The Brawl that Wasn’t
A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. Mark Twain
Sometime a bit over a year ago, I came across an article describing a big brawl that occurred in, of all places, Murmansk, way north in Russia. The story, in the Daily Caller, by one Jacob Boesson, is entitled: Refugees Go Clubbing In Russia, Harass Girls, Wake Up In Hospital The Next Morning. The story is dated February 4, 2016, but the events described would have taken place on the previous weekend, on Friday 29 January.
“A group of 51 refugees were brutally assaulted outside a night club in Murmansk, Russia, after they groped and molested women at a night club Saturday.”
The story goes on to claim that some of the refugees, eighteen of them, were beaten so badly that they were hospitalized. Well, I read a lot of stuff on any given day, both in the mainstream and alternative media, and I increasingly have a pretty skeptical attitude towards most of it. I was aware from the start that this story gave off a funny smell. The article contains no photographs or video of the (alleged) event and also does not reference any of the Russian news media, which would presumably have been the first ones to report the incident.
Just for starters, let’s consider the setting: Murmansk, Russia. Here:
A bit of googling confirmed a suspicion that I already held: Murmansk is an extremely cold place — especially in January, especially at night, and especially for somebody who is from a Mediterranean country. Perhaps that alone is not an utterly decisive consideration, but I already had some difficulty visualizing this story. Seeing just how insanely cold Murmansk would be for a Middle Easterner, I just figure that if they had some warm place to stay, they would not venture outside. But no, they all decide to go out and do some “clubbing”. Well, who knows? Maybe they all had arctic parkas that they bought in the Damascus Souq before embarking on their journey north.
So there they were, fifty-one Arab refugees in a nightclub in the tropical paradise of Murmansk, Russia. One would think that this is already such an odd sight that somebody would have pulled out their phone and snapped some photos to share on social media, but apparently not. So we have to visualize it. I guess, if pressed, we could imagine some fifty-one Middle Easterners, variants on Sacha Baron-Cohen’s Borat character, all hoping to score some “sexy time” with a local babe — utterly convinced that their dark, handsome looks make them irresistible to Nordic women. And of course, it does not occur to any of them that their inability to speak a single word of Russian will be any obstacle!
For all my doubts about this story, it was not until some months after it came out in the Western media that it occurred to me to look for it in the Russian media. I had been studying Russian for several years for personal reasons but it did not occur to me immediately to check Russian language sources. So finally, I looked at Yandex News, Yandex being the Russian equivalent of Google. I quickly came across some references to the event in Russian, but noticed that they all used the Western articles as their information source for an event that had presumably happened in their own country! Eventually, I came across this article from a Russian News Agency, Flashnord: В МУРМАНСКОЙ ПОЛИЦИИ ЗАВЕРЯЮТ, ЧТО ДРАКИ С БЕЖЕНЦАМИ НЕ БЫЛО.
“In the Murmansk region, the police assure that there was no altercation with refugees.”
The key paragraph is the second one in the article:
«Полицейскими опрошены работники заведения, изучены записи с камер внутреннего видеонаблюдения, а также записи с камер видеонаблюдения системы „Безопасный город“. В результате комплекса мероприятий информация не нашла своего подтверждения», — говорится в сообщении.
There are several different online translators to run this through and, in no case is the translation anywhere near perfect, but it is good enough for one to verify the basic meaning. Thus, Google Translate provides the following translation:
“The police interviewed the workers of the establishment, studied the recordings from the internal video surveillance cameras, as well as the recordings from the CCTV cameras of the” Safe City “system. As a result of the complex of measures, the information did not find its confirmation,” the message says.
The Russian competitor Yandex Translate generates the following:
“Police interviewed employees of the institution, studied the CCTV internal CCTV and also the CCTV video surveillance system “Safe city”. As a result of complex activities, the information wasn’t confirmed”, — stated in the message.
What this article is saying, in a very dry, matter-of-fact style, is that the local police in the area got wind of this story of the big brawl with refugees and went to investigate. There is some sort of video surveillance system in the establishment called Безопасный город, which means “Safe City”. The cops examined the video surveillance footage and interviewed people who would have been there to see what happened, and they concluded that the whole incident simply never took place.
This article is dated 30 January 2016, one day after the alleged brawl, so clearly the local Russian language news media debunked the story quite quickly.
A day later, on 31 January 2016, there is an article in Komsomolskaya Pravda with a more jocose tone. The article is entitled: “ПРОВЕРКА СЛУХА: В российском Заполярье мигранты приставали к девушкам?” In English: “Rumor Checking: Did Migrants Molest Girls in the Russian Arctic?” And the subtitle is: “Местные тихо побили арабов за углом ночногоклуба”, i.e. “Locals quietly beat up Arabs in the corner of a nightclub.” (My emphasis.)
Even with my limited Russian language skills, the ironic tone of the article comes through. The subtitle, of course, is sarcastically alluding to the fact that nobody heard or saw any of this, and it does not appear on the CCTV cameras. To be honest, the use of irony and sarcasm by these Russian journalists was mildly surprising to me. I came of age during the Cold War and always thought of the Russians as these dour, humorless people. I don’t know how I got that impression, since, at the time, I had never met any actual Russians. It must have been from Hollywood movies. So, there are many things to take away from this. The brawl did not take place and Russians do have a sense of humor.
This second article includes much more detail than the earlier one. Clearly, the newspaper actually sent somebody to the scene of events to do the fact checking. For example, one of the patrons of the Gandvik nightclub – “Gandvik”, by the way, is the name of the place where this allegedly occurred – is quoted as saying that he was there on Friday night and he did not see any Arabs there. The article provides the man’s full name, Mikhail Arkhagolov.
Another person quoted by name in the article is an employee of Gandvik, one Maxim Tikhonov, who is quoted as saying:
«Полиция бывает сама приезжает без вызова, посмотреть что творится в клубе. В ту ночь в клубе никаких драк я не видел. Не исключаю вариант что кто то плохо себя вел, полиция приехала и забрала. А по поводу что пишут про арабов, их не было в клубе, это точно. »
Here is my own translation:
“The police frequently come to the club without being called, to check out what is going on there. On that night, I didn’t see any fighting. I don’t exclude the possibility that somebody behaved badly, and the police came and took the person away. But, as regards what was written about Arabs, there weren’t any in the club, that is certain.”
