall we say, Horus, revolts against them, leads to a galactic civil war known as the Horus Heresy.
The Emperor is essentially mortally wounded and trapped upon the Golden Throne, which is this machine that I'm not going to get into, but suffice to say that the person, the being, who could have led humanity in this Golden Age is essentially crippled forever.
And the Imperium, rather than being this empire of science and technology and progress, essentially becomes this overly bureaucratic, brutal, worst aspects of whatever regimes you want, and also a fanatical theocracy where if you deny that the Emperor is a god, something literally called the Inquisition might sail up and blow up your entire planet from space on the grounds that there are heretics.
The whole point is that it's very over-the-top and ridiculous.
One of the better authors from the setting actually made the point that a lot of what was informing this was criticism of Margaret Thatcher's England and the Thatcher regime.
So, for example, you have the usual races that exist in any sci-fi editing.
You have elves, but in space.
You have orcs, but in space.
You have all the usual things.
One particularly nasty orcish warlord, for example, I think is named, like, Ghazgul Makhthraka.
And you have to think about it for a second, but what they were actually going at was that's supposed to be Margaret Thatcher.
Like, that's how blunt and crude and everything else it is.
So here's a regime where you've got commissars shooting people if they retreat.
Here's a regime where you have Religious fanatics destroying everything here's regime where it's so bureaucratic and Awful that you have millions of people slaving away for records about planets that ceased to exist 10,000 years before Completely over-the-top completely blonde completely ridiculous and meant to be so But Why is it?
That people look at a depiction of the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable and say, yeah, this is preferable to what we've got now.
This is preferable to mass democracy.
This is something that, at least in the realm of fantasy, I'm going to say, okay, I'm good with this.
So, for people who don't know what Warhammer 40k is, can you say a little bit about, is it a film?
Is it a series of novels?
Essentially it's a very complicated backstory to selling overpriced plastic miniatures for
tabletop wargaming.
I mean that's essentially what it was.
If you're not, I've never really done that.
I know there are lots of people who do, but that's essentially what it was.
The way I got into it, I think the way a lot of people got into it, is it spawned films and books and computer games and things like that.
So that's how I became aware of this thing.
But it was originally meant to be a tabletop game, like Dungeons & Dragons.
Right, it was originally just meant to be the background story to this tabletop game.
Now here's the thing that happens.
When you set up something like that, for the backstory for a tabletop game, you can kind of get away with like, oh, I get it.
It's kind of a dark satire, whatever.
But here's the problem.
Once you start creating an expanded universe, once you start doing books, and some of these books have been on, you know, New York Times bestseller list and everything else.
Once you start putting forward computer games in this expanded universe, you have to explain Who these people are?
Why, you know, you have commissars, right, who inspire these units and shoot people if they retreat and everything else.
Well, if you're going to write a book about them, what are they like?
Are they just cartoonish villains?
Because then you can't really identify with them.
Okay, then you have these superhuman warriors.
Well, what are they like?
Are they just crazed fanatics?
Or do they have motivations and what's really happening?
Like, why would anybody fight for the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable?
And so what ends up happening is people start having to explain why this quote-unquote horrible system has been set up, and you end up perhaps inadvertently rationalizing and defending it, and all of a sudden you start thinking to yourself, well actually given the background setting, This is either the best that you can do, it's a necessity to have a regime like this, or this is actually correct?
This is the best way we should approach things?
Because the alternative is much worse.
The whole point, I think, is that the idea of a liberal future of tolerance and peace and understanding and reason and science and technology, eventually it consumes and destroys itself.
Now, granted, in this setting you have things that obviously don't exist, I hope, in our world, which is, you know, dark gods and all the ridiculous things that come with supernatural stuff.
But the larger premise of, here's this utopian future that I've created.
Here are these great leaders who are going to lead us to this utopian future.
Oh, look what happened.
We created a blood-stained nightmare where everyone's slaughtering each other because we can't get our way to utopia.
What ends up happening instead is you develop a system of hierarchy, you fall back on tradition, you fall back on certain institutions which preserve a certain amount of order, and ultimately you have a dream of getting back to the highest aspirations of your species and, you know, your people and everything else.
But it's not going to be done through vague promises of idealism and reason.
You're going to have to fall back.
You're going to have to go on something more concrete, which is the idea of A real leader, of a real hierarchy, of a belief in something that is transcendent.
Not just, oh, science, technology, reason.
Because we've seen where that leads.
These aren't terribly new ideas.
This is whatever utopia of the last century was meant to advance.
And it collapsed every single time.
What I think a lot of people took away from 40k and why a lot of people on the hard right, I guess especially, have gotten into it is not just because it's fun to unironically say things like for the Emperor and, you know, purge the Xenos, the aliens, and that kind of stuff, but it's because this idea of knowing what to fight for and having something that you can absolutely defend I think that's something a lot of people in our society want and are missing.
Even people who join the military, and I know this from people who came back from Afghanistan and Iraq, if you said, well, what did you get out of it?
And they just shrug or say it was a complete waste of time or they didn't do anything.
It's very hard to say that you're defending America.
Either through the military or law enforcement or something like that at this point.
It's very hard to say that you're defending anything worthwhile if you're working in any of our major public institutions because so many of them are devoted to seemingly our own destruction. And so even this ridiculous
sci-fi version of a dystopia where you're just fighting for humanity's bare survival,
that seems preferable to what's going on now. Warhammer 40k, like the film Starship Troopers,
really taps into a thirst a lot of people have to be part of something greater than themselves
and to be actually like working towards something, making sacrifices, taking calculated
risks for a greater cause.
