1/ As more people awaken to the realization that the twentieth century was not a march of progress toward a utopian end of history but a carefully managed illusion, the official narrative begins to unravel.

Beneath its polished veneer lies a record not of moral clarity but of deception, betrayal, and orchestrated catastrophe. Among these illusions, none is more sacrosanct, more zealously defended, than the myth of the Second World War, the so-called “Good War.”

But what did that “Good War” truly achieve? In the words of Patrick J. Buchanan, whose reflection is shown below, the Second World War extinguished the last embers of Western ascendancy. All the great houses of continental Europe fell. The empires that once ruled the globe vanished. Birthrates collapsed. Peoples of European ancestry have been in demographic decline for generations. The spiritual confidence that once drove the West was replaced by exhaustion and disinheritance. The Allies may have won on the battlefield, but the civilization they claimed to defend did not survive the victory.

With this in mind, it becomes easier to understand why a serious body of historical work emerged after 1945 and was immediately subjected to suppression, censorship, and denunciation. These books, written by generals, diplomats, journalists, defectors, and independent historians, challenge every sacred premise of the official narrative.

For decades, they were buried or discredited by a powerful alliance of media monopolies, academic gatekeepers, and elites and institutions motivated by a wide range of financial, political, and ethnic interests, and often by their convergence, all determined to preserve the mythology of the “Good War.”

Only with the rise of social media and the weakening grip of legacy power structures has this alternative historiography begun to reach a broader audience. Its revival is not accidental. It reflects the slow collapse of the ideological consensus that once rendered dissent unthinkable.

To continue laying waste to the phony narrative, we must turn to the books that have dared to question it. In the thread below, I will be examining books that explore the origins of the war in Europe and the political decisions in Great Britain that helped transform a regional conflict into a global catastrophe, one that has shaped and continues to shape the political, demographic, cultural, economic, and moral character of a Western world in decline. 2/ The first serious fracture in the orthodoxy
surrounding the Second World War came not from a dissident writer or political radical, but from within the British academic establishment itself. In “The Origins of the Second World War,” published in 1961, A. J. P. Taylor, then the most widely read historian in Britain, offered a meticulous, document-based account that contradicted nearly every moral and strategic justification used to explain the outbreak of war in 1939.

Taylor did not write as some sort of partisan ideologue. He was a liberal, a former supporter of the League of Nations, and a staunch opponent of fascism. Yet his research led him to a deeply uncomfortable conclusion: that Hitler did not plan a world war, that he was often improvisational and opportunistic, and that the road to war was paved largely by diplomatic blunders and deliberate misjudgments in London and Paris.

Taylor’s thesis directly undermined the “Eternal Nuremberg” interpretation of history that had come to dominate Anglo-American public life—the notion that the war was the result of a premeditated and uniquely evil conspiracy. Moreover, Taylor showed that Hitler’s aims, particularly from 1933 to 1939, were not significantly different from those of previous German statesmen: the reversal of Versailles, the recovery of lost territory, and the reintegration of Germans stranded in foreign states by postwar border arrangements. The evidence for this lay in the archives themselves. Taylor carefully studied internal German memoranda, the minutes of cabinet meetings, and diplomatic telegrams, finding no coherent long-term plan for world conquest.

Instead, he showed that Hitler’s decisions were often made late, subject to change, and reactive to the moves of other powers. For example, the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936 was conducted with fewer than 30,000 lightly armed troops, many of them instructed to retreat at the first sign of French resistance. Hitler took that gamble only after being assured that the Western powers were distracted and unwilling to act. Similarly, the Anschluss with Austria in 1938 was not imposed by military invasion but welcomed by vast crowds and arranged with the cooperation of pro-German factions within Austria itself.

Taylor argued that the final crisis came in March 1939, not because of Hitler’s escalating aggression, but because of Britain’s uncharacteristic and poorly calculated guarantee to Poland. This move, made in response to Germany’s absorption of the remaining Czech lands after the collapse of Prague, committed Britain to defend Poland’s borders, borders that had been drawn arbitrarily by the Versailles Treaty and which included millions of Germans under foreign rule, especially in the so-called “Polish Corridor” and the Free City of Danzig. Taylor emphasized that Germany had made repeated proposals for negotiation on Danzig, including autonomy under German protection and the construction of a road and rail link between East Prussia and the Reich. Poland refused all overtures, relying on British backing. Britain, in turn, offered a blank check it had neither the intention nor the military capacity to honor, and which effectively ended any hope of peaceful settlement.

One of Taylor’s more striking revelations was that Hitler had not expected Britain to declare war over Poland, and that his staff had drawn up a range of alternative plans that included prolonged talks, joint commissions, and guarantees of minority rights. Taylor noted that Hitler did not order total mobilization or shift the economy to a wartime footing in 1939. The Wehrmacht itself was underprepared for prolonged hostilities. The decision to invade Poland was not part of a global design but a response to a local impasse, one made irreconcilable by British guarantees.

Relatedly, he also demonstrated how France, paralyzed by internal division and political instability, essentially followed Britain’s lead while possessing far less strategic interest in Eastern Europe. The diplomatic drama was not one of appeasement failing to contain aggression, but of incompatible ultimatums, nationalist posturing, and bluff diplomacy turned deadly.

The academic and political reaction to Taylor’s book was swift and punitive. Though written in a restrained tone, and grounded entirely in publicly available government documents, the work was denounced as irresponsible, dangerous, and even treasonous. Taylor lost editorial positions and speaking engagements. His public standing was damaged, and major media outlets attempted to cast him as sympathetic to Hitler, despite his long history of “anti-totalitarianism.” Yet the book could not be dismissed outright. Its prose was lucid, its reasoning meticulous, and its evidence drawn entirely from the official archives of Britain, France, and Germany.

By refusing to mythologize the war and instead treating it as a tragic outcome of failed diplomacy and misjudged alliances, Taylor restored history to its proper terrain: a human record of choices, mistakes, and consequences. He showed that the war was not a moral necessity, but a political catastrophe, one that might have been avoided had European leaders acted with prudence instead of pride. His book remains a landmark, not for what it says about Hitler, but for what it exposes about the democracies that claimed to oppose him.

“I am for the Whites, because I am White; I have no other reason, yet that is reason good enough.”

— Napoleon

For those inclined to learn more, see the essay below Misunderstood by both reactionaries and revolutionaries, Napoleon Bonaparte stands as one of the most misjudged figures in the history of European civilization.

He has been vilified by monarchists as an upstart tyrant, denounced by liberals as a reactionary despot, and misunderstood even by many of those who claim to speak from the Right. Yet it is precisely in this ambiguity that Napoleon’s significance lies.

He was not the servant of a dying order, nor the architect of modern decay. He was a transitional figure, a Caesar reborn on the ruins of Christendom, forging from its remnants the dream of a new European imperium. This essay is a defense of that vision, not as it has been caricatured by his enemies, but as it truly was: a political, raci*l, and spiritual reawakening from the wreckage of the ancien régime and the poison of Enlightenment universalism.

For all his pragmatic instincts, Napoleon was not a narrow opportunist. He understood himself as an heir to Rome and Charlemagne, as the restorer of imperial authority in a continent fragmented by petty kingdoms and corrupted by finance. His enemies claimed to fight for legitimate monarchy, yet they themselves ruled in regimes already infiltrated by Enlightenment philosophy. The Glorious Revolution in England, long before the French Revolution, had shattered the divine right of kings. The Enlightenment monarchs of Prussia, Austria, and Russia corresponded with the same philosophers who praised the French Revolution and sowed the seeds of secular humanism. If Napoleon was a liberal, then so were Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great. But Napoleon's break with liberal modernity was more profound and more consequential. Where others made peace with the Enlightenment’s materialism, he sought to reimpose spiritual form through state, hierarchy, and command.

Napoleon did not murder King Louis XVI. He did not bring down the monarchy. He rose instead through the chaos left in the monarchy’s wake, seizing power from the floundering Directory and ending the anarchy that had consumed France. In this role he was less a revolutionary than a stabilizing force, imposing order upon disorder and reversing the tide of radicalism that had desecrated churches, destroyed the calendar, and deconstructed France itself. He reestablished relations with the Catholic Church, concluded a concordat with the Pope, and restored many traditional forms of public life. Divorce by mutual consent, a hallmark of revolutionary France, was abolished. The Republican Calendar was discarded. The state returned to ceremony, dignity, and hierarchy.

When Napoleon crowned himself Emperor in 1804, it was not to claim the throne of the Bourbons, but to signal the creation of a new imperial principle. He refused the traditional consecration of the French monarchy, yet his coronation was infused with religious gravity. The Pope stood beside him. The imperial robes recalled Rome and the legacy of Charlemagne. This was not the revival of a local monarchy, but the declaration of a new civilizational project: the unification of Europe under one code, one order, and one law.

If one seeks a traditional framework to understand his legitimacy, the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven may serve as the closest parallel. In that system, a dynasty that had brought ruin to the nation forfeits the divine blessing and may be replaced by a new one that proves its worth through strength, vision, and victory. Napoleon did not claim divine right through blood. He proved his authority on the field, in governance, and through the popular plebiscite that elevated him to Emperor. Yet the deeper source of legitimacy was spiritual. He embodied the will to order in a time of dissolution. His Empire was not a betrayal of sacred kingship, but its transformation under the new realities of the post-Christian world.

This transformation was reflected not only in symbolism but in institutions. With his decree of May 19, 1804, Napoleon established the first marshals of the empire, reviving the martial nobility of an earlier age. Later, in 1808, he created a new hereditary nobility, not based on lineage alone but on service, merit, and loyalty to the state. In this effort he sought to found a new aristocracy modeled not on idle privilege but on Roman virtue. The old French nobility had long since been hollowed out by the centralizing monarchy and reduced to decorative courtiers. Napoleon attempted to restore a functional nobility, bound not by blood alone but by character. Though history did not ratify this vision, it was nonetheless noble in its aim.

Like the Ghibelline emperors of the medieval world, Napoleon asserted the authority of the Empire against the power of the Church. His seizure of the Papal States, and his declaration that the bishops of Rome had been granted only imperial fiefdoms, was not simply a geopolitical move. It echoed the ancient rivalry between the imperial and sacerdotal principles, between the solar and lunar paths of spiritual authority. Julius Evola, writing centuries later, understood this conflict as metaphysical rather than merely political. The Emperor, in this view, is not a heretic but the embodiment of a higher unity—the fusion of the sacred and the sovereign in a single, incarnate will. In this light, Napoleon's confrontation with the papacy was not an act of blasphemy, but a return to the older doctrine of sacred regality that had once defined the Indo-European world.

Though he was a man of his time, and necessarily bore its contradictions, Napoleon was far less of a liberal than his detractors claim. He rejected the logic of liberal capitalism and took direct action against the financial interests that had destabilized France. Under his rule, the Bank of France was placed under state control. Private bondholders were sidelined. The government used state credit to lend directly to French industries at minimal interest, stabilizing production during times of economic crisis. In this, Napoleon foreshadowed the corporatist economies of the twentieth century and directly opposed the usurious systems that financed his enemies abroad.

