history – Page 24

An ANZAC Lesson: The Real Enemy Is Always Behind You

My grandfather Fred was born in West Auckland, on the land that is now McLeod Park, named after his father Harry. Fred saw action in North Africa and Italy with the 2nd New Zealand Division and the British Eighth Army. He survived the war, returned to New Zealand, and raised a family. This essay is about one of the lessons he taught me.

He had, like tens of thousands of other Kiwi men, volunteered to fight in World War Two. Having volunteered, and then having experienced war and decided that it was a complete waste of time and something best avoided, he wanted to teach his offspring some lessons to help them avoid ending up fighting overseas.

He only ever spoke of combat, or of the general deprivations of war, to his wife, but he did tell us grandchildren a lot of stories about the lessons he had learned from his war experience. These generally involved insights about psychology, whether general or specific to the various nationalities he had encountered, or relating to military life and the nature of organisations.

One of his favourite stories related an experience that occurred shortly after the German surrender in May 1945. He was on the back of a troop transport truck with the other members of his company, when they encountered a column of German prisoners of war being marched along the road in the other direction. Upon seeing this, the officer in command of the New Zealand troops ordered the company to not acknowledge the presence of the German troops – after all, the war was not technically over yet.

But when the two forces met, the Kiwi troops spontaneously broke into a cheer, and waved to the Germans, who waved back with similar sentiments. It didn’t matter that they had been ordered not to do this, for the war was over, and that meant that the inhumanities of war no longer needed to be inflicted upon each other. Open fraternisation was, of course, not possible, but it was clear that no genuine illwill existed at the level of the average soldier.

It took a while to fully appreciate the import of this story. The first lesson was the magnitude of the relief that the soldiers must have felt upon understanding that the war was over. The realisation that all the killing and dying had ended would have been a joy that is barely comprehensible to someone who has never experienced combat. This joy would have been powerful enough to override any remaining sense of obligation to follow orders.

I spoke with him about this story once, after it had occurred to me that this feeling of goodwill towards the German soldiers was stronger than any goodwill he felt towards his own leaders, who were, after all, on his side. At this point he gave me a lesson, with an admonition to never forget: the real enemy is always behind you.

The apparent truth is that your enemy is the guy on the other side of the battlefield shooting at you. The real truth is that your enemy is the guy behind you, the one who coerced you into fighting in the first place. Never mind the fact that the guy behind you speaks your language – you still have more in common with the working-class man on the other side of the battlefield than you do with your own commanders.

This truth was illustrated by another, darker story, that took place in Italy. Fred’s company had taken a number of German soldiers prisoner during the battle of Monte Cassino. In the heat of the moment, one of the younger German soldiers broke down in tears, apparently under the conviction that he was about to be shot dead.

Fred offered the young German a cigarette, and instead spoke to him. Why would we shoot you in cold blood? he asked. Do you think we are monsters? The German replied that he had been told that the British were, indeed, monsters, whose insatiable greed had led them to try and take over the entire world and to subjugate it and all its peoples. It was in trying to stop this greed that the Germans had been drawn into the war.

Fred realised, of course, that he had been told exactly the same stories about the Germans. Moreover, the men who had been the ones to tell those stories had not themselves been subjected to the horrors of combat. The New Zealand politicians who had organised the war effort were safely back at home, fat and happy, as were the newspaper men. The sense of betrayal he felt upon realising this inspired the lessons he had to teach me.

Never, ever trust the politician or the newspaper who tells you how evil and terrible some men overseas are. It’s all but guaranteed that the politician and the newspaper are lying to trick you into sacrificing yourself for the commercial interests of their sponsors. World War Two was a banker’s war, Fred taught me, and the soldiers who fought in it were coerced into doing other men’s dirty work for them. There was nothing glorious or honourable about it anywhere.

There are two ways to get a man to do your dirty work for you. The first is to force him, the second is to trick him.

New Zealand’s involvement in World War One had at first been a voluntary affair, but it became a matter of force on the 1st of August 1916 with the passing of the Military Service Act. In total, almost 20,000 Kiwi men were conscripted for military service, roughly 20% of the total who served. Some 3-4,000 of these men were killed in battle.

By the time World War Two rolled around, the propaganda of the Establishment had become a lot more sophisticated. This was thanks, in large part, to men such as Edward Bernays, who had studied the use of propaganda and how to make it more effective, and who had written about it in books such as Propaganda. So they knew how to use the apparatus of mass media to convince men to join the Army.

