On Blood Sacrifice

This post is the fourth part in a series of discussions between James and Lynn on the work of Nassim Taleb, see part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Lynn:  Taleb wrote a piece on lent, Easter, and blood sacrifice that I wanted to discuss with you. My thoughts were that the lack of blood sacrifice in Western religious practices is akin to the relinquishment of the individual's responsibility for violence to the State. No bloodshed means no spiritual life. When I read the King James Bible at age 19, one of the few things I was able to gather from it is that worshiping God in the Old Testament meant sacrificing to God. It does not mean singing songs while swaying in the church pew. I grew up going to various super-fun-rock-band churches (that is from Ann Barnhardt, Queen of Crackpots), and the songs just make my skin crawl. I don't mind singing the older hymns though.

So far from requiring blood, or any effort whatsoever, most modern "non-denomenational" Christian churches insist that there is nothing for Christians to do but say a few magic words and accept salvation. It never felt right to me.

James:  Lynn, there are so many varieties of new Christian churches that I cannot even address that subject, other than to say that these churches only remain vibrant for the first two generations. There is a constant branching by young Christians, making their own churches, even building them with their hands, in a never ending attempt to correct for the materialism that tends to creep so easily into church life.

My sister left the Catholic Church to join a first-generation church. In the Catholic Church, as a boy, I was exposed to the gay, light-rock, feel-good, hippie version of New Age Catholicism and even at eight, saw it is a phony attempt to make religion cool for kids. There is, in Catholicism, a focus on sacrifice and the symbolism of blood, but the only sacrifice asked by the priest is the donation. I recall my parents being humiliated when their two dollar donations were posted in the church weekly, next to those made by business owners and CEOs. This is where religion always ends up and that is why American Christians have reformed as young churches constantly, for the four centuries of our continually fracturing history.

In the Appalachian and rural piedmont churches I have attended, the notion of sacrifice seems to focus on not taking the many pleasures that the gross world offers—a post monastic form of abstinence that fits well in such a pleasure-saturated society and I think makes a good surrogate for bleeding. The better postmodern churches are, in a sense, fertile monasteries.

Also, there is still a crusading notion among rural Christians who make up the bulk of U.S combatants in its money-grubbing wars, a notion I see as being exploited by the globalists, but is authentic none-the-less in the minds of many, who see themselves as holding back The Caliphate.

The musical orientation of some of the money-focused, feel-good churches you mention reminds me of the black ghetto churches in Baltimore, which manage to concentrate money and sexual access in the person of a store front minister. The only sacrifice being made in these churches is the woman’s giving of her oft-sampled sexual goods to the neighborhood patriarch, who stands as the alternative to the other two patriarchs in the black community: the drug king pin and White Daddy [government].

Traditionally, in American Protestantism, the notion of sacrifice has been Abrahamic, in that sons were sacrificed to the wars of expansion that spread the Gospels among the Heathen and that the lives of the early plantation Congregationalists in New England were literally sunk into the alien soil in their effort to eradicate the native forest ecology and replace it with a grassland. In 1868, Messach Browning recalled that he had done his Christian duty by siring a family of 64 sons, grandsons and great grandsons, who stood ready to fight for his nation—an overtly Christian nation.

Aside from the sacrifice of sons in war and the more heroic sacrifice of one’s self [which has never been the preferred American sacrifice, sons being favored over self], the protestant ethic of toil, or doing what a man can to live a virtuous life on an evil earth is almost Roman in character. The best example of this would be the ploughing scene in Sergeant York, where the hero, played by Gary Cooper is shown working the land, literally attacking the rugged natural environment.

In respect to sacrifice, in American culture, the notion among Catholics has been completely farmed out to the past, of Jesus taking the full burden. The aspects of sacrifice are revered, but they are not for men. This has really caused the guilt-rot to emerge strongly in American Catholicism, with third world immigrants and even Islam—the religion—being embraced as suffering foci for the post-suffering American Catholic. Currently joint Islamic-Catholic services are being held in Baltimore, and old Catholics, like my mother and aunt are being guilted into sitting through Spanish mass next to Mexicans carrying baby dolls in coffins. In this fashion the elder women in my family act out the simpering sacrifice of identity before the altar of their all-erasing God.