Chief among those enemies was England, whose naval dominance and financial networks posed the greatest threat to Napoleon’s continental vision. To counter this, Napoleon imposed the Continental System in 1806, attempting to isolate Britain by forbidding trade between England and the rest of Europe. Though this system ultimately failed, especially after Russia’s withdrawal, it marked the beginning of a Pan-European economic bloc, united against external manipulation. It was, in essence, the prototype for Jean Thiriart’s later concept of the “autarky of great spaces,” in which Europe would achieve self-sufficiency and strategic independence from the global financial system.

Napoleon’s dynastic ambitions reinforced this imperial unity. He placed his brothers and relatives on the thrones of Naples, Spain, and Westphalia. He dissolved feudal remnants and reorganized the German states into the Confederation of the Rhine, laying the groundwork for future unification. Though his empire ultimately collapsed, it had already transformed the mental map of Europe. The dream of one people under one law—un peuple, une loi, un code—would haunt the continent for generations to come.

Jean Thiriart, writing in the aftermath of World War II, recognized in Napoleon the true founder of European unity. His ideal was not the balance-of-power liberalism of the English, nor the tribal nationalism of the Slavs and Germans, but an integrated, hierarchical, and autarkic Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok. In this vision, the Napoleonic Code would be reborn as the legal framework for all Europe. Trade would be internal. Sovereignty would be continental. The Empire would rise again, not under the banner of democracy or ra*e alone, but under the higher principle of civilizational sovereignty.

In the end, Napoleon must be seen not as a deviation from Tradition, but as its reassertion in modern form. He did not restore the past, nor did he seek to, but he embodied a higher law of form, hierarchy, and destiny. He was the last Roman in the age of merchants and ideologues, and the first European in a continent still shackled by the provincialism of nations. His vision was greater than his age. His failure was not a failure of will or intelligence, but a failure of time to receive him. It remains for others to complete what he began—to forge a Europe that remembers its heroes, that recognizes itself as one, and that refuses to kneel before the petty gods of commerce and equality.

Napoleon passed from this world, but the world he imagined has not yet come to be. It waits. And it watches.

1/ Diversity is not a strength, it is a solvent.

It dissolves the bonds of trust, memory, and belonging upon which every real community is built. What begins as a promise of enrichment ends as a process of unraveling, weakening institutions, corroding loyalties, and replacing shared identity with managed fragmentation.

There are, of course, forms of diversity that enrich human life. One finds it in the contrast of seasons, the variation of landscapes, the ideas that arise within a civilization over time. A craftsman’s skill improves not through uniformity, but through trial, variation, and rejection. A body of thought grows not by suppressing error, but by exposing it to correction. The mind sharpens when it is confronted with challenge, not comfort. There is a kind of diversity that belongs to the realm of excellence.

But this is not the diversity the modern world demands of us. When political leaders speak of diversity as a strength, when universities elevate it as a core value, and when corporations restructure themselves in its name, they are not speaking of intellectual breadth or refinement through competition. They mean something very specific: the deliberate ethnic, sexual, and cultural integration of radically different groups into a single institutional, political, or national framework. Diversity, in this usage, is not an outcome, but a goal—a goal pursued through policy, enforced through quotas, and sanctified through moral coercion. It is not the diversity of minds but of bodies, not the diversity of perspectives but of demographics. It is not ordered growth, but forced fusion.

This version of diversity is no longer content to be a consequence of merit, exchange, or discovery. It has become an end in itself, pursued regardless of its impact on institutional performance, social cohesion, or national continuity. It is praised not because it works, but because it flatters the modern religion of egalitarianism. In that religion, all differences are declared equal, all outcomes must be equalized, and all resistance to these premises is stigmatized as heresy. The phrase “diversity is our strength” functions not as an empirical claim to be tested, but as a moral axiom to be affirmed. That it is repeated by those who lower educational standards, dismantle hiring criteria, and dilute the very structures they inherit only underscores the nature of the creed: the proof of diversity’s strength is never to be measured by the old metrics of achievement, but by the zeal with which its devotees destroy what came before.

It is worth asking why this belief has taken such hold in the West. How did the pursuit of diversity become the central organizing principle of nearly every elite institution across our civilization? Why is homogeneity, once regarded as a source of peace, unity, and public trust, now treated as a pathology to be overcome? The answer lies not only in the rise of liberalism, or the legacy of empire, but in the psychological condition of a civilization that has lost its will to continue itself as itself. The elevation of diversity is, at bottom, a form of civilizational fatigue, a desire not to grow stronger through challenge, but to dissipate through mixture, to surrender identity in the name of universal comfort, to dissolve boundaries rather than defend them.

Where older societies viewed social and biological cohesion as preconditions for trust, sacrifice, and continuity, the modern West sees them as barriers to progress. The result is a paradox: while our institutions celebrate diversity as a moral good, they decay under its weight. While our societies declare themselves enriched, they grow increasingly fractured. And while our leaders proclaim inclusion, they preside over a system of slow-motion disintegration. The evidence is all around us, but the religion of diversity requires faith, not sight. One must believe in its blessings even as the structures around us begin to fail. 2/ Every institution is born with a purpose. Hospitals exist to heal. Fire departments exist to save lives and property. Schools exist to transmit knowledge and cultivate discipline. Armies exist to protect a people, a territory, and a way of life. At their best, institutions reflect the character and competence of the people who create them. Their excellence is measured by how well they fulfill their function, how clearly their internal structure aligns with their external task.

But when diversity is elevated from incidental feature to governing ideal, that alignment begins to falter. An institution cannot serve two masters. If its founding purpose demands one set of qualities such as strength, intelligence, precision, or sacrifice, while the new moral order demands another, such as demographic representation, gender balance, and cultural visibility, then compromise is inevitable. Standards are softened. Objectives are reframed. The institution begins to shift its orientation away from performance and toward political display.

This is not merely theoretical. One sees it across every sector. Fire departments lower physical standards to recruit women. Medical schools admit students who meet identity criteria but fall below traditional thresholds. Military training is diluted in the name of inclusivity. Government agencies, once guided by law and reason, become staging grounds for ideological theater. Universities, which once upheld rigorous intellectual hierarchies, now resemble bureaucracies of moral indulgence, where group identity outweighs thought and academic standards yield to sentiment.

None of this is openly acknowledged. The process is not presented as a descent into mediocrity, but as a noble expansion of opportunity. The rhetoric of equity, representation, and redress provides cover for a quiet inversion of institutional purpose. Failures are no longer attributed to declining competence or misplaced priorities. They are reinterpreted as signs that the work of inclusion is not yet complete. The more things decline, the louder the call for more diversity.

This process can continue for a long time. A fire department does not need to extinguish fires every day. A military can go decades without serious combat. A university can survive for years without producing meaningful scholarship. But eventually, every institution is tested. There is always a moment when the illusion of competence collides with reality—a fire too great for symbolic strength, a war too brutal for social experiments, a crisis too severe for wishful thinking. At that moment, the institution either performs or it fails.

When it fails, it does not fall with dignity. It collapses like a rotten oak, once majestic in form, but long since hollowed out from within. The betrayal is not only structural, but spiritual. Those who depended on the institution suffer not just from its failure, but from the realization that it had been corroding for years, and no one dared speak the truth. The hollowing was not hidden. It was celebrated.

This is how diversity, when enforced as an ideological absolute, becomes a mechanism of internal sabotage. It transforms jobs into sinecures, merit into a liability, and institutions into parodies of their former selves. Those who resist are cast as heretics. Those who comply are rewarded with promotion, praise, and the grim consolation of going through the motions.

There’s a reason the film “Starship Troopers” still manages to capture the imagination. It was meant as satire, but people took it seriously.

What was intended as a diatribe against the so-called “evil isms” of the day, including authoritarianism, fascism, and militarism, ended up as an unintentional tribute.

Paul Verhoeven, who openly mocked the story he was adapting and admitted he never even read Heinlein’s novel, created one of the most effective pieces of Right-wing cinema in decades.

Like a virus, the truth embedded in the film slipped past the weakened immune system of an increasingly longhoused West. While critics were still busy accusing it of fascism, millions of young men were memorizing Sergeant Zim’s lines and watching Johnny Rico rise from pampered teenager to cold-eyed field lieutenant. What began as a satire of power and discipline became something far more subversive: a film that made strength, hierarchy, sacrifice, and war itself appear not just necessary, but noble.

Heinlein’s novel was never coy about its politics. It argues for a martial society, earned citizenship, and an aristocracy of responsibility. The vote is not a right granted for simply being alive; it is a reward for service. Power belongs to those who have proven loyalty, endurance, and the will to sacrifice. In a world fractured by decadence and softness, Heinlein offered something harder. His answer was not the hollow worship of freedom without purpose, but the truth that order, duty, and hierarchy are the foundations of any lasting society.

The Federation, far from utopian, is ruthless by design. Federal service is a filter. It exists not to shape men, but to break those who don’t belong. The training is brutal because it’s meant to be. If you can't take a beating, if you can’t lead or follow under pressure, if you flinch at the idea of killing or being killed, you are not fit to govern others. The goal isn’t equality. The goal is competence. And competence is measured in blood.

Verhoeven tried to mock all of it. His mistake was thinking he could make it look absurd by dressing his actors in Naz* aesthetics and having them deliver hard truths with absolute seriousness. But every scene meant as parody ends up radiating conviction.

When Michael Ironside, playing Rico’s steely mentor Rasczak, declares that “Violence, naked force has settled more issues in history than any other factor...” the camera doesn’t flinch. There’s no wink, no laugh track, and no signal that the audience is meant to recoil. And they didn’t, because the message didn’t feel dangerous or alien. It felt right.

When the film was released, the feeling of panic was palpable among the film school crowd and the rest of the pretentious liberal elite, whose values stood in quiet opposition to those of the nation at large. This was not supposed to happen.

Verhoeven cast tall, blond, square-jawed actors to emphasize the aesthetic extremes he intended to mock. But the effect is the opposite. It dignifies the world they inhabit. Every stone-faced soldier, every polished uniform, every martial slogan feels coherent and earned. The Mobile Infantry doesn’t apologize for its strength. It doesn’t ask for moral permission. It exists to fight and win. The Bugs, unlike modern enemies softened by diplomacy, are truly alien. They are irredeemable, hive-minded, and genocidal. You kill them all or you die. There is no middle ground.

That’s the other genius of the story: moral clarity. In most war films, the enemy is humanized, the violence is treated as tragic necessity, and the soldiers are haunted by doubt. Not here. There are no heartfelt scenes of mutual understanding. There is only the Bug, and the will to destroy it. It is not metaphorical. It is not tragic. It is war, and the only virtue is victory.

What makes the film so potent is how it treats masculinity without irony. Rico doesn’t whine. He doesn’t rebel against authority for the sake of it. He fails. He learns. He steels himself. There is no therapy. There is no soul-searching. There is only action, and the slow death of ego through duty.

At the beginning, he joins the service for a girl. By the end, he doesn’t need her. He has become a man, not through emotional validation, comfort, or any other inane therapeutic absurdity of the age, but by enduring hardship and earning the respect of other men who have done the same.

Compare this to modern war films, where the soldier is reduced to one of two roles: either a perpetual victim or a one-dimensional monster. “Starship Troopers” rejects both. Its warriors are professionals. They do ugly things because ugly things need doing. And when they fall, no one weeps. They receive a medal, a rank, and are memorialized. Then the fight goes on.

