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Some countries reap what they sow.

There is no example more certain of this than the drug war about to hit the United States. This country is the world's number one customer for all kinds of illegal drugs; it is the market that makes drug lords and their terrible influence possible in Iberian America. The US is also the birthplace of the "drug culture" that got the market going in the first place, sustains it and has spread it all over the world.  Despite the self-righteous posturing of North American politicians, "sex, drugs and rock'n roll" are proclaimed in all its mass media, an almost unchallenged facet of Anglo-American culture, which all others must imitate in order to have the slightest hope of being cool. 

Yet for decades, the tragedy of violence and social destruction in Hispanic America caused by the organisations that supply the US market have been a standing joke north of the Rio Grande. They have simply associated this with their well-known prejudice that Iberian Americans are incapable of orderly society and that this chaos is simply their way of life. But this is just another example of the disorder promoted by US influence in Iberian America since the breaking up of the Viceroyalties into nineteen countries made interference easy for outsiders. But now joke is on those who have been laughing for so long.

The drug war moves north.

A massive change is under way within the United States. For the first  time, the drug cartels (huge organisations equipped with small armies and more ruthless if possible than Daesh) have begun to move from merely supplying the US criminals who used to be in  charge of distribution within the country to directly distributing the drugs themselves. This means an essential leap in the size and organisation of US gangs - which will now be firmly controlled from without the country. The effects will be immediate (and have already begun) - a sudden rise in the number and ferocity of killings as cartels fight  for control of the market in all US cities.

There is very little the US government can do about this. Despite Trump's rhetoric on deporting criminals, not much more can be done than was already being done. The measures his government has taken targeting (or at least creating the perception of targeting) harmless  central Americans there for work will work wonders for marginalisation of all Hispanics,  gang recruitment and loss of government control within large swathes of the US. If the war in Mexico caused by this terrible industry is anything to go  by, the US is in for a long-term conflict that will lead to many things.  

This is a blog dedicated to the society of the Baroque Order. The industry serviced by the drug cartels has nothing to do with this society. Indeed, it is entirely sustained by its main competitor, bourgeois society. The conflict which awaits the United States is directly caused by its own social malaise and the obsession of its political and economic system to interfere in Iberian America. The globalisation represented by bourgeois society, the essential example of which is the United States, only triumphed by defeating and dominating the earlier globalisation which was baroque society. It seems that an essential precursor to the reestablishment of Baroque globalisation and modernity is the demise  of that of the US. The drug war is an entirely negative and horrendous business that will leave the United States in a redimensioned and difficult to recognise condition for which it will have nobody but itself to blame.

The Redimensioning of Anglosphere continues apace with Brexit.

Brexit is now finally in progress, making clear the smaller dimensions of England in Europe and the world. To the profound shock of Anglospherists, the Europeans have unanimously called their bluff and on the question of Gibraltar, given Spain an effective right of veto over future relations with the EU. In addition, the EU has made it clear that Northern Ireland could enter the EU if it united with the rest of the country. These matters were just the icing on the cake for the UK, after it had been told there would be no trade deal until Europe's stipulations were met. This is not petulance. It is Europe clearly stating what the relations of power on this continent are now.

It comes at a time when the UK economy has begun to suffer under the effects of Brexit. These problems will continue, leading to increased poverty and provincialisation for the UK. The attitude of most Europeans is that while the UK is not hated, it has played arrogant games and caused tragedies elsewhere for centuries. The fact that it has now lost even the appearance of grandeur leads to no tears. The decline of the English-speaking countries around the Atlantic does not mean greatness for Europe (itself in the thrall of its own bourgeois elite and dominated by their ideologies), but it is a symbolic and real change in the world that must lead to the resurgence of Baroque society.

The French Elections.

