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April 29, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
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Barack Obama Tells Us to Choose the Good Over the True
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Hey guys, welcome to Left, White, and Right.
I'm Gregory Hood.
I'm here with Chris Roberts.
Today we are discussing The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington.
Samuel Huntington is probably the most well-known academic of the 20th century, at least in the United States.
I would think maybe only Chomsky would probably compare to him in terms of how often he cited I certainly remember from grad school, there was a point where I was reading four different books by Huntington in four different classes.
Now, of course, he's basically persona non grata, and they're all just going to pretend he didn't exist.
But this is a guy who was at the height of what you would call the establishment.
I believe he was chair of political science at Harvard.
He was a New Deal Democrat.
He was by no means a conservative.
The fact that he ended his life essentially being chased out of college classrooms and being called a Nazi and a racist doesn't really tell us much about him so much as how vast the culture shift was over the last half century.
His last book, Who Are We?, is well known in our circles because he gets to one of the most difficult questions, I feel, which is defining American identity, whether there even is an American identity, and whether American identity can survive mass immigration, particularly from Latin America.
But the clash of civilizations was probably the book of the moment after the September 11th terrorist attacks and a lot of people drew on it to justify the war on terrorism and the invasions that were launched.
So when was the, did you read this at the time around September 11th or was this something you came into later, Chris?
No, this episode will probably Highlight our age difference more than any episode ever will I was way too little when the 9-11 terrorist attacks happened to have then subsequently read Read this book.
I I became aware of Huntington and As a teenager, entirely because of Francis Fukuyama, I read The End of History and The Last Man and then took it upon myself to read all of his critics, all the critics of The End of History thesis.
And Sam Huntington's book, Clash of Civilizations, is in a large way a rejoinder to Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and The Last Man.
So I read it in that context.
At that point in time, again because I'm a lot younger than you, this was right when the Arab Spring was happening.
Like I read The End of History and The Last Man a few months before the Arab Spring kicked off.
So at that exact moment in 2011, Everybody thought that the world, the planet, was proving that Fukuyama had been right and that Huntington had been wrong.
Right, right.
There is no Arab world.
It's all just going to be liberal democracy.
Right.
And I, at the time, Totally agreed.
I was just like, oh yeah, I mean, Huntington is clearly wrong because Huntington does single out the Islamic world as a place that's going to be especially difficult to democratize.
And he says it'll be a bigger challenge than Russia, for example.
And it just, you know, just watching the news and it was like, yeah, Huntington was wrong.
I didn't circle back around To Huntington until much, much later on, honestly.
Well, Huntington for me was somebody who I got.
It wasn't something I picked up on my own.
It was honestly through school.
And a lot of the work that he did, he did a lot of analysis on the difference of what it means to be a military officer and the code of an apolitical military.
He was writing about this decades ago when people in the atmosphere of the Cold War, when you had serious questions about whether the military should be apolitical, particularly when you have some sort of a crisis environment with the Soviets.
Basically, war is too important to be left to the politicians.
And he wrote, About why, in our tradition, it's so important to have civilian control of the military, how that's been established as a social norm.
And he also wrote a great deal about democratization, particularly certain waves of democratization, and how different, let's say, cultural groupings are more amenable to democracy than others.
It should be noted that one of those groups, maybe to give Fukuyama a little boost here before we just tear into him, is The Latin world, Spain, of course, was still ruled by Franco.
Portugal, you had Salazar.
Latin America, of course, you had all these military leaders and autocrats.
And a lot of people talked about these areas in the same way that people talk about Russia today.
They're culturally just incapable of having democracy.
Now, I would actually go so far as to say that the real problem now, not to get too ahead of ourselves, it's not so much that democracy is the end of history and there are certain cultures that are just incapable of it.
It's that what we think of as democracy now has been brought into question.
Because now we have a situation where when people, at least journalists and elites, say democracy, they don't actually mean the will of the people or the people having some sort of power over their elected leaders.
Somehow democracy, or as the term goes, our democracy, capital O, capital D, tends to be, here's a managerial class that will tell you what opinions you can read and see.
And we will protect you from authoritarian forces from outside.
And that's what democracy is.
It's just a new form of the managerial state.
When Huntington was writing, I think democracy was a lot closer to what we think.
Democracy originally was, which is this idea of popular sovereignty, limited government, certain rights that you possess, which no government can take away.
But.
His work on the clash of civilizations, I think, is more important than his work on civilian military relations, more important than his work on democratization.
Because what he's saying in the clash of civilizations is that you are going to have a multipolar world.
You are going to have Western decline and the end of the unipolar moment.
And this isn't the kind of thing that Can just be solved.
History doesn't end.
It just goes on.
And it's not even the, oh, it's a cyclical thing, as a traditionalist might say.
It's simply that it almost draws on Spengler.
That there are certain civilizations that have a kind of self-contained mental space.
And, ultimately, there's no merger possible between them.
Some may die out.
Some may be conquered.
But I mean, the obvious example would be the Eastern Roman Empire, something that was just crushed through military force.
That was a civilization that was stomped out.
But this idea that.
We can simply talk over our differences or that a global public opinion will emerge and a global man.
This was something that he attacked directly, and this got a lot of people very angry because ultimately becoming a citizen of the world.
Is sort of the end goal of the modern liberal project.
I mean, am I overstating it there?
No, not, not at all.
Uh, I mean, what you're saying is, I mean, gels very well with, with Huntington's clash of civilizations where it's, he sort of simultaneously argues that a, there are lots of places that culturally just aren't amenable to democracy as we understand it.
And that in addition to that, The civilizational differences across the world are so pronounced that even if a lot of these faraway places do democratize, there will still be such enormous cultural differences.
that this won't make the countries get along, per se.
I mean, he would argue that, you know, if Russia or China became a democracy, started holding free and fair elections as regularly as Western countries do, that they're still sort of outside of Western civilization and that there's an inherent antagonism there that kind of political ideology can't really paper over.
I mean, Fukuyama's thesis is that You know, politics is over because there's a political consensus that will inevitably reach anywhere.
Huntington is saying, no, there are cultural gulfs that voting can't undo.
Again, I mean, for those of you who don't have the map in front of them the way Greg and I presumably do, The civilizations that he identifies are Western, which you can well imagine what that is, Orthodox, which are European countries that are more Orthodox Christian than Protestant or Catholic, in addition to Kazakhstan and the Caucasian, as in the region, nations that are Orthodox and not Islamic.
And there's Islamic civilization.
There's Buddhist, which is, you know, Tibet and parts of Southeast Asia, along with Mongolia.
There's Hindu, which is just India and Nepal.
There's African, which is only Sub-Saharan African, because North Africa is, of course, Islamic.
Right.
There's Latin American.
There's Scenic, which is China, the Koreas, and Vietnam.
And then there's Japanese, which is literally just Japan.
It's a pretty unique case, too.
I mean, there you have a country and a civil... I mean, that's...
One of the concepts that we've talked about a little bit in the past and something that I'm working on with my book is this idea of a civilization state.
And Japan is one of the very few countries, I mean, it's not a huge country in terms of global population, but it's very hard to say that Japan is part of a different Civilization like it really is its own civilization.
It has its own native religion.
It doesn't have to rely on other countries for its spiritual or ethnic foundation.
It's a singular place.
I mean, our boss would probably have a lot to say on that topic and his book.
I believe that he wrote in the 90s about Japan.
Jared Taylor's book on Japan is very interesting in this respect.
Yeah, well, and Huntington does get into civilization states.
I mean, Japan is extremely unique because it doesn't have any sort of satellites.
But he notes that for the West, the civilization state is the United States.
That's what sort of drives the rest of the West.
For the Orthodox world, it's obviously Russia.
And for some of the smaller cases, the answer is, you know, really obvious.
I mean, the civilization state of Hindu civilization is obviously India, because Nepal is not about to give India a run for its money in terms of influence or wealth.
But something he talks about that's very interesting is that for both Latin America and the Islamic world, there isn't an obvious sort of chieftain of all of the nations that fall under the civilization.
because there are various issues with all of them.
Mexico would be a logical choice for Latin America, but it's kind of too aligned with the United States.
Brazil is out because it speaks Portuguese as opposed to Spanish.
Argentina is kind of out because of its constant economic crises.
And all the other nations in Latin America are simply too small to be the head honcho.
In the case of the Islamic world, Well, Turkey is a little too Western Iran is Shia which is like the which is really uncommon in most all the other Islamic countries our majority Sunni and Saudi Arabia plays too nice with with Israel and the United States and all the other Islamic nations are too small and too poor to be a clear leader and
And that's why you see so much internal strife in the Islamic world, as opposed to the Orthodox world or the Hindu world.
