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!
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
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Within democracies, the voters of the US, UK, and France are now all obliterating their "center-right" in favor of a far right, while the panicked lib-centrist "Adults In The Room" shovel their power to the far left
Lib-centrist democracy is dead. And mass migration killed it
Whatever else happens, 20th century liberal democracy has—depending on your perspective—either killed itself, or been forced to reveal what it was all along
The genie can't be put into the bottle. That form of government, and its norms, is now behind us for good
The question is always, Was it deliberate, or was it accidental
My dissection of the corpse is that it was a combination of biotrash leftists who seduced a genuinely well-meaning liberal class
Nevertheless, the outer-productive regions were still able to sort of maintain themselves as industrial zones and city-feeders until the Regime stripped their means of life, industrialization, from them
Now they have neither the ideology to replace themselves nor the economic means to support themselves to provide for the cities that robbed from them (and, to be fair, enriched us all) for centuries
The old system broke down. All that remains, for the system, is mass migration
We are out of Afghanistan because of Trump, and we are *in* Ukraine because pols like the Clintons + Bidens turned it into their personal colony/paypig
Trump's foreign policy was his greatest achievement for Americans. We need not just one Trump, but fifty Trumps
Americans buy into lies like Iraq and now Ukraine because our eternal political class has convinced them to believe in lies, against our own interests as citizens
It is not a "fringe concern." Our guy literally ran our policies. And they absolutely ruled for the American people
This is apparent from the first day that Trump won election. When our domestic ruling class declared that "Russian interference" was the only reason he won
And went on to impeach him over it. Look, that's fucking weird, no Americans cared about Russia then
The Cathedral is at least a century old, but I think it's just now gone through a phase transition, as it exhausted a lot of its liberal premises of equality
While at the same time discovering it has captured enough of the people and the elite to *abandon* equality
Which means it has the power to enforce its next phase, "equity," i.e. equality through use of force
While it shares things with previous forms of illiberal leftism, this is a uniquely American evolution of it, and also one that draws on modern forms of "force"
Regular reminder that this was already diagnosed in The Elementary Particles 25 years ago. Reason and its infinite promises of liberation from any guiding strictures doesn't lead to better lives
It leads to a form of frozenness, an inability to judge and take action
The book's parallel narrative preemptively demolishes the MedGold-level response to this, "just increase the fuck rate," "just talk to her dude" The 20th century's two totems were pure reason and free sex. Both are shown as dead ends, incapable of giving humans what they need
The two horns of the ideology turn out to be twins in what they promise: liberation from the bounds of our basic being
Which is why both broke when they were put into practice. The outcome of both characters in The Elementary Particles is disgust with themselves.
Unusually insightful article by a Zoomer about Zoomers, that gets at my main idea about the current age: the post-war order is a paralyzing agent, an ideology that strips us of all spirit + will to act
Most visibly as he describes it in youth + children
This to me is the key passage. Combined with being stripped of all meaningful values—turns out "diversity" doesn't provide personal, human meaning—
This draining of spirit leaves people angry, but unaware of what they're angry at. And unable to act against it even if they knew
In short (and this isn't a uniquely Zoomer problem, it's just most concentrated there) there is an immense sense of betrayal, with no actual understanding of what that betrayal *is*, and no spirit to change it