It's definitely the case.
At the risk of psychologizing a large segment of the population, there is a real thirst for that, and there is a real absence of that that leaves people Kind of rudderless and searching for meaning.
And that's part of the aspect of the double irony of enjoying Starship Troopers and Warhammer 40k, is people are sort of getting to that point where it's like, well, cartoonishly believing in something is better than cynically believing in nothing.
And because both of them are science fiction, You can get away with it a little bit.
And fun, yeah.
You don't actually really have to justify the ideology in either of them.
It's the sort of, it's like getting meaning in life vicariously through science fiction that creates, that depicts this world that is filled with meaning and filled with sacrifice and filled with purpose which is so different from the really shallow materialistic world we live in.
Right, and also where There are plenty of people on the other side, I think, progressives, broadly speaking, who have a moral vision, who I think are more committed to it, sadly, than many conservatives, and that's at the root of a lot of our problems.
But that moral vision culminates in self-destruction, and there's also a great degree of self-hatred.
There's a difference between being willing to sacrifice yourself for a greater ideal and Self-hatred which is essentially the dichotomy we have here what I would call like the real right from the real left.
I mean the real left you're essentially saying I will degrade myself.
I will bring myself down.
I will destroy myself so that all can be equal and I will tear down that which is high so that everything will be flat even if that leads us to a position that's broadly lower than where we were whereas on the real right you're constantly I mean is Evola would say, you know, you're constantly looking upward.
You're constantly looking beyond yourself.
You're constantly looking to the highest and the greatest and everything else.
Even in a cartoonishly ridiculous idea like the God-Emperor of Mankind.
And I think it's very significant that in 2016, when a lot of people were looking to Donald Trump as a savior figure, how was he most oftenly portrayed?
When they said, oh, God-Emperor Trump.
Well, that was coming from 40K.
A lot of complete and the power armor and the golden sword and all this kind of stuff and it's all
extremely embarrassing in retrospect but I think that shows the thirst for a leader for somebody
to To take us higher for something to look up to and to
sacrifice for well Yeah, what you're getting at earlier is the difference
between self-sacrifice For a greater good and just politicized self-harm
Right.
Where, like, there is a huge psychological difference between being willing to die in a battle that is of consequence as opposed to, you know, giving away all of your money to... Or your kids' money.
You know, to pay reparations and just being poorer because of that.
You know, there is this fetish of self-harm on the left that It's just constantly finding justification for itself in these kind of anti-white and anti-Western, anti-male ideologies of, oh well, if you just work a crappy job and do nothing with your life, that's kind of good because that way you're not really participating in the capitalist structure of the economy.
And if you're broke, that means you're not oppressing anybody, which is good.
Again, this is self-harm.
It's not really self-sacrifice.
That's actually the better.
thing because the people who are doing that, at least they're sincere, I think there's a lot more
people who are preaching this stuff for cynical reasons. No, I think it's flipped. You think more
people are sincere about it? No, no, no, sorry, that's not what I meant when I said flipped. I
think it's much more often the case that directionless and unhappy people then latch
on to a political ideology that justifies their crappy lives and vice versa. What I mean to say
is people who just worked at end jobs, even though they're very bright, doing drugs all the time,
those kinds of people are already doing that and then they get into all of the stuff about
white privilege and the evil of the American empire to justify their lot in life. It's not
that first they get into white privilege and then because of that they conclude that they should be
broke and not participate in the system. I think a lot of this stuff is actually just to justify
self-harm. Well, the idea of looking for purpose, the idea of looking for meaning, this of course is
what should be done.
Scholars and analysts of our movement, people who are digging through our own lives, will say about us and everybody listening.
They'll say, oh, well, these guys are just searching for meaning.
These guys are searching for rationalizations or justifications.
Anxiety about status and therefore they seize on these ideas to rationalize opposition to them.
I think that would be the charitable way of putting it.
I mean, we've had to sit through the same classes and seminars as everybody else out there.
And I think that one of the things that we need to be able to come back with is say, well, it's not irrational to be concerned about status because status is a given in any society.
Like, there will always be hierarchy.
And this goes back to what some of the first things that we were talking about in this podcast is the universal law of oligarchy.
The iron law of oligarchy, as I think Pareto put it.
There's always going to be a governing minority.
There's always going to be certain people in charge and certain people taking orders.
And the real question that I have is why is it seen as a good thing to degrade yourself and to voluntarily choose slavery and shame?
Especially when the people who are preaching this to you as a moral necessity There are, as you say, a lot of people who seize on these ideas to justify self-harm, but I think there are also a lot of people who are cynically preaching it because they're the ones who get to be in charge.
Sure, these are the people at the top.
Yeah, I mean, it's the stereotypical thing of some tenured professor who's got a $600,000 a year affirmative action job lecturing Appalachian coal workers on how they have white privilege.
I mean, there is a lot of that going on.
And so, Given that actual sincere political or cultural responses to a pretty straightforward message of degradation and shame,
That imposed a lot of costs, right?
I mean, you're gonna have people coming after you, you might suffer de-platforming, de-banking, a host of different consequences, media smears, all the rest of it.
I think a lot of, especially young white men, get into these, for lack of a better word, fandoms or subcultures or wherever else, where they're allowed to have this sort of fantasy life.
I mean, you can't even do that with professional sports anymore.
You can't do that with video games in a lot of ways.
I mean, we all remember Gamergate and what a big deal that was.