There's somebody really setting the pace.
Same with the West.
I mean, this jives well with one of the frequent critiques of democratic peace theory, the idea that democracies never fight wars, is that, well, basically all democracies are members of NATO, which is a military alliance.
And that's and that's that would be very true.
Huntington basically agrees with this is that, you know, Western democracy.
Well, they're all in the West and the West is sort of cohesive and led by the United States.
The United States can sort of arbitrary, you know, sort of decide.
They just sort of force people to get along or serve the role of mediator in a way that there's nobody to do that in the Islamic world.
In Latin America, which obviously has a lot less internal strife than the Islamic world, part of that is because they're absolutely all Catholic, like in the 1980s.
Traditionally.
I mean, that may be changing a little bit.
Sure, but historically, like one example he cites What's interesting is that Chile and Argentina almost fought a war in the 1980s over, like, this tiny speck of an island that was, like, exactly halfway, like, it was, you know, ambiguous as to whether or not it was in the Pacific, which makes it Chilean, or Atlantic, which makes it Argentine.
This was, like, smack dab in the middle of where we draw that line between the oceans.
And they really, really did come close to a war, and the reason they didn't is because they decided to take the matter to the Pope, and the Pope like, blessed some cartographers or something, and had these sort of holy cartographers decide, you know, who would get the island, and the cartographers decided that it was Chile's, and then Argentina couldn't really quibble, because what are they supposed to say, the Pope is wrong?
You know?
I actually find this very charming.
It really is!
Well, and then you compare that with the conflict between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, which was devastating.
It's like, well, there was no There was no chief that Iran and Iraq could take any disputes to because one was Sunni and the other is Shia.
You know, same with like, you know, Saudi Arabia can't mediate because a lot of Islamic countries don't trust it because, you know, they have all of these American military bases.
Maybe this is getting a bit into the weeds, but this is sort of, but this is what Fukuyama is, or excuse me, this is what Huntington is getting at, is that like the conflict between Iraq and Iran in the 80s Didn't have anything to do with democracy one way or the other.
It was a cultural, by which he basically means religious, matter.
And then the reason the conflict didn't break out between Chile and Argentina also had nothing to do with democracy, or communism, or anti-communism, or monarchicalism, or anything like that.
It was avoided because of this, you know, cultural religion, you know, unifying factor.
Right.
There's definitely a quest for Whole for a civilization and we can think of certain civilizations that had that and they lost it particularly with the Islamic world It's the caliphate and really the Islamic world has never recovered from losing the caliphate I mean even the Islamic State with their self-declared caliphate which was almost a parody of what came before the
Without that central pole, without that center, I mean, this is, I guess, what Evalu would call the idea of the empire, the sacral empire, where you say, this thing on earth is actually how we define our civilization, the political and the religious are united.
In Russia, you obviously have that with the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Russian political elite, and there are a lot of Western religious leaders who Are pretending to be surprised that the Russian Orthodox Church is supporting Russia's war in Ukraine.
But of course, if you're looking at it from a civilizational point of view, that's not surprising at all.
It's like saying that you're surprised that the Pope backed the Crusades.
It's simple.
If you have a religion that still has some political and cultural sway within a civilization, it makes sense that the religious and the political leadership are going to be united.
And if you don't have that, as you don't in the Islamic world now, then you have these kinds of conflicts that you're discussing.
And even if you don't have necessarily the same kind of power that the Catholic Church once enjoyed, as you point out, you still do have this sort of shared heritage which keeps Basically a war to the knife from occurring.
Yeah, there's a big question here as we as we get into Russia and Ukraine specifically.
He defines different kinds of conflicts and one of the things that got a lot of attention at the time.
Was the idea of the bloody borders between civilizations?
Obviously, if you look at the history of 20th century.
The borderlands between Germany and Russia were not really a great place to live.
This is basically the border between not just two great powers, but two civilizations.
And so you had this constant back and forth and redrawing of national boundaries and all sorts of things happening where people caught in that in-between space.
We're never quite capable of developing an independent sovereign identity that can drive off both these great powers.
They were always being fought over by one or the other.
And there's always a core state that defines the civilization.
Now, what we have now is, I would argue, that orthodox civilization or the Russian world, as you'll see some pro-Russia commentators talk about, It's obviously been weakened since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Under the Soviet Union, especially in the late stages, you had this kind of weird identity where on paper it was atheist and didn't believe in ethnicity and nationhood and workers of the world unite.
But as Huntington reminds us, civilizations endure and are more important than political forms.
So, for example, China and the Soviet Union were both communist.
They both shared the same ideology.
They both rallied behind the same symbols, but you had a very distinct split and almost a low-intensity, not almost, definitely, a low-intensity war between China and the Soviet Union after the United States was able to split them with Kissinger and then Nixon's visit to China.
The political forms and whatever form of government, whether you call it a liberal democracy, whether you call it communism, whether you call it monarchy, whatever else, all of that is actually less important than the underlying civilizational ideal.
And even if you have a revolution that comes in the name of overthrowing everything that came before it.
China, obviously, would be the great example where you had the Cultural Revolution, where they basically said, we are going to destroy everything that came before and create an entirely new society.
Well, look at where we are now, where China's basically cultural embassies in the United States are called something like the Confucius Institute.
They're turning back to their past.
Whenever you see these artistic displays that they put on, they're always appealing to traditional Chinese form.
So even though they've rejected the political form of the empire, it's still part of them.
It's still part of their blood. It's still part of their consciousness. Yeah, something Huntington
doesn't go out and explicitly ever say, but makes very clear, is that the world order of the Cold
War was really, really unique.
that it was an exceptional time in which the biggest global clashes were entirely ideological
and that that's basically never been the case, you know, that was never the case before and is
very unlikely to be the case moving forward. You know, that in the past, I mean, before the Cold
War, before the 20th century, really, I mean, it was always, it was always civilizational clashes
or religious wars or simply wars for territory and resources that we really shouldn't,
we really shouldn't read too much into the Cold War that, you know, those five decades were
really, really a big outlier, basically.
I mean, it really is an inversion of Fukuyama, who's like, okay, well, those, you know, those five decades were basically the most meaningful in human history, or quite nearly, because it settled this, it permanently settled this ideological debate.
What Huntington is saying is that those five decades were really, really weird, and now things are going to go back to normal.
Yeah, and in a deeper sense, the ideology gets absorbed by the civilizational consciousness.
Huntington says that there are wars between different civilizations on these borderlands, these bloody borders.
These are essentially fault line conflicts.
I would argue that that's what we're seeing with Russia and Ukraine.
You essentially, I mean, really, since the Maidan, that's what Ukrainian politics has been about, where Some in Ukraine see themselves as part of the West.
They may even still be Orthodox religiously, but they still civilizationally see the West as where they belong.
And there are others, particularly in the East, particularly in Donbass, who consider themselves part of the Russian world, Novaya Rossiya.
And you see this even with the symbols that are being used.
So you have this sort of Tragic slash hilarious debate going on where Russia is screaming that the Ukrainians are all Nazis and the Ukrainians are saying that Putin is acting like a Nazi.
But then we actually break down the symbols that are being used.
It's almost a replay of what happened in the Second World War.
So, for example, a lot of People who supported Ukrainian independence from the Soviets during World War II aligned with the SS and aligned with, I mean, they initially at least welcomed the Germans as liberators.
They found out quickly afterward that wasn't necessarily the case, but a lot of them initially did think this was a good thing.
Whereas For Russia, when they reconquered these areas, the hammer and sickle became something it wasn't even really the symbol of communism anymore, it became the symbol of Russian civilizational identity.
And you're seeing this now, where you see these, keep in mind, Vladimir Putin blamed the communists for giving Ukraine away in his essentially declaration of war speech before the special military operation began.
Yet, When you see Russian forces advancing into Ukraine and they take a certain city or even a certain building, what we're seeing over and over again is they keep raising the victory banner, so-called, which was the Soviet flag or a mock-up of the Soviet flag that flew over the ruins of the Reichstag at the end of World War II.
The hammer and sickle is no longer, and you're also seeing a lot of attention paid to monuments to the victory in the Great Patriotic War, They're constantly having demonstrations saying, these are the people who died resisting the Nazis, and we need to remember them, and the current Ukrainian regime isn't letting us do that, and that's why we have to resist, and it's illegitimate.
Vladimir Putin is not ideologically a communist, obviously.
He seems to be very consciously tacking Russia's identity back to the ideas of the czars.
Much like the current communist regime in China is appealing to China's imperial past, but yet the hammer and sickle and specifically the victory banner has become something that transcends communism.