This meant that the Establishment media could simply pump out enough stories about how the Germans bayonetted babies, and how they were trying to take over the world, and how Hitler was a unique evil that demanded a unique response, and enough people would believe it so that they didn’t need to conscript anyone any more. Men would simply volunteer to fight.

Fred raised me so as to never fall for the propaganda. Never to believe the politician, never to believe the media. Because, at the end of the day, the real enemy is always behind you. Your real enemy is not the opposition soldier but the one who raised the company, battalion or Army that you are now a member of. He’s the real enemy because the opposition soldier is, in the final analysis, only protecting himself from you.

Once, after I had been studying some military history, I remarked to him about conscription. Sure, I knew that the reasons behind the Vietnam War and the Gulf War were equally as false as for all the other wars. I could be smart enough to know that the television was lying to me about the need for me to participate in the next war, but if enough people my age were also aware of this, what would stop them going back to conscription?

What would I do if a conscription officer came to my house?

His reply was simple, and borne of the bravery that comes from having to face combat: “Shoot the bastard.”

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

The Spear of Destiny

Many people with a passing familiarity with occultism will have heard of something called the Spear of Destiny. This is an extremely powerful concept with deep importance for the future of our planet. This essay discusses the occult meaning of the Spear of Destiny, and its implications.

Like many occult concepts, there is an exoteric and an esoteric form of the Spear of Destiny.

The exoteric form is the one that people are the most familiar with. The usual story is that the Spear of Destiny was the one held by the Roman centurion Longinus, which he used to pierce the abdomen of Jesus Christ while on the cross at Calvary. This spear apparently became a valuable relic, otherwise known as the Holy Lance.

The spear came into possession of the Holy Roman Emperors around 1,000 years ago, and has remained in Central Europe ever since. It was said that Adolf Hitler was obsessed with the Spear, and set a detachment of crack Waffen-SS troops to capture it when the Nazis annexed Austria. Today, it lies in the “Worldly Treasure-chamber” of Hofberg Palace in Austria.

However, that’s not what the Spear of Destiny really is. There’s an esoteric explanation that makes a lot more sense.

The real Spear of Destiny is a metaphysical object, and it is held by the most influential person on Earth, whoever that is. There is always one person on Earth whose initiative controls the destiny of the human race, one person who is more powerful than all others. This person has the ability to rewrite reality according to their will, as long as they continue to wield the Spear.

The first to hold the Spear of Destiny may have been Gilgamesh, the first king of Sumeria and arguably the progenitor of civilisation. As the first king in the world, Gilgamesh was the first man to truly put the environment around him to order. Therefore, he was the greatest and most powerful man on Earth, at least for a time.

The Spear of Destiny then moved to the West and to the North, as it would continue to do for at least four thousand years. The next inheritor of it may have been a leader of the Akkadian Empire that arose after Sumeria, probably Sargon of Akkad. The Spear would remain in Mesopotamia for many centuries, as it was the only place that civilisation and order existed to a meaningful degree.

Babylonian kings no doubt held the Spear for some time. Hammurabi would have held it when he composed his famous set of laws. Ashurbanipal may have held it at the time of the neo-Assyrian Empire, and the neo-Babylonians held it after him. Nebuchadnezzar may have held it at about the time the dream from the Book of Daniel occurred.

At some time around 500 B.C., the Spear of Destiny left the Ancient Near East, and came to Greece in time for their Golden Age. The Spear of Destiny was certainly held by Alexander as his Macedonian armies conquered almost the entire world known to them. Alexander was probably the single most influential man who ever existed, and he made the Spear his own.

After Alexander’s Empire collapsed and the Golden Age of Greek culture began to fall away, the Spear continued its Westward motion, ending up in Italy in time for the ascent of the Roman Empire. Without doubt, it was held by Julius Caesar, who used it to become one of history’s most influential statesmen. Trajan would have held it as the Roman Empire reached its greatest influence.

Before Trajan, however, there was Jesus Christ, whose dramatic and total reformation of Abrahamism created a religious movement that would grow to become the world’s largest. Longinus may well have held the metaphysical Spear of Destiny on the date of Christ’s crucifixion, because Jesus Christ was the most influential individual of his time, and Longinus took that mantle by killing him.

