The Great Genetic Sort: Why They've Lied To You About Ukraine
Is Zelensky Churchill, Captain Ukraine, ... or the world's largest captor?
It’s hard to know where to begin in discussing Ukraine but let us consider that it is now back to blood.
I’ve come more or less to view this as the “Great Genetic Sort.”
On some level this phenomenon is easy to understand. This is genetic group selection and there’s safety in numbers. You prefer being with people like yourself and best of all — at least for most of us — is family. A clan and then a race is simply an extension of a family. Be wary of those who would seek to undermine this natural tendency, especially when they do things like favor lockdowns.
We see this phenomenon everywhere. It’s a paradox of the modern age. You can pick and choose what you like of globalization but ultimately you prefer those like your yourself.
Personality traits are also highly heritable and like my forefathers before me I love a good adventure where I can learn on the frontier. As descendants of the explorers who settled the North American continent, I’m very comfortable going and living in the remote parts of the American Empire. I’ve lived in areas that were majority Asian — San Gabriel Valley — or majority Hispanic or black and never really thought too much about it. When I wanted to be among other white American nerds I simply drove to where they were, or spent a lot of time on the Internet.
It is true that you tend to hunker down in more diverse areas as Harvard professor Sam Huntington once observed but I, introverted, never needed much of an excuse to stay home, reading and listening to classical music — though you don’t blast it as loud when you’re in the ghetto and it is wise to familiarize yourself with firearms lest your home be a target.
When I traveled abroad — Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia — I always believed that if I got into trouble that the U.S. Army (or Navy SEALs) would come to my rescue. This was perhaps a naive estimation but I don’t think it’s unique to me. Call it American privilege. The American Empire looks out for its own. And if not them, then perhaps their allies. Racially diverse areas work the same sort of way. If I get into trouble in the United States — a riot or a flood — I expect the police or National Guard to show up to rescue me. Barring that, I hope for a citizen militia of my fellow Americans assembling together until help could arrive. Chances are I’d have help. After all there are 3.2 million Americans abroad with more than 1.5 million Americans living in Mexico alone. If you want a sense of what an organized bunch of Americans can do look at the history of Hawaii or Texas.
Naturally being a nominal part of the American empire is good for living standards. Just ask Puerto Rico.
As the violence accelerates in Latin America we might wonder what could happen should we allow things to get out of hand. One could easily imagine a gangster/oligarch/cartel boss coming to power in Mexico and targeting the expats in Mexico to expropriate their wealth. In the past the U.S. military has been dispatched to quell violence south of the border. Dwight Morrow was dispatched by Calvin Coolidge to keep the U.S. out of a war with Mexico in the 1920s. (Linden Blue Sr., one of the founders of General Atomics, once asked me what I thought about the feasibility of using Predator drones to target cartel members. I replied that I thought synthetic aperture radar and facial recognition would do the trick.)
I believe in the long arm of Uncle Sam. That may well prove ultimately to be a fatal gamble but it is a wager I’d place.
But what if I called and they didn’t answer? Worse yet, what if I called and they couldn’t answer?
That, it seems to me, is what’s happening in Ukraine where Russians are killed and where roving oligarch-backed militias are looting Ukraine and have even taken over the Zelensky-backed government.
Far from working toward a peaceful outcome, Western media have acerbated the conflict by portraying Putin as insane and Zelensky as a sort of savior.
My friend (and defense contractor) Palmer Luckey posted this meme.
What if I told you that Zelensky was in fact a villain?
And what if Palmer Luckey’s defense company, Anduril, backed ultimately as it is by Chinese cash through some of its investors, was making the problem way worse?
Affirmative Action and Empire
Running an empire is hard work. Indeed, having read Seeing Like A State, I’ve more or less concluded that the field of statistics itself is a way for the state to access its resources.
We focus often on the natural resources of a country — how much oil, rare earths, etc. — but the most important resource for any state are its people. But who are the people? That remains an elusive question, especially in a multiracial, multiethnic empire with far flung colonies.
