THE GREAT GAY GLEICHSCHALTUNG

Audio version

The ethics of Empire

by Duns Scotus

One of the wonders of the modern world is the great oxymoron of “gay marriage,” and the fact that it has become such a major cultural and social phenomenon, despite being part of the lives of so few. 

Wherever it has been introduced, there have typically been a flurry of media items focusing on it and invariably celebrating it; while in every major city in the West, gay and LGBTQ+ events incessantly enshrine its presence amongst us. Right now, wars even seem to be being waged over it, if recent Russian propaganda is anything to go by.

To be against it, we are told, is to be "on the wrong side of history" and to be a "hater." However, a simple look at the numbers will show that it is of little actual importance in the lives of the vast majority of the homosexual population. 

Based on Gallup's comprehensive 2017 estimate, 4.5% of Americans are LGBT. This means that America has around 15 million gays. But, with gay marriage available for around seven years now, only around half a million gays have actually bothered to tie the knot. That’s around 3.3%. This is considerably lower than the number of the general population that is married (around 53%). 

The great trouble that has been gone to by the media and the cultural, political and economic establishments to turn the public around on this issue, and overhaul the legal system, hardly seems to have been worth the effort put in. Imagine Lincoln liberating the slaves only to have over 95%+ opt to remain as unpaid workers on the plantations, or the Allies liberating Belsen concentration camp only for a tiny minority of the inmates to walk beyond the wire, while the rest say, "Thanks for the offer, but we're fine here, bro."

This is essentially the situation wrought by this so called “historic victory.” It has clearly been a victory that few homosexuals personally wanted, whatever they may have claimed collectively. From this, we can deduce that what has been done has not been done for gays. They are merely a detail, or a pawn in a much bigger game. 

So, what’s really going on here? What is this much bigger game I allude to?

Some have made the case that homosexuality is promoted to undermine patriarchy as a means of promoting a wider egalitarianism:

Homosexual love is a symbol of equality in that, in the act, it connects two entities that are closer to being the same. Sex between men and women is a conjugation of two inherently unequal beings. Attempting to portray men and women as ‘equals’ requires a lot of continual rhetorical bluster to obscure the obvious reality. Holding up homosexual love as moral paragon comes naturally to egalitarians, because it matches with their political conceptions (which prizes the mental unreality of ideal forms over nature).

Since the convulsions of 1968, the West has flung itself into a Platonist concept of love (in a vulgar form), which is seen as the highest value, even among heterosexuals.

The Aristotelian view is that patriarchy leads to the private property hierarchical social order. There are thousands of years of evidence behind the proposition that patriarchy is the critical cultural bulwark that promotes a politics of private property. Plato agreed on this point. The Communists agree on this point, and as such, advance social orders that undermine patriarchy, because it’s known that it’s the atom of the private property social order.

Homosexualism is also acidic and equalising in that it works as a radical parody that cheapens and desacralizes all difference and pre-existing norms.

The symbolism of Empire

The main function of gay marriage is not the happiness of gays, but instead is merely part of the latest wave of a democratising or levelling process that has been with us for some time, following in the wake of Western vulgarization, deculturization, sexual permissiveness, racial deconstruction, feminism, etc.

But what is behind this multifarious but unidirectional process? Is this simply proof of the power and freedom of the lower orders, as Liberals like to claim? I think not. All ideological changes, unless explicitly and blatantly from the grassroots, are almost always impositions by the ruling elites, and are essentially rationalizations of their collective power interests. 

Why, then, have our elites been imposing homosexualism on the rest of us?

The Alt-Righter is naturally drawn to “villain narratives” of elite pedophile networks, or a certain ethnic group striving to undermine Western demographics. Such ideas are mistaken. The real answer is geopolitics. Yes, America’s support for gay rights is tied to its nature as an imperialistic entity. 

Imperialism typically involves one group conquering, colonizing, or controlling others. Implicit in this is a sense of “us-vs-them.” For example, the Roman Republic and early Roman Empire conquered and, in many cases, enslaved the weaker civilizations of the Mediterranean, along with many of the barbarian tribes bordering that area. It united many different races, cultures, religions, and lifestyles within one state. To be a Roman citizen at that time was a mark of distinction and superiority, in a sea of cultural, racial, and religious differences. 

But Imperialism has another side. It also has a tendency to homogenize its populations in order to reinforce its unity. Homogenization is of course implicitly egalitarian.

The economics of Empire

In the case of the Roman Empire, as time passed, the state became weaker and more defensive. There was a switch from positive, outward-directed expansionary power – the kind that accommodates differences and inequalities – to negative, inward-looking power that focuses on regimenting the population and eradicating all essential differences, except those between mercenary soldier and citizen tax drudge. 

A key moment in this process was the extension of Roman citizenship to all non-slaves by the Emperor Caracalla. This essentially devalued the institution of Roman citizenship and, according to the historian Dio Cassius, was essentially done to expand the tax base. This, along with the totalitarianisation of religion (by the emperors from Constantine onwards) and draconian law codes, meant that all Roman citizens were effectively transformed into semi-slaves of the state, rather than all non-citizens being elevated to the "freedoms" of Roman citizenship.

Through this process, indigenous identities and pagan religions that could serve as the basis for political fragmentation and renewal were weakened and subsumed. This ultimately meant that the successor states to Rome had to come from outside, imported and imposed at the point of barbarian spears. 

It is also telling that the one major difference that the Empire was unable to eradicate – the cultural difference between the Greek East and the Latin West – was also the one line on which the Empire did in fact split, in an attempt at political regeneration in the form of the successor state of the Byzantine Empire.

This switch from a positive, outward-looking empire to a negative, inward-looking one, can be dated to the period leading up to the reign of the Emperor Caracalla. By that time, the Roman Empire had become an unimperial Empire in that the military and political strength of its people had atrophied. This was the engine that drove the process of standardization towards the norm of a heavily-taxed, Christianized, semi-slave citizenery supporting an increasingly narrow and fragile military crust. 

This pattern exemplified by the Roman Empire, is the way that weak empires work – a levelling and subordination of everything to a central weakness. 

Now, no state has ever had a vaster Empire or a weaker imperial spirit than the present-day American Empire. The power of this empire in recent decades has been based on the idea of unipolarity, the concept that there is one power greater than all the others, no matter how low or weak that central power is itself. 

Unipolarity was created by the historical accident of the Great Wars of the 20th century, which allowed America to undeservedly assume the position of the World hegemon and exert economic, political, and cultural power well beyond its actual economic, political, and cultural worth.

The aesthetics of Empire 

This mismatch between the base of its power (low merit) and the superstructure (unjustified reward) means that the American Empire is deeply unstable and must always strive to enlarge its power and, at all costs, maintain the global credibility of the unipolar system. The rise of China and the continued existence of a state like Russia that refuses to accept American unipolarity are major threats to this.

The American Empire can only respond to this threat by insisting on its imperium on the global scale, and working on the assumption that the world is already within its empire, with only the processes of digestion remaining. 

This effectively means that countries like China and Russia are treated like recalcitrant or rebellious provinces that only need to be better incorporated into the great global empire in a process of economic and cultural gleichschaltung. This is the true meaning of globalization, “global standards,” and transnational organizations and trade agreements like GATT, WEF, and the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership. 

Just like the latter Roman Empire, the American Empire is not spiritually strong enough to allow real differences within the orbit of its presumed power. These must therefore be broken down and brought into line. In short, unipolarity requires the “Uni-man”: the single, interchangeable, and atomised human being – the man without tribe, race, religion, or even gender. He may have all of these aspects but only in trace elements. 

This takes us back to the Western power-structure’s otherwise inexplicable embrace of homosexualism and gay marriage: these are not so much attempts at degendering individuals (although they do that also) but rightly attempts to degender cultures. As such, they are just the latest in several waves of radical egalitarianism (vulgarization, deculturization, sexual permissiveness, racial integration, feminism, etc., etc.), all phenomena that the West has generated as it has become increasingly dependent on the idea of unipolarity. 

By seeking to create a world in which gay marriage – no matter how rare – is allowed, and in which homosexualism is culturally dominant, the American empire is effectively creating a world where its unipolarity will prevail.

The transvaluation of Empire 

Whether consciously or unconsciously, the elites in the West have instinctively known this, and this is why they have supported one form of radical egalitarianism after another, and why, without any significant benefit for homosexuals, they now support this parody of the married state.

Gay marriage is to the modern American Empire what the radically egalitarian religion of Christianity was to the fading Roman Empire -- a levelling of healthy organic difference and a centralisation around a weak centre.