Out from Under the Killing Moon

In tribal wars, clever bands ambushed others, often in the early morning under a bright killing moon. If the ambush was not a lopsided victory, the clever ambusher fled to fight another day. If pursued, they hid, set additional ambushes or outraced pursuers. If ambushers scored a lopsided victory, they exterminated rivals and gained assets, including nubile females. Victims were often disorganized by the chaos of the initial assault. Children cried for their dead parents and siblings. Casualties often exceeded 50 percent. Among Amerindians, only 13 percent "did not engage in wars with their neighbors at least once per year." More gentle peoples were enslaved or eliminated. Torture was incessant, a form of control and entertainment. In tribes, fight or be annihilated was no idle warning.

Tribal members were seldom mere disposable parts of the tribal whole. They valued their lives and sought to spread their individual seed. (I use the word seed since they knew almost nothing about individual genes spreading self-copies.) Members sometimes toppled leaders they considered unfair. Trade made matters worse, increasing tribal conflicts. Many settled peoples outproduced nomads, but nomads sometimes won by being better at killing and being more difficult to find. Nomads had an overlooked disadvantage: they suffered higher rates of miscarriages, especially when women rode horses.

In more complex societies, some wars created large, long term benefits.

But who benefits now? The direct and opportunity costs of contemporary empire wars far exceed benefits.

In many so-called professional militaries, ruling groups make personnel hyper obedient, to make soldiers regard their own lives as low value, to fight for fallacious rhetoric masking as virtue. Behind the rhetoric lies the naked psychological egoism of ruling groups and their vile outgroup allies. Research on wars refers to this egoism as opportunism.

Powerful individuals frequently look for opportunities to undermine the legitimate self-interest of others. Organ donors expect nothing while medical establishments walk away with millions. Economics is largely a sham science, promoting the excessive self-interest of free riding individuals over more deserving individuals, especially pro-immigration junk science that leaves nearly all harms out of the analysis. Military elites likewise propagandize low ranking personnel into thinking their own legitimate self-interest crass.

Military elites side with rulers in encouraging hostility toward establishment critics, regardless how well-reasoned the criticism, inculcating misplaced us versus them mindsets, even when elites operate as a them. The more rulers try to make their rule coup proof, the worse they perform at national defense.

Trying to make make professionals out of individuals predisposed toward tribalism often fails because such individuals value their individual lives and seed too much to waste it on behalf of platitudes and low value medals. In addition, many such individuals have IQs too low to function militarily in complex militaries.

In recent decades, Western militaries taught personnel to ignore unethical orders--burning villages and killing inhabitants being a paradigm case. But they do not teach personnel to disobey big picture wrongs. Note that ethics would require personnel to organize strikes to boycott the wars in Southwest Asia, yet few personnel pursue that option. The so-called emphasis on ethics seems mainly a rear end covering exercise. Blame falls on those at the bottom of the hierarchy for alleged atrocities. Institutions downplay the bigger wrongs of wasting lives and massive resources in unwinnable wars. The Vietnam war wasn't worth one American life.

The definitions of winning become ever more bad and bizarre. We enter wars with terrible or  inadequate goals. Helping powerful political parties hostile to yourself gets called winning. Wasting money to cheer for victorious, fan despising athletes is considered winning. Getting corrupt outgroup leaders to bend to the will of our own corrupt leaders is labeled winning, even when harms far exceed benefits. The tribal band member might well say, "Where is the loot? Where are the nubile females from your so-called winning? Where are your children and grandchildren? Oh, you have a ribbon, a ribbon you had to purchase yourself at the commissary, a ribbon civilians seldom comprehend. Will you wear that ribbon if you find yourself sleeping in an alley?"

To which many might correctly reply: character matters more than winning. Looting, murdering, torturing, and kidnapping are execrable. But we must go further. We must avoid evils of tribe and empire.