The article also quotes the local mayor, Maxim Pukhov, by name. Mr. Pukhov, by the way, is not the mayor of Murmansk, but of the town of Polyarnye Zori, which is where Gandvik nightclub is located. Mr. Pukhov is quoted as saying that they received an anonymous phone call telling of the brawl with the refugees, except that, as related already, on investigation, the whole thing turned out to be false.
Stop Making Sense!
Some stories are true
that never happened.
Elie Wiesel.
”Good grief, Revusky, you’re such a dreadful bore! You’re as bad as that Ronnie Unz with his tedious ‘American Pravda’ shtick! ‘Is this really true?’ …. ‘Is that really what happened?’ How long will it take people like you to realize that nobody cares? Ordinary well-adjusted people in our society do not concern themselves with such trivia!”
“Oh, you mean, trivial little details, like whether something like this really happened or not.”
“Exactly. It’s like Elie said, just because something didn’t exactly happen, doesn’t mean it’s not true!”
“Uhh…. say what?”
“You just don’t get it, Revusky. Look, the story of the manly Russian men beating up those filthy Ay-rabs moved me, in the core of my being. It reflects a profound truth.”
“But it’s bullshit! It didn’t happen!”
“Sheesh, you really are a lost cause, Revusky. You’ll never get it. Whether this exactly happened or not doesn’t matter. That’s for weirdos like you or Unz or the .01% of the population that read articles like this to obsess about… a bunch of geeks and misfits…”
“Hey, there’s no need to insult my readership!”
“You’re right. I’ll just stick to insulting you from here on.”
“Thanks, I appreciate that.”
Though the preceding dialogue is fiction, I think it will ring true to many readers. Been there, done that… Channeling the late Elie Wiesel, we could say that the above conversation didn’t literally happen but it is true nonetheless! It is satirical, I suppose, but it doesn’t even exaggerate the situation that much. In my own experience, people really will tell you pretty much openly that they believe things because it gives them emotional satisfaction to believe them.
So, however infuriating, my obnoxious, fictitious interlocutor has got a point. People fall for these sorts of synthetic narratives because the story resonates with them on some emotional level. Once one understands this, it really should come as no surprise that this fake news story of the big brawl in the Russian Arctic went viral; it entered a sort of right-wing, deeply racist, Islamophobic echo chamber and became a “fact” for very many people. It is not very hard to demonstrate that the whole thing never happened, but that really just does not seem to matter one whole hell of a lot.
The MRA Synthetic Narrative: The Muslim Rape Army is Comin’ to Getcha!
♫ Yo! There’s no place to hide…♫
♫ Once we step inside da room…♫
♫ Da M.R.A. ain’t nuttin’ ta fuk wit’…♫
♫ Da M.R.A. ain’t nuttin’ ta fuk wit’…♫
This whole Battle of Murmansk story, in which the manly men of Russia delivered a decisive defeat to the Muslim molesters, is pretty obviously part of some larger synthetic narrative that was already rolled out earlier. Let us call this the Muslim Rape Army synthetic narrative, or MRA for short. It really got going some weeks before, on New Year’s Eve, in Cologne, Germany. There, the Muslim Rape Army had gone unopposed because of the testicular deficiency of the German metrosexual girlie-men, who stood by while the MRA had their way with the local German girls, hundreds of them apparently. Somehow hundreds of young women were sexually assaulted in a wide open public space without anybody getting any clear video or photos of it.
Now, I have been increasingly converging on the view that, when it comes to examining whatever synthetic narrative, the natural starting point in one’s analysis is timeline. Typically, it is of great interest to track how a story evolved over time, when the various memes were introduced. For instance, precisely how long did it take, after the attacks of 9/11, for the entire Western media to be treating the guilt of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda as an absolute certainty? How much evidence for this existed at that point in time?
Also, there is the question of preparing the terrain, i.e. prefiguration. The Global War on Terror (GWOT) narrative was certainly prefigured well in advance, but 9/11 was really when it was rolled out for prime time. So, it could well be worth examining when the Western media started hyping this bogeyman Bin Laden character as some great terrorist mastermind. Or what about the Afghanistan angle? When exactly did the whole subnarrative about the Taliban get introduced into the story? And what about Saddam Hussein? When did they start talking about him in conjunction with the whole terrorism issue? These are questions you could ask when trying to examine this whole GWOT synthetic narrative, how certain things became so firmly established in the public mind – things for which there really was never an iota of proof.
Some More Arctic Drilling
When I revisited this particular Arctic saga recently, looking at the timeline more closely, the first thing that struck me about it was just how quickly the story was debunked – I mean, at the local level, in the Murmansk region. It was never more than an unsubstantiated rumor anyway, but certainly, within 48 hours of the alleged event, anybody who looked at the local area Russian language news would see very quickly that this had never happened.
Now, obviously, the reason that the story was debunked so quickly was because all of the local people involved did exactly what you would expect responsible adults to do in a sane, honest society. The local cops, on hearing this rumor, looked for some actual proof that the alleged incident had occurred. (Wow, dude! Proof! What a concept!) So they looked at the security camera footage, they interviewed people… Of course, there was no proof of any of it, because, as we know, it didn’t happen. So, just a day after the alleged event, the Flashnord news agency corrected their earlier report, and said that the incident never happened. That was on 30 January, and on 31 January, there was the more comprehensive Komsomolskaya Pravda article. That article was pretty damned comprehensive: not only was there no brawl with Arabs in Gandvik nightclub, but it’s pretty clear that there weren’t even any Arabs there! (Maybe the local lads were quietly shadow boxing in the corner with some imaginary Arabs…)
Well, on reflection, I suppose it’s not really that noteworthy that the relevant local people simply did their jobs and thus quashed the fake news story almost immediately. No, what actually is noteworthy is that the local people did their jobs AND it made absolutely no difference! As per Mark Twain, this particular piece of bullshit sprouted wings and flew around the world. And this happened well after the story was comprehensively debunked. The Daily Caller article is from 4 February. Russia Insider, which bills itself as “Your daily reality snack” picked up the story a few days after that, on 7 February – a full week after the local Russian media had thoroughly debunked the rumor. Now, I would say, in particular, that a site called “Russia Insider” that has a mailing address in Moscow really has no business being taken in by something like this. But regardless, it’s all over the place. The story is mirrored in practically any language you look for it. I’ve found it in Spanish, French, German…
The Miracle of the Multiplication of the Muslims (MMM)
♫ Bam! Aw man! We slam! We jam! ♫
♫ We scream like Tah-zan! ♫
♫ Da M.R.A. ain’t nuttin’ ta fuk wit’ … ♫
♫ Da M.R.A. ain’t nuttin’ ta fuk wit’ … ♫
Another aspect that I failed to notice the first time I looked at this is the way the story changed from the initial rumor to when it went viral in the Western alt-media – namely, the magical multiplication of the Muslims, MMM for short. The initial rumor that was reported at the end of January did not involve 50+ Muslims, but a smaller number: five. That appeared in English on the Fort-Russ website on 30 January. That is simply the translation of an article in Russian that had appeared on the Flashnord website. Here is some key text:
Several refugees from Arab countries were beaten in the middle of the night of Saturday in the city of Polyarnye Zori (Murmansk oblast), reported a FlashNord source in the law enforcement bodies of the region.
