Thread by @17cShyteposter

George Kennan wrote this in 1986

I'm going to turn this into a Kennan thread, because I'm going to need it.

This is about the Sacco and Vanzetti murder case, back when the nation cared about law and order. Listen closely, and you can hear the echoes of the left regarding the border crisis going on right now!

Kennan, the 26-year-old incel in 1931, lamenting tfw no gf, but also unwilling to avail himself of the degeneracies of his fellow international diplomats.

...but have hope, lads! That very year, Kennan met a 20-year-old Norwegian girl. Their marriage lasted 73 years.

Kennan just giving the Red Pill away for free 80 years before your newsletters and online courses

All right, this is what I came here for. Kennan is still just 26, and his power level just leaped tremendously.

This is in 1931. Well before we had the hindsight of history. He could already see how throwing away tradition (i.e. social AI) would lead to the Soviets' ruin.

In the continuation, he scorns leftist "theorists" as cowards and intellectual fools. Replace "humanists," which has been tainted by the left, with "those who understand human capital"

Effective economics comes not from theory, but from the people capable of being capitalists

lmao, I've been alerted to the New York Times article on this book, whose author is bewildered! as to how one man can understand the world so well—yet, when it comes to his understanding of America, was somehow so, soooo wrong.

Kennan, 1932:

Modernity is dysgenic. No amount of education or discipline can overcome that fact. No political system even thinks about this problem, let alone acts on it. Therefore the future will only get further degradation.

#BASED!

...then, just as an encore, he goes on to anticipate NRx.

Rather than being a strength, diversity proves to be a terrible weakness, disconnecting the diverse citizens from each other and thus destroying all shared loyalty to the nation, replacing a national character with an international—one might say globalist—order instead.

It should be noted that, within two years of coming to these realizations, Kennan suffered a physical and mental breakdown so bad he had to spend months in a sanatorium while being seen to by a psychologist...

...but, he recovered.

Visiting the nation of Georgia, 1936, a few months after Stalin begins the Great Purge

lol

Anecdote in 1936 from the bookkeeper of a Soviet collective farm, which saw 10% of its gross earnings—more than its total profits—stolen by petty Party leaders, who spent it on travel and drinking

I'm starting to understand why the hormonally-augmented set wants communism so bad

A glimpse into the period of 1938. This was at an inn in rural Wisconsin (his home state), so almost everything would have been "organic," "locally sourced," non-processed. Everything we're told is healthy, and pay a premium for, today.

Btw, $0.65 in 1938-bux is about $12.

Still in Wisconsin, 1938. Observing the isolation of American individualism vs his European experiences.

"It was the sad climax of individualism, the blind alley of a generation which had forgotten how to think or live collectively. ..."

On journalists 😂😂😂

(Tensions ramping up in Europe)

It's now 1940, full WW2, and Kennan is a key figure in the Berlin diplomatic corps. No small responsibility.

Note the subtlety of his localist, truly nationalist argument... for the same reason the Dutch are doomed to be "Nazis," the Honduran etc is incapable of being "American"

I.e. the Honduran must seek his own way. They can't seek to be America, or they will only be a worse form of America. And if Hondurans seek to join America, through mass migration, they will by virtue of not being Americans only be inferior Americans.

Killer logic trap.

2019 Woke Pussyhat Feminist Studies Brigade to 1944 Soviet woman: "What level of slavish devotion to state teachings are you on?"

"Uhh I dunno, maybe a 5? 6?"

"You are like little baby. Watch this."

If I were to post this outside the context of this thread, everyone would immediately assume I was making a devastating takedown of American progressivism.

Except this is Kennan, in 1944, describing the mindset of Soviet communism.

Just to really drive the point home, let me repost the last two quotes side-by-side.

The Cathedral of modern America—the media and our educational system, particularly the university—creates citizens indistinguishable from the type crafted by the Soviet state.

Here it is, the coup de grace, given 75 years ago, explaining in one paragraph the new uprising of nationalism, right-wing populism, "literal Nazism"—and the "hostility and imperiousness" that conjured up a devil that didn't exist until progressivism willed it into being

Here, Kennan diagnoses how mass migration leads to an involvement in foreign affairs that most Americans want nothing to do with, and that are often opposed to America's own interests.

59 years later, we saw a stark example of this, when neocons set us to war against Iraq.

Explaining why the proposal for the United Nations was doomed to fail to achieve its ends: if you ignore underlying power structures, your "laws" will just wind up warped to fit their interests, and your own interests will be subverted.

More based NRx-poasting!

What the Soviets were to physical endeavors, the American progressive is to social endeavors. American progs have "cut loose from all connection with reality and [begun] some fantastic colossus of a project," doomed to rot and misuse

Meanwhile nature continues to take its course

George Kennan, 1945, identifies the redpill.

I have so far restricted my reading of Kennan to this book. But it doesn't include The Long Telegram, which is his most infamous analysis (and occurs now, at this point in the diary), so I'm going to break, at this point, to read it before coming back to The Kennan Diaries.

Now, The Long Telegram. Dense insight into Russian psychology, its insecurity, paranoia, and fear of truth, + how that caused it to latch onto Marxism, with its "basic altruism of purpose," to justify all horrors it needed to inflict

Disturbing echoes of the modern US university

...

Am I going to have to quote this whole damn thing?

"After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping."

This is the conclusion of The Long Telegram, and my head has just exploded

Slow start, but this is an incredible document, both for specific insight into Soviet psychology and broader insight into psychology of leftist-power seeking—without explicitly trying to do the latter at all!

5000 words, predicting so much of the 20th C

digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/11617…

One of the reasons modern leftists are so obsessed with "fascism" is they've spent years clearing the grounds for the rise of totalitarianism. It was supposed to be their form of it that took over, of course—so now that the right is finally fighting back, they're scared shitless

Kennan, explaining how US enforcement of the creation of Israel, rather than letting them work it out themselves, will inevitably cause the US to become Israel's military enforcer

Imagine being so powerful you can predict the future of the Middle East 70 years later and counting

1949. You can choose to exert foreign policy in one of two ways: by yourself, singularly, like a warrior, with the responsibility that stems from that

Or in what BAP identifies as the longhouse: communal, hen-pecking, weak

The emerging post-WW2 neoliberalism chose the latter