Empires tend to favor meritocracies to identify the talented and direct their attention to the service of the empire. If they don’t enlist what W. E. B. DuBois called "the talented tenth” of the smaller ethnic groups, they run the risk that the empire itself will be overthrow by these entities who have no choice but to topple the country altogether.
I think this deep state explanation explains much of the enduring significance of affirmative action and why Asian-Americans will ultimately lose their court challenges in the United States. Raisons d’état explain why the state wants a multiracial multiethnic elite class. It’s easier to police the hinterlands that way.
Beijing, Washington, and Moscow all suck up resources. Metropoles like to bring the smart people to the imperial capital and press them into the service of the state.
To solve the issue of imperial governance you can think of three models:
Nationalities.
This policy remained how the Soviet Union runs affairs. To my mind the best introduction on this topic is Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (2001).
Essentially the Russians pioneered dealing with these ethnic groups and trying to accommodate them into the empire. This, in part, why the Russian empire is now a federation. Ultimately it grew to be too much and as the state got weaker — thanks in part to declining oil revenues — these nationalities could be targeted by the US and China and turned into fully independent states.
Constructs. Doesn’t it seem odd to you that some people just emerge in public life? I’m thinking of AOC, of course, but also Barack Obama or Bill Clinton or even J.D. Vance.
America and the British Empire deploy this approach. You might consider this the defining feature of the modern age. Many an intelligence operative abroad will tell you how one of the best ways to recruit an asset is to offer his children admission to a top flight academic institution.
This construct approach is ultimately why so many foreigners are admitted to elite institutions as detailed in Daniel Golden’s very good book, Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities (2017).
Roman Polanksi’s film, The Ghost Writer (2010), is a roman à clef about Tony Blair’s wife, who was likely recruited by CIA whilst at college.
Even Harry Potter, with its emphasis on the Sorting Hat, is itself an op of sorts. One can only imagine the CIA — or better yet, Mi6 — delighting in the power of seeing within the souls of those who wear a funny hat. Who knows, they might already have it! Ultimately genetics itself will help with this project. “Being all you can be” requires an understanding of your abilities and that implies if not a mastery of genetics than at least an understanding. The Russians are doing it.
Assimilationists (or even eliminationist) with special administrative zones. Think Bantustans or Native American reservations but with Chinese characteristics.
It’s no secret that the Chinese prefer to rule with an iron fist and a smile. They’ve gone about eliminating or enslaving those groups who won’t join in to their empire. They are committed to “erasing ethnic identity” and they have done quite a good job of it. Their commitment to genetics is world class and may soon become first class if we don’t do what we can to preempt it or catch up. Why the Chinese even own 23andMe and Blackstone-backed Ancestry DNA! Their CEOs show the commitment. (Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein were both investors in 23andMe.)
A report out of Xijiang from a few years back gives you an understanding of how the Chinese control those nationalities not under their control — through technology. One wonders if they will expand the Chinese social credit score to the whole earth and if the Max Levchin-backed “Buy Now, Pay Later” approach might be the precursor. Might we then build our own to check them?
Beware of the Balaji Srinivasan or Patri Friedmans of the world who want these sorts of small nations proliferating. No sooner has a special administered region been tried than it comes under the domination of Chinese triad or governmental control. Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore… the list goes on.
This model is ultimately preferred by the Chinese who have elected to enslave the Uighurs. If I had to bet, I’d bet on the Chinese model. After all, isn’t the default setting of the human race Han Chinese?
Weak states still have need of extracting and dealing with the affairs of running a state and so they create oligarchs who are entrusted with handling these matters.
Absolute power, especially over an aluminum mine, can lead to absolute corruption and so ultimately the oligarch has both the inclination and the interest in depositing his ill gotten gain in the West where it might ostensibly be kept safe from expropriation. What’s happening now is that the various deep states of the world are getting together and picking and choosing whose assets get taken and under what pretext.