The incident occurred in the nightclub Gandvik.
“According to preliminary data, five refugees were beaten in the entertainment establishment. According to witnesses, they behaved insolently and had been pestering local girls,” — said the Agency’s interlocutor.
For the sake of completeness, I should point out that the above translation, from the Fort-Russ website, contains a significant translation error. The text saying “five refugees” were beaten was mistranslated. It should be “up to five refugees”. The original Russian is “до пяти”, which means “up to five” or it could be also be translated as “five or fewer”. I have mixed feelings about harping on this. I used to do translation work (though never from Russian) and I know how easy it is to make mistakes. Still, it seems like a pretty sloppy mistake. “Five or fewer” is not the same as “five”. It doesn’t matter much because the really glaring question is how the hell the story went from five refugees to fifty-one! The stories that went viral a week after this all claimed that 51 (surprisingly precise number) Arabs were beaten up. Also, 18 were hospitalized. (It is quite a feat of fisticuffs to beat up five Arabs and cause 18 of them to be hospitalized!)
“More typical Revusky nitpicking! Five, fifty, eighteen…. What’s the difference anyway? When you go on about this stuff, people’s eyes glaze over!”
“Well, you’re right in a way. It doesn’t make any difference. The true number is ZERO! Zero Arabs were there in the first place. Zero were beaten up and zero were hospitalized!”
“Okay, well, zero is a number too, after all….”
I think it is instructive to drill down into the details. The mistranslation of “up to five” as simply five is sloppy, but it’s easy enough to see how it happened, and we should attribute it to honest error. But how did the five Arabs then turn into fifty-one? How could that be an honest mistake?
My own theory is that the people who decided to push this story may have honestly believed that the story of five Arabs getting beaten up was true, but they also figured that five is really just too chickenshit a number. So it was like: what the heck, let’s say fifty instead. Well, it’s like padding an expense account. If there aren’t really any controls in place and nobody is going to call you on it, then…. But then the problem is that, just as with the padded expense account, if the numbers are too round, it looks suspicious, and that would be why they adjusted fifty up to fifty-one.
That’s my theory of how they got from five to fifty-one. As for how they got the figure of 18 Arabs hospitalized, well, I actually have a separate, independent theory for that: whoever it was pulled it out of his ass. (Well, never mind. If worse comes to worst, maybe they can get laws passed in the various Western countries making it a crime to question any of these numbers.)
Geography is a Bitch
Another aspect of this story that I missed the first time round was the way the alleged scene of the event shifted. The reason this occurred, to put it bluntly, was because of a complete lack of people doing the most basic homework. I shall explain…
The Daily Caller and most of the other new sources (using the term loosely) that reported on this refer to the event having happened simply in “Murmansk” or “Murmansk, Russia”, which anybody would parse as meaning the city of Murmansk. But the original rumor (which also alleged 5 refugees being beaten up as opposed to 51) was about an event alleged to have occurred in Gandvik Nightclub, which is not in the city of Murmansk (population 300,000) but in Polyarnye Zori, a much smaller city (population 15,000) that lies 224 km (139 miles) to the south. The confusion arises from the fact that Polyarnye Zori is still in the administrative region of Murmansk, i.e. Murmansk Oblast.
In any case, make no mistake; this is no nitpicking, trivial detail. The distinction here is just about perfectly analogous to the difference between New York City and New York State. (Coincidentally, Murmansk Oblast is almost exactly the same size as New York State, about 2% larger.) So, it’s as if somebody, reporting on an event alleged to have happened in some small town in upstate New York, then reported it as having happened in New York City, because he doesn’t know the difference! Granted, that’s understandable in a way. Until quite recently, I certainly did not know the difference between the port city of Murmansk and the overall region, Murmansk Oblast. But now I do know. Why is that? Because I looked it up! I guess I’m kind of old school in that way. I think that if you are going to write about stuff like this, and be even halfway credible, you really have to have your shit together on these sorts of basic facts.
You see, also, we are at a stage in history where there really is no excuse. It is so easy to get these things right with a quick google search that, when people get these kinds of very basic things wrong, it is bound to be a red flag. So, if somebody writes about something in Canada and clearly has never figured out the difference between the city of Quebec and the province of Quebec, or the person confuses the city of Vancouver with Vancouver Island, what does this tell you? Maybe it is not absolutely determinate, but if somebody is so careless as to get things like that wrong, it really makes little sense to take that person seriously as an information source.
Taking the Virtual Tour
At this stage of the exposition, it is long established, at about a 1000% level of certainty, that nothing happened in Gandvik Nightclub on 29 January 2016; it is a constructed fiction, a synthetic event. Still, one can take an interest in the setting of a fictional event. For example, countless Sherlock Holmes fans have visited 221 Baker Street in London to see where the great detective shared accommodation with Dr. John Watson, his great friend and straight man. This is not so crazy really, because even though Holmes and Watson are fictitious individuals, the Victorian London of the stories is a real place, or based on a real place anyway.
Gandvik nightclub, in the town of Polyarnye Zori, is also a real place. It is where this more recent fiction, the Great Battle of Murmansk, is set. It can be instructive to look at the setting of the story because a synthetic narrative will typically have some little bits of truth to it. This was what I was getting at in my first article on the Unz Review, where I coined the term Roger Rabbit Narrative. The Roger Rabbit movie is not a straight animation in which everything on the screen is a cartoon. Cartoon elements co-exist on the screen with real people and objects.
After a bit of research, I did conclude that some Arab refugees have passed through the town of Polyarnye Zori. On investigation, it is something of a transit hub. It lies right along the Moscow-Murmansk highway and also has a train station, with connections to both Moscow (28 hours) and St. Petersburg (23 hours). I saw all of this courtesy of Google Maps, and I also see that if one were to drive 20 hours north from Moscow, one could hang a left there and head west towards Finland or Norway. Also, I have come across articles that describe how some Syrian refugees really have taken this circuitous backdoor route into Europe, via the Russian Far North, and thus, they probably really did pass through Polyarnye Zori, this town founded in Soviet times that straddles the Arctic Circle. I assume that this rather sad story really did happen, but, unlike the Battle of Murmansk, received little attention. As I said at the beginning, it is pretty cold up there in January and somebody from a warm country who found himself there would probably not think about going out partying.
