history – Page 42

Sweden Met With Catastrophe Because of Arrogance

I arrived in Sweden for the first time in December of 2001. Within weeks, before I even had the chance to adjust my sleep schedule to the 11-hour time difference, the country was rocked by the murder of Fadime Sahindal. I didn’t understand it at the time, but this incident – and Swedes’ reaction to it – could explain the disaster that has now befallen the nation a generation later.

Sahindal was a Turkish refugee, and had moved to Sweden with her family at the age of seven. She was evidently a high-spirited woman because she refused to accede to her father’s demands that she abstain from dating any Swedish men. This refusal, to to horrified astonishment of the Swedish population, was enough to provoke her own father into shooting her in the head to absolve the perceived shame Fadime had brought upon the family – a so called honour killing.

I had never, ever heard of such a thing as an honour killing in New Zealand, because our Muslim population is too low. So I had to look to Swedish people, as fellow Westerners, to suggest a reasonable reaction. The reaction to this was, at first, utter shock, mostly because murders were shocking enough by themselves in the Sweden of 2002, and to my surprise people got over it very quickly, appearing to reason that the problem would be sorted out soon enough.

But on the fringes on Swedish society, a plaintive voice sounded in the dark forests. It said, calmly and logically, that if women are being murdered for going out with young Swedish men, then the nation’s efforts to integrate these people – now arriving in their tens of thousands – were going to be extremely difficult. If the immigrants hate us so badly that they’d rather kill their own children than have them go out with ours, how will they ever have the will to integrate?

Many Swedish people appeared to have followed that line of reasoning to the obvious, and unremarkable conclusion that if they hate us that badly then we ought not to let them into the country, at least not in any large number. These people had learned, however, that they could not articulate these thoughts without being socially executed, because the consensus was that Sweden would do an excellent job of integrating these immigrants, and anyone going against this consensus was ostracised without mercy.

The intellectual class of Sweden appeared to be obsessed with becoming an “ideologiskt stormakt” (ideological superpower). The reasoning was that Sweden was too small to be a superpower in any military or economic sense, so she could only find satisfaction for her ambitions to be recognised as the best in the world through ideology. She would have to set some kind of Christ-like moral example for the world to follow.

Swedes strongly disagreed with me when I claimed that this desire, borne of a self-righteous and narcissistic need to be recognised as the best in the world at everything, was likely to backfire. Sweden had proven itself the best in world at solving any and all social issues – this was the constant refrain that I could not escape during my time here. Vi är stolt men inte nojd – we are proud but not satisfied – was the campaign slogan.

Therefore, Sweden would inevitably prove itself better than every other country in the world at solving the issue of how to integrate masses of angry, psychologically crippled men of fighting age from cultures rotten with hatred for outsiders. I realised this from talking to a Swedish friend of mine who was a member of the ruling Social Democrat party.

I tried to explain the mathematics of open borders to him. I used the metaphor of two bank accounts, one containing $100 and growing at 5% interest, the other containing $1,000 and growing at 2% interest. No matter how small the initial principal in the first bank account, as long as it grew at a higher percentage it would eventually become the larger of the two.

Therefore, I explained, if you allow mass and unending chain migration from a foreign population into your country, and those foreigners breed at higher rates than you, those foreigners will eventually outnumber you in your own country. Then you are forced to either get rid of democracy or be ruled by them.

He shrugged his shoulders. It was evidently not considered a big deal. “Dom försvenskar sig” (they will become/make themselves Swedish) was heard everywhere. The underlying belief appeared to be that, out of sheer gratitude, the refugees would cast aside all of their previous culture and immediately adopt Swedish norms, having finally come to the conclusion (self-evident to Swedes) that Swedish culture is the best in the world.

None of this is to disparage Swedish culture – to the contrary. Aside from the problems mentioned in this essay, I was deeply impressed with the national character of the Swedish people. In all regards I found them exceptionally competent, thoughtful, industrious, honest, organised and compassionate. They had clearly succeeded in building a society with very few problems.

Unfortunately for them, this success also contained the seed for their demise.

A foreign visitor to Sweden (at least 16 years ago) quickly noticed that it was an unusually high-trust society. People generally believed what you told them. This high trust allowed for an exceptional level of efficiency, because it meant that business could be conducted with very little suspicion.

It also led to Swedish people forgetting, over time, that not everyone else in the world was like that. The level of trust in Swedish society at the turn of the century was so high, and so taken for granted, that it was assumed that everyone else in the world was capable of behaving like that if they were just given a chance.

And so, the failure of other countries to successfully integrate large numbers of Africans or Muslims and turn them into productive members of society was blamed on the moral failings of those countries – those populations were simply too racist or unwilling to pay the high levels of welfare necessary. Sweden would be different because of the unique foresight and generosity of these people.