The Spear of Destiny remained with the Roman Emperors for a few hundred years after Trajan. Who held it during the Dark Ages is unclear, but it can be perceived again in the possession of Charlemagne, as the Frankish king put order to much of Western Europe. The Spear spent some time in the Holy Roman Empire, which was founded by Charlemagne in 800.

William the Conqueror may have held it in 1066 during the invasion of England, and Marco Polo may have held it during his travels in the 13th century. In any case, the Mediterranean rulers of Venice, Genoa and the later Iberians appeared to be in control of the world’s destiny at this time.

As the Age of Exploration began, the Spear may have been held by Christopher Columbus, but was more likely held by his patrons, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile. As Iberian dominance wound down, to be replaced by Northern European control, the Spear moved to Holland.

The Spear of Destiny was held by William of Orange at the peak of the Dutch Empire, and dramatically leapt over the English Channel after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Shortly after this event, England would combine with Scotland into “One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain.” This soon became the British Empire, the largest and most powerful the world had ever seen.

The Spear of Destiny would remain in Britain for at least two centuries, being held at one point by Queen Victoria as the British Empire expanded into a force capable of conquering the globe. After the carnage of World War One, the Spear of Destiny became attracted across the Atlantic, probably to New York, and probably into the hands of Theodore Roosevelt.

Adolf Hitler’s supposed obsession with the Spear can be better understood in this context. The exoteric story is that “Hitler believed the power of the weapon would give him the power to conquer the world“, and that Hitler said, of seeing the Holy Lance, “I myself had once claimed it as my talisman of power and held the destiny of the world in my hands.”

The esoteric story is much different. Hitler knew of the metaphysical Spear of Destiny and wished to take it back from the Anglo-Americans. Had he succeeded in conquering Europe and bringing Britain and America to the peace table, Hitler may well have taken possession of it, and he may well then have held the destiny of the world in his hands.

History, of course, had other ideas. From the East Coast of America, the Spear seems to have travelled further West, and probably now resides in California. It’s possible that Donald Trump holds it, but it’s also possible that it’s in the possession of a Los Angeles movie or music magnate, considering the reach of American soft power.

The future, of course, is unknown. But we can predict, given the relentless Westward motion of the Spear of Destiny over the past 4,000 years, that it will at some point cross the Pacific. Most people already believe that China is destined to supplant America as the world’s foremost power, and this means that the Spear might move there in coming centuries.

This is no guarantee, of course. The Spear might pass to Japan first, or even Korea or Indonesia. Another possibility, considered by very few, is that it may pass to Australia, as the Southern Kingdom has the land area to build a monumental empire over the next few hundred years. After that it may move to India.

All that can be said for sure is that the Spear of Destiny is the single most sought after object in this section of the Great Fractal, and therefore it can be predicted that people will fight for control of it as long as human civilisation exists.

Could Labour Win An Absolute Majority in 2020?

A new Reid Research poll has put the Labour Party on 49.6% support, with the National Party languishing well back on 41.3%. Although this no doubt reflects a polling boost from the Christchurch mosque attacks, it raises an interesting question: could Labour govern alone after 2020? Dan McGlashan, author of Understanding New Zealand, examines.

No party has won an absolute majority since the introduction of MMP in 1996. The closest any one party has come was the 59 seats won by John Key’s National in 2011. But yesterday’s Reid Research poll suggests that there’s a very good chance that Labour could win one after the 2020 General Election.

We can see a clear pattern over the last two electoral cycles. The Fifth Labour Government came into power in 1999 on a promise to repeal the cruel welfare reforms of Jim Bolger’s Fourth National Government, winning 38% of the vote. This they increased to 41% by the 2002 General Election, as people still remembered what it was like having Ruth Richardson and Jenny Shipley in charge. From there, it fell away until National defeated them in 2008.

The Fifth National Government, likewise, came into power in 2008 on a promise to repeal the excessive pandering and taxation of the Clark Government. They won 45% of the vote in 2008, which increased to 47% in 2011, as people still remembered the suffocating nanny state culture of Helengrad. From there, it fell away until Labour defeated them in 2017.

So there’s every reason to think that the Sixth Labour Government will get a boost of some kind in 2020, as people still remember the grinning indifference of their National Party predecessors. The swing of the electoral pendulum suggests that Labour should hit its peak support next year or shortly thereafter, before the public inevitably gets sick of them and National wins again in either 2023 or 2026.

All this might mean that they can stay up in the high 40s (in terms of support), but there are other indicators that suggest they could govern alone after the 2020 General Election with as little as 45% of the vote.