I suspect that the above notion of guilt-based sacrificed, of living prosperously as the benefactors of an ancient God’s suffering, lingers even in the secular, ethical construct of American Atheism, wherein a nominally Christian person, secularized beyond redemption, is led to believe that his abstinence from actual sacrifice can be atoned for by sacrificing his unborn children via omission, and stepping aside in sterile old age as the suffering slave class from Latin America and beyond takes the places at the American Table of the Last Supper that might have been occupied by his children.

The turning point for me, is the year of my birth, 1963, and the Yul Brynner movie Kings of the Sun, with Shirley Anne Field and George Chakiris. Brynner plays a proto-Comanche Indian chief who at first opposes, then allies with a fleeing Mayan King and his exiled people. The King, played by Chakiris, at one point overrules the high priest in the matter of sacrifice, noting that this new land was so fertile that no sacrifice need be made. [This is a heavily propagandistic story line aimed at indigenous white America.] In the end, the sacrifice is made on the temple stairs, when the native Chief, played by Brynner, dies defending the refugees from their pursuing enemies on the very stairs of the un-bloodied sacrificial pyramid. In the year of my birth a movie maker was already preaching what the new Christian sacrifice would be in America, the extinguishing of identity and patrimony, in favor of refugees from across the sea.

To get back to your objection to “singing songs and swaying in the church pew” as a form of religious expression that has replaced sacrifice, I might add that available evidence hints at conversion to Christianity of black slaves by their white masters as facilitated more easily by indulging the African penchant [which does, indeed, seem to be genetic] for song and dance. Again, the sacrificial aspect of toil is present, as it was through the entire Middle Ages, when the suffering serf carried the fighting and praying classes on his back in return for the promise that his way to eternal paradise had been assured by the sacrifice of Christ.

In summation, it is my opinion that in the Western World, with all of its indigenous traditions submerged by Christianity and with Christianity itself fighting off cycle after cycle of corruption introduced by the rampant materialism of modernity, that the notion of sacrifice remains three-tiered as it always has: work from the poor, money from the merchant, blood from the powerful and their pawns and offered with words from the ruling class.

The latter has three postmodern manifestations:

1. The powerful, and those of a liberal mind who align themselves with the elite, by and large, sacrifice their bloodline to their post-Christian ideology, by forgoing reproduction and adopting suffering groups and individuals as their children, in this way retaining much of the psychology of sacrifice.

2. The massive, secular edifice of modernity—in its America form—has retained a Christian patina, with mottos such as, “In God We Trust,” and “One Nation Under God,” not yet stricken from the American creed, encouraging predominantly Christian combatants to sacrifice their lives in the “The War on Terror.”

3. Every day, in every mid-sized to large city in America, the thugs of the Black Urban Mob that have risen since 2014, are shedding the blood of those who must bleed and die for the crime of being born white. Among the victims one will see a strong tendency not to blame their attackers, a common aspect of sacrificial victim behavior.

Thank you, Lynn.

(c) 2017 James LaFond and Lynn Lockhart

Defeating the Perspective Trap

James, let's continue our discussion on Taleb's antifragility, see part 1, and part 2.

LL: I think you have applied this idea of antifragility in your own life quite extensively, especially the way that any aggression displayed against you is material for your writing. I often wonder what the learning process must have been like for you, much earlier in your life, as you developed your approach to managing the constant aggression in your environment. Can you comment on that?

JL:  At 11, after five years of being beaten and tormented by older children and teenagers, I talked my father into a punching bag and weight set and stayed inside until I could hit hard enough to make the floor above shake. The first ingredient a person needs to deal with aggression is the ability to apply aggression. You have to make at least one example before you can begin the nuanced threat negotiation that has typified most of my life. The sports comparison would be that you have to attain a certain baseline conditioning to engage in the sport in a learning way. By age 15 I had an aura of menace that kept almost everyone away. After nearly killing a man at 18 and narrowly avoiding prison time, I unlearned this, and had to learn it again on the job and on the way to work. By age 31, when I walked into a strip club—all 143 pounds of me—bouncers wanted to be my friend, businessmen would ask me to take their seat and the strippers would compete for my attention. This had only to do with the fact that I had become used to dealing with mobs of black youth and crews of gangbangers six nights a week and carried myself on a constant combat footing—was flat-out suicidal for most of my 30s. I had a D& D Charisma rating of 6 out of 18—just a bad actor who never initiated. The negroes could smell this, that I was like a coiled snake. I was really a creepy person who was utterly callous with everyone but my sons. My wife suffered greatly from this studied neglect of the softer parts of the world.