The psychological origin of the disaster currently befalling Sweden is nothing more than the very same hubris that great writers and playwrights have been warning us about since the time of Homer. It lies in the narcissistic, arrogant belief that Sweden is the best in the world as if by God’s Will and therefore can effortlessly solve the social problems that other nations had struggled with.

Sweden has to accept that it’s impossible to make gold out of shit, no matter how skilled and intelligent one is.

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

Why Books Will Surge Back Into Fashion

The next great invention is like a comprehensive collection of webpages on a specific topic, printed on paper and with no advertisements or intrusive pop-ups, bound into what’s called a “book”

Way, way back in the almost prehistoric age of 1993, the Internet was barely in its infancy. Compared to its form today, the Internet of 1993 was practically at the zygote stage. As the elderly readers of this column may recall, gathering information mostly involved a building called a library, which stored information solely in hard-copy format (i.e. books).

This system had worked out pretty well for a few thousand years, as it became common for kings and rulers to build royal libraries for the sake of attracting scholars from near and far, which made it possible to have an educated middle class, and, with that, all the trappings of what we now call civilisation.

In the mid-90s, at about the same time as the introduction of Windows 95, things started to change. Although there were still very few people who had decent websites or information portals up, there only needed to be a few thousand such resources for the Internet to be bigger than most people’s local libraries.

A tipping point was then reached. Once the Internet started to contain more information than the average library, it started making more sense for researchers to make the Internet their first port of call. Most of the early Internet pages were built by nerds and hobbyists who were obsessed with their area of expertise, meaning that you could go on the Internet and effectively find entire books worth of information from digital libraries all around the world.

This made researching many times more efficient than it used to be. Early web browsers like Netscape, Northern Lights and Metacrawler allowed people to escape the nightmare of index cards and misshelved books. This made it possible, with technological enhancement, to learn many times faster than one otherwise could have done.

Then, something terrible happened. Someone realised that this unprecedented access to information was so valuable that you could start sticking advertisements on it, and people would still consume the medium. At this point, the televisionisation of the Internet began.

It was subtle at first. Just a “sponsored post” here and there, or a notice that the big banner ad underneath the header was now necessary owing to increasing bandwidth costs. But as the shekels rolled in, more and more people became attracted by promises of easy money, and started making websites specifically to put ads on them. When Google introduced AdSense in 2003, the floodgates were fully opened, and have remained so ever since.

In 2018, advertising on FaceBook and Google search is as intrusive as television, radio or newspaper media ever was. What was once a portal away from crass commercialism and the mindless pursuit of more money, the Internet has now mostly become a collection of billboards-for-rent. Websites such as VJM Publishing, that do not advertise apart from a list of links to our published books in the sidebar, are extremely rare.

Worst of all, the surge of advertiser money has seen the advent of mass censorship, as leery marketing executives put pressure on platform providers to make controversial speech less accessible so as to ensure their product is not associated with anything unfashionable. This has sent people who want access to quality information elsewhere.

The final result of this is that books are going to take over again. The Internet won’t go away, because it continues to fill an extremely useful niche in study and research, but people will start using it less for actual information (because of the ever-more intrusive ads), and more as an index through which quality information in the form of books can be found (which is ironically closer to its original purpose than it is today).

Because the Internet is so vast, it allows for tremendously specific books to be written and to be easily made available to readers, despite the ads. This new breed of books will be responsible for the resurgence in book readers over coming decades.

Psychedelics Fill The Vacuum Left By The Destruction of Genuine Spirituality

In the West we have no common spiritual tradition. The closest we come is an empty imitation of the old myths and legends of a Middle Eastern tribe of genital mutilators. Where the Buddhists pray for an end to the suffering of all sentient beings and the Hindus know for certain that consciousness survives the death of the physical body, we Westerners are still mutilating the genitals of our baby boys and living in utter terror of the day our vital organs shut down. Luckily, there is historical precedent for solving these problems.

The natural spiritual traditions of Westerners were destroyed by successive waves of Abrahamic invasions, beginning when the Romans made the terrible mistake of taking in Abrahamic refugees. Allowing this evil supremacist tradition into the West had the effect of corrupting those tasked with maintaining these natural spiritual traditions, ending with their replacement by hollow lies.

Before the Abrahamists invaded, Europe was rich in folk spiritual practices, with use of the amanita muscaria mushroom in the North and psilocybin mushrooms in the South allowing our forebears to reconnect with God. Not only did the ancients use psychedelics, but they did so frequently and with reverence, like any skilled practitioner would use them today.

The amanita muscaria folklore lives on in our stories about Santa Claus and his reindeer (Santa’s red and white costume represents the mushroom, his rotund build represents its roundness. The reindeer are there because Nordic shamans would potentiate the psychedelic effect of the mushroom by inducing reindeer to eat it and then drinking the animals’ urine).