Labour’s support parties, New Zealand First and the Greens, have fallen well below the 5% threshold, and there are good reasons to think that both will crash out of Parliament in 2020. The Greens are only polling at 3.9%, and New Zealand First are doing even worse, at 2.3%.

The New Zealand First Party might as well have pissed in the faces of their supporters, such is the contempt they have shown them since taking power after 2017. Every New Zealand First MP voted against Chloe Swarbrick’s medicinal cannabis bill, despite the passionate support for it among their heavily Maori voting base. Then they signed the country up to the TPPA, despite campaigning against it when in opposition.

The Green Party are not doing much better. Far from presenting an educated, intelligent, left-wing alternative, the face of their party is now anti-white racists like Marama Davidson and Golriz Ghahraman. The Greens lost ground in 2017 among people of European descent, and the sharp increase in authoritarian and anti-white rhetoric appears to have driven the centrist Greens back to Labour.

The Greens also have the double problem of defending their educated urban elite votes against The Opportunities Party, which looks set to run again, and Vernon Tava’s potential blue-green movement. Both of these latter vehicles will try to appeal to the same educated, urban 20-39 year old demographic as the Greens, meaning that competition will be extreme.

If both the New Zealand First and Green parties fail to get over 5% of the vote, then the composition of the next Parliament might be simply Labour, National and David Seymour. If this is the case, then 49% of the total electorate vote would likely entitle Labour to 65 seats or so, out of a 120-member Parliament.

Of course, the curious thing here is that if the Greens and New Zealand First do fall under the 5% threshold, and no other new party manages to get over it, one of either Labour or National is all but guaranteed to end up with an absolute majority. The only way it could not happen would be for David Seymour’s ACT, currently languishing at below one percent in the polls, to act as the tiebreaker.

This will be good news to some, and terrible news to others. As we have been reminded in recent years, we Kiwis have no absolute human rights, and Parliament is sovereign. Therefore, a party with an absolute Parliamentary majority can do absolutely whatever it wants to the New Zealand people, with no oversight. The only recourse the New Zealand people will have is the chance to vote them out again in 2023.

Considering that the Labour Government has already been very weak on protecting our rights to own firearms and our rights to free speech, there is good reason to be afraid of an absolute Labour majority. Andrew Little has already used the Christchurch mosque shootings to “fast-track” every piece of legislation he can think of, so who knows how far a Labour Party with an absolute majority in Parliament could go to reshape the world in their image?

Understanding New Zealand, by Dan McGlashan and published by VJM Publishing, is the comprehensive guide to the demographics and voting patterns of the New Zealand people. It is available on TradeMe (for Kiwis) and on Amazon (for international readers).

Red Pill, White Pill, Blue Pill, Black Pill

There are many theories that describe the change in personality traits over generations. The most well-known is the Strauss-Howe conception of generations that gave us terms like “Baby Boomer”. Local anarchist philosopher Rick Giles has expanded on this conception, giving us a spiral idea of history based around the ebb and flow of moral cycles. This essay attempts to map both these theories onto the “pill theory” of modern Internet culture.

The Red Pill-Blue Pill dichotomy is a metaphor seen everywhere on the Internet of today. It is based on the famous scene from The Matrix, the film that made a powerful impression on Generation X and, consequently, Internet culture. In this scene, the character Morpheus offers the protagonist Neo a choice of one of two pills: a blue one that will send him back to the dream world of being a normal person, and a red one that will awaken him to the truth of reality and show him “how deep this rabbithole goes”.

It’s a metaphor that hearkens back to Plato’s Cave and the mystery schools before that. The idea is that anyone who has taken the red pill is someone who has voluntarily accepted the truth of reality, no matter how terrible, and who has escaped delusion. They are therefore enlightened, so much so that their lives are now fundamentally different to the bluepilled. Thus, ‘bluepilled’ is effectively a synonym for ‘unenlightened’, ‘gullible’ or ‘a sucker/pleb’.

A related conception is the dichotomy of the White and Black Pills. These serve as rough spiritual metaphors. The idea is that anyone who has taken the white pill is optimistic, full of life, happy and positive. The blackpilled, by contrast, are pessimistic, morbid, depressed and emo. One way of characterising this axis is using the Bloomer and Doomer images, the former blossoming like a spring flower, the latter seeing death and decay around every corner.