Multicultural empires rampantly engage in bait-and-switch and divide-and-rule strategies. They antagonize other groups with salami slicing and spirals of tit-for-tat acts. China salami slices via  emigration, trade policies, and South China Sea thefts. Salami slicers often find to their surprise that past trends change. Hitler sliced off Czechoslovakia, but was shocked when he could not slice off Poland. Such ruling groups are decadent and willfully blind to their power cravings, blind to their unjust treatment toward those outside the ruling groups. Nevertheless they love to play the victim. The Third Reich's rulers excoriated degeneracy while lying their rear ends off, while stuffing their faces with alcohol, amphetamines, and synthetic opiates. It's astonishing how corrosive concentrated power is in empires. Female rulers deserve their share of blame. "Europe's queens were 27 percent more likely than its kings to wage war."

Even smaller lands such as Sweden should be viewed as mini multicultural empires, where elites use ethnoracial diversity to bait whites into fighting each other instead of corrupt rule. Elites consolidate  totalitarian power under the banner of security, a lack of security they deliberately caused by pursuing diversity.

When one multicultural empire fights another, citizens find themselves thrust into dilemmas. Their own ruling classes commit evils, yet some outgroup ruling classes commit more evils. Should one fight and perhaps die on behalf of lesser evils? Maybe one should sit the war out. Truth is a rampant casualty of war. No aggressive government admits to being the greater evil. Shirking becomes more common in diverse units. Should it even be regarded as shirking when totalitarian governance denies one's right to self-determination? But should one turn his back to family and friends?

Many warn against Thucydides traps, but even somewhat well meaning members of ruling classes seem clueless about how to avoid such traps.

Outsiders have a better grasp:

1. emphasizing no more brother wars (not the biological meaning of brother) 
2. avoiding salience to outgroups
3. keeping good fences to make better neighbors
4. increasing credible local deterrents, for example, providing smaller, better nations with nuclear deterrents sufficient to extract massive costs on aggressors
5. avoiding being the victim of a fait accompli, especially the rhetoric of inevitable white genocide by multiculturalists.
6. recognizing that outside interference often prolongs civil wars or other conflicts. (Often prolongation and mutual destruction is what the outsider seeks.)
7. recognizing that long lasting rivalries make wars more destructive.

But ruling classes will not pursue policies based on "no more brother wars" because they regard nonwealthy whites as an enemy. They would punish any elite member uttering those four words. They pursue salience and globalism because it gives billionaires more play money, no matter how much conflict globalism creates and how many harms globalism creates for nonwealthy Westerners. They will not provide nuclear weapons to smaller nations because doing so threatens arbitrary nonproliferation rules and threatens their nuclear oligopoly. It also threatens their profiteering, their ripping off of taxpayers, demanding we defend people who dislike us or who are disinclined to fight themselves. A mere eleven percent of Japanese Gallup poll respondents said they would fight for their nation, though that a number is malleable by mass media. Pew polling suggests a host negative views towards Americans by Japanese. Contempt would not be too strong a word for their attitudes. But multiculturalists expect us to suffer and die on behalf of people who hold us in such contempt.

Despite its reputation for being, well, byzantine, the Byzantine Empire managed to survive far longer than the Western Roman Empire by employing crafty diplomatic and military strategies. But such leadership exists almost nowhere among contemporary Western ruling classes. They likely consider such acts not even part of their duties.

Resolve often works, but for what ends should we direct our resolve?

If Japan, Poland, Taiwan, Ukraine, Australia, South Korea, and a few other nations had nuclear arsenals, the world would be a safer place. Instead, Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal for empty globalist promises that backfired spectacularly. A status quo bias exists. It is considered acceptable for aggressive Pakistanis to have nuclear weapons, but not for more logical individuals in Taiwan.

In the long run, despite technological advances, nuclear mistakes, pathogen evolution, natural disasters, and dysgenic overpopulation will likely cause havoc. The recently arising dysgenic paradox is thus: The worse genes individuals have, the more likely they will breed. The better the genes, the less likely. The most dangerous enemies often reside from the neck up. One way or another, the totalitarian xenocentrism of many whites will end. Racial cooperation out competes xenocentrism. And unethical winners become even more aggressive toward losers.