"Where did the Dissident Right go wrong?" will long be a question worth asking in these circles. Better still, it will be worth answering.
In its early days the Alt-Right was a high quality rebooting of rightist critiques that had been unfairly excluded from the intellectual ecosystem. This is what gave it its virility.
But this healthy development was soon derailed and dissipated by an increasingly low-IQ and narrow focus on the blatantly taboo. In short, in place of hard-hitting, high-IQ analysis that exposed the contradictions and challenged the foundations and of the Neoliberal, globalist order, we got low IQ Nazi memes that actually reinforced it, while also allowing the system to roll out increasing amounts of censorship.
This unfortunate deterioration was partly driven by shills, partly by laziness, and partly by some of the same instincts that once fed into sub-cultural movements like punk rock. But it was also a case of the medium becoming the message, with people using memes not just to push points and make attacks but also to do their actual thinking and analysis for them.
To be clear, memes are fine once you have done the hard work of researching, analysing, and understanding an issue correctly. They allow you to condense things into a sharpened, internet-friendly point that you can then unleash to great effect, in the certain knowledge that you are pushing the narrative in the direction of truth while also "owning the libs."
But if you get things the wrong way round, skipping the laborious process of understanding, and instead do your thinking with memes rather than a data-and-logic-driven process of analysis, then you are likely to approach an issue along too narrow a lane and completely misunderstand and misrepresent it.
This danger is widespread, but is being especially well demonstrated by many of the responses to the Taliban's unexpected blitz-like victory in Afghanistan. One classic example of such crass misunderstanding and almost criminal mischaracterisation of what happened has been provided by the already well-known Stone Toss cartoon above.
Stone Toss has plenty of talent in reducing ideas to strong, memetic imagery. In this way he is able to reach millions despite the constraints that Big Tech imposes. But talent doesn't mean understanding. In fact, Stone Toss's cartoon, purporting to explain what happened in Afghanistan while also offering lessons to American dissidents, clearly shows that he has practically no understanding of the Taliban's victory -- or else is actively lying.
The idea put forward in the cartoon is that a relatively small and poorly equipped force (Taliban guerrillas, American Dissidents) can win against Superpowers if they just keep fighting an asymmetric war long enough. Because -- guess what -- powerful superstates just give up after a while. Yes, Stone Toss probably saw Red Dawn at an impressionable age.
Hollywood crap is not a critique
Stone Toss is wrong on two counts:
FIRSTLY there is no way that US Dissidents can follow in the path of the Taliban against their own governments. They simply don't have the Islamic-inflected insanity and impoverished toughness, while the elites they would be opposing would have zero inclination to just pull out. Where to?
If there is any lesson in the Taliban victory, it is simply not transferable to America.
SECONDLY the cartoon ignores practically all the real factors that played a role in the Taliban's victory -- or more correctly America's decision to withdraw from a country that it occupied at the high-water mark of its Post-Cold-War imperialism.
Back in 2001, America's geopolitical rivals were weak, but now they are strong. For more on the role of China and Russia (CHIRUS) in the rise of the Taliban read this article: RUSSIA, CHINA ARE STAGE MANAGING THE TALIBAN. Also, back in 2001, the economic prospects of intervening were much better. But these soon faded. I have written about some of this here: KABULLSHIT. Furthermore, back in 2001 the naive Neocon faith in "nation building" was still strong and unsullied by the intervening years of failure.
After the NATO occupation of Afghanistan, all those factor started heading in the other way. Instead of Afghanistan being a way to cut off and surround an Iran refusing to play ball with the petrodollar, it became an isolated and increasingly vulnerable enclave of Western power, far from the sea and requiring the cooperation of "frenemies" like Pakistan to even be accessed.
With the deterioration of the US positions in Turkey and Iraq, it also lost its value as a part of the geopolitical anaconda that America was attempting to place around Iran.
Quite simply CHIRUS played a cleverer, more subtle economic and geopolitical chess game than the West, getting the Taliban to improve its game, while linking up to Turkmenistan's vast natural gas reserves, and using water disputes and security concerns between the Central Asian "stans" to strengthen their wider hand. The decision of Biden -- and before him Trump -- to pull out of Afghanistan is an eminently sensible and long overdue pullback due to the changing balance of geopolitical power in the last twenty years.
But it's not just Stone Toss. Much of the rest of the Dissident Right, in its pathetic hunger to feel empowered, has latched on to the wrong end of the stick in a frenzy of bad memes. This one has been much shared and retweeted:
According to this piece of internet garbage the Taliban "won" because they are "Chad" even though they haven't even been fighting Western forces in Afghanistan for almost two years.