And so what ends up happening is people seize on anything, even the things that are meant to be satire, even the things that are meant to be negative, and say, well actually this is a way of escaping into something that's preferable to the role that's being given to me now.
And also, 40k specifically, is a product of Britain and there's the ghost of the British Empire in a lot of the things.
So, for example, I will give some of you guys may remember from the 1990s the Sharp series of films where it talks about a British soldier who saves the life of the Duke of Wellington, ends up becoming
an officer, and he fights in the Peninsular Wars and runs around, has all sorts of
adventures fighting Napoleon and everything else.
Well, there's sort of a... and then there's a whole series of books that went along with this.
Bernard Cornwall, same one who wrote Master and Commander and things like that.
There's a whole series in 40k known as Gaunt's Ghost, which is essentially Sharp but in space.
The Commissar in one of these novels, I remember there was a song that some of these Imperial
Navy guys, you know the guys in the spaceship, are singing, and it was essentially a version
of the old British army song, you know, over the seas and far away.
way.
King George commands and we obey, only now it's like, you know, the Emperor commands and we obey.
There is also this nostalgia for the days when Europe and more specifically Britain bestowed the world when you could take pride in yourself and you could take pride in the king and the empire and everything that made you what you were and you're not allowed to do that anymore.
But if you create this kind of cartoonish.
Version of it and with a wink and a nod and you're saying well, we don't really believe in this stuff But isn't it fun to pretend that we believe in it?
But I think within that there's a certain amount of people who are thinking but we do actually believe in it And also I should point out I mean the first people I knew who were really into this stuff without exception They were all veterans and I think a lot of it really yeah Yeah, and I think it was because they were people who?
I mean, a lot of the, well not a lot of them, all of them had seen war, but they all thought it was pointless.
And there was a hunger for imagining fighting for something that mattered.
Even if it's like a nightmarish theocracy, it still makes more sense.
Even if it's imperfect, even if it involves sacrifice.
Yeah, that still makes more sense than bringing, you know, transgenderism to Afghanistan or whatever it is that America is supposed to be about now.
Well, a lot of this, both Warhammer 40k specifically and a lot of alternative fiction, especially Harry Turtledove, which we do intend to talk about at some point in this podcast, reminds me a lot of something the late Mark Fisher wrote about in his really influential book, Capitalist Realism.
I'm going to read a section of it.
And y'all, especially you Greg, are going to have to bear with me because there is some lefty drivel in this analysis that we're going to have to kind of cast to the side.
But really, stick with it.
Stick with it anyway.
So Mark Fisher is talking about the film Children of Men, which is this future dystopia in which humanity has become totally infertile.
We've seen the film.
That was a Yeah, which I actually do like the film, but more on that in a second.
So the quote is, Watching children of men,
we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Frederick Jameson and Slazov Zizek,
that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
That slogan captures precisely what I mean by capitalist realism,
the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system,
but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.
Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination, the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living.
Not so in Children of Men.
The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it.
In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and capital are by no means incompatible.
Internment camps and franchise coffee bars coexist.
In Children of Men, public space is abandoned, given over to uncollected garbage and stalking animals.
One especially resonant scene takes place inside a derelict school through which a deer runs.
So, there's a lot to dig into here.
Now, obviously... I'd be better off considering today's schools if we had deer running through them.
Now, obviously I'm not endorsing this silly kind of left-wing idea that we are ruled by a bizarre hybrid of ultra-authoritarianism and capital, but Fischer's point about children of men and a lot of sci-fi generally, I do think is really on point.
I agree.
So much of it is just about a slightly or occasionally dramatically crappier version
of what we have now.
And that is very true of children of men where it's like, oh, humanity is infertile.
It's like, oh, well, that's easy to imagine because humanity is becoming less and less
fertile, especially in the West.
And throughout that film, because there's no purpose, because there are no children,
it's been like 20 years since a human baby has been born.
Everything is really vapid.
Everybody is really nihilistic.
The streets and everything are really dirty.
And it is just like a crappier version of the nihilism and filth that we see today.
And you see this in so many things, like the movie The Day After Tomorrow, where it's like, okay, global warming just goes full throttle and there's just a disaster.
Or The Handmaid's Tale, especially the TV series, which again, for lefties, at least... They think they really believe this stuff.
They just view this as kind of the culmination of Trumpism.
More universally, the really popular television show Black Mirror, which I think is great, like each of its episodes, it's kind of like a modern version of the Twilight Zone, but each of its episodes just take, you know, cancel culture and social media and the surveillance state and just kick it up a notch into something that, you know, even worse than we have today.
One of the real strengths of Warhammer 40k and the whole, this enormous, sprawling alternative universe that it depicts is that it does finally just break out of this tendency in sci-fi where it's just like, oh, it's what we have now, but worse.
Warhammer 40k is just a totally, totally different world.
And I think that that is really, really liberating to a lot of people.
And this is true, albeit to a lesser extent, Of the film Starship Troopers, of what if instead of everything just being crappier, everything was just totally different?
What if in the future the wars we fight are really important?
What if they're really existential?
Like, what if there's kind of a broad-based... What if you're allowed to take your own side?
Certainty in the fact that the government is good.
What if the government was on your side?
What if you were fighting something truly evil?
And I think that is kind of a secret sauce to a lot of these really combat-oriented sci-fi universes.
It's also true of the Halo video game franchise, which also became, you know, TV series and pulpy novels and all of this stuff, where it is this future existential war against this evil enemy alien race, and all of humanity is united in this fight to the death with it.