The ancient Greeks partook in the ceremony at Eleusis once every mushroom season, and they did so with such reverence that to this day no-one is quite sure of precisely what the recipe of the kykeon was. This enabled them to see the world beyond in a way that had up until then been the province of exceptionally gifted shamans.

The Abrahamists destroyed as many of these traditions as they could, as Abrahamists have done everywhere in the world they have set foot, on account of the unique viciousness of that religious tradition. But they could not destroy the mushrooms themselves, no matter how severely they punished their use. And so it was only a matter of time until they lost their grip and the folk spiritual traditions reasserted themselves.

This causes problems, although we don’t realise it because you need a little bit of spirituality to realise it, and we have none left. If one of us does become a little bit spiritual, they tend to realise all of these problems, and this often leads directly to the state of psychological collapse known as psychosis.

Because our culture is rotten with materialism, we have no commonly understood way of recognising when one of us has achieved a state of spiritual insight. Indeed, the usual response appears to mock them for being a “loony”, as if the eternal truth of materialism was so self-evident that only a mentally ill person would even pause to question it.

This is why Westerners who achieve a spiritual breakthrough usually end up with a psychiatric diagnosis in short order. Our culture is so spiritually dead that we cannot recognise spiritual gnosis even when it’s right in front of us. We sneer and jeer at any hint of it.

But knowledge of magic mushroom use (alongside that of LSD) has slowly seeped into the Western consciousness since the 1950s. Thanks to the Internet and what’s left of our culture of intellectual free inquiry, it has been possible for those who have heard the call of the shaman to share their experiences with others, and after much discussion it has become clear that the psychedelic experience and the spiritual experiences of the ancients are much the same thing.

The Church did such a good job of destroying natural spirituality, and they did it for so long, that they are unable to act when it starts to arise again (as it is doing now), because they have forgotten what their enemy even is. This means that knowledge of how to use psychedelics will once again become widespread, and this will once again lead to a spiritual golden age.

What Was Done To The Colonies Is Still Being Done – To Us

Nothing has really changed from 1860, except that the propagandising of the slave system has become more sophisticated

The herds of the West have been conditioned to react to the word “colonisation” with horror and guilt. From the late 1400s until the European empires were wound down after World War II, ghastly crimes were indeed committed by colonial invaders against the native peoples, all over the world. But what this focus on historical crimes overlooks is that these same crimes are still being committed, by the ruling classes against the middle and working ones, to this very day.

In 1860, shortly before the American Civil War, the total slave population in the United States stood at 3,953,761, or 12.6% of the total population. In the Gulag system at its height under Stalin, there were believed to have been up to 6 million people incarcerated.

Most people agree that slavery and Communism were two of history’s greatest evils. But in 2013, there were 6,899,000 Americans under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) – about 2.8% of the total population. Although smaller as a percentage of the national population, in absolute terms it still represents a greater number of unfree people than under either slavery or Communism.

In fact, it amounts to about 25% of the world’s population of prisoners, and not all of them are in there because of murders, rapes and armed robberies. Far from it. Because of the War on Drugs, the population of non-violent drug offenders in American state or federal prisons has increased twelvefold since 1980.

The same strategies that the colonial powers used to subjugate their client populations are being used today to subjugate the peoples who are still their client populations – only instead of being done to dark-skinned races by lighter-skinned ones, it’s done to the working and middle classes by the ruling ones.

Today’s system of convict labour achieves almost everything that was seen as desirable in a slavery system anyway. Some refer to this as the ‘prison-industrial complex‘, because the profit incentive seems to have led to people being imprisoned for the benefit of shareholders in private prisons. These prisoners are often paid less than 20c an hour for their labour, despite that their productivity is dozens of times higher.

So the mentality behind the great colonial enterprises of enslaving millions and extracting resources from them in the form of labour not only still exists but it still manages to enforce its will in the 21st century West. The only difference is that, this time, the people are enslaved through the prison-industrial complex, and mostly for arbitrary drug offences.

Some groups are hit harder than others by this approach. Black people are imprisoned at the rate of 2,306 per 100,000 people, which means almost 1 in every 40 American blacks are in prison at any one point in time, and for black males the rate is an incredible 4,347 per 100,000 people, about 1 in 21.

The mentally ill also suffer atrociously in American prisons, regularly being subjected to corporal punishment for reasons related to their condition, such as becoming confused or anxious or having difficulty following instructions.

The truth is this: the ruling classes only recognise each other as true human beings, and all lower classes are considered some kind of animal to be exploited. Emphasising the racial aspect of the crimes of colonialism, as is common today, only serves to shift the blame from the ruling classes who planned and designed it to the middle and working classes who were forced to help carry it out lest they become the next group of victims.

Colonisation was never a matter of race, and it didn’t stop happening after the European empires fell. It was always a matter of class, and it simply shifted from being done to them over there to being done to us over here.