The little town of Polyarnye Zori started to intrigue me and I was wondering what the place is like. Well, a picture tells a thousand words. At first blush, it does seem to be a rather grim looking place. It is a compact little town, though I suspect that people could still get lost amidst the monotonous Soviet architecture, which I guess is why the authorities have put out a handy little map, which I found online:
This should allow us to get the lay of the land. Armed with the above map, let us go on a little virtual tour, shall we? We can stroll around (virtually) and end up at the notorious “Gandvik” night club, the scene of the alleged events.
Scanning down the list of numbered locations on the map…. locations 1, 2, and 3 are bank branches. Makes sense. Anybody passing through might want to find an ATM. Location 4 is the aforementioned train station. Now things get a bit interesting. Location 5 is the Lyokha Cafe-Bar. Well, that’s not Gandvik. But, not to worry. It’s there! The Gandvik bar is location 22 on the map. Maybe Polynarnye Zori is not so bad; it has two bars, two restaurants (locations 8 and 9), three hotels (locations 10, 11, and 12), a Post Office (location 14), two pharmacies (locations 15 and 16). Location 20 is a church (right on the other side of town from Gandvik bar) and location 21 is a supermarket. There is a movie house (location 13) and a post office (location 14) too. Location 6 is a gym/fitness center and 17 is the public swimming pool, which I assume is indoor and heated. Location 19 is the skating rink. So, the town has most everything people need, I suppose, all within walking distance.
Locations A, B, and C on the map are the fire station, militia, and some sort of first aid clinic respectively. I guess the latter is where the 18 refugees in need of medical attention after the brawl would have been taken — assuming anything had actually happened, that is.
But anyway, the focal point of the story is the Gandvik Nightclub. It looks like it’s right next to one of the hotels, Gostinitza Zori, which is number 12 on the map. I’m pretty sure that this hotel and the nightclub are really basically the same business. Given how far north this is, I would bet (though I am not sure) that one could go between locations 12, 22, and 21 (the supermarket) without venturing outdoors.
Despite being located in a grim, freezing cold, Soviet planned city, the Gandvik Night Club looks like a rather gay place actually. (I mean “gay” in the traditional sense, before the word got hijacked.) The establishment has a VKontakte page. (VKontakte is the Russian equivalent of Facebook.) The page’s heading reads: “У нас самые весёлые вечеринки в городе, самая яркая и зажигательная музыка от лучших диджеев, с нами не соскучишься!))”
“We have the most fun parties in town, the most stimulating and provocative music from the best DJ’s, with us you won’t be bored!”
On Gandvik’s VKontakte page, one can see some of the posters they have put out that advertise some of the various thematic parties at Gandvik. On 20 February 2016, not too long after the date of the alleged brawl with the refugees, Gandvik had a military themed party:
It was billed as “самая мужская ночь в году!”, the most manly or macho night of the year! I suppose the Russians could be sincerely celebrating their manliness and martial spirit, but truth told, the whole thing has a rather tongue-in-cheek or even campy feel about it.
“Look, this just goes to show that you don’t get it, Revusky. You never do. You see, when you’re as manly as these Russian dudes are, you can kid around about it, it’s no big deal.”
“Uh yeah… okay…”
So, what else? It’s 200 Rubles (currently about $3.35 USD) cover charge but girls get in for free before midnight.
The week before that they had a “Love Party” with a Valentine’s Day theme.
It’s striking how much English the Gandvik club puts on their posters, in a place where most ordinary people would not really know that much English, would they? That’s hardly unique to Russia, of course. Doubtless, people the world over think that using English gives off an impression of cosmopolitan sophistication.
“What you don’t understand, Revusky, is that inside every one of those Russky bastards, there’s an American trying to get out!”
“Oh, maybe that’s it…”
Again, at the bottom, it says 200 Rubles entry, which must be the standard cover charge, and girls get in free until midnight. (That information, like anything they really want their customers to understand, is in Russian.)
The Love Party that coincides with Valentine’s Day seems to be a yearly event. One of the photo albums on their Vkontakte site is devoted to the 2014 edition. The scenes are pretty mundane. Here are some of these Russians gettin’ down on the dance floor:
Photos like this look rather unexceptional and could just be a photo of young people having a good time anywhere in Europe. (Of course, that is because it was taken earlier in the evening, before the bar’s regular patrons all transform into vampires.)
You know, looking at this, I couldn’t help but think that if these people had just a bit of Negro genetic admixture, they might have some better dance moves.
“Ha! You like takin’ chances, dontcha, Revusky?”
“Oh, never mind, I just said that to see if you were still awake…”
I can only imagine what Polyarnye Zori was like in Soviet times, but nowadays it does not seem to be a particularly prudish place. Gandvik sometimes has some rather raunchier themed parties. For example, they seem to have held a Playboy themed party in which girls played at being Playboy bunnies.
So there you have it. I trust that the White Nationalists reading this all have a lump in their throat by now. It is surely instructive to take a more up-close look at the scene of the events. We really see what is at stake. If not for those manly menfolk who defended their women’s honor against those marauding Muslim maniacs….
“Proud WHITE men, dammit! Defending the very flower of white womanhood!”
“Exactly! Facing down those stinking swarthy savages…”
In this photo taken at the same event, we see some of the men in the background. Surely they are among those chivalrous men who defended their women’s virtue against those who would have defiled, degraded, and dishonored them.
“Uhh, aren’t you laying it on a bit thick now, Revusky? What’s next? Bayoneting Belgian babies?”
“Hey, this is MY article! Why don’t you write your own damned article?!”
The World in Front of One’s Nose
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. George Orwell, 1946
Increasingly, the entire world is in front of one’s nose. Jonathan Revusky, 2017
I think everybody knows what I mean here. The convergence of various technological developments – video cameras in everybody’s pocket, mobile internet, social media… – has created a situation where one can see much of the world as if it was in front of one’s nose. I am hardly convinced that this is an unambiguously good thing, but, like any phenomenon, it does have its good side: it can be a very powerful tool in terms of helping one see through bullshit.