Even the film’s infamous propaganda reels, intended to mimic Naz* newsreels, end up reinforcing the message. “Would you like to know more?” Yes, actually. We would. Each segment, though presented as satire, feels more like a challenge. Enlist. Train. Take the risk. Become someone worth remembering.

The irony is almost tragic. Verhoeven set out to warn the world about the so-called dangers of authoritarianism. Instead, he created a film that reads as a tribute to order, sacrifice, and the raw appeal of military discipline. He wrapped a nationalist fist in a velvet liberal glove, and unsurprisingly, the fist broke through.

Today, “Starship Troopers” is more relevant than ever. It speaks to young men raised in weakness, denied initiation, and drowning in abstraction. It offers them something real: purpose. Brotherhood. Something to fight for. It doesn’t waste time debating the morality of war. It assumes war is coming, and asks only one question: will you be ready?

The answer, for more and more men, is yes.

They don’t laugh when Rico says, “Kill them all.” They cheer.

And that’s the problem.

Because deep down, the people who hate this film know exactly what it awakens. Don’t feel like reading the essay? Visit the link below to listen to it:

chadcrowley.substack.com/p/they-didnt-l…

1/ Rome was not founded on an idea. It was founded on blood.

Long before it became an empire, and even before it called itself a republic, it was a people, rooted in the land, bound by ancestry, and ordered by sacred law. Its political forms, its rites, and its authority did not emerge from theory or abstraction, but from the lineage that sustained it. The foundation of Roman order was not a contract, nor a creed. It was the unbroken continuity of kin.

To be Roman was to belong, not merely to a place, but to a line of men whose names were carried forward in stone and smoke, in ancestral altars and funerary masks, in land worked and defended, and in gods who had no power outside the bounds of that blood. The res publica (the republic) existed only because the populus Romanus (the Roman people) existed as an organic and reproductive force.

What modern thinkers call biopolitics—the governance of life itself, including the regulation of reproduction, kinship, and identity for the preservation of political order—was not a theoretical concept to the Romans. It was the lived structure of their world. Nor was it foreign to the broader course of human history. It became alien only to the modern West, and only in the aftermath of the catastrophes unleashed by the great European civil wars of 1914 to 1945.

For the Romans, biopolitics was the foundation of their world. They understood, even if only instinctively, that the strength of a state depended on the biological vitality and cohesion of the people who composed it. A polis, like a body, had to preserve its form through generation, discipline, and exclusion. If it failed to reproduce itself, in both flesh and spirit, it did not perish with a cry. It vanished with a fading memory.

The Roman family (familia) was not a sentimental household. It was a sovereign religious and legal entity, governed by the father not by custom, but by law and sacred obligation. The paterfamilias held more than authority over his household; he bore spiritual responsibility for its continuity, a duty owed to both ancestors and descendants. The hearth, the tomb, and the field were bound together through ritual, and the survival of the family was the condition for the survival of the gods themselves. In Rome, the divine had no existence apart from the rites of the city and the sacrifices of its citizens. Every aspect of Roman life, from marriage to inheritance, from public office to military service, was structured to preserve the continuity of bloodlines, and through them, the continuity of the Republic.

As Fustel de Coulanges wrote in “The Ancient City,” it was this ancestral religion, more than any political theory, that formed the soul of Roman institutions. The family, when enlarged and projected outward, became the tribe. The tribe, organized into curiae and centuries, became the city. At each level, the same principles held: hierarchy, piety, ancestral inheritance, and sacred obligation. The Republic was not merely a system of rules. It was a living order in which public life grew directly from private worship, and in which citizenship was not chosen but inherited.

This biopolitical architecture was not hidden or suppressed. It was revered. The Roman census, the cornerstone of civic order, was not merely a tally of property, but a ritual affirmation of lineage and status, recording who belonged and who did not. Political rights were tied to military service, and military service was reserved for landowning citizens who had proven their loyalty not through ideology, but through blood and sacrifice. Only those who had given sons to Rome could speak in her assemblies. Only those who had fought for her could shape her laws.

It is easy, from the vantage point of modern Western abstraction, to forget that the Republic was not born out of philosophical speculation, but out of the habits of a people who had, over centuries, disciplined themselves to live as a collective expression of duty, hierarchy, and memory. What sustained Rome was not an idea of freedom in the modern sense, but a form of ancestral justice, a continuity between the dead, the living, and the unborn, anchored in the land and the family. It was this rootedness, this sacred exclusivity, that gave Roman law its force, and Roman citizenship its meaning.

To speak of Rome without speaking of the Roman people is to speak of a ghost. The Republic was never merely a system of government; it was the outward expression of a living people.

It was the expression of a specific ethnos, a people who understood themselves as a sacred lineage, and the city as the living soul of that lineage made manifest. Without this people, the Republic could not have existed. And when they ceased to reproduce themselves in body, in spirit, and in law, the Republic did not fall in battle or in debate. It faded into memory and was replaced by something altogether different. 2/ As Rome expanded its reach across the Mediterranean in the second century BC and into the first century AD, following the defeat of Carthage and the conquest of the Hellenistic kingdoms, it entered a new phase of triumph and transformation. Yet embedded in its victories was a fatal paradox—one that would haunt all great civilizations to come. The conquest of foreign lands brought wealth, territory, and imperial prestige, but it also set in motion the gradual dissolution of the very people who had made conquest possible.

Victory filled the treasury but emptied the city of its founding stock. Slaves, traders, and rootless rent seekers poured into the capital, not as guests, but as replacements. What began as assimilation turned into inundation, and what had once been a tightly woven civic body became a patchwork of incompatible tongues, rites, and loyalties. As the Republic swelled into empire, this demographic shift was not merely a consequence of expansion, but one of its driving engines. The Roman people, once sovereign over their city, became subjects of a state that ruled in their name but no longer preserved their form.

Rome, in its earliest form, was not a philosophical abstraction or a commercial hub. It was a community of Italic tribes—Latins, Sabines, Oscans—bound by kinship, common cults, and a proud martial tradition. Recent genetic studies confirm that the founding Romans shared close affinities with other European populations, particularly those of central and northern Italy. Their language, institutions, and worldview emerged from the same Indo-European matrix that shaped the aristocratic warrior societies of the broader continent. The mythic descent from Trojan exiles may have added poetic grandeur, but the biological and cultural substance of early Rome was unmistakably European.

The Roman approach to inclusion had once been deliberate and limited. In the Republic’s formative centuries, Rome had expanded by integrating fellow Italic peoples through conditional citizenship, offered in exchange for military service and loyalty to the city. This preserved a basic ethnocultural coherence, one that allowed the republic to grow without losing its character. But as conquests extended across the Mediterranean, particularly into the East and Africa, the policy became untenable. The influx of foreign populations overwhelmed older mechanisms of integration. The demographic character of the capital shifted so dramatically that, as Seneca observed, most of those who inhabited the city were no longer native to its soil or subject to its gods. Rome had become a crossroads, no longer a sanctuary of ancestral custom, but a gathering point for alien cults and unrooted masses.

This transformation was not invisible to Roman observers. Cicero lamented the erosion of civic unity and warned of the political consequences of indiscriminate enfranchisement. Cassius Dio records the lex Papia, passed in 65 B.C., which sought to expel non-Italics from the city. That such legislation was proposed at all, and that it ultimately failed, speaks to the scale and permanence of demographic change. Juvenal, writing decades later, described a city teeming with foreigners whose speech, religion, and habits were alien to Roman tradition. He did not speak of enrichment, but of disorder.

Beneath these pointed observations lay a more profound anxiety. Roman identity, once rooted in shared bloodlines, sacred rites, and civic sacrifice, was now something that could be granted by imperial decree.

Citizenship, once the hard-earned privilege of soldiers and landholders, became a tool of imperial administration. The most radical expression of this came under Emperor Caracalla, whose Constitutio Antoniniana in A.D. 212 extended Roman citizenship to nearly every free inhabitant of the empire, largely for fiscal and administrative reasons. What had once been the defining bond of a people was now a meaningless status conferred without distinction. The rituals of belonging were emptied of significance, and the citizen body filled with men who owed no ancestral debt and bore no spiritual connection to the city whose name they carried.

This was not cosmopolitanism in any noble sense. It was not a convergence of complementary traditions, but an imperial amalgam justified by the language of necessity. The new masses did not assimilate upward into the Roman form. Instead, Roman identity was diluted to accommodate them. The elite, absorbed in foreign luxury and abstract ideals, ceased to revere their own ancestral mores. The masses, drawn from distant provinces, brought with them gods, festivals, and social instincts incompatible with the Roman ethic of order, restraint, and duty. Public monuments still bore the names of old heroes, but the spirit that had once animated them had long since faded

In this chaos of foreign tribes and unfamiliar cults, the bonds of civic trust began to unravel. Without shared ancestry, without the gradual transmission of memory through blood and ritual, no political cohesion could endure. The Republic had relied on more than law; it had relied on the recognition of mutual belonging, a shared understanding of sacrifice, and the presence of fathers and sons who fought for the same gods and tilled the same land. When that recognition was lost, the law itself became brittle. Faction replaced fellowship. Rome, like any state stripped of its ethnopolitical core, became ungovernable except by force.

This process unfolded over generations, but its outcome was unmistakable. The name Roman would continue, engraved in marble and shouted in triumphal processions, yet the reality beneath the name had changed beyond recovery. Later generations would still speak of the mos maiorum, the ancestral way, though they no longer lived it. The city endured, but the people who once gave it shape, and soul, and sacrifice, had been displaced.

1/ Why were we never taught this? Why is the story of slavery told only through the lens of White guilt?

The question lingers in every classroom, every textbook, every sanctioned account of the past.

In schools, in media, and in the official rituals of modern memory, slavery is not presented as a universal affliction, but as a uniquely White crime.

It is not portrayed as something native to the human condition, but as something unique to European history and identity, something for which all future generations must atone.

But slavery is older than Christendom. It is older than the modern West. It is older than any nation now standing. It is not a deviation from human nature, but an expression of it. The Assyrians practiced it. The Egyptians institutionalized it. The Persians and Indians codified it. African kingdoms enriched themselves by it. Muslim caliphates sustained whole economies on it. Slavery has existed since time immemorial, among all peoples and all cultures, not as an aberration but as a constant. The only historical distinction that belongs to Whites is that they abolished it.

What is never taught, what is actively erased, is that Whites were not only perpetrators of slavery but also its victims. In the seventeenth century, Whites were kidnapped from English port towns and Irish villages, shackled in ships, and sold in the West Indies. In 1627, over eighty percent of the 25,000 slaves in Barbados were White. The term “Barbadoesed” entered the English language to describe the practice of seizing the poor and sending them to die on Caribbean plantations. They were not apprentices. They were not settlers. They were slaves, often worked to death before they could complete the fraudulent terms of indenture.

Michael Hoffman’s “They Were White and They Were Slaves” documents this in relentless detail. English workhouses were emptied. Children were taken from city streets. Convicts and petty thieves were sentenced to a life of servitude under the pretense of justice. Political dissidents such as Jacobites, Irish rebels, and Scottish Highlanders were deported not to exile, but to bondage. The voyage across the Atlantic was brutal. Many never survived it. Those who did were put to work in the cane fields under a regime every bit as harsh as that endured by African slaves in later decades. Courts colluded with landowners to deny them release. Contracts were extended, punishments intensified, and many were deliberately driven to escape in order to justify lifetime servitude.