LL: Taleb has noted that he avoids anything or anyone that is "middle brow." He associates with only the most elite in any academic field, or taxi drivers, doormen, (and maybe grocers?). Back in 2008 he was getting death threats for his comments on the banks and markets and took up deadlifting to deter attacks. Now his deadlift is over 300 lbs (he is in his late 50s with no previous athletic history). He loves hanging in the gym with the meatheads. He doesn't care for extensive proofreading of his writing, which is something he has in common with you. You specialize in mining the dregs of Baltimore for both your fiction and non-fiction. You have also been memorializing the lives of so many who served in unacknowledged slavery during the "colonial" era. Is it a coincidence that our elites wish to erase these classes of people who possess a type of understanding that has been effectively brainwashed out of the more compliant, educated classes?

JL: Okay, Lynn, you know how you continually take umbrage over my assertion that I’m a dumbass? Well, I am. I won’t get into the years of crying as a child as I tried and failed to learn basic math, even with a tutor and remained unable to read two years after my younger brother was reading toy assembly instruction. Yet, the people in the middle of our society—you and most of my readers, who are college educated or brilliant laymen—are continually dumbfounded at how I can make deductions and observations that astound men such as Ulric Kerensky—who is a flat-out genius, I mean a dude who could have been a Tesla in another age, before the regimentation that drives minds like his underground. He calls it wisdom, what I have, and he is right. How did I get all of this insight that the big brains and beautiful minds gawk at and misunderstand?

I aspired to learn, to read, and finally did. Made certain to read what others generally did not, history, anthropology, religion as well as the wars all boys read about. I did this so I could feel smart, not having the confidence to compete with others mentally in any way. Then, knowing myself unsuited for middle management, I stayed at the bottom of the bottom of the working class economy, a simple clerk in grocery stores for decades, refusing 13 offers of promotion as I slowly learned, and then finally learned that I was seeing that business from a perspective that no management person sees it from, as managers start on their track early and never gain deep experience at the low level. I had lower class perspective. When I finally agreed to a management job I held out for the top spot and got it, doing things that smarter, more experienced mangers—who could actually count money, for instance—could not do. I understood the engine that drove 60% of supermarket volume like no one else. I built a 7-man crew that carried a 110 person store out of failure and into profit.

Lynn, the people in the middle always suffer from lack of perspective—they are the meat, the grist of the social mill, the dupes and the fools. In early modern Britain, as the poor were being driven to the cities by the rural rich, where they were preyed upon my the Dickensian middle class, they formed an alliance with the urban old money, the heirs of fading fortunes and formed what was called “The Fancy” and came to be known as “the sporting set,” in America. The men at the social apogee and at the social knee saw the world in like and ancient ways, where the herd, the flock, the fold of the merchant class and those aspiring to a place on its lower rung, clung to the merchant values that amounted to the worship of property and shunned all things spiritual, such as honor. The Fancy birthed prizefighting as the sport it is today, gangs of poor thugs and sets of dandy’s working as pug and sponsor, attendant and spectator to the fighters, their living mythic heroes, a thumb in the eye to the depraved middle class who campaigned for an end to prizefighting for over a century and failed. The middle class even fell like ducklings into the cult of celebrity born by boxing—with John L. Sullivan being the very first modern celebrity.

Men low and high saw that materialism was ultimately the death of humanity and gloried in risking health and fortune in a brutal imitation of the ancient heroes that had returned to the human imagination with the translation of Greek and Latin literature from the ancient world. Boxing literature from 200 years ago is chock full of ancient comparisons. The poor men played the hero to their fellows and betters as the smartest of the rich men read to them or wrote for them of the ancient heroes.

In short, Taleb figured out what I only learned through gross repetition and long years in the social depths he somehow framed in his imagination.