You will recall the miracle of the multiplication of the Muslims. (Praise the Lawd!) First they say five (or up to five) Muslims got beaten up and then it somehow jumps to 51. That, in itself, is telling, but consider the fact that it is so easy to find photographs of the place where this allegedly occurred. Now, I find it hard to precisely judge the size of the premises from the photos, because most of the photos on social media focus on the people and don’t pan out to the entire establishment. However, my sense of things, judging from the photos, is that 51 Arabs do not fit in Gandvik nightclub.
Or maybe they do, just barely. I asked a few people to look at various photos and tell me what the maximum capacity of the place is, just guessing roughly. I think the consensus is that fifty is about the upper bound. So, maybe 51 Arabs fit in Gandvik nightclub but there wouldn’t be any space left for anybody else! And then the problem is that, for the entire incident to occur, at least after the miracle of the multiplication of the Muslims (Hallelujah!) you need your 51 Arabs, probably at least as many manly Russian men, and then you also need some of the flower of white womanhood in there to get their pussies grabbed or whatever, and set off the whole incident. So you need well over 100 people in there. Judging from the available photos of Gandvik nightclub. I suspect that the place would most likely end up looking like this:
I mean to say, it stands to reason that the people who effected the miracle of the multiplication of the Muslims (Allahu Akhbar!) never looked at a photo of where this allegedly happened. Of course, the local cops knew the place intimately, but they were checking out a story in which five (or really, up to five) people got beaten up. If somebody had called them anonymously and said that 51 Arabs were beaten up in this place, the cops, who regularly visit the place, would probably just laugh, because they know that 51 Arabs don’t fit in the place, and furthermore, would also know, from hotel registrations, exactly how many Arabs were currently in the town. It seems highly unlikely that there were even 51 Arabs in Polyarnye Zori in late January!
On the other hand, the original story of five Arabs getting beaten up, from their point of view, could have been true. So they did have to go investigate it.
The important lesson here is not about this event (or non-event) specifically. You see, the world being effectively in front of one’s nose is a game changer. If this were 1987, say, and they told us that 500 Arabs were in Gandvik nightclub, we could even believe that! A few of us might suspect that it is nonsense, but we would still be unable to decisively debunk the story as we can now – instantly, with a quick image search on the internet.
So, the world has changed and this has very real implications that we must ponder. Moreover, the world has changed but the modus operandi of the people behind these synthetic events and narratives has not changed very much; it is still very 20th century, based on 20th century assumptions about people’s access to information. There is a real disturbance in the Matrix and it will be very interesting to see how this plays out over the coming years.
The Culture of Bullshit
The bullshitter (…) does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. Professor Harry Frankfurt, from “On Bullshit”
In 2005, a surprise bestseller was “On Bullshit”, by Professor Harry Frankfurt, of the philosophy department of Princeton University. It was actually the republication in book form of an essay he had written in 1986, an attempt to explore the phenomenon of “bullshit” in a more rigorous, intellectual way than is customary. The book lasted 27 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and the author had his Warholian fifteen minutes of fame, being interviewed on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. Clearly, it did strike some nerve; people had a sense that bullshit was an important topic. Only some people, I suppose. It only takes a small percentage of the population to turn a book into a bestseller; after all, most people do not even read any books at all. Like the proverbial frog that never realizes that it is being boiled alive because the change is gradual, most people would also not realize that their entire society is being gradually smothered in bullshit.
If all of the articles I have published on this website were bundled together in book form, “On Bullshit” would also be an appropriate title. The concepts introduced in these essays all revolve around bullshit. I coined the term High IQ Idiot, HIQI, to refer to the people who, regardless of how high an IQ they possess, are just incapable of seeing through all the bullshit that pervades society. Terms such as “synthetic narrative” or “Roger Rabbit narrative” could, for the most part, be replaced by “bullshit” with little to no loss of meaning. Taboo-Induced tortuous theorizing, or TITTfor short, is a certain kind of bullshit, that comes into existence because the correct explanation is a taboo.
Now, in my honest opinion, the Frankfurt book leaves quite a bit to be desired. It is too ivory tower; the author does not really get his hands dirty in the topic. He never does, for example, what I have done here and in some earlier writing, which is to take one concrete piece of horrendous bullshit and carefully analyze it; his writing always stays at a rather abstract level. However, he does make an interesting distinction, between lying and bullshitting. To lie is to know the truth but, for the sake of expediency (or occasionally just for the sheer pleasure of it) to say something other than the truth. To bullshit involves an indifference to truth itself. The good professor goes on to argue that bullshitting is ultimately more insidious, more harmful to society, than lying.
Professor Frankfurt wrote a follow-up book in 2006, entitled “On Truth”, that did not replicate the success of “On Bullshit”. I did not read that, but according to the various reviews, it makes a careful academic philosophical sort of argument for why the truth matters – or in effect, why our society should really try to do something about all the pervasive bullshit. He apparently even says that the disregard for objective truth (i.e. the culture of bullshit) has a tendency to drive people insane.
“Fellas, I plead with you. You’re going too far. It’s getting dangerous. All of the bullshit is finally making the goyim meshuga! Oy vey!”
My sense of things is that what is noteworthy about this second book is probably not so much anything it says, but that the author feels a need to write it in the first place. In a sane, healthy society, do people really need high-powered philosophical arguments to convince them that the truth matters? Do the local cops in Polyarnye Zori up in the Russian Arctic need some Princeton guy to explain to them why it is important to establish whether the brawl in the nightclub really occurred? I think not. Surely, in a healthy society, that the objective truth matters is axiomatic.
Now, getting back to Harry Frankfurt’s distinction between lying and bullshitting, finally my sense is that the distinction is interesting but also can be blurry in some cases. The story of the brawl in the Russian Arctic begins with people lying. At the very origins of the whole thing, there are people who know perfectly well that it never happened who get the story going. However, after that, when the story goes viral, most of the people propagating the story are not really lying so much as bullshitting. For example, when the Daily Caller reports the event happening in the city of Murmansk, when the original story is a much smaller town in the Murmansk region, this is symptomatic of a culture of bullshitting. It is so easy to get details like this right nowadays, that when they get it wrong, and it is never corrected, it tells you something about the culture from which this whole thing emerges. It is a culture in which there are no particular consequences or stigma to getting very basic things wrong.
Of course, if these people had a culture of being careful about facts, they would have done enough minimal checking to realize that the story wasn’t true in the first place. This is especially true of sites like Russia Insider or Fort Russ, where a large part of the staff are Russians or know Russian. I think the thing to take away from this is that the lying is enabled by the bullshitting. A liar consciously puts out a lie and then all the bullshitters propagate it because of their indifference to factual truth, the culture of bullshit. Otherwise, the lie would be stopped quickly in its tracks.