You can judge the power of a state to the extent that its oligarchs toe to the Party line. Jack Ma now behaves himself and Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, has the contracts for the CIA. The US deep state ultimately always must turn the companies with the greatest access to information and natural resources and that is, indeed, what’s happening now.
A state whose oligarchs are given free rein isn’t a state at all but a mobocracy.
Why Putin Has To Protect The Russians Wherever They Are
Russia under Putin is a revisionist power. By that, I mean he wants to revise how business is done in the world. To do that, though, he has to show some restraint. Alas, he can show no restraint in the defense of the Russians not in Russia, especially in the areas where they constitute a majority.
Had you considered this frame you’d understand exactly what Putin is doing.
A useful Twitter thread explains the matters before us in ways that are obvious once you consider them.
States naturally resist ceding territory because they may well be punished by their domestic constituencies. At least in theory. But weak states suffer what they must.
But might some local elites prefer Russian hegemony to their local mobbed up “leaders”? Consider that the average Russian is far richer than the average Belarussian, Ukrainian, or Moldovan.
Consider being ethnically Russian in Moldova or Ukraine and knowing that your cousins, some of whom are no doubt less enterprising than you or your ancestors, live richer lives than you do simply because they are a part of Mother Russia. Wouldn’t you naturally want to join the old country?
After all, Crimea was annexed and life has seemingly gotten better for them once the Russians restored the water.
And wouldn’t the Russian people prefer an orderly government to the local militias funded by Ukrainian Jewish oligarchs?
Is Putin right that there is a communist and Nazi groups terrorizing ethnic Russians?
Well, let’s look at the sources.
This is, of course, what Putin is counting on. That those who are closest to the problem will prefer his rule over the local mobsters.
The disturbing question that linger is whether or not he’s right. We can’t consider that question because to do that would be to suggest that we might have been wrong about how we’ve handled matters worldwide. It might even force us to think seriously about matters we had previously and wrongly considered settled.
Or to consider how often we are lied to. A friend at the FBI tells me that many of the Bureau’s top Ukrainian sources are essentially unusable now because they’ve been told to promote the propaganda.
The first place to go to get a sense of these matters is the dissident and deep state publications. Among my favorites are Unz.com (largely Russophilic), The New York Review of Books (American deep state), and Seymour Hersh (who acts as a kind of limited hangout betwixt Russia and the US deep state).
Avoid the middle tier as they have no interest in anything but propaganda. Monitor the Chinese, Russian, and Anglosphere media instead as they can be somewhat dispassionate. This means understanding that neither CNN nor Fox nor NBC can be trusted. Anything that elicits an emotional response is to be distrusted and anyone who suddenly became an expert ought to be looked at askance.
Remember that Zelensky is an actor who rose to power through his ties to a Ukrainian oligarch. He is not an honest broker. He is a pay to say sort of guy and now he’s been cast into the role of a lifetime. That is, if he’s not assassinated.
Real life isn’t a Hollywood screen play and all lives are lived in media res.
Recall that the line between prostitute and actor is a relatively thin one and that it was nonexistent until recently. Bollywood is historically quite mobbed up. So, too, was Hollywood, at least until the deep state project of Netflix and Amazon came in and conquered it. (Have you explored the deep state ties of Netflix? You really ought to!)
To some extent stagecraft is statecraft but eventually you have to deliver. Take it from me: You can have some great social media game but if you’re too good they’ll kick you off.
There is another way of talking about this — Russia could be beginning the process of becoming a strong state again by dictating matters outside of its borders. Like America, it, too, wants to limit other states from acquiring nuclear weapons, especially when those states threaten its people or are weak states.
We should defend the Russian principle which makes nation states responsible for the conduct of their oligarchs. But we should extend that to the Russian oligarchs too and perhaps also to American ones as well.
Rather than force them to pay a wealth tax as Elizabeth Warren wants, we should endeavor to have them invest in making life better in America.
Affirmative action makes sense in this way and has been loved with for a long time. But why the new onslaught of woke stuff? It seems almost an accident that got out of hand—it must be annoying to people in power. And why conquer Hollywood? (Owned by China?)