The first round of voting gave Marine Le Pen more or less the vote that was expected. All opinion polls have indicated the near impossibility of her winning the second round and becoming President. However, unlike 2002, where the political establishment united to neutralise her father, circumstances are very different. Emmanuel Macron is a poor candidate, and even more bizarre than Hillary Clinton. In addition, Melenchon, the leader of the main leftist formation, has refused to call for a vote for Macron. Le Pen has also received the support of Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (who was eliminated in the first round with 5% of the vote). The Pope refuses to pronounce on the vote and the French Bishops' Conference, which in 2002 presented a united front against Jean-Marie Le Pen, gives no indication this time of what it considers  the moral choice to be. It is a qualitative leap towards respectability for Le Pen. Polls now show her support rising against that of her opponent. Her defeat, while probable, is no longer certain.

There are two possible outcomes. While Macron's win will mean more of the same for France and Europe, a Le Pen presidency would not change things in the ways many expect. For one thing, her program is not particularly radical. Even the question of the EU and the Euro, as her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen indicated,  is not set in stone, and any change would require a process of years to eventuate. Le Pen, even after the upcoming legislative elections, will have a small minority of Deputies to support her and may well find that, as with the Trump presidency, the change, while not merely cosmetic, would have mainly symbolic value and lead to resentment and anger from ethnic minorities. For France, it would represent the start of a long and serious crisis, because the National Front would be unable to implement most of its rather tame policies, while ethnic minorities, the extreme left, and the self-righteous liberal bourgeoisie could make governability a problem.

The Islamist Attacks in France. Bourgeois Society has no Reply.

 The Baroque Order lost its fight for hegemony by the start of the eighteenth-century. The principal reason for this was its failure to incorporate France. This was partly due to the accidents of dynastic politics and partly because of the French monarchy's refusal to reject the Renaissance, preferring instead to continue in the same vein with the ideological developments of Bodin and Montesquieu, who laid the basis for the modern bourgeois state and social order. France in the sixteenth and seventeenth  centuries took the path of state sovereignty and national advancement at the expense of defending the continent from its enemies. It could be said that the French state did fairly well out this policy - the "hexagon" got a little bigger - but at what price for Europe!

The Islamist challenge (France now contains eight or nine million inhabitants of this origin) means that the French must wake up to their true identity as Europeans belonging to its traditional Christian civilization, or disappear trying to resurrect some new version of the Gaullist national state.

France is at the heart of Europe and we all wish to see it rediscover its roots. To do this it must never look for inspiration to its history or thought over the last 550 years. Only then can France regain its rightful place in Europe. But five hundred and fifty years is indeed a long time. To the legitimate question of how the French are to act in the modern world in which their action has been so equivocal until now, we must answer: look to the first modern and global civilization, the Baroque Order.

Going back to a slightly older stage of the bourgeois state is no solution. A Europe of Gaullist nation states may seem attractive to some when confronted with today's degenerate globalist culture. But the history of Europe demonstrates that no sooner does the bourgeois national state arrive on the scene than it begins conflicts with its neighbors or is itself torn  apart by the pretensions of subnational groups aspiring to create yet more nation states. This is the inescapable logic of all bourgeois nationalism.

The Baroque order's political and social realities offers the solution. It was never one political system; it was a series of different political and social realities united only by sharing a common head of state, or one related or allied to him. Lacking any ideological pretensions, the Hispanic world which was the leading component of the Baroque Order, was known simply as The Monarchy.  The unity of civilization between these states was of course also undeniable. This arrangement worked incredibly well under determined external attack, which had little effect on its hegemony for the first hundred and fifty years.

Europe needs to preserve national and regional historical identities but will not achieve this through the chauvinist nationalist inventions of bourgeois society.  "Anglosphere" is increasingly consigned to irrelevance and bourgeois European society will now disappear by recovering the Christian society it replaced or disappear before the threat of Islamism, which will permit no other choices. Europe is firmly back on the path to the pre-Westphalian seventeenth century reality, where only the Baroque Order can provide the answer. This time, France will not be able to choose   the lonely path of perceived national importance, but will join Europe in helping it defeat those same challenges the Baroque Order emerged to fight: the Renaissance; bourgeois society, Islamism.