Towards a Taxonomy of Bullshit
So what begins as a deliberate lie becomes propagated and morphs into bullshit. To be more precise, it becomes first-order bullshit. What then happens, at least sometimes, is that this then spawns higher-order bullshit. Here is a concrete example. The website Russia Insider echoed the fake news story about the Grand Battle of Murmansk on 7 February 2016 and we see at the top of the article now:
For an excellent, thought-provoking essay on this issue, see our article which appeared a few days after this one: Russians Bewildered by Cologne Rapes: ‘Where Were the German Men?!’
This linked article, contrasting the behavior of the manly Russian men in Gandvik nightclub with the girlie men in Cologne, Germany, was written by one Alexander Maistrovoy, a Russian Jewish émigré author. I believe he is a Zionist Jew who currently resides in Israel, but grew up in Russia and would thus speak Russian as his first language. In this article, Mr. Maistrovoy informs us that “postmodern cultural totalitarianism has changed the very nature of man”. (Wow! That’s some profound shit!) Of course, he means in the West, not in Mother Russia, where the men are still men, as evidenced by this Glorious Battle of Murmansk.
Well, since the event in question simply never happened, i.e. is bullshit, that means that any such grand philosophical/cultural analysis of said event is also necessarily bullshit. However, it is a different sort of bullshit. If, as per Professor Frankfurt, we’re going to get serious about understanding bullshit, it looks like we need a whole taxonomy. The original fake news story, we could say that is first-order bullshit, while something like Mr. Maistrovoy’s analysis of how “postmodern cultural totalitarianism” is altering the “very nature of man” – this is derivative or higher-order bullshit, which is what you end up with when you build a whole analysis based on bullshit fake news events.
This is bullshitting with more intellectual pretensions. I suppose you could say that the people who engage in this, sometimes even making a life’s work of it, are higher up on the food chain of the bullshit ecosystem, but it’s all part of a whole, this overall culture of bullshit.
Ron Unz is a Prophet and a Man of God
An interesting thought occurred to me recently about miracles. The supernatural events in sacred writings, like the Bible, all occur in a far-off mythical past. Suppose you were to create a new synthetic religion based on events that (supposedly) occurred very recently. Just for fun, we could say this religion, Unzianity, claims that Ron Unz shook a stick and the sea parted. And this happened, not in ancient times, but some time last year, let’s say. It occurred to me that this new religion would effectively be demanding belief in, not one, but two miracles:
- The event itself, the parting of the sea in this case.
- That absolutely nobody managed to get it on camera!
I suppose the first miracle is still the higher order one, since it involves a suspension of the laws of physics. However, the second miracle is also quite a tall order in itself. Surely it is impossible, to all intents and purposes, for an extraordinary event of such a scale to occur in the current-day world without people whipping out their smartphones and photographing it or catching it on video. In turn, many would upload the photos and video to Facebook or their blogs…
Well, truth be told, people don’t exactly need Ron Unz to part the sea or any other such earthshattering event, in order to whip out their cameras and take a selfie. They post pictures of any mundane scene – birthday parties, baby pictures, a successfully baked chocolate cake… Not everybody does this, of course, but there are enough people recording every banal detail of their lives that there is a vast photographic record of all sorts of things, and an awful lot of it is publicly visible. So there is nothing extraordinary about my ability to dig up photos of young people partying in Gandvik nightclub. In fact, it would be very surprising if one could not do so. Heck, it might even be a latter-day miracle!
Revusky’s Razor
Above, I made a point of analyzing to death the fake news story in the Russian Arctic. To be clear, it’s not that this story, in itself, is so important as to deserve this level of attention. In practice, we are so inundated with this kind of bullshit that it is not feasible to devote this level of detailed attention to each one. The point of analyzing one very deeply is that we can really use it as a launching point to discuss more general concepts.
Moreover, I don’t think an astute person should need this level of analysis to classify this as a synthetic event. There are really two dead giveaways right from the start:
- The cartoonish nature of the whole thing.
- The complete lack of any visuals, i.e. photographic or video evidence.
Using terminology from earlier articles, the whole thing is an RRN, a Roger Rabbit narrative. The Arabs who can’t keep their hands off the local girls and the manly Russian men are all cartoon characters. The violence in the story is cartoon violence. I found it a bit disturbing that we are invited to chuckle at the story of 18 men being beaten so badly they are hospitalized. In a sane world, that is no laughing matter. One could get indignant about this, but then, on the other hand, once you think that it’s really just cartoon characters, why get worked up? After all, we know that none of this ever happened.
A person with a sufficiently high BDQ (Bullshit Detection Quotient) can sense that this is a cartoon, but if all you’ve got is IQ but practically no BDQ – i.e. unfortunately, you are a HIQI – then you need something else to see through it. And that is the second point above, the complete lack of visuals. Do you really think that 51 lecherous Arabs and an equal number of chivalrous Russian men, over a hundred people, can get in a broken down fight like this and absolutely nobody takes a photo or films it? People take photos and film one another blowing out the candles on a birthday cake and nobody is going to film this? C’mon.
In any case, if our goal is to kill Roger Rabbit, I think we have the perfect murder weapon.
Revusky’s Razor: If an event of sufficiently large scale is alleged to have taken place in a wide open public space full of people, yet there is no corresponding video or photographic evidence, then it must be fake news.
There are caveats, but they should be fairly obvious. This only applies to fairly recent events, the last so many years. We have only recently reached the point where just about everybody has a digital video camera in his or her pocket, typically in the form of a smartphone. Also, the penetration of the various electronic gadgets has not been uniform. Obviously, people had them in the richer countries earlier. But my sense is that, when it comes to very recent events, the last couple of years, Revusky’s Razor applies pretty strongly just about anywhere. A friend of mine married a lady from Ethiopia and it came up in conversation that all her relatives in Ethiopia have smartphones and send her photos on WhatsApp and so forth. I initially inferred that her family were all part of the privileged class of people in Ethiopia, but no, not at all. Some of her family are poor people, living in shacks more or less. Yet they still can whip out their Chinese-made knock-off smartphones and take photos or even half-decent video! It really has reached this point.