Further east, the trade in White slaves took on a different form but no less cruelty. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Muslim raiders, operating with the support of Ottoman authorities, descended on the coasts of Europe. Towns from Italy to Ireland were sacked. Ships were seized. Christian men were chained to the oars of galleys, women sold into harems, children taken and converted, destined for a life of service as janissaries in the armies of the Sultan. In “Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters”, Robert Davis estimates that more than one million Whites were enslaved by Barbary corsairs between 1500 and 1800.

This was not piracy in the modern sense. It was state-sponsored terror. It was strategic. It was religious. And it persisted for centuries. In North Africa, European slaves were castrated, tortured, starved, and beaten. Some were kept alive for ransom. Most were not. Giles Milton’s “White Gold” tells the story of Thomas Pellow, an eleven-year-old English boy who spent twenty-three years as the personal slave of the Sultan of Morocco. His ordeal was not unusual. It was part of a vast and forgotten system of human plunder that targeted Whites for profit and humiliation.

Yet we are never asked to remember this. It does not appear in films, textbooks, or school plays. It does not serve the narrative of permanent guilt. That narrative requires only one story: the transatlantic trade in African slaves, and the moral burden assigned to every White child because of it. Every other account, every other truth, must be buried.

But memory is not a weapon. It is a foundation. To erase this history is to sever a people from their past, to strip them of the right to remember what shaped them, and to make them vulnerable to moral extortion and permanent self-denial. This essay does not seek revenge. It does not seek apology. It seeks to remember what was deliberately forgotten. Because only in memory does justice begin. 2/ Slavery in the modern imagination conjures the image of the plantation. Cotton fields, overseers, and the Black slave in chains. This image is not inaccurate, but it is incomplete, and deliberately so. Behind it stands an older, more expansive architecture of bondage, one that bound Whites in systems no less dehumanizing and far more common than most are willing to admit.

In colonial America, servitude was not merely a stage of life or a contractual hardship. For many, it was a sentence. The term “indentured servant” has survived, but the brutality it concealed has not. These were not apprentices learning a trade. They were prisoners, often seized without consent, sold for profit, and treated with contempt by those who knew they would never answer for their crimes. In “White Cargo,” the depth of this exploitation is laid bare. Children as young as eight were bound to labor. Men were branded like livestock. Women were raped with impunity. The law offered no recourse. A runaway could be whipped, shackled, or simply have years added to their term. Few survived the seven years on paper, let alone the endless extensions imposed in practice.

The story did not end with labor. Many of these so-called servants were convicts, deported en masse by the English crown. Others were Irish, caught in the aftermath of Cromwell’s campaigns or the Jacobite rebellions. Still others were swept from the streets of London, sold by “spirits” and press gangs, or traded away by their families for survival. In “Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776,” Abbott Emerson Smith outlines the sheer scale of this system. Between 1607 and 1776, tens of thousands of Whites were forcibly relocated to serve the needs of empire, stripped of rights, kinship, and future. The legal distinction between servitude and slavery existed mostly on paper. In reality, it was a distinction of vocabulary, not condition.

This was not a marginal phenomenon. It was a transatlantic enterprise, tied into English economic life and colonial expansion. The plantations of Virginia and the sugar mills of Barbados operated on the same logic that would later apply to African slavery: reduce the laborer to a cost, extract everything of value, and replace the body when it breaks. In the early stages, that body was almost always White.

Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire constructed its own system, less bureaucratic but equally ruthless. In “The Forgotten Slave Trade,” Simon Webb reveals the organized abduction of European Christians by Muslim powers, not as random raiding but as imperial policy. Corsairs, operating under the protection of local rulers, prowled the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, taking entire villages captive. The devshirme system institutionalized the theft of children from the Balkans, converting them to Islam and raising them as janissaries. They became weapons of the state, torn from their families and trained to kill their own.

White slavery was not incidental. It was systemic. It was profitable. And it endured for centuries in silence. In North Africa, eunuch guards patrolled royal harems. Galley slaves rotted in the stench of their own waste, chained to benches until death. In England and the colonies, young boys died in coal mines, and women bore children only to see them sold into new terms of bondage. In both East and West, White bodies were consumed for labor, for war, and for breeding. The moral grammar of the modern world has no place for this history because it disrupts the carefully managed ledger of grievance and guilt.

But a ledger that omits half its entries is not a record of justice. It is a tool of control. And control, not truth, is the purpose of the modern slavery narrative.

1/ History does not always remember its most faithful sons. In an age like ours, where loyalty is mocked, conviction is pathologized, and sacrifice is treated as madness, those who give everything for a cause greater than themselves are often buried twice, first in flesh, and then in silence by those who inherit the world they tried to save.

John Alan Coey is one such man. He died young, an American Achilles, far from home, in a war that the modern West has consigned to oblivion—not because it lacked meaning, but because its stubborn existence near the end of the twentieth century unsettles the carefully woven mythology upheld by liberal elites, a mythology in which history is presumed to march inexorably toward equality, and in which all memory of blood, hierarchy, tradition, and resistance to civilizational disintegration must be suppressed to maintain the illusion of progress.

He fought and bled for Rhodesia, a bastion of White civilization struggling for survival in the heart of a darkening continent, holding fast against the rising tide of Marxist revolution, international condemnation, and the slow poison of betrayal.

To the liberal mind, this is incomprehensible. Why would an American college graduate, with a promising future and a peaceful life ahead, abandon it all to join a condemned regime, to kill and to die in the bushveld of southern Africa? But Coey was not a creature of comfort or calculation, and he bore no resemblance to the child-men produced by the late modern West, who confuse comfort with virtue and shrink from every demand that might require discipline, sacrifice, or pain. He belonged to another type altogether, one forged in the crucible of destiny, guided by conscience rather than convenience, and sustained by a vision that placed blood, soil, and faith above personal safety, social acceptance, or material reward.

He believed that civilization is not a gift, but an inheritance, and that inheritance demands stewardship, and at times, sacrifice. For Coey, the collapse of the West was not a metaphor, nor a distant abstraction. It was unfolding in real time: in the chaos of American universities, in the betrayal of Vietnam, in the slow surrender of Rhodesia. He saw clearly what most refused to see, that a spiritual war was being waged against his people, a war fought not only with bullets and bombs, but with perverse ideas and lies. And he chose to fight. Not in despair, but in defiance. Not as a mercenary, but as a soldier of faith, of heritage, of order.

This essay does not aim to rescue Coey from obscurity merely for the sake of remembrance. It seeks something greater, to draw from his life a lesson in courage, conviction, and the cost of truth in an age that worships lies. His was not the path of moderation, nor of political pragmatism. It was the path of the martyr, the path of the last crusader. And it begins not with his death, but with a decision, a choice that stands in opposition to everything the modern world teaches its youth. The choice to fight when others submit. The choice to believe when others mock. The choice to die, not in vain, but in fidelity to a world worth saving. 2/ To understand John Alan Coey is to understand the force that burned at the very center of his being, the flame that guided every choice he made and every enemy he chose to face. That force was not ideological alone, nor mere political conviction, but something deeper, a militant Christianity, stern and unyielding, forged in the Lutheran tradition of his forebears and tempered by the urgency of a collapsing world.

Coey did not see Christ as a pacifist sage or a modernist caricature so prevalent among contemporary churches that speak in the language of liberal platitudes. He saw Him as a king and commander, a divine authority under whom all things should be ordered, including race, nation, and state. His religion was not abstract piety, but a call to arms, a summons to defend what he called “our way of life” not only with prayer but with action and sacrifice.

He had no patience for the soft Christianity of his age, the kind that turned its back on public life and left the battlefield of history to its enemies. He feared, and rightly so, that a Christianity stripped of its will to power, its sense of divine mission, would become not a bulwark against evil, but an accomplice to it.

In Rhodesia, he watched this unfold firsthand. Missionaries who would not speak against Marxism, churches that preached universal love while their congregations were slowly surrounded, believers who whispered of salvation while refusing to fight for the civilization that once built cathedrals and empires. This was not the faith Coey lived or died for. He believed that to be Christian was to resist evil wherever it appeared, whether it took the form of Communism, liberalism, Zionism, or any other force working to undermine the divine order of the world.

He was an avid writer, and his diary returns often to the same truth: that prayer without struggle is hollow, and that belief, when left unacted, becomes its own form of betrayal. He did not wait for divine intervention to rescue what men were unwilling to defend. He believed that Christian men were called to stand, to take risks, and to bear burdens when the world descended into confusion. His writing was not an exercise in ego, but a form of resistance, a way to preserve what others chose to forget, and to leave behind a record that might speak even after the battle was lost. In this, he was a radical traditionalist in the most severe and necessary sense. He saw the collapse of the West not only in political terms, but in theological ones. What had vanished was not simply the fear of God, but the deeper understanding that man is called to bring order to the world, to align his actions with what is above him, and to suffer if necessary in that task.

In the Christian West, he believed, spirit was not opposed to ancestry, and divine purpose did not unfold in abstraction but through the lived continuity of peoples shaped by history and bound by duty. The peoples of Europe, refined through hardship, marked by genius, and sealed in sacrifice, were not accidental to the story of the West but essential to it. If God acts through the world, then the unraveling of a people is not merely a political event but a spiritual calamity. Coey saw this with clarity. And because he saw it, he could not remain at home, could not fall silent, and could not retreat into private devotion while the visible church of the West surrendered its mission from within.

1/ The modern world speaks in binaries it barely understands: Right and Left, conservative and progressive, liberty and equality, as if these were natural opposites, born equal in dignity and power, locked in an eternal debate over governance and values.

But the truth is far more ancient, and far more asymmetric. These are not equivalent visions of the world, but rival ontologies—rival answers to the basic question of what reality is, and how we are meant to live within it.

One is rooted in nature, hierarchy, and the tragic dignity of difference. The other in abstraction, revolt, and the utopian lie of sameness. The Right, properly understood, is not an ideology. It is an acknowledgment that to discern is to judge, and that judgment implies inequality. It begins with the recognition that life is unequal, that nature sorts and stratifies, and that from this order arises both beauty and greatness.

The Left, by contrast, begins with denial. It refuses to accept the givenness of the world, the limits imposed by nature, the existence of inherent difference. It sees every distinction as a wound to be healed, every hierarchy as a crime to be punished. What it cannot equalize, it seeks to destroy. And what it cannot destroy, it seeks to redefine, until nothing true remains but power dressed up as compassion.

There was a time, in the wake of the French Revolution, when these terms referred not to worldviews, but to where one sat. In the National Assembly, those who supported the Ancien Régime, the monarchy, the Church, and the old order sat to the right of the president’s chair. Those who favored revolution, equality, and the abolition of so-called “privilege” sat to the left.

The seating reflected something deeper than politics.
It revealed a division in the soul of the West, between those who saw hierarchy as the condition of civilization, and those who saw it as the root of all injustice.

Over time, these positions hardened. What began as posture became principle. What began as reform became revolt. The Right affirms that men are different, by birth, by spirit, by capacity, and that civilization exists precisely to cultivate these distinctions, not erase them. The Left recoils at this, for it cannot bear the sight of excellence unearned or failure deserved. Its moral vocabulary is built on resentment, its politics on permanent insurrection.