Brexit - A Great Advance for the Baroque Order

The bourgeois system which we resist  has always consisted of two branches corresponding to the two streams of thought issuing from the Enlightenment. The first, supposedly rationalist, was the French Revolution and the modern regimes inspired by it (various continental European systems for example). The second was the conservative romanticist stream, the main representative of which today is sometimes called "Anglosphere". Let there be no doubt: both branches have been deadly enemies of the Baroque Order. If the France of Napoleon helped destroy Genoa and Venice, Britain helped destroy the Kingdom of Naples. The United States has been an implacable enemy of the traditional order in all of Iberian America and the Philippines.

Europe and the Mediterranean is the centre of the world and what happens in the European Union is of vital importance. The departure of the United Kingdom drastically limits its ability and that of the United States to influence the continent. This event is particularly significant given the very possible emergence of a more isolationist and terminally divided United States in the event of a Trump presidency. We have no liking for the bourgeois secularist culture that dominates countries like France. However there is no doubt that "Anglosphere" and all that comes with it had become increasingly dominant in Europe. What 2016 has brought to both the UK and the US has begun the process of redimensioning "Anglosphere" into irrelevance. With the decline of UK/US political/cultural presence, the stop to the growth of English as a lingua franca and the distancing from Europe of a culture with strong anti-Catholic prejudices, Europe has a chance.

The next battleground is France itself. The Islamist challenge in that country will prove to the French that the Enlightenment and Renaissance basis of their current political culture is an abject failure in meeting that challenge.

Trump Sets Loose the Hispanic Phenomenon.

The end of the coexistence / integration.

Donald Trump's campaign may not bring him to the presidency but the effects are the same. It will end attempts to assimilate the 60 million Hispanics living in the US. This figure is huge and has changed the demographics of many regions, especially those that historically belonged to Hispanic civilization. However, there is a high risk that the generations who were born there lose their culture like African Americans - people deprived of their own culture and ending up as second class citizens forever. We are only at the beginning of the process but it is very clear that the rancor Trump's campaign has started will continue until it shatters once and for all the illusion that the US is not an anti-Hispanic society.

Three possible reactions.

Hispanics can react in three ways. (A) A very small percentage will choose complete assimilation (indeed have already done so), their Hispanic origin present only as folkloric detail without influence on culture or ideas - and here we have the examples of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. (B) Opting for the Democratic Party and its vision of national identity. The problem is that this identity (a nation of minorities united by liberalism) is only rhetoric and will not work as Anglos begin to make clear their true stance toward Hispanics. This position has always been radically negative.
(C) To recognize themselves as members of another civilization and rightful owners of much of the current USA.
 

Until now, US Hispanics have lacked unity and awareness of their global identity. The fact that many Hispanic people are mixed together, plus a new element - the undisguised contempt of Anglos represented by Trump, will allow them to feel their essential unity. Anglos are now a minority in states like California and New Mexico, where Hispanics are close to an absolute majority, and  very much the majority among young people and workers.

A Trump presidency - Retirement of Globocop?

Despite his rhetoric, Donald Trump has plenty of common sense in terms of foreign policy. Unlike Bush and Clinton who brought the useless wars the consequences of which we still suffer, Trump wants fewer adventures abroad. In addition, it is clear that internal problems resulting from his anti-Hispanic policies, and his ideas of economic retreat concerning China, will produce a US state much less present in world affairs.

 This would mean in effect the retirement of the post-Westphalian order's enforcer and is therefore beneficial to the world. However, the return of the great civilizations to prominence does not imply a more comfortable world. Economies will suffer disorders as a result of the weakening of the globalist model. Baroque civilization has been marginalized for three centuries by nationalism and "market forces". The decline of the post-Westphalian system is not just an opportunity for the revival of our  civilization; we have no choice: on the horizon are antagonistic civilizations that must be contained if we are to survive.

The impact of the emergence of the Hispanic phenomenon in the US.

As a result of the campaign of exclusion they will recognize themselves as Hispanics above all else.Trump might not be elected perhaps, but will have done a huge favor to the Hispanic 20% of the US population that has not been able or willing to see its essential unity.
 It is also a favor to the Hispanic world in general,  consumed as it has been by the divisions caused by nationalism and bourgeois ideologies.