I initially thought that Revusky’s Razor was just a corollary of Ockham’s Razor, as in: the simplest explanation of the lack of visuals is always going to be that the event never happened. So, by Ockham, that will be the preferred explanation. But actually, I’m going further than Ockham in this case. I’m not saying that the event not having happened is the simpler explanation and thus preferable. No, I’m saying that, at the current stage of history, it is the only explanation.
In particular, the only feasible explanation of why there is no video of anybody being sexually assaulted in Cologne inside or outside the train station on New Year’s Eve is that it never happened. A tree can still fall in the forest without it being caught on camera, but hundreds of women cannot be assaulted in public in the middle of Cologne in 2016 without there being any photos or video. If this had happened, we would have the corresponding visuals and we just don’t.
Bullshit is Bipartisan
When I wrote my first contribution to the Unz Review, in which I defined the term HIQI, i.e. High IQ Idiot, Barack Obama was still President. Though I never really thought that HIQI-ness was a left-right issue, probably at that time, my own mental image of the archetypal HIQI would have been a “progressive” Obama supporter. Here we were, after seven years of this disgusting puppet, this Wall Street shill, and these Obama fans were still talking like this was our President and so on. I remember writing private emails to various people, in which I ranted bitterly about this pathetic, desperate need to delude themselves that is so characteristic of left/progressive types.
Of course, as I write these lines, Obama has gone off to his golden (more like platinum…) retirement, and is now receiving his payoff for his 8 years of dedicated service to the banksters. We have a new president, Mr. Trump, and we can see the very same compulsive self-delusion, except now on the political right. This guy is our president, he’s working for us…
Upton Sinclair famously said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” In other words, people become invested in believing whatever bullshit. He meant they become financially invested in it, i.e. their daily bread depends upon it; their very career is built on it. That is quite real, but I am sure it goes quite beyond that too. People, like in the case of the die-hard Obama supporters, become emotionally invested in whatever bullshit narrative.
I enjoy eating chocolate but I don’t need it the way an alcoholic needs a drink. Now, I could talk jokingly about craving chocolate and needing my “fix” but we know it’s nothing like the craving of a heroin junkie. By the same token, it isn’t just that these people believe whatever bullshit; they have a deep need to believe it. Increasingly, I perceive this as something that is somehow inculcated by society, system, Matrix, whatever you want to call it. This is the real essence of HIQI-ness.
I do not fully understand how all this works by any means, mind you, but it is surely a key phenomenon to understand if one wants to fathom this pervasive culture of bullshit. Somehow the propaganda system cultivates and then taps into this desperate need people have to delude themselves. I earlier mentioned Harry Frankfurt’s essay, “On Bullshit”. Doubtless, Professor Frankfurt is an intelligent man and his heart is in the right place, so he perceives the problem to a large extent. Still, as far as I can see, he does not possess anything like the analytical toolset needed to get very far with the topic.
A serious study of bullshit – bullshitology, if you will – would probably require an interdisciplinary approach, leveraging concepts and knowledge from various fields. There are very basic concepts in psychology, such as cognitive dissonance, that operate heavily. This relates to what George Orwell was getting at when he introduced the term doublethink in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Also, projection: people can be acutely aware of their own faults when they are manifested in other people, yet do not see it in themselves. So, a very prominent liberal/progressive figure like Michael Moore, and his followers, can see (accurately) right-wing Republican bullshit for what it is. Likewise, those very same right-wing Republicans also perceive (accurately) that Michael Moore is largely full of shit. However, neither side of the (largely synthetic) political divide perceives themselves as compulsive, chronic bullshitters. Of course not, that’s always the other side.
Continually, there is the false dichotomy that if you don’t believe whatever bullshit from one side, that you must therefore believe the other side’s bullshit. So, for example, when I make no bones about the fact that the MRA narrative is total bullshit, i.e. there is no Muslim Rape Army, I anticipate that people will then simply assume that I believe in “multiculturalism” and “diversity” and so on. No, not really. In fact, I am somebody who is increasingly sympathetic to the ethno-nationalist position. Certainly, I believe it would be greatly preferable if countries in Europe remain demographically dominated by their founding peoples. I also have little doubt that the left/progressive Germans who are so welcoming of mass immigration are vastly underestimating the cost that it will impose on German society.
While the left progressives are (as usual) deluding themselves, the hysterical, apocalyptic rhetoric of some of the ethno-nationalists is probably even more unhinged from objective reality. Countries like Germany or Sweden are in no real danger of becoming Somalia and I think sane people really know that, so the over-the-top rhetoric probably is counter-productive. The people engaging in that come across as cranks – I suppose that’s mostly because that is what they are.
I sympathize with the ethno-nationalist viewpoint, but the case has to be made honestly. It is simply too self-evident that the MRA is a deranged racist fantasy. I am quite certain that nothing happened in Cologne and there is no Muslim Rape Army. Again, if something had happened, we would have the visuals. And we don’t. It’s that simple.
It’s really a shame. If we didn’t have this culture of pervasive bullshit, the immigration issue could be discussed rationally – discarding all the PC shibboleths, but also without resorting to toxic nonsense about non-existent Muslim rape armies.
What is to be Done?
♫ Imagine there’s no bullshit… ♫
♫ It’s easy if you try… ♫
A lot of political activism is based on the idea that if you could get the other side to stop believing in their bullshit and believe in your bullshit, that the world could then become a much better place. So, the left-wing activist thinks: if only the right-wingers would stop believing in their horrendous right-wing bullshit, and the right-winger reasons the same way in reverse. Increasingly, I tend to think that this is hopeless: my sense is that the only path of meaningful change would be for both sides to stop believing in ALL of the bullshit!
Another way of expressing this is that what is needed is not for the right-wing HIQI to move towards the left and become a more left-wing HIQI, or vice versa. No, what is needed is for people to stop being HIQIs!
At the roots of Western civilization, we have this thing called the Athenian dialectic, which is the idea that opposing viewpoints can meet and debate and, by this process, you converge towards the truth. Our legal system seems to be based on this, which is why we have the prosecution and the defense in a trial and so on. I assume that the two-party “democratic” system is based on the same sort of theory. However, I am quite certain that this theory of the dialectic is based, just for starters, on the assumption that both sides are intellectually honest!
Now, frankly, I don’t see any guarantee that the Athenian dialectic always works even under ideal conditions, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out any rational reason to believe that it can work in a culture of bullshit! In fact, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. Just as two wrongs do not make a right, confronting left-wing bullshit with right-wing bullshit does not, by some sort of alchemy, produce truth, or sound public policy either. No, you just end up with a huge stinking mass of bullshit. What you end up with is the Monty Python argument shop skit.