It is now almost the banner of this civilization.
And on the other hand, if you look at as often, if you look at some of the groups that are fighting for Ukraine, a lot of people will say, oh, well, it's.
You know, Nazi or far right and everything else.
And I think a lot of it, it has more to do with this is just the way of declaring independence from this civilization, this other civilization that has been dominating us in the most militant and extreme fashion.
Usually it's on the borders of a civilization.
When you're trying to break away from something, that's where you get the most extreme manifestations of independence.
Huntington talks about these ideas of torn countries, where you're not quite sure where they fit in a civilizational model.
Turkey would be one of the great examples.
Now, Turkey, after the First World War, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which I guess you would say is the last time you had any kind of an Islamic power that could really claim to be the caliphate.
Yes, absolutely.
And they could flex on a global scale.
Right, right.
I mean, again, World War I was, at least according to the Turks, I mean, it was a jihad.
It was a holy war.
And the Germans, of course, were delighted with this, even though it didn't ultimately do enough.
But when he was writing, when Huntington was writing, Turkey seemed to be moving toward Europe.
There was a lot of discussion about Turkey joining the EU.
Boris Johnson, of course, at the time, not at the time, but Boris Johnson a few years ago was, and he's part Turkish himself, so it's not that surprising, Was talking a lot about Turkey being part of Western civilization and how it should be in the EU and everything else.
Now that's all gone.
Now the idea of Turkish membership in the European Union seems more distant than ever and Turkey itself is actually going back to this idea of its Ottoman past.
Turkey is in a very strange place because to this day.
You can't insult the memory of Ataturk.
And.
He is.
The symbol that defines the Turkish state, but he also openly made fun of Islam.
He said something along the lines of why should modern people have to obey the rules by some illiterate Arab shepherd.
Clearly, if you look at what Erdogan, the leader of Turkey, is doing now, he has some sort of imperial pretensions.
He was helping out Azerbaijan.
He's been active in northern Syria.
He's trying to build a civilization state.
He's trying to appeal to this greater memory.
Turkey is not going to be joining Europe.
Instead, it's going to be reverting back to being an Islamic civilization.
But it is still in that in-between.
And you can imagine circumstances where the pattern would reverse and it's in these torn countries and it's on these border conflicts that we see the real hotspots of global conflict.
One of the other things we should keep in mind is Huntington discussed the idea of core state conflicts were basically you have.
The central pole of a civilization, as you pointed out, the United States for the West, going against the central pole of another civilization.
So for Orthodox civilization, obviously, that would be the third Rome, that would be Russia.
Right now, just looking at Russian media and looking at the way policymakers are talking about it, Russians believe and have believed basically since the beginning that they are fighting not so much with Ukraine, but with the United States.
That this is a Russian-American proxy war, which may eventually become a real war.
And America's Defense Secretary kind of said the quiet part out loud when he said that we want this conflict to go on because we want to weaken Russia.
Now, he was saying we want to weaken Russia so it can invade other countries.
But I think just the first part of that sentence is going to be used to great profit With Russian propaganda, because you can point to it and be like, see, like, this is what we've been telling all along.
And this idea of a civilization being united, even in a degraded form, you see it in the yearning of something like the European Union, where.
There is this sort of proto-European consciousness.
There's something greater than just our nation states.
We're part of something that's larger.
We're part of something that is more primordial and maybe even deeper.
Because nationalism is more recent, in terms of a historical phenomenon, than civilizational identity.
I mean, certainly if you could go back to a European in the year 1300, He would have no conception of belonging to a modern nation state.
He might know about his Lord or he might know about his region, but he would obviously know that he belongs to Christendom.
And he would know that there's a difference between his civilization and their civilization, which is why things like the Crusades even happened.
I mean, that by itself shows that civilizational identity has real power.
But there are obviously a lot of objections to this theory.
Specifically, because we can think of many conflicts where people who are very tightly related by blood and culture fight very savage wars against each other.
I think the American Civil War would be one of the main examples.
And you could also say, well, if there is a split within a civilization, if you have something like the Iran-Iraq War, where They don't really see themselves as having the same religion.
I mean, you always tend to fight the heretic harder than you fight the foreigner.
Doesn't that mean that Huntington at least got some of his definitions wrong?
Because if they are not really united by the same faith, is it really fair to say that they're part of the same civilization?
And there are also some questions about whether Related civilizations are all that separate.
I mean, is Latin America really a separate civilization than, say, the United States and Europe?
Is Japan actually all that disconnected from the civilization that was created by China?
Because obviously we can think of some of the cultural imports that came to Japan, which are now part of Japanese identity, but they didn't originate in Japan.
And if you can kind of this kind of gets into the question of when we're discussing race, because the hardest thing is there's always that gray zone.
It's sort of like if you're defining your family, you can play little word games about, well, okay, are your cousins your family?
What about your second cousins?
What about these people a little farther away?
I mean, if you want to be clever and annoying, you can use that to try to deconstruct the idea of family.
Well, you can sort of do the same thing here.
And a lot of his critics did to deconstruct the idea of civilization and the counter to a lot of what he was talking about.
And again, this was seen as A borderline racist book by a lot of people.
At the time it wasn't so much, but certainly now.
Because if you're saying that there are certain identities that cannot be deconstructed without essentially annihilating the underlying people, what you're essentially saying is that In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
And there is no permanent solution possible, right?
I mean, there are only civilizations that are on top for a little while, and then something happens and they go down, but maybe one day they can return.
But if you believe in progress, if you believe in an end of history, if you believe that there's a moral necessity to work towards those things, Huntington's thesis isn't just a challenge to your worldview. It's a moral crime. And that's
why Samuel Huntington, who was about as accepted as any academic can possibly be,
basically ended his career as something of an outcast. Yeah, very much so. It was interesting because he
worked in two different presidential administrations and both of them were Democrats.
One was LBJ and the other was Carter.
Yes, the far right icon, Lyndon Johnson.
Yes, that's exactly right.
Of like everyone who listens to this, probably he's at the top of the list of the worst president of all time in terms of what he unleashed.
Yeah, which I mean certainly Huntington didn't see it that way.
I mean even slightest.
No, I would never would never consider himself say a white advocate.
But then again.
There was that naivete.
I mean, I'm not calling him naive so much, because obviously, I mean, this is one of the greatest scholars of the 20th century, probably one of the greatest American scholars of all time, and it would be a real shame if all that people took away from Huntington was Clash of Civilizations and Who Are We?
His older works are actually extremely interesting.
Yeah, his stuff on democratization, like guarding the rise of the middle class, is exceptionally interesting.
And not controversial, either.
Nobody disagrees with it because they're offended, and very few people disagree in any capacity.
But what you're getting at is very real.
I mean, Huntington, there's that catchphrase of politics is downstream of culture and culture
is downstream of religion, which is this very, which kind of all colorblind conservatives
take as being like 100% true.
And Huntington, knowingly or not, really, really adopts that.
I mean, his view of civilizations across the world is almost entirely religious.
And this is something that Fukuyama actually hit him on.
And it's funny, because Fukuyama basically disagreed with Huntington on kind of liberal grounds.
But I think race realists actually end up agreeing with Fukuyama's criticism in this sort of backwards way.
So after he wrote, after Huntington wrote Clash of Civilizations, he wrote Who Are We?, which was a book sort of speculating on the idea that America, because of mass immigration, might become Latin American and Catholic as opposed to its historic Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, and this would come with real problems because You know, our work ethic is Protestant, and our judicial system is Protestant, and our political values are all very Anglo-Saxon-Protestant.
And he felt that all of that might change once Latin American Catholics became the majority, or close to the majority.
And Fukuyama wrote this critique of Who Are We, which Fukuyama really, really disliked this book.
And he wrote this funny thing.
Let me read it for you.
This is Fukuyama writing.
This is Fukuyama writing, I lived in Los Angeles for nearly a decade and remember passing groups
of Chicanos gathered at certain intersections at 7 a.m.
waiting for work as day laborers.
No lack of a work ethic here.
That's why Hispanics have pushed native born African Americans out of low skilled jobs
in virtually every city where they compete head to head.
So Fukuyama is is right, but he's sort of missing the point of, yeah, the you know,
the old thesis of the Protestant work ethic is is true when we compare white nations to
But yes, for some reason, despite the fact that American blacks are overwhelmingly Protestant, the Protestant work ethic thesis just doesn't really apply to them.
And for some reason, there are these non-black Catholics who, I mean, especially Chicanos in LA, I mean, You know, they're obviously not pure white, but they have a great deal of white ancestry in them.
And a lot of Hispanics call themselves white.
In fact, the longer they're here and the wealthier they get, even though you could argue that it's actually a bad move career-wise to call yourself white because you get cut out of these programs, when you ask them how they identify, they identify as white.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
I always love those kinds of things.
You always see this with the pro-immigration stuff, where they'll say things like, see, the immigrants actually commit less crime than native-born Americans.
And it's like, okay, yeah, you've proven that Hispanics commit less crime than blacks.
Blacks, yeah.
Thank you.
You've really caused me to rethink my cultural assumptions.
Yeah.
Well, and again, the fact... So obviously, Fukuyama is no race realist, and he's not really willing to speculate as to why it is that these Catholic Chicanos managed to... Do you think he knows better?
I mean, not to get too much, but I mean, come on.
I don't, actually.
I don't think Fukuyama could bring himself to... Yeah, the whole world view would be wrong.
But I think we were both in pretty much total agreement that Fukuyama has been given a bad rap by his interpreters because every time something happens, everyone's like, oh, this proves Fukuyama's wrong.
And it's like, no, it actually doesn't.
I mean, his thesis was, it was a bit more than saying nothing important is ever going to happen again.
And you could, if you take a step back and then you say, if you're trying to defend Fukuyama vis-a-vis Huntington, you could say, well, Obviously, democratization has suffered reverses.
There are some countries that were once democratic, which are now becoming authoritarian.
Obviously, this raises huge questions about what does it really mean to be democratic or authoritarian.
It seems to be coming like the word racist, just sort of a, or fascist, just sort of a word.
Authoritarian is just what you call things that you don't like if you're a journalist or something.
But if you take a step back Since the end of the Cold War, you definitely have more countries moving toward what both Fukuyama and Huntington would have considered liberal democratic governments.
And this includes many of those countries that a lot of people once argued were completely incapable of having a democracy.
This including Latin American civilization and Spain and Portugal.
Which, you know, I mean, we're ruled by authoritarian regimes into the 70s.
I mean, this is not ancient history here.
And they were, and they did this as part of, I mean, remember Franco Spain was part of NATO.
I mean, so it wasn't like, Oh, it's Portugal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you could say there, if you, especially if you look at the real divides within countries and we've, I've written about this and we've spoken about it before.
If you look at urban elites in a city like Brussels, in a city like New York, or for that matter in a city like Los Angeles, do they really think of themselves as belonging to Western civilization, or do they think of themselves as belonging to a kind of global, cosmopolitan, worldwide culture defined by what's in media, defined by Global corporations that quite easily can penetrate civilizational barriers.
I mean, until when you had all these companies getting driven out of Russia, I mean, that's the first time that I can recall where you really had the walls come down and companies basically leaving or the or being blocked out of a civilizational area.
I think that.
It's too early to say, and like what the Chinese said about the French Revolution, you know, what's the importance is too early to say, because right now, what we're seeing, and this is why I think the Russia-Ukraine conflict is so important, not just for the, because it's a challenge to us as white advocates, but more than that, it's a challenge to the very idea of the West, it's a challenge to the idea of democracy, it's a challenge to the idea of Whether it's always just going to be civilizational warfare, because, not to get too much into what Alexander Dugan has to say, but he takes at least some of what he's written about the idea of a multipolar world from Huntington.
Huntington also wrote about an emerging multipolar world, and if you have a multipolar world, it follows that There are actually going to be polls for each civilization, a center, something that is considered to be the heart of this civilization, and that they're going to have a certain amount of economic and cultural autonomy and sovereignty and separateness from other civilizations.
But.
We also have seen basically up until the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The spreading of a kind of global culture.
I mean, when you see Black Lives Matter protests in Korea, as we saw, and you see the kind of rhetoric of liberal democracy being spread in non-Western areas, maybe that's just Proof of American power and maybe that's just sort of a way of showing that state is part of is essentially an American client state That you subordinate your culture as well as your politics But you could argue and I think some have argued and they're not entirely without merit That what's emerging is a sort of global liberal I don't even I'm not even sure if I would call it a culture.
It's almost an anti-culture like a A product that is pushed from the top down and can be accepted by everyone who wants to be part of this globally connected world sharing the same assumptions about human rights and the enlightenment and how we can move past superstition and tribal identity.
There's also a big question and this is what I want to spend the remainder of this talking about because I think this is The key question for white advocates.
What I just discussed, Chris, unless you want to comment on it, I don't know the answer to whether Fukuyama or Huntington is right as far as that big picture goes.
I think we're just gonna have to wait to see how things play out, and that question is probably not going to be answered until after our lifetime.
But I mean, what do you think?
Morally, I'm on the civilizational point of view.
That's what I want to believe, but I'm not sure that's actually true.
Okay, so of course there are like four or five things to talk about here.
One, getting back to the sort of, you know, Huntington's sort of religion, Uber Aulis, which Fukuyama picks at in a kind of accidentally race-realist way, you know, another kind of chink in that armor that is really quite amusing is that on the European continent, Huntington unifies Catholics and Protestants.
That division is so small that they're still on the same team vis-a-vis the Orthodox.
Which, hey, there's good reason for.
I mean, it's been 300 years.
Outside of Ireland, with the exception of Ireland, it's been some 300 years since there's been a major conflict in Europe between Protestants and Catholics.
The fact that Germany and France are both kind of mixed countries.
No pun intended.
I mean something I've always actually been very curious about is why exactly it is that on the continent Protestants and Catholics really just kind of stopped slaughtering each other, you know, by the early 1700s and it just stopped being a big issue.
But although Huntington says that when it comes to Europe Catholics and Protestants are on the same team He doesn't apply that in the New World, right?
The reason he basically separates Latin America from the United States and Canada is because Latin America is Catholic, but Canada and the United States are Protestant.
But that doesn't matter to Huntington in Germany or France or the Low Countries or Italy or anything.
And again, it's like, well, there's, you know, there's this unmentionable issue of race, right?
It's like, the Protestants and Catholics in Europe are the same race, and that's not true in the New World, you know, at least less true.
I mean, he also doesn't talk much about Catholic Quebec as being you know, a super big problem child in the new world, you know, and it's like, well, if it's a big deal that Mexicans are Catholics, why is it not a big deal that, you know, Irish Boston or Irish, you know, Chicago, Irish Minneapolis, you know, the Catholicism there isn't really an issue, but again, you know, Huntington's large, you know, refusal to look at race... He doesn't, who are we?
Not so much in this.
You see it, you really do see it there, which I find Which I find deeply amusing.
In regards to your question of like there's this universal kind of consumerist anti-culture, what's interesting, Huntington isn't really given credit for this, but much like, okay, so you know how earlier I said Fukuyama thinks the Cold War is like the most important thing of all time, and for Huntington it's this weird aberration.
There's this sort of, he kind of inverts Fukuyama's argument.
Huntington also ...inverts Thomas Friedman, although Huntington wrote, you know, all of his major works before Friedman wrote any of his major works.
But Friedman was, of course, of this big opinion that once everybody is eating McDonald's, we'll all get along, that globalization, you know, makes the world flat, and as such we're all just gonna, you know, interact with one another on sort of capitalist terms.
I'm sorry, the fact that we're even putting Huntington and Friedman in the same category makes me want to rip my brain out.
Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, slow down, buddy.
So even before Friedman made that argument, Huntington, in Clash of Civilizations, actually perfectly inverts it.
And there are a couple key passages, and this is from the essay.
We actually super should have mentioned this at the top of the show.
But Clash of Civilizations was first an essay published in Foreign Affairs in 1993, and it became a full book in 1996.
Same deal with Fukuyama.
First there was an essay, then there was a book.
Huntington writes, in the essay, the world is becoming a smaller place.
The interactions between peoples of different civilizations are increasing.
These increasing interactions intensify civilizational consciousness and awareness of differences between civilizations and commonalities within civilizations.
And later on, he writes, The process of economic modernization and social change throughout the world are separating people from long-standing local identities.
They also weaken the nation-state as a source of identity.
In much of the world, religion has moved in to fill this gap, often in the form of movements that are labeled fundamentalist.
Now then later in the book, and this might be the most famous passage from the book, is he wrote, somewhere in the Middle East, a half dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking coke, listening to rap, and between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner.
So he was slightly off on the details of what was to come in five years, but I mean, really, you know, don't quibble with it.
It's pretty on the nose.
I mean, talk about hitting a nail on the head.
Wasn't Mohammed Adda going to strip clubs right before the attack and everything else?
Yeah, a bunch of them lived in Patterson, New Jersey, which is not exactly a conservative Islamic place.
And again, this is the inversion of Friedman's thesis of Huntington actually says that this global consumerist culture actually makes us more aware of our civilizational differences and he explicitly says that like, yeah, just because you eat
McDonald's and the other guy does, in no way means that you're not going to culturally despise
one another. And you see that on a smaller level within the United States. I mean, in terms of
consumerism or in terms of consumption, America is the most homogeneous monoculture of all time.
I mean, everybody eats fast food, everybody drinks McDonald's, you know, and everybody's technological products come from one of two companies, and lots of times it's split.
I mean, my phone and my computer come from opposing tech giants.
This just sort of happened, I didn't give it much thought.
But even though we all get our furniture from Ikea and we all go to McDonald's when we're hungry and in a rush, we still absolutely hate one another.
Just go to a McDonald's at certain hours of the morning and you'll see a clash of civilizations right there before you.
Blacks and whites going at it.
And I remember in one of the last interviews Huntington gave before he died, He commented that he drove a Japanese car, but this in no way affected his opinion of Japanese people.
This just made absolutely no difference to him.
I feel the same.
I'm sure the majority or at least a substantial number of my clothes are made in China or Vietnam or Indonesia.
I don't care.
That does not make me like any of those places more or less.
I just don't care.
It's immaterial.
Again, no pun intended.
So again, the globalization of American consumption habits really did not impress Huntington basically at all.
And again, with that passage from the book about these Muslim men listening to rap, by which of course he means American rap, and drinking Coke and wearing jeans, it's like, Yeah, but they still feel super Islamic and outside of society.
Again, you see this in Europe as well with the Muslim underclass.
Many of the terrorists who blow up trains and shoot rock stars and all of this stuff were born and raised in France or in Germany.
You know, their gastrointestinal system can withstand McDonald's, and they have laptops from either Mac or Microsoft, and it just doesn't matter.
I really think, I don't know, it's almost kind of like a left-wing bias to sort of think That what you consume really defines you.
I mean, that's something kind of the anti-establishment left, or even kind of like the anarcho-anti-WTO people, they really feel that this is the case.
But I mean, and the ultimate counterexample Which proves that this doesn't have to be a violent thing, is Japan, right?
I mean, Japan is perfectly modern.
They have all the stuff we do, but they have this extremely distinct and like totally foreign culture, and just no amount of technological gizmos or Hollywood movies has managed to make a dent into that at all.
So no, I don't think, I don't agree with Friedman at all, that sort of the world becoming flat And, you know, free trade reigning supreme is going to make us all like each other.
I think Huntington is much more on the money.
I mean, it's funny when you sort of start to look at these examples.
It's like, oh, yeah, it's not true.
I mean, on paper, it sounds so true of like, oh, we all use the same Internet and like we all buy products from all around the globe, like we're all going to like each other more.
But then you just look at the evidence, even just in a sort of cursory way.
And it's like, yeah, this just isn't.
Yeah, and being raised in a certain area doesn't mean that you identify with that civilization.
I mean, if that was true, we would say Jared Taylor is a Japanese man.
Again, and this is, again, the issue with Huntington's colorblindness of like...
Absolutely.
You know, like, yes, there is Western civilization.
Like, it is absolutely appropriate to talk about Western civilization, Western liberal democracy, as a conceptual thing that unifies Sweden and the United States and Italy and everything.
But, like, there are also just serious domestic issues with, like, you know, that Western Civ might be true on a macro level.
But just because it is true doesn't make irrelevant, serious domestic issues, which are often racial ones.
And again, another way Huntington accidentally gives the game away on this is Although his Islamic civilization is totally a-racial, right?
There are Persians, there are Arabs, there are Indonesians, there are Asians.
His African civilization is entirely defined by race.
It's all black Africans who are not Muslim, but there's no religious unity in black Africa.
No, absolutely not.
There's Christianity, there's these weird sort of pagan religions, there are these traditional tribal religions, you know, it's like his This is one civilization that has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, and it's entirely a racial thing.
But again, he sort of kind of gives the game away on this of Latin America is its own civilization, but Portugal and Spain are part of the West.
They speak the same languages as Latin Americans and have the same religion.
You see these little You know, these little failures, these little limitations, I guess I would say.
So it's like, yeah, Huntington, I think, is largely right.
But, I mean, the biggest points of weakness in his thesis absolutely have to do with race.
Right.
I mean, the civilizational model works, but the dividing line is race, not religion.
And you can even be part of not just the same religion, but the same institution, and you're still in different civilizations.
I mean, Black, Haitians, and French, Native, Indigenous French, they're both Catholics, or at least a lot of them are, but they both speak the same language, or at least some form of it.
But are we really going to believe that they're part of the same civilization?
Right.
I mean, the first thing the Haitians did once they could was slaughter all the Frenchmen on the island.
And so, This, as you, you're right, he does give the game away and the dividing line, not just between different states, but even within states is race.
And I'm reminded of something Jared Taylor said in the past, this was some time ago, but he spoke of how you can actually see cities and neighborhoods within what we used to think of as our countries.
Where you actually see areas that essentially have ceased to be part of Western civilization.
I think Sam Francis said something along the same lines.
And obviously one of the more spectacular examples are the no-go zones in France.
Where, sure it's in France, sure they're near these historic locations, but sure these people may even speak French, they may have more awareness of what's going on in French pop culture or French politics than I do, but They're not French.
They'll never be French.
They'll be offended if you call them French.
And even if they do something in the French political system to try to win more benefits for their group, It is.
It's an act of conquest.
I mean, they're trying to grab resources away from their political and racial enemies and bring it to themselves.
Well, and listen, Huntington would be willing to talk about no-go zones in Europe because of the religious difference.
And he would be talking and he's explicitly talked about sort of losing the South, the American Southwest to Mexico,
essentially.
But, Huntington's worldview in no way allows the acknowledgement
of no-go zones in America that are simply black, you know, like Detroit or something. Because again,
there's no religious difference. It's like, you know, well Detroit is super Protestant, right?
It's more Protestant than, you know, Los Angeles or Boston.
It's like, well, but still, Boston and Los Angeles, especially Boston, are much more, like, American and safer and better and more prosperous than Detroit.
Like, it's not just religion.
And even with his dividing line in Europe with the Orthodox versus the non-Orthodox Christian world, he doesn't really get into the fact that There are plenty of Russians who don't really view themselves or Russia as a whole as being European or white, that they have this like racial view of themselves as being sort of mixed or Eurasian or, you know, sort of Mongoloid, Caucasoid, all of these different things.
And again, obviously not all Russians think in those terms by any means, but an enormous number of them Do.
And that's also part of the division.
It's not just a question of orthodoxy or non-orthodoxy by any means.
Yeah, because if that was true, how would you explain the war between Russia and Ukraine?
Particularly, I mean, I know that a lot in the west of Ukraine or not, but, and I also know that with a little help from the United States, the Ukrainians set up kind of their own branch of the Orthodox Church, but At the same, you have orthodox fighting orthodox, and they speak the same language in a lot of these cases.
They were part of the same polity within not that long ago.
And yet it is still a civilizational conflict.
And ultimately, I think that as white advocates, and as identitarians more broadly, as I'm, this is just speaking for me, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but just for my own sake, as an identitarian, You have to, as a view of history, as a way to interpret the world, it's all about how you see yourself and what you consider to be worthy of identifying with and fighting for and, if necessary, dying for.
And the key dividing line in terms of what is actually happening on the ground, from the greatest wars to a fight at a McDonald's in some terrible city at three in the morning, You know, it's race.
It's not religion.
And this is also true when we think about... I mean, I know culture comes from the cult and everything else, but the fact is, most people in the West, especially when you look at Europe, are not believers.
And so if you say, well, it's all about Christianity, if you truly believe that Christianity is what defines you and defines your civilization, well, your civilization is African.
Because that's the future of Christianity, and that's who And at least just in terms of pure numbers.
Obviously, I don't mean that there aren't a lot of whites who aren't taking this seriously and fighting the good fight, but in terms of sheer numbers, it's going to be a third world church.
Well, and true believers, I mean, like Ross Duthat, I mean, thinks that Europe will ultimately be revitalized through non-white Christian migration from Africa.
There are lots of Catholics who want this black African guy to be the next Pope, because he's the most socially conservative.
I get the culture war stuff, and I want to say one more thing about it, but just to be blunt, and just for those types of people who might be listening to this, you're just cowards.
This is just a cute way of saying, oh, I'm not liberal, but I'm not going to talk about race because it's actually about Catholicism.
And it's like, OK, great.
Like, go to Haiti.
There it is.
Go have fun.
And and the thing about the West, but this this does get to a deeper problem, which is that it is amazing.
That we can, and I know the Shia-Sunni split and everything else, and obviously there are a lot more divisions within Islam than just those two.
I mean, just look at Syria.
But ultimately, we whites are in a very bad position spiritually because a lot of our civilization was built upon overthrowing the religion that united us for so long.
So if you Like, some people will say Western civilization began with Christianity.
I would say that's nonsense because, I mean, then you're throwing away the whole Greco-Roman world on anything that came before.
I mean, the Roman Empire was built by paganism.
I mean, unless you're just gonna say, like, well, that's not part of the West, well, okay, then I don't know what you're talking about in terms of the West.
But, if you were to say that, I mean, one thing that some people have said, You could say, oh, well, that was a different civilization, and out of the ruins came something new, this Christian civilization.
Fair enough, that's an argument.
But now, post-Enlightenment, and certainly I have a lot to say about, I identify more with the critics of the Enlightenment in a lot of ways, a lot of the hardcore traditionalist Catholics who no doubt would burn me for heresy, and they'd be right to, but I still sympathize with their stuff.
We're still in this, We're in this situation where the leading, the top, our cultural elites have defined themselves for so long, even in this country, when you look at people like Thomas Jefferson, for so long as we are overthrowing ancient tyrannies as exemplified by monarchies and the church.
And we've created this new world.
And so what we end up with is this Western civilization, which we can still talk about as being a coherent entity.
We can still talk about it as having meaning.
And Huntington, of course, does this.
But it's divided because the thing that most would look to for our spiritual roots has also been the thing that has been defined by our intellectuals as the top enemy.
For centuries.
I mean, what did Voltaire say?
Like, erase the infamy when it comes to the church?
And then if you have the Protestants and the different sects, they're not doing that well in terms of preserving any sort of a coherent national identity or civilizational identity.
If you were to look at, say, the Church of England, I mean, you could argue that Maybe there was something along the lines of a distinct almost Anglo civilization or sub-civilization with the British Empire and the Church of England.
It had a spiritual root, it had a sacral kingship, it had a king-emperor and a queen-empress for a while.
But look at the Church of England now, where it's essentially, it's no different than what you're going to read in the New York Times.
And unfortunately, the Roman Catholic Church seems to be not much different in a lot of ways.
Uh, at least, you know, with the current Pope and a lot of the current leadership.
And so it raises a certain question for us, which is if we, if we accept that the West is a thing, that it is a civilization and that we can talk about it as being, as it being a meaningful thing.
And everybody is at least in regards to the Russia Ukraine conflict.
I mean, you always see the term, the West, the West, the West, the West.
So, Clearly, even though sometimes they pretend that it's not, the intellectuals do think that it is a meaningful term.
Is it defined by a religion that has lost most of its cultural and political power, or is it defined by This vague belief in liberal democracy, something which we can't even really agree on anymore, and something which the core tenets, things like freedom of speech, are being taken away from us in the name of liberal democracy.
And a lot of people will say, well, the answer to this is to return to traditional Christianity.
But of course, that just raises further questions because, OK, well, which church, which sect, Which subsection of each church?
I mean, the Roman Catholic Church is one body, but there are obviously a lot of different factions within that.
And I think.
It's it's the most uncomfortable conclusion, but I think it's also the most rational conclusion that when you just keep chopping away at all the contradictions and you just keep chopping away at all the things people don't want to say, including Huntington, although he did kind of talk about it, but not kind of explicitly talked about it.
And who are we?
At the end of the day, the West is defined by race.
And you could say, well, there are people who in the West who are not white, who are still nonetheless Western.
And I might even concede that, but they're willing to identify with white history.
And this is there's a kind of clever game that a lot of conservatives try to play.
Ben Shapiro tried this.
Where he was saying, oh, well, it's completely ridiculous to say Western civilization is white civilization.
Well, if it's not, then what is it?
Because if you're trying to define it by a religious creed or a series of values, which most people now probably don't even believe, or just kind of being in a certain place or a document or the Constitution or everything else, you come up with very unsatisfying answers.
But yet if we break it down and we look at, okay, where are the lines that define us and them?
Where do we see conflicts erupting?
What are people fighting over?
Why do people care about whether a certain statue goes up or down?
Why do people care about the demographics of a certain area?
It is race.
And race by itself is not enough to Save a people I mean if it was if just being white was enough like there would be no problem obviously there is a spiritual element here, and that's a discussion for another day, but in terms of defining the West I Think Huntington perhaps unintentionally gives the game away when you just look at the map that he drew and I think he got into it a bit more in his last book the book that really sort of expelled him from polite society near the end of his life and
Where he says, yes, there is this racial element and who are we is a separate work, but he ended that book.
It doesn't just, it's not just the title that has a question mark.
He sort of ends the book with a question where he's saying, is it possible for a country to transform its racial stock and essentially be the same place and still have the same culture and Even be the same country in any meaningful sense.
We should point out.
I'm just going to say this last thing and then I'll shut up.
The we should note while considering this question that he said in clash of civilizations that.
Nobody has yet been able to redefine its civilizational identity.
So.
I think that sort of answers the question of whether a white country can become majority non-white and still be part of the same and still be the same country and still be part of the same civilization.
Interesting footnote here is that for both Fukuyama's End of History and Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, in both cases, The initial essay version had a question mark in the title, and then subsequently the book did not have a question mark in the title, which I think probably has more to do with Publishing House's marketing desires, but it is still funny that both of them posed their theses as questions when it was just an essay, and then the essay went viral, essentially.
Then it turned into a more muscular book.
But in terms of your You know, religion versus race, I mean, I obviously agree with you, and yes, Huntington is right in that civilizations aren't really ever internally reformed.
I mean, they can decay and collapse, or they can become conquered, right, but it's never It's it's never it's never really a sort of an internal pivot The closest you'd kind of have to that would have been Turkey after the fall of the Ottoman Empire but again, that was because the literal Empire had fallen Turkey was like a new nation and Turkey's pivot to the West, you know only lasted Yeah, 70 80 years really before they started attacking back to their to their Islamic roots, right?
You know something I I think this book does make me think a lot about in terms of religion and race.
I'm a history buff, but generally only for the last few hundred years, and every now and again I go back and look at the European wars of religion.
And I'm reminded of just how devastating they were.
I mean, nobody really talks about the 30 Years War anymore, but it did last 30 years and it killed at least 4 million people.
And I mean, this was in the 1600s when there simply were not that many human beings on Earth.
You know, same with, you know, there was an 80s year war.
It was all, you know, Protestant versus Catholic, just like the 30 Years War.
And all of these wars eventually, you know, ended, like all wars do, but they didn't end in that, you know, either the Catholics or the Protestants definitively won.
It wasn't like the destruction of like Zoroastrianism or something, right?
Right.
And in kind of no time at all, people really stopped caring very much about this stuff.
And I wish, something I really wish Huntington had gotten into more is why it was that within Europe, aside from Ireland, this just stopped mattering and this just stopped being a civilizational fault line.
And why that although the Protestant versus Catholic difference stopped mattering, the Orthodox versus non-Orthodox matter line continues to matter.
Because to me it's like, okay, well, if on the old continent we can make the Protestant-Catholic division not very relevant.
It's like we should find a way to do that with, you know, with white orthodox people as well.
I mean, that would be great.
I mean, I hate that there are enormous religious differences within the white world.
It's really not to anybody's benefit, and it causes all parties to align with, you know, with non-white groups that share their religious views, which is silly and self-defeating.
The other thing that Huntington doesn't address, and Well, kind of nobody addresses when they talk about there being a multipolar world, right, as opposed to bipolar during the Cold War between Russia and America and the occasionally argued unipolar world that either was or maybe kind of still is with America being the only hegemony.
It's very fashionable.
I mean, Huntington is far from the only person who talks about multipolar worlds.
Robert Kagan talks about this a lot as well.
You know, the idea that we're gonna have lots of superpowers, you know, Russia, China, America, India, you know.
in various other countries possibly, maybe sort of. But the thing is that
there's not really any such thing as a three-way fight. All conflicts end up being two-sided.
This is true if, you know, if any of you ever been in any kind of brawl or fight involving more than one person or, you know, even if you play like a game of Risk or something, it just, it eventually boiled down to, if not two people, two sides.
There's never really going to be a point where there is like a three-way global conflict.
I mean, you can even look at the World Wars as an example of this, of like The World Wars happened in contexts in which the continent of Europe was multipolar.
There were several large different states jockeying for power and control.
But did they fight, you know, three, four, five different ways?
Like, no, everybody picked a side.
One of two sides, and it was a two-way fight.
You know, so any conflict for sort of global dominance is going to be two-way.
It's not going to be three or four-way.