 

Scottish independence will come.

Whatever the results of the Referendum this Thursday, the kingdom of Scotland will once again regain its independence.  Unlike some of the fictitious nations claiming independence today in Europe, Scotland is a historical entity and people, with centuries of independent life before being forced into union with England.

The problem with this union is not only to do with its brutality and cultural genocide, but the fact that it signified for Scotland subjection to the bourgeois values dominant in early eighteenth-century England. Of course, the campaign for independence is dominated by the soft left, itself a representative of bourgeois ideology, but no one is in any doubt: Scottish separation will be a blow to the British establishment, still a force in the bourgeois world which we combat. oligarchy

Dangerous Precedent with creation of an Islamic state in the Philippines. 25-3-14

On the 27th of March, the Philippine government will sign a deal with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.  The agreement provides for an autonomous Islamic region on the Island of Mindanao in return for the MILF laying down its weapons.  This formula has been tried several times already. Each time the violent Islamic organisations split and new or rival organisations continued the war.  It is an old strategy: they can claim to be seeking peace (and obtain the advantages that come with government) and continue the war at the same time.The agreement provides for an Islamic statelet called the Bangsamoro. It will contain about 15% of the territory and a little less than 15% of the population of the Island of Mindanao. The Moro National Liberation Front has vowed to reject the agreement and continue fighting. The MNLF wants the entire island (home to more than 20 million Filipinos), as well as Sarawak and North Borneo.

Actually, the Philippines have come a long way since the arrival of the Spanish brought them into the Baroque world. In the early 16th- century, Mindanao was firmly under the control of Muslims, and even Manila itself had recently come under the rule of an Islamic sultanate. The Spanisah arrived just in time to prevent the Philippines from becoming an Islamic country. This nation is strategic and very important to the world. At this precise point, the Western, Christian world in its baroque form forms as wedge that prevents further expansion of both the Islamic and Chinese civilisations. Establishing a bridgehead at about this point was behind the strategy of the Catholic Monarchs Isabel and Fernando in sending off the Columbus expedition. They wished to encircle the Islamic world that had surrounded Europe itself for so long, and begin the task of evangelising Asia. The project succeeded dramatically although it had to wait another thirty years of so after Columbus. 

Geopolitically, the Philippines does not belong in its present alliance with the US (which has behaved as the worst enemy of filipino culture and interests), nor should it fall under the influence of China, or suffer the return of Islamic rule, which was been removed from its islands with so much difficulty. This people of one hundred million was formed in and lived for centuries in a baroque civilisation which gave it its very being, and its meaning in the eyes of the world. Only in this period did the Filipino people know peace and unity.

The Philippines are a vital part of the Baroque world today. They must continue to resist both Islamic and Chinese expansion. They must also begin to recover from the century of North American domination that has damaged them culturally. The Philippines are should not submit to Chinese influence nor allow the return of the Islamic rule which was destroyed in these islands with so much hardship. The Philippines are the western shore of that baroque ocean of the future which is the Pacific.

The Cathedral of Cordoba is not a Mosque     27/2/14

The recent attempts by the socialist junta of Andalucia to place doubt over the ownership of the Cathedral of the city of Cordoba fool nobody. The excuse is that it is a cultural monument and should belong to the state. We all know that the ultimate intention is to bring back Islamic worship to the building. The Cathedral of Cordoba has been owned and administed by the Church for 800 years. Before that it had been a mosque for four centuries. However, before that it had been a church for even longer.

The Junta now states that it is not questioning the legal ownership, but this just another in a long list of attempts to attack the Christian heritage of Andalucia. A few years ago, 100 muslims from Austria attempted to hold a religious ceremony in the Cathedral and were thrown out when guards intervened. However, this did not happen until there had been a brawl during which at least one knife was used. The Bishop of Cordoba will not permit muslims to use even a corner of our Cathedral for Islamic worship. He is right.