I think there's a real liberation that comes with Imagine that something like that is possible, and it's not just going to be, oh, in the future everybody's going to be even less fertile, or the weather is going to be even worse, or social media is going to have even more control over your life.
You know, some of those critiques embedded in those dystopias are valuable, and sometimes they're done well, such as in Black Mirror.
Other times it's just junk, like in Day After Tomorrow.
But I think there is a real importance in Just, like, letting people dream of something just totally different from what we have?
They can't.
They can't let people dream of it.
I mean, to take what Fisher said here, the idea of imagining an alternative to liberalism, classical or otherwise, the idea to imagining a different system of values, that's what seems impossible to a lot of people, at least when it comes to real-world politics.
With sci-fi and, broadly speaking, fantasy, Well, especially high fantasy, even if you look at, like, Tolkien or something like that.
I mean, the idea of sacred authority, the idea of something being beyond yourself, the idea that you're part of a hierarchy, and that you have a place, and it's good to have a place, and it's good to fight for this, that is a radical different thing.
There's Morgoth's Review, which is a good YouTube channel, which will probably get purged any day now, but he You can do both.
You're allowed to get into wargaming, but only if you work out.
always tell when somebody gets into one of these things because it's like all they talk about it's
like joining crossfit or something beautiful analogy yes you can do both and uh you're allowed
to get into war gaming but only if you work out don't be one of these like people who gets it
doesn't work out but he was talking about a fan-made movie which was called hell's reach
and it was sort of this kind of doomed last stand of these guys against this invasion of
I think it was at works or something like that.
And he was like, well, you know, it's interesting that people have made this stuff and everything else.
And he said, It's interesting that you have these amateurs making stuff, you know, with no resources.
Making stuff that's better than Hollywood.
You know, just objectively better in terms of storytelling, in terms of drama, in terms of stuff that matters.
But what's really important is that this is a non-liberal world.
And by non-liberal I don't mean like non-democrat.
I mean totally different from the fundamental premises of classical republicanism.
Of even the Enlightenment.
I mean, really, if you take 40K in the broadest sense, and I'm sure this was unintended, but really it's about the failure of the Enlightenment Project, where you say, we can perfect mankind through education, and we can perfect mankind through reason.
And then, you know, you draw that out over a period of time, and it's, no, no you can't.
And we don't need to insert dark gods or weird things to explain, like, why this happened in our world, because we saw it play out in real time.
And if you see where the logic of Western society is taking it, What good is all this talk about human rights and enlightenment and values and democracy and everything else when, at the endgame, the people who have gotten into this the most, the people who believe in this ideology the most, hate themselves, don't want to reproduce, and can't wait to be replaced?
And this is another thing which gets into satire and the idea of double irony and everything else.
Think of, you said that a lot of Modern satire takes what we have now, and it's just like, oh, imagine this, but only a little bit worse.
Well, not satire, just sci-fi.
Dystopia, yeah.
But here's the thing, even in Children of Men, the targets of the social criticism are still, broadly speaking, on the right.
Like, authority, you know, broadly defined, like that's the problem.
Yeah, in this future UK, there's this authoritarian government that's super anti-immigrant, and they're putting the Right, right, right.
It's the same thing with like V for Vendetta where it's like fanatical Church of England.
It's like have you seen the Church of England?
I mean like what and this is sort of the the problem because there's there's two problems here.
One is If you tried to talk about what's actually happening, satirize what's actually happening, which I would say is basically what was happening on social media 2016 and for the brief period when we had something of a free internet, it becomes hate speech and it gets shut down because you can't, I mean, people talk... You can't make a, you couldn't make a right-wing children of men.
You would never be allowed to make this movie.
The producers would not let it get through.
In which there's a future dystopian in which there's an authoritarian government that's
centered around political correctness or anti-whiteness.
You can't do that.
You're not allowed to do that.
You won't get funding.
You won't get released.
You'll get deplatformed.
But you can sort of accidentally sort of create these sort of sci-fi worlds where you don't
have to deal with that one way or the other if it's sufficiently different from the world
we live in.
Right.
That's why.
Warhammer 40k.
You could never write a political manifesto advocating for the kind of worlds that are in Starship Troopers or Warhammer 40k, you know, that would be illegal in a lot of Europe.
In the UK specifically.
I mean, let's take Let's take the 40k most cartoonish versions of what probably maybe even some of the leftists who created it and read some of the books and things like that have talked about in interviews and everything else.
Let's say they really believe it.
Let's then go beyond what they actually believe.
Let's say Margaret Thatcher was a fascist, the monarchy is ridiculous and superstitious, we have an overwhelming theocracy in the UK, authoritarianism, hierarchy, all these terrible, terrible things.
You can imagine that as a cartoon.
Now let's look at the UK now.
If you say the wrong thing in a bar, you might get a police inquiry.
If you say something on Facebook, the police might come to your house.
You have grooming gangs taking your daughters, and if you try to fight back against it, the police arrest you.
The United Kingdom is not free.
It is not free.
This idea of mass democracy and everything else is complete nonsense.
There is no free world.
How do you say that?
How do you even say that in the UK when it's basically illegal to say that?
Or if you do say that, now you're immediately pathologized as a far-right-wing extremist and you're not going to have access to these things.
Which brings me to the second problem with If you were trying to do a sci-fi version of what we have now.
I mean, imagine how you would even structure it.
Some guys get on a spaceship, sail somewhere, go to another planet.
The people at the other planet meet them and say, hello, we've never met you before, but we also know that we need to destroy our entire society and let you take it over.
So we're just going to commit suicide now and dismantle everything and hand it over.
Like, great book.
I mean, so everything has to be structured in a way where Even the bad guys quote-unquote have to be broadly speaking on the right because it has to be at least seen as something
Attractive or dangerous or romantic for it to be a compelling story because you can't write a compelling story about what's going on now.
Even something where you have a critique of, say, leftist ideas.
Take, for example, the I think of what the film was Equilibrium.
Yeah, with, you know, yeah, guys doing crazy stuff with guns and everything else.
Now, if you look at the the ideology in the movie, it's in passing, it's to prevent Crime by controlling or ending essentially emotion and they even talk about hate crimes, right?
So the government gives mandates doesn't give forces everybody to take these pills that like make you into a robot like you don't more or less feels when you take these pills anti-feels pills.
Yes, which is essentially what our society is now in a lot of ways, but There's kind of a throwaway line where it says, you know, one of the big innovations that helped us lead to our glorious new society was the idea of the hate crime.
The idea that emotion and the emotion behind a crime is almost more important or worse than the crime itself.
And therefore, if we get to the root cause, I mean, what is the reason they give to try to shut us down?
They say, these guys are saying these things.
Therefore, it's going to lead people to think in this direction, and that's going to lead to either crimes or, what I guess they're more afraid of, a social revolution, which will have a social order that we want to avoid.
So therefore, to cut it off, we need to cut off the thoughts, we need to cut off the emotions.
I mean, how do they phrase it, right?
We're trying to, we're opposed to hate.
We're opposed to an emotion.
I mean, I'm opposed to joy.
I'm opposed to anger.
I'm opposed to feeling full.
I don't even know.
I mean, you're basically declaring war on a human emotion.
And the same people who do this were the same people who were making fun of President George W. Bush when he talked about a war on terror, which was just a tactic, not like a thing that you can actually achieve victory over.
Right.
That's ridiculous.
But a war on hate is not ridiculous.
Right.
The essential problem that I think faces the creative left, if there even is a creative left, where they're just out of ideas.
We're just hearing the same story over and over again.
Now, broadly speaking, that's true of a lot of like legends and stuff here with a thousand faces, that kind of thing.
But we're just hearing the same thing over and over where it's, here are some people, they have something good.
Be it superpowers, be it some sort of a society, be it some sort of position, and it's inherently horrible that they have this and they need to destroy it and they need to dismantle themselves and they need to sacrifice themselves.
For everybody else even if they get nothing out of it Yeah, I mean that was sort of like the the message of the
movie elysium, which I thought was interesting I mean that was made by a south african expatriate and he
talked about The problems that were facing the world was clearly
informed by the real world where he essentially not directly, but more or less talked about
Swallowing population and the impossibility of taking care of everyone the impossibility of having first world living
standards when much of the globe is still gripped by poverty and
inequality.
And the essential answer was, yeah, but we're not really allowed to do anything about it.
So, you know, grab your ankles and that's all there is to it.
I mean, you're not allowed to fight back.
And even in these cartoonish versions of sci-fi, You're allowed to fight back.
And so that's why people are like, oh, Purge the Zenos.
Purge the Emperor.
And yeah, it's a cartoon, but it makes more sense than believing what CNN tells you.
Right, so in getting into that fighting back, I really want to get into is Harry Turtledove.
And you know, before we do this, I just want to point out that there was a, I remember there was some right-wing activist who made some comment about one of his books on Twitter and he saw it and like went nuts and beat his chest about how much he hates it.
So I'm just really hoping that he listens to this.
I want you to know we've read your books and we've taken all the deliberately wrong lessons from them.
So enjoy this, Harry.
Yeah, it's actually very unusual to meet somebody on the dissident right who has not read a lot of Harry Turtledove.
I'm actually always really surprised when I meet somebody who hasn't read even one of his novels.
There were people I knew in college who were, like, apolitical and who read the stuff and identified with the people you're not supposed to.
Alright, let's actually explain ourselves here.
So, Harry Turtledove is Basically the godfather of what's called alternative fiction or alternative history.
He writes these very pulpy novels, you know, the same kind of trade paperback thing as Tom Clancy, but they're all about how things could have gone differently.
His most famous novel is called The Guns of the South, in which, in 2014, Supporters of apartheid in South Africa managed to obtain a time machine.
Somebody else made it, but they managed to steal it somehow.
Right.
But the time machine, for whatever reason, can only go backwards 150 years or frontwards 150 years.
years or frontwards 150 years. So they go back to 1864, right when the South is starting
to decisively lose the American Civil War, and they bring the South AK-47s, along with
a lot of other goodies, but mostly AK-47s.
On the cover of Guns of the South, there's this beautiful, beautiful portrait of Robert E. Lee holding an AK-47.
And then, of course, armed with 20th century assault rifles, the South goes on to decisively win the American Civil War and it achieves independence.
There's also a whole other, I mean Harry Shurtlelove has written so many books, we definitely can't
even come close to talking about all of them, but he also has the Great War series, which
is also a series in which also the South wins the Civil War, but by considerably more conventional
means.
And very believable.
The point of departure is, and I apologize in advance if I've got this wrong,
It's been years since I read it, but I think the point of departure is simply that those Union soldiers don't find the general order before Antietam.
And so Lee wins at Antietam, which was when the South was closest to international recognition from the European powers.
Lee wins at Antietam, the Confederacy probably does become independent.
Well yeah, and France and Britain then recognize the Confederacy and everything, and then this is a whole series of novels.