LL: Taleb has also introduced another concept -- skin in the game. This is probably the most important. He says you cannot trust anyone who does not take risks in their field. I can think of quite a few ways you exhibit this quality, and have therefore earned high credibility. For one thing, you write under your own name, in topics that are highly taboo, both to the ruling class and to some of the dissident groups. You are a pedestrian in possibly the most dangerous city in the US. You gave up your lucrative day job to write. I don't think there is a better example of skin in the game than your work on ancient weapons through Modern Agonistics. How can anyone believe a Ph.D. sitting in his office, when James LaFond has sacrificed blood and bone to learn the use of these weapons, in addition to your extensive reading?

JL:  He re-introduced the oldest masculine aspect of tribal life into our sick world of liches, wraiths and zombies. Lynn, now you know why I resist pleas to scamper to safety out of Baltimore, because skin in the game is all I really have that most literate humans lack, the source of my only real value as a non-fiction writer.

Now, the Ph.D. in his office cult that we have has real roots. Amongst the large brained creatures that make up my leadership [a Freudian typo I’m keeping since you people have pretty much led me around by the literary nose—I don’t even decide what I read anymore. I’m like a crib-note generator for busy minds.], I probably fall on the short end of the scale in terms of brain power, but am swimming in a wealth of experience. Think of a more primitive society—like Big Ron’s Baltimore—where the average knucklehead is nearly retarded and a fellow of mine and Ron’s good but not great intelligence, becomes a sage or the guy with the right read on a situation while others get run over by a chain of events they may have initiated. When everybody has the same experience, then being the Ph.D. is a big deal. This is the position of the coach in athletics. The intelligence of coaches over athletes is usually a larger spread than you’d see between management and labor. This, again, encourages high levels of adaptability in sports, with pro athletics outpacing most sciences in terms of adaptation of application, because you have brilliant coaches with a gut knowledge of the activity, communicating with the meatheads getting hit. Very few high-level athletes show any aptitude for coaching. So, where does the Ph.D. cult fit?

It fits in barrooms, in locker rooms, in a kick-ass Colonel’s command center, that’s why sports and war and beating the shit out of people, evolve and a democracy—a thing all about the collective center, about meat herders making the herd feel like they are serving it—has not changed since Athens.

Thanks for making me think this morning.

James

(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart

On Becoming Antifragile

James,

We have discussed offline Nassim Taleb's concept of antifragility, detailed in his book "Antifragile." Briefly the concept is that things may be fragile, that is, easily damaged; or they may be robust, that is, not easily damaged; but it is also possible to take the spectrum further, and look for things that are antifragile, that benefit from stress, attacks, or the passage of time. Taleb gives the example from Greek myth of the Hydra, which grows two new heads each time one is cut off. What are your thoughts on this characteristic?

Lynn

Lynn, thanks for stretching my brain space again.

What would my boxing coaches say about Taleb’s antifragile concept? In other words, if I had summarized the anti-fragile concept to them in a training session, what might they have said:

Reds Foley: “If you don’t learn to move that head they’ll soon be no room in there for those big ideas.”

Big Rich: “No shit, Sherlock—give me another round!”

Raphael: “Steel sharpens steel. We don’t sharpen our knives with silk pillows.”

Mister Jimmy: “Some genius got paid for saying that? I wonder if he’ll by my car. The transmission is shot.”

Mister Frank: “That’s the foundation of what we do here. I’d like to speak to this man. I’m sure I could learn something from someone smart enough to figure that out without stepping in the ring.”

In other words Lynn, this is clearly known to anyone who has fought and who trains to fight or trains others to fight. There is all the equipment and technique to learn, the hundreds of rounds spent shadow boxing and meditating on method. However, one is not made fight ready until he is set to sparring with a partner.

That partner, if inept, and posing no danger to the fighter, will make this fighter weaker, will leach from him the essence he is trying to increase.

There are also numerous pitfalls to sparring, as many unproductive things that can crop up as productive. If sparring is mistaken for fighting, for instance, retardation and fixing of an incomplete skill set may occur. If conducted sensibly, sparring, with the right sparring partner, which means a partner who poses some level of threat, is the only way one progresses in the training environment in such a way as to translate to the fight venue. But even this, since there are various takes on the behavior that fall short of the actual fight, only achieves a portion of a fighter’s evolution.