U.S. GOES ONE YEAR WITHOUT A COMBAT DEATH IN AFGHANISTAN AS TALIBAN WARN AGAINST RENEGING ON PEACE DEAL (Feb.,2021)
The real message of the Afghan pullout is not the power of "goat-shaggers on motorbikes," as someone once described the Taliban, but instead the slow ebb of imperial, geopolitical power.
Unfortunately a lot of the big brained stuff like this doesn't fit into a tiny, little meme, while using memes to do your thinking will radically shrink your brain.
The Dissident Right, which has much more intellectual heavy lifting to do than any other movement, should be particularly wary of them, and try to get back to this:
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Colin Liddell was the Chief Editor of Affirmative Right and is the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by it here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia).
You could look at this another way: the memesters of recent years haven't replaced the high-quality thinkers of the early dissident Right, but have joined them, and are making the necessary bridge between the theorists and the great mass of ordinary non-intellectuals whose passions must be aroused in order for any substantial resistance to coalesce. (The target audience for these simplifying memes were never going to read those highbrow blogs in the first place.) That they have caused the system to "roll out increasing amounts of censorship" should be encouraging: the reason that the early bloggers of the Dark Enlightenment and the Alt Right weren't censored is that at that stage the threat they presented wasn't significant enough for "the system" to take seriously. Now it clearly is. That's progress, in my view.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your point that the situation here is very different from Afghanistan -- precisely, as you say, because the elites who would make war upon a rising Right will have no place to withdraw to. That doesn't mean, though, that they will _win_ an asymmetrical conflict; the difference is only that the stakes will be higher, and the passions more intense -- as is the nature of civil conflict always and everywhere.
Larry Correia wrote a fine piece about this prospect, a while back, in response to Eric Swalwell's moronic comments about the futility of patriotic resistance. Worth reading, I think, if you haven't already:
https://monsterhunternation.com/2018/11/19/the-2nd-amendment-is-obsolete-says-congressman-who-wants-to-nuke-omaha/
The other side of the coin is over-intellectualisation of comparatively obvious critiques - 5000 word essays on Heidegger to hint at why mass Third World immigration is undesirable.
DeleteBut the masses are irrelevant trash and most of them will never do anything. What the right needs is competent people with money and power, not herds. Herds always follow anyone they can offer them revenge and security, the right is losing because it is led by grifters and disorganized losers. Populism is based on a fake, democratic idea of how society works. America is pretty much doomed forever until it falls apart, though, so I really have no investment in this situation. I would rather just live in an oriental cyberpunk city, I feel zero attachment to the brainwashed trash who fill America's filthy streets.
DeleteAnother important factor that these sorts of casual smoothbrain analogies tend to leave out is the role of big data and spyware in potentially crippling violent insurgencies in developed societies.
ReplyDeleteIraq is generally seen as a far more “modern” (and urban) society than Afghanistan. Far more Iraqis are literate and have access to the internet/smartphones than Afghans. I remember reading that U.S. intelligence analysts basically created honeypots for the insurgents, which they would use to great effect to lure and kill-off insurgent leaders. One thing you won’t hear many dissidents on both the left and right acknowledge is that the U.S did, in fact, win the Iraq War by any rational standard (i.e the U.S. backed Iraqi government is still in power, even if Iraq is, and always will be, a shithole).
So we see that the more urban and Online a society is, the easier it is for the Western/Global elite to subdue any violent resistance in that society. The factors that applied to Iraq relative to Afghanistan apply that much more to the U.S and other Western nations relative to Iraq. In a similar vein, there is also just the fact that your average glowie intelligence analyst is far more likely to understand Arabic than Pashto, and far more likely to understand English than Arabic. You can also look at Northern Ireland in the 70s to see what tends to happen when an insurgency in a primarily urban society tries to fight even a semi-competent modern state.
So it’s not even about “2nd amendment can’t beat tanks and nukes Lel.” It’s about the fact that it would take all of 5 seconds for your “based, nationalist, anti-globalist resistance front" to become a honeypot that systemically annihilates anyone stupid or naïve enough to actually take it at face value.
Fully agree. We need to attack the Afghanistan debacle instead as a defeat of the neoliberal "invade the world, invite the world" ideology. We must stop both for the West to survive.
ReplyDeleteI posted this on Gab and the MIGA clowns assumed that I was a Twitter liberal. Why is the American right so fucking stupid and illiterate?
ReplyDelete