Israel Shamir – The Unz Review Feb 21, 2020
What a wonderful enchanted life we boomers have had! Living was easy, accommodation plentiful and inexpensive, salaries were high, girls willing. The world was offered to us like a heap of pearl oysters on the silver tray. We could travel, change our countries and jobs as we like, we could fight for justice and mercy for others, we could seek our own way to God. It was great to be born after the war.
You won’t believe it, the children of latter (or earlier) generations, that life could be so splendid. We could buy a two-bedroom maisonette in Kensington on my junior BBC journalist salary. We could cross Africa and climb Kilimanjaro, trek Nepal, report on wars, go to Paris for weekend.
And the world was full of variety; not the sickening fake diversity of living next door to a black, a Chinese and an Indian who shop in the same supermarket and watch the same Hollywood movies you do; but real variety of England being English and Japan being Japanese. In London of late sixties-early seventies, pubs served warm real ale, British grey sausages and steak-and-kidney pie; Ty-Foo tea at five o’clock; we could smoke at the table; we could jump on and off open double-deckers; seat belts were unheard-of. Waitresses in greasy spoon cafes called me “luv”. In Kyoto, women went around in kimono; and men spent long nights drinking sake; Noh and Sakura Viewing were popular. Sweden was unashamedly blond, and topless Nordic maidens suntanned and splashed in the cool lakes.
Israel was a poor struggling country of suntanned boys and girls in keffiyeh. We were proud of our army service and of growing wheat in the kibbutz; while Arabs were noble peasants, and lived in beautiful old houses. Israelis had a good reputation those days as tireless trekkers. “White hunters”, we called ourselves after Hemingway’s African stories.
(All that is gone. Recently I could not find a single English pub in London; they served wine and European fare. No kimonoed lady was sighted in Kyoto. Swedish girls donned bra as the immigrants stared too intensely. Israelis became fat and insolent. As for smoke, you just may not smoke anywhere, you mayn’t drink and drive, and the damn belts became compulsory even in the buses.)
Our generation was more sophisticated than the preceding one. We forbade forbidding in 1968. We stopped the Vietnam War. We ended race discrimination. Gays danced and didn’t think of marriage – they added an exotic element to the fabric of life, and so did foreigners who were scarce even in London and Paris. I was such a rare bird, mixing with other writers in Parisian cafes. Workers were invariably local and native, and so was food and drink.
Art of cinema had flourished. The best films were made for us by Bergman and Bunuel, Godard and Oshima. We witnessed the Space Race of two superpowers and thought we shall land on Mars. Social optimism was endless, we were sure our tomorrow would be better than our present.
We had it so good! It is really pity that the world we pass to our children and grandchildren is not that wonderful, quite crowded and over-regulated. Perhaps our life was good because we came to the world freshly fertilised by millions of dead men, after the great calamity of the World War. The historians say that Europe after the Black Death was also a wonderful place. We feel it, even if we do not dare to say it explicitly, but this is a partial explanation of mankind courting Armageddon.
The new Chinese virus is an example. It has mortality rate of 2 p.c. and it is not much. It seems that children and Europeans do not die of it, even if they get infected. So, a nasty but not dreadfully nasty kind of flu. Every flu virus now at large in the US kills many times more people. American swine flu with its billion infected and hundreds of thousands dead in 2009 looks like a mountain next to the pea of coronavirus. Perhaps it was a lab-crafted bio-weapon, but then it is not especially effective one, unless its nastiness will become apparent with years.
And still the hype is immense. Every case of this super-flu is treated by media as an outbreak of bubonic plague. In Israel, there are zero cases of the new virus, but all news begin with the reports on its progress. In Russia, zero cases; rather, two Chinese tourists were sick and recovered. Though Russia has much less virus-induced hysteria than the West; and President Putin expressed his support of the Chinese people, and they are grateful for his solicitude, but even Russia closed its borders to Chinese tourists unless in transit. Probably Putin was hesitant to risk even a few (unavoidable) deaths that his enemies would put on his account.
Yes, it is an attack on China. I see it had been enlarged upon by the usual suspects who wrote about Uygur Holocaust and Hong Kong freedom fighters. But the Chinese did put us on high alert by their unusual prevention measures.
There is an assisting factor. We are waiting for Apocalypse, for Zombie Invasion, for nuclear war, for climate disaster – not in fear but in anticipation like an exhausted debtor waits for an enemy strike that will kill him and his relentless creditor alike. We are debtors, indebted and assailed by the state and by companies. Since 1789, Europeans haven’t been this powerless. We can’t survive without state support, can’t get affordable medical care or burial unless we are within the system. Any official may do with us whatever he feels. More and more often, they demand social security and pension payments to be returned to the state for few years back retroactively, if they deem the debtor’s case was dubious. In the US, welfare shrinks, so do good jobs, but student loans grow.
We face bleak tomorrow. AI will send millions to the dole, if the dole would still be available. The billionaires will flourish as in the Ancien Régime. Whoever is outraged by the excesses of the French and Russian revolutions and ascribed them to the Freemasons and Jews, will have a chance to judge for oneself, as the pre-Revolutionary regime is likely to return. Democracy won’t survive; we won’t survive unless willing to be slaves. Why don’t the Europeans breed to survive, you ask? Does it make sense to survive, that is the question.
If so many people subconsciously want the new great war to come, it will come, if St Greta Thunberg and her green fighters won’t destroy our civilisation first. Indeed this Soros-sponsored movement is the single biggest threat to our mental and physical health. When they will have their way, we shall be rolled back into Stone Age.