Where the fighter gains mastery—the only place this occurs—is in that most dangerous setting where he can be stopped, injured, maimed or killed. Being stopped may cause a type of spiritual damage that is essential an injuring, maiming or killing of the fighting spirit.

The fighter is brought along in evolutionary steps to prepare him first for an “antifragile” immersion in sparring and then finally in competition where the nature of the more lethal environment will greatly increase his adaptive quality.

This antifragile notion is, perhaps tied to Nietzsche’s dictum, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

Admittedly, in the case of boxing, the coach is pre-selecting an antifragile—let’s call him hyper-adaptive, though “robust” is really perfect, to be cultivated as an evolving combatant in progressively more stressful training session and then fights, in such a way that the fighter literally ascends a transformative field of experience, a field of experience ritually and perilously far beyond the domesticated norms of the civilized experience.

LL:  James, you quote Nietzche, whom Taleb discusses at length in the book, and in your last paragraph you note the importance of pre-selection on the part of the coach, another topic he covers extensively.  It fascinates me to see intersections between seemingly disparate intellects, your insights particularly so, since you seamlessly combine both modes of inquiry, that of the intellect and that of the physical.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

Considering a Primal Human Perspective

A Prequel to the Author’s Interview with Lynn Lockhart

Lynn, you’ve asked me some pretty big questions and also to match wits with a man that has put forth some daunting ideas. Before answering I should make plain my divergence from modern society so that an understanding can occur.

Modernity places man in his masses under ideologies, according to numbers.

I disagree.

Most blatantly I disagree with this approach to violence studies. For instance, the FBI did a comparative analysis of Cocaine-Boom Miami circa 1980 and Dodge City, a hundred years earlier, and declared parity between the two, as they use numbers of people under threat, not area of habitat under threat to determine risk of violence, with their stupid how many deaths in 100,000 equation.

What this showed was that Dodge City and Scarface Miami were both equally violent to an unacceptable degree. Ever since people have used the euphemism that if guns are not taken away from Americans, than our cities will become like “The Wild West”

Well if Baltimore was like the Wild West, we would have had only one homicide last year. That’s right, in the year Dodge City was compared to Miami during the drug cartel high tide, one man was killed and that in a voluntary duel over a woman?

Not one murder, just a man slaughter. And, according to the FBI, that is equivalent to Cuban thugs and Columbian Narcos hosing down strip malls with machine guns while women and children are shopping?

Why would these geniuses—and they are geniuses, unlike I who could not pass the FBI entrance exam—come up with such a false model?

It is simple, the FBI is a branch of the U.S. government, and that government like all other modern state systems is engaged in people farming. Just as shepherds and ranchers count their livestock so do our handlers.

This, I see as a departure from most of human history and prehistory and has its roots in the two great submissive faiths, Christianity and Islam. Islam means submission, with Muslim men taking names that proudly declare themselves the slaves and servants of God. In Leviticus—in the very book of the Old Testament that justifies enslavement, God’s Chosen People are declared to be his slaves, and should therefore strive to keep one another free of lesser bonds of servitude to outsiders. Being raised Catholic, the idea that I was supposed to submit as a first response to an invocation of authority over my person and my soul was explicit in the ritual kneeling, the constant reference to God, His Son and Prophets “shepherding” their “flock,” coupled with the “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s admonition that our parish priests quoted often, indicating that I should be a submissive subject of a government, that I should be livestock.

This doctrine of submission to God and his representatives insured that Christianity and Islam would be the dominant faiths over most of the planet. And breadth means something here. For these faiths are the blueprints for interacting with the human habitat. There may have been more Hindus at one point, but the adherents to that religion were geographically limited, meaning that fewer aspects of creation fell under their religion’s influence. And to people before the materialistic ethos and atheism supplanted so much of the metaphysical construct humanity lives within, Creation meant something, something more than a pile of rock to be rendered into ore and smelted into precious commodities.

Many current critics of the “Abrahamic” faiths take issue with their ethnic or environmental origin. But the fact is that most tribal conquest resulting in civilizations feature violent, herding people displacing the ruling class of a submissive toiling people, who are naturally viewed as cattle, and hence chattel. This was obvious to all pre-modern societies. But modern society operates under a fiction, far less plausible than the idea of God, that is the idea of “civil service” or “democracy,” the insane notion that the cattle rule the ranch through their bellowing.