So the South wins the Civil War, and then there is what's called the Second Mexican
War in which the South invades northern Mexico, and then the United States aligns with Mexico.
It's both the Second Mexican War and the Second Civil War.
And then there's a series of novels after that in which World War I happens, but with
the South and the North on opposite sides of it.
So you get trench warfare in the United States.
And there's all this cool other stuff that happens.
The Mormons in the West take inspiration from the success of the Southern Secessionist Movement
by fighting their own Secessionist War.
Blacks in the South during World War I get inspired by communism and, you know, have this huge communist revolt.
Yeah, one thing I want to suggest to Mr. Toledov, like, the blacks discussing communism in stereotypical black accents is a little... like, even I'm reading it and, like, cringing being a little insensitive here, but okay.
Yeah.
I also want to give a shout out to the hashtag Desnatt Gang for an independent Deseret.
I'm following you guys.
Keep fighting to take back your church.
I'm not going down that rabbit hole.
My point about all of these Harry Turtledove novels is, again, what I was getting at earlier with that freedom to dream thing of you could never get away with writing a novel in which the South secedes now successfully, right? You can't do
that. Just like you couldn't write a novel now about apartheid retaking control of South Africa
or, you know, just the Afrikaners retaking control or successfully seceding. Yeah, I don't
think anyone would even want apartheid.
But what you can do in, like, our cultural atmosphere is you can write alternative history
novels in which you at least portray it as somewhat negatively the South simply wins the civil war.
And again, there's this plausible deniability that you see in Warhammer 40k and Starship Troopers and all this, where it doesn't even matter at this point whether or not it's satire or whether or not you're reading Harry Tuttledove and you're supposed to be cheering for the South or cheering for the North.
It's just that liberation of being able to- The freedom to dream.
Yeah, the freedom to dream.
It's also just this rejection of the idea that history is telecratic or linear and we're always improving.
The Whig theory of history, we're always becoming more egalitarian, we're always becoming more democratic.
Francis Fukuyama was right and we've been on this Francis Fukuyama trajectory for centuries.
You actually get to reject all of that and imagine people taking up arms for their identity and fighting for it.
I've seen a lot of criticism, and again, this sounds crazy and nuts, but I think this idea of the freedom to dream is important, and this is something that's being taken away, and it's being taken away deliberately.
There were a lot of leftist critics out there who have problems with the idea of alternative history generally, and you even see this in video games or something like that.
Oh my gosh, that's right!
No, the guys who made Game of Thrones, they were going to do a mini-series in which the South wins the Civil War, but it got cancelled because black people flipped out about it.
It's a faux documentary, a documentary about things that didn't actually happen.
I think Spike Lee was involved in it, called C.S.A.
Yeah.
And even that, it's sort of a, it falls flat.
It's a British, you gotta explain stuff.
Yeah, alright.
C.S.A.
is a, supposedly a British documentary about how the South won the Civil War and then conquered the entirety of the North.
So imposes slavery in the North.
Right and then in Latin America and all of the stuff and it's obviously meant to be viewed all as you know negative and it's also in this silly left-wing way trying to say what we have now isn't actually that different from CSA being victorious.
Which is one of the confusing things about it because you're saying oh this is this nightmarish world that we'd be living in but also this is what we have now which doesn't make sense and you also have Claims made in this faux documentary which show that, you know, you leftists just can't do good satire, where they say, oh, well, Canada becomes a superpower because a bunch of blacks flee north and all become scientists.
You know, you gotta like, you just wanna like, if you could somehow have a mind reading machine and like get a bunch of good Democrats in a room and just like, look at their thoughts as they watch that and just be, how many of them really think like, yeah, that would do it.
That's the secret sauce, guys.
There are fake commercials in this fake documentary, and one of the fake commercials is for a TV show called Slave Catcher or something, which is basically that TV show called Cops, except it's just grabbing slaves who have run away.
It's the same thing!
And then the left-wing point is like, well, we already currently watch TV shows where we just watch big, beefy cops.
Police come out of the slave patrols and all that.
I mean, that's a real argument that you'll get, like contemporary police come out of the slave patrols and everything else.
Well, it's easy to just, like, BTFO lefties making this argument of like, oh, so if it's not that different, would it be not a big deal if we reinstituted slavery?
Like, we wouldn't be able to perceive the difference between that and what we have now.
Like what's your point here?
Right.
It's like, you know, you hear lefties, like, I mean, at least I had, you know,
lefty college students when I was in college, straight up saying Jim Crow
didn't end what we have now is Jim Crow.
The South actually won the civil war.
You hear that sometimes.
Can we re-institute Jim Crow?
Can we re-institute sundown laws?
Like, would you not be able to notice if that happened?
It's just, right.
It's so silly, but again, double irony.
A lot of people in the distant right really love CSA.
I own it on DVD.
I think it's a great, I think it's a great movie.
When I was in college, and I was not the one who actually got really into Turtle Dove, but one of my friends did.
He was kind of a Democrat, but he got really into the books.
One of Turtle Dove's weaknesses as an author is he doesn't really come up with characters a lot of times.
He just kind of takes a guy from history, gives him a different name, puts him in a different society, and then they follow the same script.
Yeah, disclaimer here.
Harry Turtle Dove is not a I'm not a master of literature or prose.
No.
These are pulpy novels.
There's not a great deal of character development.
There's just a ridiculous amount of sex, too, which is so annoying.
Yeah.
It's, like, cartoony sexy.
Skip it, right?
Yeah, and it's like, listen, let's get to these big... I'd rather get back to the trench warfare.
Yeah, like, let's do it, man.
This is dumb.
But again, something that makes Harry Turtledove so much better than all of these other pulp authors, like Tom Clancy comes to mind, is that there's something so frustratingly neoconservative about everything Tom Clancy writes.
Wow, wrote.
Oh, yeah.
Excuse me.
Yeah, no disrespect intended.
My mistake.
R.A.P.
But, like, he's got this big book called The Dragon and the Bear, which is about this future war between Russia and China.
And America aligns with Russia.
Toward the end of his life, his book, he was more or less advocating for America aligns with Russia.
Right, but his point in this novel is that Russia, in this sort of not-too-distant future, is like a healthy Western-style democracy, and China still isn't, which is why America and Russia align against China.
It is just this like neo-conservative fantasy of like, oh, we managed to get Russia to be a democracy through the Cold War, so now we're gonna fight this other war, and then China will be democratic.
And at the end of the book, China just becomes this like happy-go-lucky Western-style democracy, and it's just... Now they can enjoy this It's all just so trite.
It's like George W. Bush could have written this novel.
Again, there's not that freedom to dream.
They're the same limitations that Mark Fisher was talking about in these dystopias where these kind of militaristic fantasies of all of these techno-spy thrillers still just fit so comfortably in the paradigm of we need to fight wars for democracy, we need to fight wars for feminism, we need to defeat Islamofascism.
Or the more dated stuff by Ian Fleming who wrote the James Bond series where it's just It's just anti-communist pornography, you know, it's just like this like impossibly handsome and incredibly talented spy who's just outwitting all of these, you know, Russian bureaucrats and, you know, petty third-world Marxist dictators and stuff, and it's still all just within the paradigm of what we have today, which is like
Lame, and I don't care if China is a democracy or not.
We shouldn't fight a war to make China a democracy.
I mean, that's, like, their problem.
Like, they can figure that out.
And, like, as far as Ian Fleming, like, you know, look, I'm glad we won the Cold War.
I'm not, you know, I don't like communism, but, like, man, it's over.
Like, it's done.
It's been over for a long time.
But with Harry Turtledove, you have this just total, like, I don't know, right-wing liberation theology of just, like, what if the South, what if the South had won?
And you see this.
What if people stuck up for themselves?
You see this also with Computer games too.
I mean there was there's a game called Hearts of Iron 4 where it's basically World War II and so you can take command of whoever but somebody had made like a mod and it created like a whole different world.
I think it's called like Kaiserreich where basically Germany wins World War I and so what ends up happening is not so it's not you know, oh, I'm now we're all Cheering for this or that but it's history is on a different trajectory So things that you that seem in France like going communist or something like that like these things suddenly become Real in this world and these aren't that ridiculous.
I mean, here's the point of departure Germany wins World War one That's not crazy.
I mean that could have happened right and so these things happen, but Once you get people thinking along these lines, even if you're thinking in left-wing lines, like the idea of France goes communist, right?
It's dangerous from a progressive point of view, from the journalist-controlling point of view, because once people start thinking, another world is possible, right?
That used to be the leftist slogan.
Now the slogan is, don't you dare think another world is possible.
And we're going to get you fired, and we're going to make sure you can't have a Twitter account, and we're going to make sure that you don't get anything other than... And also, every show is just refighting World War II over and over and over again, and it just becomes...
You know, you talk about the Cold War being over.
I mean, how long has World War II been over?
I mean, at a certain point, it's just like, it's the same story over and over and over again.
You just kind of tune it out.
Right.
Well, for the left, to the extent that they believe another world is possible, it's like their other world is just, like, what?
So everybody is transgendered?
Yeah, there's no glorious vision.
Everybody gets a UBI so it's okay if you lose your job.
This is really not the stuff of spectacular fiction.
This doesn't really count as freedom to dream.
It's just more ridiculousness of what we have now.
There's no glorious vision.
If you look at...
I'm not as familiar with contemporary progressives or the dirtbag left as you are, but based
on what I've been seeing, as far as like, well, what's the endgame here?
What do you really want?
And again, if we go back to Marx, What he wanted was essentially, once the shackles of capitalism were lifted, everybody would have unbelievable human potential.
You know, there'd be Shakespeare's everywhere, we'd be conquering nature, we'd be doing all these incredible things.
There's something really thrilling about that vision of communism.
But that's gone.
Because now it's...
Work sucks, man, and if we get the revolution, we'll get to sit at home and hate ourselves or something, but, like, get paid for it?
I mean, there's no... there's nothing compelling.
It's, like, vague stuff about, like, oh, there'll be a Green New Deal, and, like, maybe there won't be pollution.
It's, like, okay, so we won't die, and we'll sit around?
I mean... Well, remember that Marx had a son-in-law.
His most famous book is called The Right to be Lazy.
I'm serious.
I'm serious.
I'm absolutely serious.
To the extent that I'm not serious, it's because it wasn't a son-in-law, maybe it was like a nephew, but I'm pretty sure it was a son-in-law.
And his point, I mean, it was actually kind of like a, I don't know, the original dirtbag left critique of like orthodox Marxism of just like, look, I don't want to, you know, work in these glorious factories.
I want to just kind of... What do I care about tractors and pig iron?
You know, I want to hang out and when I'm on Twitter, I don't want to see anything offensive.
You know and it's like I guess you know really strictly speaking that does constitute a sort of freedom to dream But I mean it's pretty crappy dream.
Yeah, what a lame.
I mean here's a dream Way better to dream about World War I in which the South is fighting against the North.