As this essay will now demonstrate, it’s possible to map the Blue Pill-Red Pill-White Pill-Black Pill quadrichotomy from popular Internet culture onto both Strauss-Howe’s and Giles’s conceptions of human generational change.

The generation that fought in World War II are the red pilled. They got redpilled harder than anyone since could really understand. It’s impossible to have any illusions when you are facing an artillery barrage or a Panzer charge – you appraise reality accurately and act accordingly or you die, simple as that.

As the war was winding up, they naturally got together, first in their companies and then in their Returned Services Associations, and asked themselves what the fuck the whole war was really about, and who was ultimately to blame. Eventually, they came to understand that the whole idea of a heroic narrative was a complete sham, designed to manufacture consent for a war that really only benefitted arms manufacturers, bankers and politicians. To understand that the world works like this is to be redpilled.

Commensurate with being red pilled is a somewhat traumatised disposition. As a highly social, highly traumatised generation, they hit the booze, and hard. Theirs is an Honour Culture in Giles’s conception, because they risked everything for what they have, and only very rarely complain or show pain or weakness.

The Silent Generation are the white pilled. They grew up during the Great Depression, and so became accustomed to having very little. This has meant that they instinctively feel gratitude for the plenty that we currently do have. They also grew up hearing about how the previous generation saved the world from terrible evil, so they grew up believing that they lived in a society where their forebears only wanted the best for them and where authorities could be trusted.

They are white pilled because they are naturally the most optimistic. This generation grew up with the suspicion that God may well have favoured the Anglo-American style of governance over its German, Soviet and Japanese alternatives. For them, everything works out in the end, and success is simply a matter of continuing long enough.

Their characteristic drug is tobacco, which is appropriate because they are a social generation, and also for the reason that you have to be whitepilled to smoke tobacco because you have to ignore the likelihood that it will kill you. Theirs is more of a Dignity Culture because they haven’t had the need to fight quite as hard as the World War II Generation. They’re not inclined to butt heads over honour; they would rather let things slide.

The Baby Boomer generation is bluepilled. They are Cypher from the Matrix. They don’t care at all about thinking or struggling to overcome, they just want an easy ride and someone to wipe their arse when they get old. For them, staying informed is a simple matter of switching the television on and being told what the truth is. They have a vague sense that reality is truly terrible, so it’s best to not look too deeply into things.

Their problem is that they are essentially doubly gullible. Not only are they not aware of how reality works, having been raised by televisions in an age of wealth, but their parents weren’t redpilled either, having lived in an age of plenty. The Boomers don’t really get it at all, which is why their characteristic drug is opiates. Preferably administered rectally by cheap immigrant labour.

The bluepilled don’t want to think, they just want their entitlements. This is why they correspond to a Victimhood Culture in Giles’s conception. Every obligation they are made to feel is considered an unreasonable imposition, and they deeply resent the implication that they’ve fucked up the world. Their greatest fear is someone cutting their pensions.

The offspring of the Boomers, Generation X, are the black pilled. This is the natural result of having bluepilled parents. Because their parents wanted nothing but the easiest ride possible, they didn’t end up passing on as much knowledge as they could have. Indeed, Generation X were pretty much left to it, many becoming “latchkey kids” who had both parents working. They felt that their parents not giving a shit, and that led to them not giving one either.

Among Generation X, the highest moral value is not giving a shit. This manifests in an exaggerated sense of coolness. To give a shit about anything is to be uncool, which is to be shunned. This is why grunge was so popular among this generation’s teenage years, and why they have been so apathetic towards politics and religion. Apathy means that you can be trusted; ambition means that you might abandon them like their parents did.

Generation X is a natural slave cohort, which is the result of their apathy towards politics. Because they have shunned those who tried to understand the political world and to organise, they are almost completely bereft of both guidance and power. Their characteristic drug is cannabis, because once you realise that there truly is no hope and that no-one gives a shit, you might as well just spark one up and enjoy your day.

It’s not clear how the Millennials will end up defining themselves, because at the moment they seem to be an extended form of Generation X, replete with nihilism and apathy. At some point, one would expect there to be a revolution so that some kind of Honour Culture reasserted itself, but whether this will come at the hands of the Millennials or of a generation that comes later remains to be seen.

What can be predicted is that the nihilistic apathy of the younger generations today will lead to a cataclysm of some kind. It might be military in nature, it might be climate-related, or it might be simple revenge on the Boomers. Whatever happens, the generation that follows the bloodshed will be redpilled, and the cycle will begin anew.