Before we continue with the dialogue on Taleb’s work, I’d like to make it plain that I see the human being in terms of his relationship to God, which includes the environment, and excludes the herd, the human shepherds. It is obvious that the sacred creeds of submission informed those who structured modern state systems and political ideologies, and that these notions of Dar al-Islam and Christendom contained a more ancient notion of habitable space, not simply the numbers of their flocks.

Before the Industrial Age, Europeans thought in terms of faith far more than race and would speak of “Christian lands,” placing people in their living context and beyond it, rather than in our atomized way. Muslims had a similar view and retain far more of it than we secularized Christians.

“…he regarded himself as a citizen, not of a country called Morocco, but of the Dar al-Islam, to whose universalist spiritual, moral and social values he was loyal above any other allegiance.”

-Ross E. Dunn on Ibn Battuta

Early Christianity retained much of the ancient, holistic, human worldview, before it was gradually reduced to an ethos to support Modernity. Many Christians [I’m not one] have a sense for this and are continually reinventing the Church on a smaller scale, whether localized or inward-reaching, even bordering on the shamanic, like John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, in which he discusses “the silence of fathers” in our denatured society. In a larger sense the ethical systems derived from these religions are, too, silent, which is why I wanted to discuss Taleb’s antifragile concept and his related opinion concerning the absence of sacrifice, after this attempt to place it in a truer context.

I’ll address Antifragile, and then sacrifice, over the next two weeks.

Thanks for the demanding line of inquiry.

(c) 2017 James LaFond

The Scale of Warfare; Q&A with James LaFond

Masculine Revival in the Face of the Machine State: From the Peace of Westphalia to the Marseilles Soccer Hooligan Clash and the Baltimore Riots

Note to reader: If you haven't read James LaFond's post "No Small Beer," or seen the related video, you should go there first.

The video is an hour long and well worth watching, but the gist of it is that there is a growing movement of Soccer Hooliganism in Russia. Young men are training and fighting one another in groups, and in 2016, around 200 of these Hooligans went to Marseilles during the World Cup and attacked their English counterparts. English Hooliganism has seen better days and they were unaware and unprepared for the battle. The video was put out by the BBC and has the predictable biases.

LL: James, you have observed that the Peace of Westphalia marked the beginning of "national machine warfare." Relatedly, Nassim Taleb has proposed, also citing the Peace of Westphalia, in "Antifragile," that the existence of nation-states, as opposed to city-states, feudal and tribal groups, led to the pattern of war of the twentieth century, with large scale conflict, and has left the world with far greater danger of catastrophic war than ever in history. This contrary to the popular view (from Steven Pinker) that violence, including warfare, is on the decline world wide. Taleb's point is that having numerous local skirmishes is much safer than having large powers in constant tension, and we won't know how bad it could get until it does.

JL:  Lynn, first, violence within society continues to increase, counter to law enforcement data. Society is now more violent per foot space than it ever was. However, since our intellectuals deal in violence per 100,000 , an intrinsically dehumanized scale, we, like the wildebeest, are seen as rarely preyed upon. Medieval studies of violence show a high per-capita rate of violence. However, per-capita notions are artificial. What is important is violence per foot. How dangerous is the place where you live if you removed everybody but yourself and the predators? That is the psychologically impactive view, what produces alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, ennui, decadence…

Furthermore, if we go along with the misleading and fundamentally flawed FBI notion of macro-data qualified violence we see the following when compared with my first hand survey:

In 1996, only 25% of violence came to the attention of law enforcement.

In 2016, only 5% of violence came to the attention of law enforcement.

During this 20 year period law enforcement has made a multi-layered commitment to reclassifying violence down, with home invasions becoming destruction of property, muggings becoming theft, etc.

Beyond this is the fact that most aggression does not result in legally definable aggression. Me following you to your car and then walking on by because your husband happens to be sitting in the car, when if he hadn’t I would have attacked you, is not definable by law enforcement.

Also, where murders may remain stagnant, with handgun killings staying steady nationwide and stabbing perhaps doubling, blunt force attacks, as the admittance of clubbing and beating victims do not trigger law enforcement responses as do gunshot, stabbing and rape admittances, have greatly increased, with cagey criminals averse to prison time switching to blunt force away from firearms and edged weapons.