America aligns with Imperial Germany, interestingly enough.
We can even go on a further one.
There's another one I'm not going to get into, but this is sort of the ultimate leftist nightmare.
I think the author even described it as sort of the vision where everybody, the bad guys, win everything.
Which is S.M.
Sterling's Domination of the Draka Series, where essentially everybody, the quote-unquote bad guys from every point of history, French Royalists, Confederates, everybody, everybody goes to South Africa for some reason, and for some reason creates this like anti-Christian, anti-egalitarian, right-wing, Nietzschean form of society built upon slavery and subjugating everybody else, and creates this sort of Super race and you get this vision of World War Two where the Nazis are the liberals and like fighting to prevent Europe from being conquered by slavers and so it just goes completely nuts.
Now even now this is obviously probably the most cartoonish form of anything that I've ever seen but even this People talk about it and start wargaming it and saying, could this happen and everything else?
And you start thinking to yourself, well, this, even this thing that is obviously portrayed as not just bad, but the worst possible outcome, even this has stuff where it's dangerous for people to think about.
So there's one novel, for example, where one of these evil people from, you know, the Drakkar, whatever, comes to our world and shows people, you know, in today's reality, like, this is the society they've created and everything else.
And of course, she immediately gets a bunch of followers.
And the reason is because They say, oh, well, this is clearly better.
And I think they should.
She shows like a picture of like Haiti, like as it is in her world.
And of course, it's like beautiful and wonderful and everything else.
And then you like look at ours and it's like, well, I mean, some people are going to look at that.
It's like those satellite photos you see of Haiti where you have like send it where you have the deforestation in Haiti where it's just like a total wasteland from space.
And.
There have to be people who look at the world and say, this is not what we want.
This is not the endgame.
But the only way you can have a meaningful critique of it is from the right.
And it has to be on an anti-liberal basis.
It has to be on a fundamentally different grounding.
You can't really do that from the dirtbag left of the modern left, because other than vaguely waving your hands and talking about capitalism, there's no ultimate vision.
Yeah, that's actually a huge problem with Mark Fisher, who I was quoting earlier.
It's so typical of lefties, all of these critiques of everything, sometimes insightful, sometimes not, and it's like, well, what do you want?
And it's like, oh, well, I want free healthcare.
I want good jobs for everybody.
It's just not a lot of there there.
Right.
And if you implemented it tomorrow, the ground would shift and it would be, oh, well, we actually don't really have free health care because there's not enough money for it or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, there's nothing new.
I mean, it's the same thing that's being told for a long time.
Whereas in these fantastic things, let's go back to 40K, for example.
I mean, in this you have a vision where the emperor, say, Here's human potential at its utmost, and this is what you're fighting for.
And there's theocracy and there's bureaucracy and there's all these terrible things and there's problems and everything else, but here are these people who have superhuman abilities because we're achieving it through science and genetic modification and everything else.
Here's this vision of humanity dominating the galaxy and fighting for ourselves.
Here's this idea of taking up our own side.
That makes more sense.
than being a normal citizen in a mass democracy where every minute of every day it's hate yourself, hate everybody who came before you, and distract yourself from how disgusting everything is with all this consumerist crap that you don't really want.
Yeah.
And here's some advertisements to convince you that like this plastic gidget will make your life better.
Yeah, just find meaning by tearing down statues and then just go home and watch Netflix.
Right, and you can watch shows about like how, you know, We have to watch out for World War II again, because that seems to be a lot of these miniseries now.
I mean, I'm not even going to get into those for Alternative History, just because they're so unimaginative and not even worth thinking about.
It's just, did you know that we could have lost?
It's like, shut up.
I mean, what do you guys want?
And I think this idea of the freedom to dream is really important for our side, because We have two things going for us, and unfortunately they're a bit contradictory.
The one thing that we do have going for us, and we've discussed this before, there are times in history, and there are even things that exist now, where we can point to and say, yeah, yeah, we would take that.
I mean, you pointed out Switzerland, where it's basically like, what do you want?
That.
There are towns in America, like, what do you want?
What's a good life?
This.
Or, like, where I just moved to, like, that kind of thing, where it's just, this is what I want.
But that's not really enough to get people to go all the way.
Because, especially when you're working in this cause, I mean, you're basically, and this is going out to all you guys out there, I'm basically asking you guys to step forward and take part in a movement where there are going to be costs.
There are going to be social costs, there are going to be monetary costs, there may be physical costs.
And to do that, you have to be willing to sacrifice, if necessary, anything.
And that requires a really compelling moral vision.
I don't want to say a vision of utopia, but a vision of the ultimate good.
Yeah, a vision with moral clarity.
Right, and the idea of throwing yourself entirely into a struggle.
And that's something that I mean, it's our job to present that, but in these alternative universes where they create something like that, and this idea of throwing yourself into something entirely, screaming for the Emperor or something like that, even if it's originally meant as satire, even if it's originally meant as a cartoonish parody, it comes off as better.
And same reason that the Starship Troopers film failed as satire, because he inadvertently created a society that looks better than what we have now.
Yeah.
Well, and I think, yeah, I mean, I think that's a good wrap, but again, Freedom to Dream is really kind of the point we're obviously trying to hammer home here, and for y'all who haven't indulged yet, I really, really recommend reading any of Harry Turtledove's novels involving the American Civil War.
They are just an absolute blast, and you actually get to imagine something different.
Man, it's just...
It's so nice.
It's just so great.
Another world is possible, guys, so keep that in mind and the emperor protects.
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