What the Right calls order, the Left calls oppression. And what the Left exalts as justice, the Right understands as a war against nature itself. 2/ To understand the Right, one must begin not with contemporary politics, but with metaphysics. The Right arises from an intuition older than philosophy, a recognition that inequality is not a flaw in the human condition, but rather its foundation. Long before the invention of the state, before writing or coinage or law, men ordered themselves according to visible and invisible differences. There were those who stood first in courage, first in wisdom, first in sacrifice. There were those who followed, who served, who learned. This was not a system imposed from above, but an order revealed in the very act of living. It was through this order that meaning was born, through ritual, through loyalty, through the shaping of spirit by form.

Every enduring civilization has accepted this truth, whether it spoke in the language of divine right, noble blood, natural law, or some other form meant to concretize the nature of reality. Hierarchy was not an accident but a necessity, a way of giving structure to difference and direction to destiny. What we call aristocracy did not simply mean wealth or birth. It meant the rule of the best, of those who bore the burden of example, who embodied the soul of a people in visible form. The Right today, in its highest essence, is the memory of this order. It is the will to preserve form against entropy, rank against chaos, and quality against quantity.

The Left, by contrast, begins with the denial of difference. It sees inequality not as a feature of life, but as a crime against it. It assumes that if there is variation in outcome, someone must be to blame. It replaces the ancient language of virtue and excellence with the modern language of grievance and injustice. It is ant-life.

In its purer, and thus most radical forms, it is not merely opposed to injustice. It is opposed to distinction itself. It wages its war on the visible first, on sex, on language, on family, on nation, but its target is metaphysical. It seeks to dismantle the very idea that some things are higher than others, that some lives point upward while others fall naturally into disorder. It seeks to unmake the ladder itself, so that no man may rise, and no man may fall.

The Right remembers what the Left exists to forget. That civilization is not built by making men equal, but by recognizing that they never were. That order is not an imposition, but a revelation. That the truth of things cannot be constructed, only discovered, or in our case today, rediscovered. And that to live well is not to indulge the will, but to align it with a pattern more ancient and more enduring than the age that denies it.

1/ Rome was not born of equality, and it did not rise by the will of the many. It was shaped by conquest, ordered by hierarchy, and ruled by the strongest.

Yet modern minds, softened by utopian fever dreams and poisoned by the cult of equality, look backward and see in the Roman Republic the blueprint of their own dogmas: democracy, universal rights, popular sovereignty. But this is illusion. The Roman Republic, Res Publica Romana, was never a democracy. It was a disciplined aristocratic order, a warrior republic in which law served strength and freedom belonged only to those who had earned it through service, sacrifice, and ancestral pride.

From its inception in 509 BC, the Republic was structured as a carefully calibrated system of power-sharing among unequal estates. The Senate (Senatus), composed of ex-magistrates and drawn largely from noble lineages, did not make laws, but it issued advisory decrees (senatus consulta) that in practice carried immense moral authority (auctoritas). Its members were not chosen by the masses but emerged from those who had climbed the cursus honorum, the rigorous sequence of public offices. They served not as agents of change, but as custodians of ancestral custom.

The Roman people (populus Romanus) took part in governance only through carefully structured assemblies, whose very design reflected the sacred hierarchy of the city. A single century of equites could outweigh entire ranks of lesser citizens. Even the comitia, which passed laws and elected magistrates, were overseen by men from the great families. What seemed like popular rule was, in truth, a ceremonial reaffirmation of order—an act of submission to Rome’s divine and inherited structure.

No writer captured this balance of forces better than Polybius, the Greek historian brought to Rome as a hostage during its ascent to dominance. Writing in the second century BC, he praised the Republic’s koinē politeia, a mixed constitution blending monarchy in the consuls, aristocracy in the Senate, and “democracy” in the assemblies. Yet he emphasized that stability came from the aristocratic element. The system worked, he wrote, because each part constrained the others, preventing tyranny, oligarchy, or mob rule.

Power in Rome was not an individual right. It was a burden borne by the optimates, the best men, on behalf of the city. Rule was grounded in inequality, custom, and duty. Rome did not seek equality. It sought greatness. And greatness demands order. 2/ The foundation of that order was the ordo, a sacred hierarchy of classes and functions, inherited rather than invented, divinely sanctioned rather than constructed by consent. Roman society was stratified by nature and necessity. Each rank had its place, its duty, and its dignity. To disturb this structure was not progress; it was impiety.

The patricians (patricii) traced their lineage to the gentes maiores, the great clans linked to the city’s founding. They held the auspicia, the right to interpret the will of the gods, and occupied Rome’s chief priesthoods and highest offices. They passed on the mos maiorum, ancestral custom, as a living tradition. They did not merely govern; they mediated between man and the divine.

Opposite them stood the plebians (plebeii), a varied class of citizens—farmers, artisans, traders, and veterans—excluded from religious authority and high office. Over time, beginning with the Conflict of the Orders (494–287 BC), they forced a series of concessions: the creation of tribunes with veto power, the codification of law in the Twelve Tables, and eventual eligibility for the consulship. But this struggle did not end in equality. The rising plebeian elite merged with the old patriciate to form a new governing class: the nobiles.

Political life remained a contest of ambitio (noble striving), dignitas (reputation), and auctoritas. Rome’s institutions did not serve the masses but honored those proven in virtue, discipline, and sacred duty. The comitia centuriata, the Republic’s highest assembly, was structured not by number but by worth. The leading centuries, drawn from the upper orders, voted first, often deciding the outcome before the lower classes were heard. This was not inequality in the modern sense. It was a reflection of natural rank and the burden of command.

The Republic endured not because it embraced popular rule, but because it sustained a vision of order in which excellence, not equality, governed the fate of men and nations.

1/ The victors write the histories, but the defeated preserve the truths. Though buried beneath years of distortion, censorship, and shame campaigns, the memory of the Confederacy endures. It persists not out of sentiment but because it represents something deeper than politics or war. It is a symbol of identity. In an age where White identity is systematically dissolved and forgotten, the Confederate legacy stands as a beacon of rootedness, hierarchy, and defiance against centralized tyranny.

No other chapter in American history so clearly reflects the struggle for civilizational sovereignty. The men who fought under the Southern Cross were not defending abstractions. They fought for land, kin, and a vision of liberty rooted in the Anglo-European tradition. Their banners did not wave for markets or empire, but for the right of a people to govern themselves according to their own principles. That right has not vanished. It has only become more dangerous to assert.

Today, the Confederate soldier is demonized, the flag is forbidden, and the cause is vilified. But what has replaced it? An empire that celebrates degeneracy, erases borders, manipulates guilt, and promises equality while enacting dispossession. The same regime that desecrates monuments now seeks to erase memory itself.

This is why the memory of the Confederacy must be preserved, not as a mere attachment to a long-dead past, but as a form of resistance; not as a retreat into history, but as a vision for the future. The war on the Confederacy has become a war on White identity itself, an erasure of heritage, memory, and sovereignty that reaches from the past into the ongoing struggle for self-determination. 2/ The Confederacy, and the so-called “Civil War,” did not destroy the Old Republic; it exposed the transformation that had already begun. The Southern states did not revolt against the Constitution; they upheld it. It was Washington that shattered the constitutional order by refusing to honor the voluntary nature of the compact and by declaring war not just on the South, but on the very idea of self-governing states. This was the true revolution, and it came not from Richmond but from the Potomac.

At the American founding, this truth was understood. North Carolina and Rhode Island joined the Union only after the new federal government had begun. Their late entry did not delegitimize the Constitution; it affirmed that the states were sovereign and free to choose. When the Southern states later chose to leave, they acted within the same tradition. Secession was not treason. It was continuity with 1776.

Lincoln broke that continuity. He treated the Union not as a covenant among peoples, but as an unbreakable empire. His government imprisoned dissenters, censored the press, suspended habeas corpus, and razed entire communities. In doing so, he redefined the Republic into a centralized state held together by force. What followed was not reconstruction, but redefinition. The postwar amendments, particularly the Fourteenth, did not restore the Union; they dissolved it into something hostile. The Constitution had been abandoned.

This was not inevitable. Even Jefferson recognized the legitimacy of separation. In letters written during the New England secession crisis of the early 1800s, he calmly accepted the idea that regions might part ways if it served their happiness and freedom. The South did not create the idea of peaceful separation. It had the courage to act on it.

That courage is now branded as evil. But the true crime, in the eyes of the regime, was not rebellion. It was the assertion that a distinct people had the right to exist and be remembered. That is why monuments must fall, heroes slandered, and flags banned. The goal is not reconciliation but erasure.

Yet the truth endures. The Confederacy was not perfect, but it stood for something real: the survival of a people bound by blood, place, and tradition. For that, it must be remembered.

1/ For years, the pattern has held. A White person makes a comment, sometimes crude, sometimes merely unfashionable. A video is clipped, stripped of context, and cast into the digital coliseum. The crowd demands penance. Doxing follows. Then come the sponsors, the employers, the journalists. The result is always the same: apology, groveling, ruin.

This is not justice, it never was. It is a moral spectacle, a purification ritual for the postmodern West, where the cleansing agent is White submission. The apology is not meant to be accepted, but to affirm the guilt of the group. The goal is not reconciliation, but re-education, humiliation, silence.

But this time, with the case of Shiloh Hendrix, the script cracked. Her personal details were posted online. She received death threats. Her children were targeted. And yet, she did not capitulate. She did not appear on camera with quivering voice and downcast eyes. She launched a fundraiser.

And White people responded.

Not the media, not the institutions, not the credentialed class, but ordinary White people. Tens of thousands poured in to support her. The platform, GiveSendGo—not GoFundMe, which routinely bans dissidents—reported over $250,000 raised in days. These were not donations. These are the stirrings of something new. Each dollar said, “We see what you are doing, and we are done pretending.”

This is more than a defense of one woman. It is a rejection of the moral framework that made her a target. The Hendrix affair is not the first of its kind. But it is one of the first to end differently. No apology. No resignation. No collapse. Instead: resistance. And that, more than anything else, signals a shift.

The ritual is breaking. And with it, the spell of White guilt. 2/ White guilt was never a natural sentiment; no people naturally hate themselves or push for their own demographic extinction. It did not emerge organically from conscience or history. It was manufactured, ritualized, and weaponized. It was imposed from above by alien elites who seized control of the institutions of education, media, and culture, and rewrote morality to make one group, the White population, the permanent villain in its own homeland.

From the youngest age, White children are taught to associate their identity with conquest, slavery, cruelty, and destruction. They are told to dissociate from their own heritage, to feel shame for the achievements of their ancestors, to distrust their instincts, and to question the legitimacy of their very existence. They are instructed to love all others, but never themselves.

This is not ethics. It is psychological warfare.

And like all systems built on repression, it only works if it remains unquestioned. The moment it is challenged, seriously, openly, defiantly, it begins to fall apart. The power of White guilt lies in silence, not argument. Once someone says aloud, “I do not feel guilty,” the illusion weakens for everyone else.