Taking the above factors, from Baltimore City, into account, how can anyone look at a marginal decrease in overall killing stats across the nation, or a reduction of robbery stats [which are heavily massaged by reporting methods] and see a less violent world, where it is at least three times as violent.

A better way to rate aggression would be to track the sale and installation of plexi-glass counter shields at retail outlets and aggregate them, meaning the bulletproof counter installed on North and Maryland 40 years ago is still in use, and all of those built since, at an accelerating rate, actually amount to a manifold doubling of hostile points of aggression and predation across the real physical landscape rather than in the contrived theoretic landscape of the FBI macro stats.

As for the Peace of Westphalia, which traditionally dates the rise of the nation state, projecting force with conscription-based armies over kingdoms and republics employing feudal obligations and mercenary employment for force projection, here are my immediate thoughts.

The defeat of the Spanish tericos [combined arms regiments loyal to the king of Spain] that led to the Peace of Westphalia, killed whatever connection to warfare that heroism had, that is whatever the brutal 30 years war had not already erased. In a very real sense, that war, from 1618 to 1648 was when God was killed on the battlefield along with the divine right of kingship. Kings would now increasingly become a class of managerial despot compromised by their advisors. That war also saw the first WMD, the Hell-Burner of Antwerp. The Spanish were as evil as the rest of the players. But their soldiery still held to notions of heroism that would soon only find expression in dueling and prize fighting, which emerged at this very time as a plague on the officer class. We see honorable violence being pushed downward into society as the first modern slave armies [they emptied the prisons and whore houses to fill the ranks] sterilized war of meaning as it became a collective expedient.

LL:  James, do you think the Russian Soccer Hooligans represent a return to tribal warfare? You point out in the comments to that article that these firms fight one another for practice. By fighting firm vs. firm, they signal the safety of their towns, and by joining up to fight the English, they can also signal national strength.

JL:  The fact is that these hooligans are engaging in warrior pursuits with meaning as only a few hundred men of any nation can engage in meaningful warrior activity in the machine-minded armed services. Once you get below the special operations types you just have a welfare state-prison-school-system in uniform.

LL:  I have mixed feelings about what they did in Marseilles, but I wonder if there aren't a few English and French who would think twice now about going to war with Russia?

JL:  Such notions as national will for war are really obsolete. War is now a machined wraith of its former self, a form of macro-policing by globalists and doomed resistance by nationalists, and has been such since 1948. This Marseilles clash was about the Russians using the occasion to assert their masculine humanity over the decadent Brits, in essence saying, “We will remain Russians and men, as you are thrown on the scrap heap of humanity by the soulless system that your grandfathers fought to erect, which has now begun eating its own, reducing you to neither men or Englishmen, but a shadow without a ghost—you revolted against Modernity and sank into sloth and we carry on.”

The Russians are letting the British and the dying West know that they have all become like Tolkien’s ring wraiths—terminally, amorally domesticated ciphers.

LL:  Looking back over this I have left out what I really wanted to talk about which is your idea about outsourcing violence.

We have seen that an individual man has the right to risk his own body in the violent endeavors of his choosing. You have made your life's work out of sharing your violent experiences, and we learned about some of the physical consequences last week.

By joining firms, these young Russian men compromise themselves to a group, albeit a small and highly accountable one. The leaders of the group are fighting alongside the recruits and we saw that the fighting and the leading are inextricably linked when Vasily indicated that he had retired from fighting and firm leadership, without distinguishing between the two. Moving up the scale any further removes the warrior role from the leaders who are responsible for disposing of their lives.

JL:  Lynn, you have just described a real—if circumscribed within the confines of modernity—a real, actualized return to the hero bands of primal antiquity. Vasily and his men are Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Odysseus and his Crew, Jason and his Argonauts, Achilles and his Myrmidons and Beowulf and his dozen heroes. As strange as it seems Russian soccer Holliganism is a protest against outsourced aggression-based society and an expressed yearning for a return to a primal lifestyle.

LL:  Thank you James.

‘No Small Beer’ - jameslafond.com

‘The European Age’ - jameslafond.com

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(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart