This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comMark Brahmin and Richard Spencer address the death of Queen Elizabeth II and analyze the process through which something becoming “sacred” and “divine.”
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| See, actually, for two or three years now, Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. | |
| And we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late 30s. | |
| Get out of here. | |
| Of course, the problem is where to go, because it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction. | |
| See, I think it's quite possible that the 1960s represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished. | |
| And that this is the beginning of the rest of the future now. | |
| That from now on, there'll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. | |
| And there'll be nobody left, almost. | |
| to remind them that there once was a species called a human being with feelings and thoughts, and that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet. | |
| Wow. | |
| I admire the sentiment in the sense that it's not telling us the familiar story, which is basically there are these baddies out there, and they're sadistic monsters, and they want to destroy your life and kill you maybe, and these are the Nazis, and they're going to be controlled. | |
| It kind of reverses it in the sense that postmodern society, It's not Nazism, but it is a kind of concentration camp that you've built yourself and that you are the guard of it. | |
| And that we've kind of created this world that we can't quite escape out of. | |
| And that everything, where are you going to even escape to? | |
| Everything's headed in the same direction. | |
| I think one of the things that I was talking about with... | |
| The group that we have here on Substack, and I've brought up this sentiment before, is this end-of-history sentiment where there's no out and there's no in. | |
| When I was a kid, I was born in 1978, so I can remember... | |
| The Cold War. | |
| And I can even, even though I was very young, but I can even distinctly remember, and it was 1990 or thereabouts, being in Neiman Marcus with my mother, and we were doing Christmas shopping. | |
| It might have even been 1989, but I don't think it was. | |
| And they were selling in Neiman Marcus pieces of the Berlin Wall. | |
| I don't know if this is accurate or not, but it might have been a complete scam. | |
| Who knows? | |
| But you could, for $100 or something, buy a piece of the Berlin Wall and it had spray paint on it. | |
| I do remember this kind of sense of ending. | |
| In fact, history has been commercialized where you can literally buy it at an affordable price, an artifact. | |
| But when I was a child in the 80s, Even though I was quite young, I had a sense of, like, you could be in communism or out of communism or in America or freedom or out of America or freedom, and you could kind of escape. | |
| You know, I remember this story of this young kid, I believe, from Norway who flew a light aircraft to Moscow or something. | |
| So he kind of like evaded the Soviet anti-aircraft systems and got to Red Square. | |
| Some classic story like this, or people escaping East Germany through whatever means, tunneling or... | |
| You know, I could escape. | |
| And I would be in the same global structure that I'm in now. | |
| And even on a cultural or intellectual level, we're not really headed in some different direction. | |
| I think a lot of these things that you hear from, say, Alexander Dugan or... | |
| Or lesser lights in the dissident right or something about how Russia is on some totally different path. | |
| Multipolarity, there would be some Russian sphere that would just be traditionalist or free or whatever. | |
| I don't buy it in the slightest bit. | |
| I think even well into the 1980s, there was a... | |
| A general convergence of the Soviet sphere and the American sphere. | |
| I mean, there was McDonald's in Moscow, and in a way, there was communism in Nebraska, if you understand. | |
| There was this just, you know, not that America wasn't kind of more powerful by that period, and not that America didn't, on some level, win the Cold War. | |
| I think it was much more ambiguous than that. | |
| I think it was a general convergence into kind of one ideal for the planet. | |
| And so we are, you know, sorry to sound a bit like Alex Jones here, but like, we are confined in a prison planet. | |
| We are confined in the same sphere of things. | |
| And there's kind of no way out. | |
| There's no real... | |
| This is what Fukuyama... | |
| Was getting at at the end of history. | |
| It wasn't just that, you know, American capitalism and liberalism is more profitable or wealth creating than Soviet communism. | |
| I think he's obviously correct about that. | |
| That wasn't what he was saying. | |
| He was saying that you can't think yourself out of Americanism. | |
| And that even if one of the things he said in the preface to the end of history was that. | |
| All of his critics were basically reiterating his thesis. | |
| And so they were saying, oh, no, actually, you're wrong. | |
| History hasn't ended yet because there are some places on the globe that aren't democratic and where women don't have the same rights as men, etc. | |
| And he was saying, well, that's my thesis. | |
| It wasn't that there aren't some kind of backward places on the planet. | |
| It's that everything is moving in the same direction. | |
| And, yeah, I mean, I think that's the profound sentiment. | |
| I mean, you could kind of say that there was a trad revolt by the Taliban or al-Qaeda of this violent traditionalist revolt using contemporary means, that is, using weapons and airplanes and... | |
| Technology of America, but kind of turning them against America and attacking the World Trade Center. | |
| You could kind of say that that was the rejoinder to Fukuyama. | |
| But that rejoinder has been short-lived and isn't something that I think can ultimately win, at least at this point in time. | |
| That we're kind of all... |