Death Squads and Businessmen or What Can an Assassin Do after the War is Over?

The other day on my Facebook, the issue was raised about how techniques used to prepare men to murder without remorse are now morphing into business advice. These are some of my thoughts.

One of the fundamental differences in our world is the increasing replacement of the idea of “cool” with the idea of the heroic or heroism. I want to talk about how that happened and some of what it means for our current state of existence.

If you go back in time to the 1960s and 70s, you see the emergence of this thing called “cool”. I don’t yet have a clear understanding about this idea. I can say that it is supposed to be a positive thing. It is hypothesized by social scientists as having spun out from Afro-American culture. It became linked to youth and to pro-modernity movements (the so-called left-wing) that also came to dominate institutions of learning and research. It became a pervasive aspect of life and was incorporated into the market appearing as a necessary characteristic of many commercial products. In this form, it produced it’s own version of celebrity. You could say that the last part of the 20th century was the age of cool, hip celebrity stars. They were drawn from all kinds of places. Henry Rollins emerged from the punk rock scene and now makes millions just talking about all the cool stuff he does. Hunter S. Thompson made writing cool and hip for generations of young, especially men. “Cool” even invaded the university, which had descended over thousands of years from the training grounds for the clergy and later, the very wealthy. Today, that liberal, Ivy League Jew Steven Pinker is a millionaire household name alongside rock music icons and film stars. He is the epitome of the “cool professor”.

So there’s this thing called ‘progress’. If you believe in it, you accept that the world is moving forward and becoming ‘better’. All this started some time back around the French Revolution and is being carried through by the values of that time powered by a scientific-technological revolution that discarded religion and superstition replacing it with ‘facts’ and a lot of math. We are healthier, freer, more secure, more affluent and happier than we have ever been because of this, and this is a global trend happening all over the place. The world that we live in is just better than it used to be. The pro-moderns became politicized very quickly and within decades formed mass political movements that dominated vast swaths of the world.

But there’s another side to this story. There are people who disagree with this idea of progress. The world is not better than it used to be. Our lives are not better lives than those of the people who lived before us. In fact, we are living a degraded, unnatural form of life that has robbed us of meaning. Affluence is an illusion caused by materialism. The production of all that ‘stuff’ that fills your life destroys people’s inner sense of peace. Inequality has reached levels that were historically unimaginable. The dangers of the modern world are so unpredictable and unstable that fear has become endemic. The richest people of the world are so scared that they reject the very system of distribution that gave them this wealth and cling to ideas that have only ever produced suffering and scarcity. Or so the story goes. These people are the anti-moderns, or as some people call them, the right-wing.

They were slow to develop. The anti-moderns emerged first as an aesthetic movement during the 19th century called the Romantic Period. The anti-moderns reached their peak during the German Third Reich. At this time, the entire world became dominated by the German people’s struggle to rebuild a life based on ancient values that they believed had made them the fathers of Western civilization and the most advanced culture to ever evolve. Built into this was the idea that ancient values had been lost and the knowledge that had produced the superior German culture had been degraded. The regeneration of this world would bring about a superman. I am not clear on what this superman is supposed to be like. I need to read more original works from the theorists of this age, but it’s tedious and terrifying work. More will come on this later.

As we all know, things didn’t work out too well for the Third Reich. By the end of 1945, they had destroyed all of Europe, vast parts of the Soviet Union, killed millions and completely collapsed as a legitimate political force. But many National Socialists survived the Third Reich. There were millions of Germans who had gone through the Hitler Youth and joined the SS fighting on the Eastern Front or working in death camps. Their excitement for an end to modern progress and a return to the traditional values of the Aryan people was not dampened by the second crushing defeat of Germany’s attempt in less than half a century to take over the world. So what did they do?

Lots of them had to run away. They had done things during the War that were really bad and if the US or Britain had gotten a hold of them, they knew there would be no mercy. They spread out across the world looking for places where they could safely talk about the evil Jew and his domination of the non-productive forces of the world. Many of them had done nothing particularly wrong during the War, so the stayed in Germany or where ever they were, and taught their kids how Hitler had almost saved Germany with his revival of traditional German values and principles. But the National Socialists were never again a major political power.

They did not disappear though. Their philosophy splintered off into pieces that were digestible by the progressive Western democracies that had colonized them. Perhaps the first of these was the eco-fascist movement. The National Socialists were very environmentally conscious. Many of them were vegetarians. There was no problem for them to integrate smoothly into the various institutions of the environmental movement. As a result, it’s most successful political wing, the Green Party, became a haven for National Socialists. This is probably no longer true, but environmental groups are aware of this danger and watch out for the problem. What it shows though, is the way that even the most extreme forces opposed to progressive modern life are able to morph into something that’s acceptable and their principles survive almost unnoticed in places that think they are symbolic of progress and immune from bad thoughts.

All this brings us back to the world of serial killers trained by the US Navy teaching business business managers how to run meetings. Where did this come from? What on Earth would make anyone think that death squad commanders have any knowledge to share in the boardrooms of our largest businesses, much less to troubled young men looking for answers to their personal problems? And once again, we have the problem of the anti-moderns. They’re goofs. They’re not just goofs, they’re uneducated goofs. They have been so completely banished from higher reaches of our institutions of learning and research some of them perceive this as a conspiracy theory, or at least a revolutionary takeover. The contemporary anti-moderns have nothing interesting or intellectual to say. They overlap so much with Christian political groups that promote alternative science, you could even think of the anti-moderns as a counter-modern movement. Personally, I think this is because their position is intellectually bankrupt and no one with any brains would be interesting to them, but the least you could say is that they have been unable to attract a generation of hip and cool academics who sound convincing. They have been unable to attract virtually any intellectual base without paying people directly to put their names on findings already vetted by their financiers.

That doesn’t mean the anti-moderns don’t have iconic figures. They do – lots of them. They are just not hip, cool and intellectual. Who are they, then? For one, there’s all those Navy SEALS running around telling you that their experience as assassins and serial killers can help you change your life. He’s not a SEAL, but I include Joe Rogan in this group. Joe is about as counter-modern as you can get. He has pushed every conspiracy theory there is. He makes jokes about feminism and progressive thinking. He is friends with Alex Jones. There is Jordan Peterson, who appears to be the only one of these guys with legitimate academic qualifications. There are mixed feelings about Peterson out in pop science world, but I personally think of him as a proto-fascist who, despite not realizing this, is popular with the extreme right-wing and evangelical Christians. He claims to be a scientist and promotes the Enlightenment, but also suffers from severe mental health problems that he believes he can treat by eating only red meat. What do these guys have in common? Most of them are quite literally warriors. They are combat veterans who have fought others to the death and survived. Along with Rogan, many of them are involved in competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and hold high ranks, such as black belts. Rogan is also a high-level Taeknowdo champion. These are very tough guys. I have no doubt they’d finish me off quickly, and maybe hardly even notice they did it.

They are also heroes, in every sense of the word. Many have been involved in the seminal battles of the Iraq War leading sensitive, important missions. They are sport champions at a level that is almost unimaginable. Former SEAL and motivational author, David Goggins, holds the world record for pull-ups done over a 24-hour period. He is an elite ultra-marathon runner and in 2008 was named a “Hero of Running” by Runner’s World magazine. Many of these men are quite literally supermen. Then who is Jordan Peterson? No matter what I think about the guy, the fact is that he is a leader in the academic discussion of heroism. Some call his scholarship on heroism shoddy and not based in real research findings. This is irrelevant to my problem. He is a pop culture leader in the discussion of heroism. His model of the hero makes it natural, based in our history as humans rather than a divine gift. It is a manly thing, as opposed to being feminine. It is something we all understand, regardless of our background and it is something that all of us can achieve.

This is only the beginning. the 21st century just started. We’ll all be dead while this structure is still evolving. Who knows where it will go? I’d like to live forever and see what happens, but I’m not going to. There’s much more I could say about this, particularly about its links to Roger Griffin’s theories of fascism and their palingenetic myth. Maybe I’ll write more tomorrow.