And Huntington doesn't really give us a guide as to How these different civilizations are going to align with one another against other allied civilizations.
He talks a little bit about there being sort of an implicit alliance between the Islamic world and the Chinese world, largely just based on trade and military assistance.
But I much more question, you know, in regards to the rise of China, like if Russia will end up siding more with China against America and the West, or more with America and the West against China.
This is something that I find really frustrating about anti-Russian posturing by NATO and America right now, is I don't... The more the West alienates Russia, the more likely Russia is to align with China in any number of future conflicts or or trade wars, which is really not to our interest.
We're going to need all the help we can get in countering Chinese power on a global scale.
Right, the same with like, you know, India and Russia have always been pretty closely aligned
for decades.
And as we push Russia out of the Western realm, India is largely taking the side of Russia and not with us.
And that is not, again, that is not good for us because India could prove to be an invaluable ally
I mean, they're historic rivals.
And India, unlike Japan, is huge in terms of population and has an enormous military and nukes, you know?
Same with Russia.
It's like, you know, having Japan on your side against Russia and China is totally pointless, right?
And Huntington just sort of leaves us kind of hanging with like, You know, there are all of these different civilizations.
Ergo, the world is going to be multipolar, even if, you know, there's kind of a normalization of democracy everywhere.
And it's like, sure, that's true.
But there's again, there's just there's no such thing as a as a three way flight.
It basically never happens.
Right.
I mean, it's just kind of basic game theory, even in elections when there are.
Right.
Right.
You know, it still ends up being too, even when they're not running Head to head, like both of the times the California governor has been recalled, both Newsom quite recently and Schwarzenegger back in the day, there were basically two rounds of voting.
You do yes, no on the recall, and then if yes, Who should be the new guy?
Schwarzenegger wasn't recalled.
He was the guy who took power because of the recall.
Excuse me.
Yeah, thank you.
It was Gray Davis, I want to say?
I believe so.
Something like that.
But I remember they used to talk about on the news of how it was like either the incumbent is going to stay or Schwarzenegger is going to win.
This isn't really a recall.
It's just one versus one here.
It's just sort of formatted goofily.
And that was true with Newsom as well.
Right?
There weren't really multiple challengers to Newsom in any kind of serious way, right?
Right.
I mean, you had multiple, but everybody knew if you wanted to get them out, you had to side with this guy or the other, and it became a bipolar choice.
Same thing with the Spanish Civil War.
I mean, if you look at all the different factions, right?
I mean, you lock these factions in a room, they'll all kill each other.
But if you open the door and all the other guys' factions are out there, everybody unites and fights them, because that's just how it works.
Yeah.
And Huntington provides no sort of guide as to how this will happen, but obviously it does.
I mean, the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire were different civilizations, but they aligned in a war against other Western powers.
How does Huntington explain that?
I mean, Huntington both sort of misses race and also This is just kind of like the harsh real politic that John Mearsheimer would write about, where for him it's, you know, religion is as irrelevant as race.
It's all just resources.
It's all just Niccolo Machiavelli.
And all of these things exist in, you know, overlapping circles.
So, you know, for the remaking of The World Order, which is the subtitle of the book, The Clash of Civilizations, and the remaking of World Order, I mean, it's almost an inappropriate title, because for Huntington, there's just going to be global disorder, because you have these seven or eight different civilizations kind of jockeying for power.
But yeah, you know, what the book really leaves me as an identitarian wondering is like, okay, why did everybody in the West stop caring about Protestant versus Catholic?
And like, how can we make that difference?
feel as small as the difference between Orthodox and non-Orthodox.
This is definitely not what Huntington wanted me to walk away thinking about, but it's very much what I'm left pondering.
Well, a lot of the distinctions between Catholic and Protestant, maybe this is just showing his age and where he comes from, I mean, let's not forget that well into the 20th century you had political parties that were defined by religion.
So, for example, in Germany, you had a Catholic party, and Catholicism's place within Bismarck's Germany was always kind of uncertain, because the driving power was Prussia, which is historically Protestant, and they deliberately kept Austria out of Germany when they unified, at least Bismarck did.
And if you look at the Netherlands, the Catholic-Protestant divide was very big there, even in the 20th century.
I think what explains why those things went away, remarkably quickly, in fact, just look at like the quiet revolution in Quebec, how the Catholic Church went from basically running society to being almost entirely powerless.
The big thing that did it was the transfer of education from the church to the state.
And a lot of those things that were core to people's identities suddenly became a lot less important and new forces moved in.
What I would say is the big challenge now is there is a conception of the West that is shared among our rulers.
You're hearing it now with the conflict vis-a-vis Russia, but they're defining the West in the words of a German that I saw talking about the supposed cultural differences between The West and Russia, where she said, Russians aren't really Westerners, because they're not postmodern, and they don't have an idea of how to live, how to create your own life and live it.
And they're not really scared of death, or they don't.
They're too accepting of death, that kind of thing.
And I'm thinking to myself, well, if values are determined by basically who controls media and the educational system, which I believe, And the values that defined the West, I mean, obviously race is what the core of that civilization is.
But in terms of the values that are now being used to describe it, if it's this kind of postmodern liberal, it's democracy, except when you vote the wrong way, in which case you don't have democracy anymore.
And everything is about constantly reinventing yourself and Discovering yourself because you have no idea who you really are.
If that's what the West is, I don't want that, and I don't want to defend it.
What we need is to kind of flip it over.
And I'm not saying I don't want to defend the West, but I don't want to defend that ruling class.
What I'm calling for is an overthrow of not so much the political elite, because that's almost irrelevant, but the cultural elite, the media elite, the educational elite.
And so we define ourselves as Westerners, as whites, as being part of a shared tradition that extends back through Christendom and back to the Roman Empire and to Greece and even beyond.
I mean, even Venner talked about the idea of Hyperborea.
Maybe that's a myth, but people need myths.
It's a good one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, we might find out about the truth of some of these myths.
I mean, I hate always falling back on Evola, but he always says, you know, the myth is more important than history.
It's truer than history because when you actually get into what you base conclusions on ancient history on, you actually don't have all that much evidence.
I mean, it's all, it's always a stretch.
So when you have a myth that speaks to people down the line, generation to generation, that actually does contain something that is more true than whatever it is that actually happened.
Especially because we can't know for sure what actually happened once we go back far enough And I think what Huntington's value is is that he does?
Give us a defense of The West as a civilization as something that is real as something that we belong to as something that extends beyond Just the nation-state but because he doesn't confront race and And because, as you say, he doesn't really explain why religion is so core.
to his division of the world, but then he ignores these divisions which were really, really important to people at one point, to the point where they were slaughtering like a third of their population or whatever it cost Germany during the 30 years war.
Yeah, some of the most devastating wars in human history were the Protestant versus Catholic wars in Europe 400 years ago.
Right, I mean one of the... Nobody remembers this.
No, I mean this is one of the big things where, I mean again not to start a giant religious conflict, but this is sort of one of these things where If people say, oh, well, it's about Christianity.
Well, whose?
I mean, are we, do we just go back where we get to have a fun game of slaughtering each other over whose interpretation of the Bible is correct?
Because, I mean, it's, you can't just say like, oh, it's Christianity.
Like they're, somebody actually, one church actually has to be right here.
One, one sect.
It can't just be whatever you think it is.
And if you say, well, it's the institution that shaped the West, Post-classical civilization, of course, more than anything else, Roman Catholic Church, the Church is Europe and, I mean, the faith is Europe and Europe is the faith, as Belloc said.
Well, I mean, if you look at the current Pope, he's telling everybody to open wide the doors and bring in all these Muslims and then there won't be a Christian, even a rump Christian, Europe anymore.
So, I mean, is that what we're supposed to unite around now?
And I think that all of these questions, especially about spirituality and religion and how people define themselves in regard to their spiritual beliefs, I mean, these are really central to his thesis, and as you say, he just doesn't explain them.
In fact, I think there are a lot of things that he just doesn't address at all.
Yeah, and I mean, I brought up these critiques, but in his defense, I mean, He is talking about such enormous concepts, and it would be very challenging to address every single quibble, but even still, that distinction of Latin America is Catholic while Canada and America aren't, but that doesn't matter at all in Europe.
I think it's so funny.
To me, growing up, this is one of the reasons why I came to see the importance of race, is because all of these historical religious divisions in the city I lived in, You know, could not have mattered less.
And I mean, it's like, you know, you go to an American prison and it's like, you know, Catholic, you know, Catholic Hispanics in prison don't align with like, you know, Irish and Sicilians against, you know, white and black Protestants who are also united, you know, a unified sort of anti-papist force.
I mean, this is all, this is all very, you know, this is, again, it's, I mean, it's a joke.
It's, you know, you just laughed about it.
And also, a lot of these religious identities are usually just part of the trappings of an ethnic or racial identity.
I mean, one of the things that I think a lot of these so-called anti-jihadist people got wrong, again, this is a movement that isn't really around anymore, but was quite prominent following September 11th, 2001.
One of the things they got wrong is they were saying, oh, these Muslims are going to come in and they're going to impose Sharia law on Europe, and then they're going to impose Sharia law on the United States.
What I think you're going to get instead Is you're going to get a non-white underclass that is Muslim, but being Muslim, and you'll always have a fundamentalist element and, you know, people might fall back on it if they're seeking a justification for doing some sort of an attack or getting their life in order, whatever it is.
But it has more to do with this is a cultural signifier to show that I am not part of your civilization.
As opposed to, I am deliberately converting to this thing, and I am going to follow Islamic law to the letter.
Because again, if we're going to talk about Islamic civilization, we can meaningfully speak of it.
We can say it is a thing, even with all the divisions.
But what you can't say is that everybody within Islamic civilization is following the same playbook, even though the Quran is Much less open to interpretation than the Bible is.
Right.
The strange folkways of tribes and peoples around the world that predated Islam in a lot of cases still continue.
And, I mean, heck, if you're just talking about Afghanistan itself, tribal divisions within that country have a lot more to do with explaining what's going on than just saying, oh, well, these guys are just Islamic radicals.
I mean, they're all, by our standards, Islamic radicals, but that doesn't mean they're all on the same side.
So if we don't have an explanation about why that is, and you have to get into questions of ethnicity and kinship and everything else, and maybe even you start touching on racial questions, unless you're able to explain these things, I think that his book has a lot of explanatory power, but it's not some all-encompassing thing that serves as a guide for how we should move going forward.
And as you say, I mean, I think at the end of the day, the key dividing line is race, not religion, and religion is often subordinated to race.
Yeah.
Yeah, very much so.
And as to the, you know, I mean, Huntington is obviously not Not wrong about how important religion can be, but you know, the direction of the West would be becoming so secularized, and I mean, you and I, and plenty of other people who took, you know, Huntington seriously, such as Paul Gottfried, would say, well, you know, the new religion of the West is, you know, egalitarianism, is anti-racism, is anti-transphobia, all of this stuff.
And it is a faith.
It is a faith.
Yeah, I do think it's properly understood as a religion.
And yeah, you're talking about how if that becomes the West, it's certainly not a West you want to defend or fight for, but all of the religious solutions to the West's problem just seem equally improbable.
A revitalized traditional Catholicism is like, yeah, I don't think that's going to sweep across the white world.
And even if it was, it wouldn't be white in a lot of these cases.
I mean, you see these traditionalist Catholic enclaves, and I noticed this, I mean, this is from, you know, conservatism ink days and stuff, but the people who, it's almost like if you oppose political correctness or leftist orthodoxy on one thing, you have to compensate by being super accepting of another thing.
Yeah, that's right.
So you would have, you know, very militant Christians, and again, this, Raises questions, because the militant evangelicals and the militant Catholics are not going to get along.
You'll get militant Christians who are extremely pro-life and who are revolting against the modern world in a sense, but they also sincerely and truly believe that with as much fanaticism as they bring to the abortion issue, and you know, I'm not faulting them for that, but They bring it to the immigration issue, where they say there is no such thing as race doesn't exist, divisions don't exist.
Here's this one Bible verse, which I'm going to take out of context, which says that there are no Jews nor Greeks, for we are all one in Christ Jesus, forgetting, of course, that that exact same verse also says there's no difference between male and female.
So, I mean, if you want to play that game.
But yeah, I think this is sort of the thing is that I am, and you can even imagine, you don't have to imagine, you can just see it.
Go out, forget talking about like, oh, traditionalist Christians of this stripe or the other.
Just walk around your neighborhood, go look at the mainline churches.
How many of them have rainbow flags up?
How many of them have Black Lives Matter signs up?
How many Churches are saying that this I mean how many even in I don't want to pick on the Jesuits because it's almost too easy But I mean in America the the Jesuit magazine here.
I mean they were explicitly comparing George Floyd to Jesus Christ and So you can even imagine a sort of nightmarish religion where the faith-based claims of egalitarianism sort of get mushed together with this vaguely Christian spirituality and Uh, which is basically what mainline Protestantism has become in a lot of places.
Uh, and even some of the more lefty elements of the Catholic Church.
And so, and, and heck, the Southern Baptists, I'm not sure if they changed their name.
I think they did, but I mean, they're having a battle.
I mean, the Southern Baptist having a battle about critical race theory, the nomination that was specifically created because they didn't want to let abolitionists tell them what to do.
So.
Right, but again, this gets back to what I'm talking about.
It's like a case of Christianity has become so perverted and globally is so non-white, you know, so okay, ergo, maybe Christianity can't save us, but it's like, so what, are we to expect, you know, that a revitalized, you know, Nordic paganism or Hellenic paganism can do the job?
Well, I mean, you might be asking the wrong guy when it comes to this.
Whatever you do, I think it's difficult sociologically to envision that happening.
No, I think here's my answer, and I'm actually going to draw on Toynbee, who's another author who I think that it would be fun to get into at some point.
Arnold Toynbee wrote a book called Study of History, but his model... And how he draws from it explicitly in Clash of Civilizations.
Yes, he does.
Toynbee essentially made the case, and he made a lot of historical judgments that I disagree with, but he says that civilizations are essentially presented with certain challenges, and often a spiritual rebirth of one kind or another are the way a civilization overcomes a challenge and survives.
My opinion has always been that you can't sit down and invent A religion that will somehow like, you know, a lot of people will be like, Oh, well, we need a white version of Shinto.
Well, you don't get, you don't get to do that, you know, but I think, I mean, Heidegger talked about this when he said only a guy will save us.
He, he said, and Heidegger of course is very dense and hard to understand sometimes all the time, but What he was essentially saying is that we have to prepare the conditions and something may emerge.
And I think the best way to do that is by saying we are part of a tradition that goes beyond Christendom, that goes beyond the Roman Empire, that goes beyond Greece, that we are part of something that goes to the very dawn of history, that we carry the torch of human greatness within us, that we're We should be proud to be who we are and that we could not be otherwise, that from the dawn of the universe, everything had to happen as it did for us to be who we are.
And we need to engage in the struggle to save our people.
And out of that struggle, something may emerge.
I think that putting the struggle first is actually the solution, as opposed to just cooking up whatever spiritual solution you think works best and then trying to go in.
I of course have my own answers and I'm fully satisfied with them as far as what I think is the correct viewpoint as far as spirituality and religion but most people would disagree with me and I think it's sort of a real waste of time when you get these fights over religion within our movement because very quickly you just start Getting lost in semantics and even very broad statements like we need to return to traditional Christianity.
That doesn't tell us very much, because the obvious question is, well, who's traditional Christianity?
And as you say, I mean.
Huntington somehow manages to make Protestantism very important in some areas but not in others.
And in some places it divides civilizations and in some places it doesn't.
And we can't just overlook these questions.
I think that the biggest failure of Huntington was He shied away from taking a hard look at race.
And I think that may have been just because a product of his time, because, again, this was not he was not a right winger.
He was not a conservative.
He was a New Deal Democrat.
And you can imagine a patriotic left of center Harvard professor believing that the Civil Rights Act would lead to a colorblind America and a more united country and everything would work out.
And I think Huntington saw near the end of his life with who are we that it was not going to work out.
But at that point it was too late and he died before we really saw it start manifesting in the extreme forms.
We see today.
I'm just going to say this and this will be the last thing that I have to say on the subject of Huntington.
I mean, this is a guy who, I have tremendous intellectual respect for, and this is somebody who, probably one of the very few people that, where I didn't think grad school was a waste of time, because reading Berkson, going through everything else, I mean, it was much more compelling than some of the other people that I had us read.
But the last memory I have of him, when he was still alive, is he gave a speech on who are we.
And again, this is at a time when campus politics were less extreme.
And basically he was chased out by screaming Philistines who have no idea what they're talking about, but they know vaguely that he represented in some way the white man and the white civilization that they hated so much.
And as he was walking out of there with people screaming, you know, this guy who was at the pinnacle of academic achievement, I can't help but wonder if somewhere in his head he was thinking to himself, Maybe it really is about race.
Okay, we've got to end on that.
That's too epic.
I'll try.
I hope you're right.
Not that it matters all that much if you are.
We'll see you all next week, everybody.
Thanks for tuning in.
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