That is what the Hendrix fundraiser represents. Not a defense of one person, but a refusal to obey the narrative. It is one thing to quietly disagree with the orthodoxy. It is another to act on that disagreement. The act of giving money in defiance of the media’s command is a political gesture far more radical than voting. It is an act of moral rejection. And tens of thousands just performed it.

This would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Even five years ago, the weight of institutional guilt still compelled submission. But something has changed. The spell is weakening. The repetition no longer works. The words no longer bind. The system still speaks in the language of shame, but fewer and fewer are listening.

The idea that Whites must apologize for existing is no longer sacred. It is simply absurd. And once absurdity is exposed, mockery follows. Then rejection. Then reversal.

We are witnessing the early stages of that reversal.

1/ The gods do not die. They are forgotten, buried beneath layers of habit and history, but they do not die. They retreat into shadow, and wait.

Carl Jung understood this better than most. In 1936, he wrote what remains one of the most dangerous and revealing essays of the twentieth century: “Wotan.” Not a political tract, nor a condemnation or endorsement, but a psychological diagnosis. What had seized Germany in the years following the First World War, what had lifted a broken nation into frenzied unity, was not the product of economic distress or even political genius. It was something older. Something primal. The return of a god.

To modern ears, the language is foreign. We are taught that history moves forward, that the past is behind us. That gods are metaphors, and myths are fiction. Jung rejected this illusion. He believed that the human psyche is not modern. Beneath our rational minds lie older strata: ancestral, tribal, animal. These are not merely emotional residues. They are archetypes, living symbols that shape perception, action, destiny. Among these, Wotan, the storm god of the Germanic world, had long slumbered. But not peacefully.

“Wotan is a restless wanderer,” Jung wrote, “who creates unrest and stirs up strife.” He is not an idea. He is a force. And like a buried current, he surged again into the open air, possessed a man, and through him a nation. This was not a metaphor. It was not poetic license. It was, in Jung’s eyes, an eruption of the collective unconscious, a revelation of what lies beneath the mask of civilization.

The age of progress had promised liberation. But something ancient had been repressed to buy that comfort. The old gods, driven out by the Christian Church and sealed beneath layers of Enlightenment reason, had not vanished. They had only withdrawn. And what is repressed returns, often with violence.

What Jung saw in the rise of National Socialism was not a political program. It was an awakening. Not a renewal of reason, but its opposite: the storm. A mythic reassertion of the buried spirit of a people. A reckoning with the shadow they had refused to integrate. That shadow had a name. Wotan. 2/ Many in the West may have forgotten their gods, but the gods did not forget them.

To understand what happened in Germany, Jung tells us we must not look at politics, economics, or ideology. We must look inward. Deep beneath consciousness lies a submerged architecture: the collective unconscious. It is not formed by personal memory, nor shaped by media or schooling. It is inherited. It is ancestral. It remembers what man has tried to forget.

This deeper structure carries what Jung called archetypes—primordial forms that shape human behavior across generations. These are not invented. They emerge from the very fabric of our being. And when ignored, when repressed, they do not disappear. They fester. They twist. They return.

Repression does not heal. It buries. And what is buried often returns with teeth. The Christianization of Europe demanded the suppression of pagan memory, of the fierce, ecstatic, tragic spirit that animated the old gods. Wotan was not exorcised—he was internalized. Turned inward. Made unconscious. And there, in shadow, he waited.

In Jungian psychology, the shadow is not simply evil. It is the totality of the unacknowledged. Strength, passion, instinct, and rage—qualities disowned by the modern, rational man—accumulate in the dark. The longer they are denied, the more violently they demand recognition.

So it was with the Germans. Their technological ascent masked a psychic disfigurement. They had rushed into modernity without integrating what lay beneath. A veneer of Christianity, a century of Enlightenment, a cult of reason—and still, the old storm-god brooded under the surface. And then the dam broke.

It is not enough to say that Germany went mad. Madness implies aberration. But Jung’s insight was more disturbing: this was not madness. It was memory. An inherited form reasserting itself through myth, movement, and man. Wotan did not invent the warpath—he returned to it. The furor Teutonicus, long suppressed, surged back with modern machinery. And it found a vessel.

Here lies the root of Jung’s warning. When an individual represses a part of himself, that part finds other means of expression: dreams, compulsions, breakdowns. When a people represses its ancestral gods, the same principle applies. The gods return—not as symbols, but as storms. Not as fantasies, but as forces.

War is dysgenic. It kills the best and leaves the rest.

Civilizations are not upheld by institutions alone, nor by laws, nor even by victories. They are upheld by men. Not by the many, but by the few—the aristioi, as the Greeks called them—the best.

Not merely those born to privilege, but those who prove themselves worthy of command, who unite excellence of soul with courage of action, who embody the higher possibility of man.

The Romans understood this instinctively. Though they revered lineage, they did not bind greatness to birth. Their nobility, or nobilitas, referred not simply to aristocratic descent but to a recognized status earned through public distinction, by proving one’s excellence in tangible form.

It was a living tradition of excellence, open even to the novus homo—the new man—who had the fire to rise, so long as he proved himself in the crucible of war, rhetoric, and public service. The Roman Republic was not rigid. It cultivated greatness wherever it found it. But even such a system, perhaps especially such a system, cannot survive the repeated loss of its best men.

When the aristioi are sent to die generation after generation, and the men who remain are those who avoided danger or mastered the arts of peacetime flattery, decline is not just likely. It becomes inevitable.

Nowhere is this pattern more evident than in the Roman experience during the Punic Wars. The three Punic Wars, spanning from 264 to 146 BC, were not minor frontier conflicts. They were total wars for dominance over the Western Mediterranean basin, pitting Rome against Carthage, an ancient maritime empire wealthy in trade and arms. Rome, a city-state grown into a martial federation, found itself locked in a struggle that would test not just its arms, but its very essence. The First Punic War was largely naval and bloody, but it was the Second—fought between 218 and 201 BC—that broke something within the Roman body.

It was in this war that Hannibal Barca led his Carthaginian army across the Alps and inflicted defeat after defeat upon the Romans on their own soil. At Trebia and Lake Trasimene, the Romans lost entire armies. But the catastrophe of Cannae in 216 BC stands above all. There, on the hot plains of Apulia, Hannibal annihilated a Roman force of roughly 86,000 men using a brilliant double envelopment maneuver. Between 50,000 and 70,000 were killed in a single day. It was not only the bloodiest day in Roman history; it was also one of the deadliest battles in all of recorded antiquity.

Among the dead was Lucius Aemilius Paullus, one of the two consuls of the year, a noble commander of courage and discipline. His colleague, Gaius Terentius Varro, survived the battle but bore the shame of the rout. Alongside Paullus fell over eighty members of the Roman Senate, more than a quarter of its entire body.

This was not just a military disaster. It was a demographic and spiritual decapitation. The Senate at this time was not a haven for idle aristocrats. It was composed of consular veterans, ex-magistrates, and men deeply steeped in the mos maiorum, the ancestral code of duty, discipline, and restraint.

Cannae also claimed hundreds of equites, Rome’s equestrian officer class, and scores of young patricians-in-training, scions of the Fabii, the Cornelii, and the Aemilii, families that had produced Rome’s statesmen and generals for generations.

This was a blow Rome absorbed, but never truly recovered from.

The aristioi, the living seedbed of Roman order, had been cut down in their prime. In their place rose survivors, not necessarily stronger but often more cunning, men shaped less by the ancestral virtues and more by the demands of a changing world.

Tenney Frank, the American historian and classicist, would later identify this moment as a turning point. In his writings on the Roman economy and population, Frank emphasized the dysgenic consequences of Roman warfare. It was not simply the physical loss of manpower that concerned him, but the biological and civilizational cost of sacrificing the most noble, brave, and disciplined men in each generation. In his words, “The long wars of the Republic destroyed the ruling stock... The brave perished childless, the cunning remained behind.”

Frank was describing a silent catastrophe: not the death of an army, but the death of a type. With every decade of war, the Republic lost more of its vital aristocracy—not the decadent elite, but the aristioi in the truest sense: those who bore the burden of command and led from the front.

Even Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, the victor of Zama, would see his line marginalized in the decades following his triumph. His descendants were politically impotent by the time of the Gracchi. This decline of the nobility was not merely a genealogical fading, but a transformation of Roman political life. Without the aristioi to guide it, the Senate degenerated into factionalism and corruption. The Gracchi, tribunes who sought to restore the Roman ideal, were themselves symbols of the aristocracy’s twilight. They were idealist remnants met with violence by a Senate no longer composed of great men, but of wealthy survivors. Their deaths marked the final collapse of the old order’s moral legitimacy.

And yet, the Roman system had always embraced excellence wherever it emerged.

This openness to excellence was one of the Republic’s strengths. The rise of novi homines, new men of no noble birth, had long been a sign of vitality rather than decline. Men like Cato the Elder and Cicero rose through merit, not lineage, embodying the Republic’s ideal of earned nobility.

Even Gaius Marius, a formidable general and reformer, emerged from humble origins through sheer talent and resolve. But with Marius, something began to shift. His career marked the moment when military success no longer reinforced the old order but began to replace it. Even a meritocratic aristocracy requires an existing class of aristioi to test, train, and uphold its standards. When that class dies, and the gatekeepers vanish, what follows is not a flood of greatness, but a lowering of the gates. By the time of Marius and Sulla, the Republic had devolved into militarized factionalism. Ambitious generals now raised private armies and marched on Rome itself. The mos maiorum was dead. What remained was ambition, unchecked by nobility, and cynicism, cloaked in legality.

The pattern is not Roman alone. In the modern age, we see a dark reflection in the fate of the British upper class during the First World War. At Eton College—a finishing school for Britain’s aristocratic elite—over 20 percent of former students died in the trenches of the Western Front in World War One. This was a death rate higher than that of the average soldier, who perished at a rate of roughly 12 percent. These young men, often commissioned as officers, led from the front and died by the tens of thousands. They were not cowards nor parasites, but the final echo of a ruling class still bound by honor and sacrifice. What replaced them was not nobility, but bureaucracy. Managerial efficiency rose where character had died.

The death of the aristioi is not an accident of history. It is a signal. A society that cannot preserve its best—biologically, spiritually, institutionally—cannot preserve itself. Rome won the Punic Wars, but in doing so began the slow unraveling of its Republic. The men who embodied its highest virtues were lost. What followed was not rebirth, but erosion. First civil war, then Caesar, then empire. The form endured, but the soul had passed.

So too in our age. When the best are no longer born, or are sent to die young, or are replaced by the cunning who serve only themselves rather than the brave who serve the greater whole, the system does not survive. It persists, but only as a ghost of what once was and what might have been.

We must remember this. Not out of nostalgia, but out of duty. For if we do not learn to honor and preserve the aristioi—not in name, but in kind—we will inherit not a civilization, but its ruins. A Reply to a Good Post:

https://x.com/CCrowley100/status/1914780689481834866

1/ The modern West is not a civilization in decline. It is the afterglow of one already dead. Its towers still stand, its machines still hum, its markets still churn — but the spirit that once gave it life has fled. What remains is not a culture, but a corpse animated by momentum and memory.

We were born into this world as orphans of a forgotten order. And yet something in us still remembers. A word. A gesture. A silence that once meant more than speech. It stirs in moments of clarity, in flashes of rage, in the quiet refusal to kneel before the absurd. This memory is not personal. It is civilizational. And it is beginning to awaken. 🧵👇
2/ Civilization does not fall all at once. It decays. It forgets. It doubts. It replaces form with function, beauty with comfort, hierarchy with appetite. Then one day the people look up and realize that the temples are hollow, the leaders are cowards, the children are strangers, and the words carved in stone have become a foreign tongue.

The man who walks among these ruins today must understand: we are not living in a world without tradition. We are living in a world where tradition has been buried, denied, and mocked, but not destroyed. What collapses is not tradition itself, but the fragile architecture built in defiance of it. Beneath the broken scaffolds of the modern world lies something older than the State, deeper than the nation, stronger than ideology. Tradition does not die. It merely withdraws. It waits.

Tradition is not behind us. It is beneath us. It is the subterranean fire that once shaped mountains and now smolders under ash. The man who would reforge himself must first dig through the wreckage, not in mourning but in recollection. For ruins are not just symbols of loss. They are blueprints. They tell us what was once possible. They tell us what can be done again, but only by those who refuse to be content with managing decline.

To live among ruins and do nothing is cowardice. But to live among ruins and remember is to draw the sword still buried in the stone.

We are not here to conserve the ashes. We are here to rekindle the flame.

1/ Why did Yukio Mishima die by the sword in 1970?

Why did Imperial Japan’s young officers rise up not against the Emperor, but for him?

Why did Zen monks teach warriors how to die without fear?

Because the true Right begins where the ego ends.

Let us discuss 🧵👇 2/ After Japan’s defeat in 1945, the world saw a nation in ruins. But behind the rubble was something older than the empire, something that hadn’t surrendered: the spirit of sacrifice. This essay explores the spiritual and political vision that drove Japan’s interwar ultranationalist movements, particularly those within the military who sought not to overthrow the state, but to redeem it. Their rebellion was not revolutionary in the Western sense. It was an uprising from within, led by young officers and idealists who believed that modern Japan had betrayed its ancient soul. They called this soul the kokutai, a concept meaning national essence, referring to the metaphysical unity between people, land, Emperor, and tradition.

We begin with the phenomenon of gekokujō, a term meaning “the lower overthrows the higher.” Unlike leftist revolts, these men rose in the name of loyalty. Their insurrections, often bloody, were meant to purify the government and return Japan to its sacred origins. Many of them belonged to the Kōdōha, or Imperial Way Faction, a group within the army composed mainly of younger officers who fused traditional Japanese warrior ethics with a spiritual nationalism. Their worldview drew from Zen Buddhism, Shinto, and bushidō, the code of the samurai that emphasized loyalty, courage, and the readiness to die.

Theirs was not simply a political movement. It was a moral crusade rooted in metaphysical discipline. Through the practice of zazen, a form of seated meditation, the cultivation of mushin, or no-mind, and the ritualization of death, they sought to embody a kind of warrior-sage—men who would rather fall by the sword than live without honor. In this way, the interwar Japanese right resembled not the conservatives of our age, but something far older: a caste of priestly warriors, willing to die so that something higher might live.

This essay traces their path not as a call for imitation, but as a study in contrasts. We in the West live under a regime that hates its own origins. We have no Emperor. No divine lineage. No unbroken tradition to serve. And yet we too sense the collapse of our national spirit. In the Japanese example, we do not find a model. But we do find a challenge. What would it mean to fight not for power, but for essence? What would it mean to die upright?

1/ You can tell the health of an age by who it crowns. Today, the coward rules. The ugly is praised. The perverse is proud. That is not politics. That is metaphysics. The world has turned upside down.

Let us speak of Julius Evola—of clarity in the face of collapse.🧵👇 2/ The face of the crowd is a mirror. Not of who you are, but of what time it is. Look long enough and the truth of the age reveals itself—not in political theory, but in posture, voice, and smell. The Kali Yuga, the final age of dissolution, is not proven by books or slogans. It is proven in the obesity of children, the smirk of cowards, the visibility of the perverse, and the pride of the unworthy. A sick age does not merely tolerate its parasites, it feeds them. It builds them statues. It takes their sickness and names it “virtue.”

The modern world pretends to be rational. It claims to be governed by neutral facts and material forces. But every traditional civilization knew better. They understood the world as a vertical chain of being. What happens below reflects what has broken above. This is the “doctrine of correspondences”—that every social, physical, and even atmospheric condition reveals the state of the metaphysical order. If kings lose their virtue, there will be famine. If priests become liars, the land becomes infertile. If the hierarchy collapses, so does the world.

When the higher no longer rules the lower, the lower does not remain still. It surges upward to fill the void. And what we live in now is the result of that void. The age does not merely fall short of the ideal—it has reversed it. The noble are shamed. The herd is praised. Not by accident, but by design. Weakness is now holy. The degenerate is now sacred. The purpose is not healing. It is humiliation.

But the masses are not merely passive. They are not helpless victims of decline. They are its raw material. When the metaphysical order fractures, the crowd rushes in. The herd becomes the agent of destruction. It does not know what it serves, but it serves it anyway.

So we return to the mirror. To the stadiums, the subways, the supermarket aisles. And we see what time it is. Not by the clock, but by the faces.

1/ America was not born from principles. It was born from struggle. European peoples crossed oceans, tamed forests, built civilization, and now watch, silent, as strangers inherit what they are told is no longer theirs to claim.

Let us discuss the reality of America! 🧵👇 2/ A nation that forgets itself does not simply vanish; it becomes a vessel for others. Today, America does not suffer from a lack of identity, but from a surfeit of borrowed ones. The monuments remain, the Constitution is recited, the flag still flies. But beneath these symbols, something fundamental has shifted. The American nation, once a living ethnos, an organic people formed through conquest, colonization, and civilizational struggle, has been supplanted by an abstraction. Citizenship has become a costume. Borders are lines on paper. And national belonging is now defined by bureaucratic process, not blood.

This transformation did not occur by accident. It was imposed. And the chief mechanism of imposition was the redefinition of the American nation as a universal idea, rather than a particular people. This idea, most often described as the “proposition nation,” claims that anyone, from anywhere, can become American simply by affirming certain creeds: liberty, equality, democracy. But creeds do not build nations. Peoples do. And the men who created the United States were not abstractions. They were English Protestants, settlers and pioneers, bound by shared ancestry, language, religion, and law. They did not build a “nation of immigrants.” They built an Anglo-American Republic.

That Republic is now being dismantled, not in the name of revolution, but in the name of its own professed ideals. The irony is deliberate. The project of turning a real, historical people into a propositional fiction required severing America from its ethnic roots. The Civil Rights revolution accomplished this with remarkable efficiency. It reframed the Constitution as a universal instrument, not a compact among descendants of a common stock. It recast the Founding Fathers as mere ideologues, not nation-builders. And it introduced the heresy that the American identity is not inherited, but chosen.

In doing so, it erased the line between citizen and stranger, between legacy and newcomer. It prepared the ground for demographic replacement by defining resistance as moral failure. And most devastating of all, it taught White Americans to feel guilt for their existence, to disown their patrimony, and to surrender the institutions their ancestors forged.

But a people cannot live forever in denial of who they are.

1/ This is a review of David L. Hoggan’s “The Forced War.” It is not a tale of inevitability, but of refusal.

Refusal to negotiate, refusal to listen, and a Western policy that ensured war. Hoggan shows that 1939 was not fate. It was a decision.

Let’s discuss. 🧵👇 2/ David L. Hoggan’s “The Forced War” is not a work of academic speculation. It is the result of years of archival research, diplomatic transcripts, and firsthand testimony. What follows is a condensed account of his findings, drawn from documentary evidence and grounded in facts long buried beneath postwar mythology.

Also, to be clear, because this always needs to be stated, this is a book review and a presentation of the information gleaned from Hoggan, not my own original research.

The Second World War did not erupt like a storm from nowhere. It was not the consequence of madness or fate. It was summoned, summoned by treaties broken in silence, by games of bluff and betrayal, by men who mistook prestige for power and dogma for diplomacy. In Hoggan’s account, the war of 1939 was not inevitable. It was manufactured.

This is not a tale of blind escalation or an uncontrollable clash of ideologies. It is the record of deliberate choices. The German Reich, under Hitler’s leadership, had already recovered territories lost to Versailles without a shot fired. Austria had returned to the Reich willingly. The Sudeten Germans, abandoned by the Czechs and denied self-rule for two decades, rejoined their own people after the Munich Conference. No army had been needed. No conquest had occurred. These were not acts of aggression, but acts of national reintegration.

Poland was different. Poland, shaped by the legacy of Józef Piłsudski, clung to illusions of grandeur and a deep distrust of compromise. Instead of seeking accommodation with Germany, it looked to Britain for security and to the past for purpose. Hitler did not demand subjugation. He asked only for the peaceful return of Danzig, a city over 90 percent German, and a corridor of transit between Germany and East Prussia. The response from Warsaw was silence. The response from London was a guarantee it could not enforce.

This guarantee, issued on March 31, 1939, was not a moral stand. It was a strategic miscalculation drawn from the oldest of British habits. For centuries, Britain had sought to prevent the rise of any dominant power on the Continent. But the world of 1939 was no longer ruled by European balances. It was shaped by forces beyond London’s reach: Soviet industrial might, American wealth, Japanese expansion, and a reborn German nation. Yet Britain played its hand as if nothing had changed, dragging France along and gambling with the lives of millions for the sake of old illusions.

Hitler, despite everything, did not rush into war. He revised his demands. He delayed operations. He made new proposals. He pleaded for negotiation. But the line had already been drawn, not across maps, but across minds. And once drawn, it would not be crossed. The war to come was not declared by Berlin, but by silence, by pride, and by a refusal to listen.

They called it victory. They raised their flags and wrote their histories—the same histories we read today, and that our children are indoctrinated with.

But beneath the banners and beneath the rubble lies something else: a corpse. Not just of a nation, but of a civilization. The death of National Socialist Germany was not merely a military defeat. It was a civilizational sacrifice. A deliberate, systematic extermination of a people. A holocaust in the truest and most literal sense of the Greek word—a burnt offering. Germany had dared to defy the world order. What followed 1945 was not peace. It was purification by fire.

Thomas Goodrich’s “Hellstorm” is no ordinary retelling of a history we think we know, a history whose shadows still stretch over us. It is the unmasking of a crime so vast, so sadistic, that even its survivors could barely speak of it. It is the record of a Europe that turned on its own flesh, that drowned itself in blood not to survive, but to cleanse. It is the hidden gospel of the defeated, and the damned.

The Allied powers did not merely conquer Germany. They destroyed it. The cities were not bombed. They were incinerated. In Hamburg, in Dresden, in Cologne, the firestorms were so hot they created their own weather systems. Asphalt melted. Human fat ran in the streets. Thousands boiled alive in air raid shelters. In Dresden alone, tens of thousands of civilians—refugees, children, the wounded—were reduced to ash in a single night. Eyewitnesses described bodies fused to the pavement. Mothers with charred infants locked to their breasts. This was not collateral damage. It was a ritual act.