It would be less traumatic to go back to some features tested in our boomers’ youth. Let people hope for better future, as good as our past was. And for that:
1. Make housing affordable. Even The Economist, a Thatcherist British magazine, suggests that. For that purpose, make landlordism painfully unprofitable. Tax the rent to utmost and forbid them to evict non-paying tenants. Tax the vacant houses. This was practiced by the British Labour in 1960s with great success, and owners-occupiers replaced the landlords. It would be considered anti-Semitic, granted, but what’s wrong with some practical anti-Semitism?
2. Return to the draft in the armed forces. War is too important to outsource. It is exciting for a young man to undertake military service. A man who never served in the army may become a John Bolton, a cruel chickenhawk, and send others to war. A man who served can become John F. Kennedy and strive for peace. There is no anti-war movement in the US for there is no draft. Young Americans do not care about endless wars in Afghanistan and Syria because they are not called to fight and die there. Draft would restore responsible military policy.
3. Make things to last. A car may serve for thirty years, properly attended to. IPhone has been fined for slowing down old models; this is a good example. Make everything repairable. Make obsolete the term “obsolete”.
4. Encourage craftsmanship instead of mass production; keep working men’s salaries high; limit mass migration and massive food import. Undo mass tourism.
5. If you want more, teach children that greed is worse than racism. Make financiers miserable. They should not earn more than a professional worker. Tax them hard, not so much for redistribution purposes but in order to save these dynamic people from greed-worship and direct them into doing useful things, like Henry Ford, Walt Disney and our own Ron Unz did. It is not a coincidence that these men had their misgivings about traditional Jewish love for money.
The lost paradise of boomers’ young years, if not our youth, can be regained. We had it very good, so can you!
This article was first published at The Unz Review
Isn’t Shamir’s triumphant article published too quickly?
A century ago, after Bolshevik revolution Jews believed that everything was over. NWO at the gates. They controlled the West with capitalism and Russia with communism.
Joseph Stalin and his concept of “socialism in one state” destroyed their plans for world revolution.
After WW2 they also believed that they had conquered the world. Capitalism for the West and communism for the East. Soviet Union on knees. All the world in the iron grip of dialectics. In Bretton Woods they designed one world currency created out of thin air by Fed.
Joseph Stalin rebelled again and created debt-free money in Soviet Block. They murdered him in 1953 but could not unite the world.
And now Shamir is telling us that the game is over. Over? We’ll see.
Shamir’s solutions are great and they are also the first steps in our survival as a civilization. However, to make any of them work we have to give up our idolatry to money and to those who wield it to control us in everything we do. Hard to do for all the pampered, self-serving boomers who sold out long ago and have completely squandered every hard-won principle of decency, good will, and trust of Western civilization in just a few decades.
Small is beautiful. Less is more. Buy local. Fix it.
However, to make anything work again, we also have to rebuild our religious infrastructures for spiritual ends being more important than material ones, and to revitalize our moral standards to combat all evils, to build trust, and to protect and sustain family life to propagate well-adjusted children.
We must enact laws for radical trust busting to prosecute monopolies and chains for unfair business practices. We must protect small businesses and local industries.
As for the draft – no half measures or political correctness please. We must make it mandatory that every young male has to spend at least two years in the military service of his nation – the purpose being to make “men” out of them and to give the character teaching them duty, courage, virtue, honor, and sacrifice. As for women, real women want real and responsible men, not boys. We must prosecute and incarcerate anyone in government, private enterprise, or the educational system diverting women from their natural inclinations to have happy stable natural marriages and children.
Exceptional!!! Today is a good day to be a visitor at The Truthseeker.
Can’t believe anyone on here would advocate a draft? If you can’t have dominion over your own life, you have nothing. Forget free speech or private property, not being able to to forgo being asked to sacrifice your life for political elites is insane. It won’t matter anyway in a decade as hi-tech will be doing all the killing so it’s a moot point. Just can’t believe there are people who want it, especially knowing that wars are all a creation of the Phoenician Navy.
@ Bryan
I don’t find Shamir a Messiah but I believe he is right. Draft is a good idea.
You NEVER have a dominion over your life. Do you believe in “liberal values”?
You never have such a dominion, society is like industrial husbandry of cattle, pigs or poultry. All your living experience depends on the will of “reptilians”.
Draft still works in Russia or Belarus and other countries in the region (eg. Judeonazi Ukraine). Shamir is right, every man should have a military experience. Good for individual consciousness and social psyche. Military transforms boys into men.
In the West men did not experience such transformation and you have societies of faggots. Shamir is probably right saying that reptilians liquidated draft in order to reduce anti-war protests. Mercenaries do not complain, they may die and this is only monetary transaction. Money for life. Disguisting. Money for life, triumph of Judaism.
I would add one more to Israel Shamir’s list:-
Make all government as local as possible. That would include raisng and spending parish taxes. The Parish Council is the most efficient and honest level of government in Britain. The biger government bodies are, the further from the orcinary people they get. The welfare fraud that we all see every day in Britain would be immediately stopped if it were up to the Parish Council.
No organization is 100% efficient, but in general I have found that the bigger the organization the greater the waste.
There are other alternatives to a draft, for instance, a larger financial incentive to
service. Much could be done to make it more desirable, probably eliminating petty
wars, conflicts for financial gain, GOINGFORTWENTYSTAN and such…
But starting with totally insane defense budgets – THAT for starters would do much more
than madatory service which WILL be abused by elite chikinhawks…
Re the draft: I lucked into never having to even register (born between 56 & 60.)
The ONLY thing that STOPPED Vietnam was the draft applying to parents of kids who decided to ‘look at’ what their country was doing. (Also, have conscientious objectors – upon mere declaration – be directed towards working to fix the USA’s infrastructure.)
People are too self-interested and not-future looking, that the current best way to awaken them is to draft everyone! There’ve been countless articles discussing how if the draft was still in effect, we’d have never invaded the ME and I believe it.