From the East, the Soviets descended like a biblical plague. They came not as liberators, but as predators. Stalin’s commissars handed out leaflets encouraging mass rape and slaughter. Ilya Ehrenburg’s pamphlets, sanctioned by the Soviet state, told soldiers to “kill the Germans.” Not the soldiers. Not the guilty. The entire people. And they obeyed. Women were hunted like game, taken from cellars and barns and schoolhouses. They were gang raped, mutilated, and discarded. In many towns, there were no survivors, only corpses with mutilated genitals and shattered skulls. In Nemmersdorf, girls were crucified to barn doors. In Berlin, nuns were raped in their sanctuaries. Mothers were violated in front of their sons. The average German woman in the Soviet zone was raped multiple times. Some committed suicide. Others were killed after being used. The Red Army left behind a trail not of liberation, but of obliteration.

But it was not just Russians. The Americans and British were more clinical, more bureaucratic in their extermination. Eisenhower’s death camps were not marked by gas chambers, but by starvation and exposure. Millions of surrendered German soldiers were placed in open-air enclosures, denied food, water, and medical aid. They died in the mud while the Red Cross was turned away. The official designation, “Disarmed Enemy Forces,” was a legal trick to avoid Geneva protections. In the Rhineland alone, over a million German POWs died after the war was over. This was not neglect. It was policy.

And still the horror deepened. The expulsions began. From Prussia, where my family hailed from, from Silesia, the Sudetenland, the Banat, and the Danube Valley, millions of ethnic Germans—many with no connection to the war—were dragged from their homes and forced into death marches across frozen terrain. They were stripped, beaten, raped, or simply left to die. In Czechoslovakia, the Beneš Decrees authorized open murder and the wholesale theft of German property. In Yugoslavia, German civilians were herded into extermination camps. In Hungary, Romania, and Poland, entire villages were wiped off the map. By 1950, over twelve million Germans had been expelled. More than two million were dead.

This was the true holocaust. Not a metaphor, but a physical reality. Germany was consumed in fire, sacrificed to the gods of vengeance, finance, and democracy. It was not retribution. It was a warning. No nation, no people, no race would ever again be permitted to rise outside the system. What they destroyed was not only a state, but a symbol. Not only a people, but a living idea.

And the victors called it justice.

The women who were tortured to death with iron rods. The men who died in ditches gnawing on grass. The children buried alive beneath collapsed hospitals. They were not mourned. They were forgotten. They were told they deserved it. The world that weeps for every minority, every narrative, every grievance, had no tears for Germany. To this day, none are permitted. To question the official story is to risk exile, imprisonment, erasure. But the truth remains, cold and immovable, like a mass grave sealed in concrete.

The modern world was born in 1945. It was baptized in blood. The postwar order is built on silence, built on bones, built on the lie that there are no crimes but German ones. Yet the greatest crime was not committed by the defeated, but by the victors. The firebombings. The death camps. The rapes. The famines. The expulsions. These are the pillars of the so-called free world.

And yet Germany did not vanish. Her cities rose again, rebuilt from the rubble. Her people endured, even if they were forced to wear the mask of shame. What could not be destroyed was that ancient, stubborn spark, the will that raised cathedrals, composed symphonies, mastered engineering and law, conquered chaos and made it form. That spark remains. Dimmed, slandered, nearly extinguished. But not dead.

The death of National Socialist Germany was not the end of something evil. It was the end of something sovereign. It was the killing of a living order, a people who looked inward for strength, not outward for approval. And in its place came the empire of consumption. Of rootlessness. Of spiritual exhaustion. Germany was scourged for reminding the world what Europe once was. And in punishing her, they punished themselves.

“Hellstorm” is not a cry for pity. It is a record. A testament. A mirror held to the face of Western man, showing him what he became when he traded honor for vengeance. When he burned the altar and raised a shopping mall. When he crushed the one nation that might have led him out of the nightmare now unfolding across every Western capital.

The dead do not speak. But this book speaks for them. And we must listen. Because the future depends on what we remember—and what we refuse to forgive. Your response is scattered—part moral outrage, part family memory, part rhetorical deflection. But it doesn’t actually address the argument.

Yes, history didn’t begin in 1945. That’s precisely the point. But it also didn’t begin in 1933. The claim that the horrors inflicted on Germany were simply the natural consequence of “what came before” is not history. It’s justification after the fact. You ask why angry men marched into Germany—very well, I ask why their anger took the form of mass rape, firebombing, forced starvation, and ethnic cleansing. Were infants in Dresden legitimate targets? Were the women of Silesia legitimate spoils? Was the Morgenthau Plan—designed to reduce Germany to pre-industrial misery—a moral policy?

You invoke your grandfather as a kind of moral anchor. My own family fought on both sides. I make no appeal to emotion, because emotion has no bearing on whether an atrocity occurred. “Hellstorm” is not about denying crimes. It is about telling the part of the story that has been buried beneath Allied mythmaking.

Your entire framing presumes that Allied violence was either proportionate, justified, or regrettable but necessary. But that framing dissolves under scrutiny. Eisenhower’s open-air camps, the Soviet rape campaigns encouraged by Ilya Ehrenburg’s leaflets, the firebombing of civilian cities like Hamburg and Dresden—these were not battlefield excesses. They were deliberate policy.

The question is not whether Germans suffered because of Hitler. The question is whether what was done to them—after the war was decided—can be called anything other than criminal.

If you believe that victory legitimizes atrocity, then just say so plainly. But don’t pretend that moral high ground was ever part of the Allied campaign. It wasn’t. “Hellstorm” simply reminds us of that fact. And that’s presumably why it unsettles you.

1/ A nation is not an idea. It is a memory. A lineage. A people. America was never a blank slate — it was an extension of something older, born in the blood-tide of the Anglo world and carried west by those who remembered.

Let us discuss! 🧵👇
2/ America was not born in 1776. That was not the beginning. It was the crack of a faultline, the rupture of something older, deeper, and blood-bound. The origins of the American Republic are not found in the writings of Enlightenment lawyers, but in the war cries of Germanic warbands who crossed into Britain as the Roman legions departed and the world fell back into darkness. The date is 410 A.D., and the act is one of civilizational transfer. A people with no country but many swords arrived on a fractured island and made it their own. The first Anglo-Saxon republic was not declared; it was carved, by axe and fire, into forests, into riverbanks, into the bones of those who resisted.

What followed was part of a greater upheaval known to historians as the Völkerwanderung, the “Wandering of the Peoples” — a centuries-long migration that shattered the Roman world and redrew the ethnic map of Europe. As the Western Empire collapsed under its own weight, wave after wave of Germanic tribes moved into Roman territory: Visigoths to Iberia, Ostrogoths and Lombards to Italy, Franks to Gaul, and — most decisively for our story — Angles, Saxons, and Jutes to Britain.

These were not one people but kindred tribes. The Angles hailed from what is now Schleswig-Holstein. The Saxons came from the coastal lowlands of northern Germany. The Jutes originated in the Danish peninsula. All were pagan, seafaring, tribal, and warlike. They spoke closely related dialects that would eventually evolve into Old English. The Roman Britons, weakened by internal division and abandoned by the imperial legions, invited these tribes to fight their battles. Their main threat came from the Picts and Scots who raided from the north. The arrangement was simple: fight for us, and we will give you land.

They came as mercenaries. But mercenaries become invaders the moment they realize the hand that pays them is weaker than their own.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the moment: Hengist and Horsa, chieftains of the Jutes, landed on the shores of Britain in the service of King Vortigern. But once the swords were drawn and victory assured, they sent back word across the sea: the land was good, and the Britons weak. More ships followed. Then came settlers. And then came war. Treaties were broken. Kings were betrayed. Cities were burned. The Britons were pushed into the western hills of Wales and Cornwall. Their tongue, their gods, their order — all faded. The English were born.

This, not the Boston Tea Party, is the real beginning of American identity. For the Anglo-Saxon does not merely inherit. He invades, he clears, he settles, and then he builds. He arrives at the frontier of a collapsing order and imposes his own. Britain was not saved. It was remade. A thousand years later, Virginia would be born in the same way.

The ethos of these early Anglo-Saxons was not liberty, but loyalty. Not universal rights, but rooted obligation. The folc (the people), the dryht (the warband), the kin-group, and the hearth-companions—these formed the original constitution. A man’s rights were what he could hold and defend. His worth was measured by his wergild, his blood-price. To be exiled was to be erased. The ēðel, the homeland, was not land in the abstract. It was sacred ground, the place of one's ancestors, the origin of both identity and law.

When the Anglo-Saxons crossed the North Sea, they brought no manifestos and no doctrines of equality. They brought a way of life: warrior loyalty, tribal order, ancestral faith, and the instinct to conquer and cultivate. When the English crossed the Atlantic, they brought the same. The planting of tobacco in Virginia echoed the clearing of woods in Kent. The fortified homesteads mirrored the burhs, the fortified towns of the Welsh frontier. The instinct was unchanged — to carve order from wilderness and to defend the bloodline with barricades and law.

The myth of 1776 obscures this truth. Americans are taught to worship ideas, not ancestry. But before there was a Constitution, there was a people. And before there was a people, there was a conquest. The Anglo-Saxon Republic did not begin with the pen. It began with the axe. That is the true founding. The rest is myth or forgetting.

1/ A nation forgets its founders, then calls it progress. Andrew Fraser’s “The WASP Question” is not nostalgia—it is an indictment, a diagnosis, and a challenge to a people who abandoned memory for abstraction and now wander, derelict, in the ruins of their own making. 2/ What became of the founding people of America? Not the mythic immigrant multitude, but the English stock that planted the first parishes, drafted the first colonial charters, fought the Indian wars, and declared independence in their own tongue and on their own terms. In “The WASP Question,” Andrew Fraser offers neither apology nor sentiment. He asks, with calm severity, why the Anglo-Saxon Protestant, once master of the institutions he shaped, now moves through the ruins of his own order as if he were only a guest.

This is a book about displacement—not simply social or political, but spiritual. It charts the fall of a people who abandoned their ancestral memory to create a universal republic, only to find themselves scorned by the very world they made possible. “Even in their own eyes,” Fraser writes, “WASPs now constitute little more than a demographic abstraction altogether devoid of the soul and the substance of a serious people.”

The answer, for Fraser, lies in the fateful decision to replace ethno-religious identity with constitutional idealism. The Founding Fathers, largely of Anglo-Protestant descent, built a new civic faith in place of the old blood and church. Over time, what had been a concrete, embodied culture became an abstract doctrine of rights. A people rooted in land, lineage, and liturgy became evangelists for a borderless ideal. The commonwealth gave way to the marketplace. The Protestant conscience dissolved into global moralism. The founders’ descendants became strangers to themselves.

Fraser does not call for a conventional political revival. His vision is deeper. What he rightly calls for is palingenesis—a rebirth through memory. The term, drawn from ancient Greek and used by both reactionaries and revolutionaries, refers to a national or civilizational renewal that emerges not through reform, but through collapse and return. This is not a restoration of the American Republic, but a resurrection of the Anglo-Saxon spirit that predated it: tribal, Christian, and conscious of itself.

This review will unfold in stages. We will trace Fraser’s account of WASP decline, from the imperial Reformation through the American Revolution to the therapeutic managerialism of the present. We will examine his critique of civic nationalism, his theological reflections, and his proposal for a new tribal aristocracy. And we will consider his vision not just as lament, but as a path—however narrow—toward ancestral return in an age that has forgotten who it is.