Now, as for my adaptation of the sappy John Lennon lyric above, no, it is not easy to imagine a world with no bullshit, no matter how hard you try. It seems to be part of the human condition. But it seems to me that the only real vector of improvement from the current dire straits we are in is to work towards a world with significantly less bullshit. More specifically, to counter the culture of bullshit, we need to foster an intellectual culture, or environment, that is much more bullshit-averse.
That, on its own, would not directly solve any concrete problem, but if we don’t address this very basic problem of all the bullshit, we’re pretty helpless. For example, the refugee crisis in Europe, as dramatic as the situation is, is still but a spillover effect from all these endless wars that have now destabilized a large swathe of the planet. I do not presume to understand fully why all this happened, but at least, I do now see more clearly how the the public justification of these wars was foisted off on the general public (i.e. all the HIQIs out there) by means of a series of synthetic events. Of course, one particularly spectacular synthetic event stands out, that of 9/11/2001, when the big overarching Global War on Terror propaganda narrative was rolled out for prime time. Many people are obsessed with 9/11 and one can hardly blame them, but the point still must be made that it is part of a larger whole.
In short, the whole mess was perpetrated or enabled by means of weaponized bullshit. If more and more people could see through all the various propaganda constructs, that would not get us out of the mess we are now in, but it would, for starters, drastically curtail the ability of the people who got us here to pull off any more of these things. And then we might even start being able to extricate ourselves. (Yes, I know that hope is a dangerous thing…)
Sometimes it does look hopeless, but I think there is one thing that can give us, the rebels who want to resist the Empire, some hope. The hoaxsters and propagandists are actually in an ever weaker position because they do not have the visuals that correspond to their phony narratives. That was not so much of a problem in the last century, because they had much more control over information. There is now a kind of cottage industry, if you will, that has sprung up, of blogs and YouTube channels, and these people, whenever one of these bullshit things goes down, they carefully analyze the visuals or lack thereof. Now, as with anything, it is a mixed bag; there is not the filter of people having to get whatever professional qualifications to do this work. Independent researchers into these questions that the mainstream won’t touch are largely autodidacts, but many are nonetheless very competent, intelligent people. This is the case going way back, before the Internet, with the JFK research community and so forth. Regardless, these people are doing what a real independent professional media would be doing if our system really worked as advertised. (To be clear, I mean the ones who are for real. There are surely fakes who work for whatever Deep State faction who are posing as real, honest researchers, but who have a disinformation agenda. They may put out some truthful material but it will be laced with disinfo. So this is a very complex environment to navigate. All this problem also goes back to pre-Internet times.)
The basic defense strategy of the Empire is to try to smear all of the independent researchers as “conspiracy theorists”. That whole order of battle was formed way before the current generation of bloggers and youtubers. They put out this meme about half a century ago in the aftermath of the JFK assassination (and the other murky hits in the sixties, like RFK and MLK…) that anybody who looks into any of this is just a nutcase. And they have been pushing every lever possible, via Hollywood movies and everything else, to plant this idea in people’s minds: “Don’t listen to those people, they’re a bunch of conspiracy theorist whackos”. Surely nobody reading this needs to be told that, to be smeared as a “conspiracy theorist” is a death blow for the career of any of the presstitutes or the rest of the people working in the “intellectual industries”, who want to be considered “respectable”.
So, on the one hand, you have a half century of brainwashing to deal with, when trying to deal with all the HIQIs, but the bullshitters still have one hell of a problem. Just recently, I came across this photo:
This is one of the visuals that was put out right after the alleged 3/22/2017 terrorist attack in London. On Westminster Bridge. I have shown this to various people, most of whom are not so political, and nobody believes that this is a real picture of a woman who was just run over by a double-decker bus. I certainly don’t think so. Granted, I don’t know what that should look like. I’m not a physician or a paramedic or first responder of any sort, but like, what is this? Like, where’s the blood?
There is nothing even that extraordinary about the above photo. You can go find endless examples that are comparable. When you examine these various events, you almost invariably see that they were running some sort of drill almost concurrently with the real event. Or just before. Is it rocket science to figure out that a primary purpose of these drills is so that they have some visuals that they can then pass off as being part of the “real” event? The problem is that careful (not even very careful) inspection typically reveals that there’s something fishy going on.
Once you overcome this endless conditioning of “Don’t listen to those crazy conspiracy whackos” you very quickly see that all of these things are laughably fake. It is a tough battle still, because there is all that brainwashing, there is the HIQI’s desperate need to delude himself, but on the other hand, the people behind this crap are asking you NOT to believe your “lying eyes”! A lot of this is a pure bluff. There is an orange clear as day and they are trying to tell you this is an apple! Once more and more people realize that the world is largely in front of their nose, and they just look, surely even given all the conditioning, many will come to see the extent of the deception. And this is a very, very big problem for the people behind all the fakery.
Some readers may be flabbergasted that I earlier made such an unqualified, categorical statement, that the event in Cologne that provoked so much discussion simply never happened. This would probably be because you find it inconceivable that anybody would attempt to pull off such an audacious hoax. Well, not only that they would attempt it but succeed! I can hardly blame you. I find it pretty hard to conceive of as well, I sometimes have to pinch myself, but people have to understand that there is no other conclusion that can be drawn. Just look at the space, or set of spaces, in which this is alleged to have occurred. Where were the hundreds of women sexually assaulted without anybody managing to get it on camera? Where? Tell me the spot. It’s not just the assaults themselves, but also the immediate aftermath. There should be scenes with females wandering about looking very distraught, sobbing, with torn clothes… And that should be caught on camera too! There is simply nothing.
What we currently have is a public intellectual culture in which there is simply no stigma or embarrassment attached to being duped by these hoaxes time and time again. It doesn’t matter if it’s the 57th time they find the suicide bomber’s passport in immaculate condition on the scene… Not only is there no stigma attached to being duped continually, it is de rigueur! The person who says all this fake crap is fake is smeared as an unserious person. This is largely the case even in the so-called alternative media, let alone the MSM.
We definitely need to develop a public intellectual culture in which being duped by hoaxes is shameful! Consider a relentless meritocracy like professional sports. It is very hard to perform consistently under pressure, so even a top player will occasionally miss a dead-easy shot, but it doesn’t happen very often and it is humiliating and costly for them when it does. A star player who starts dropping the ball too much will be benched and then eventually dropped from the team. In boxing, you f*** up and you get knocked out cold and I hear that’s pretty unpleasant.
In that sort of environment, you screw up too much and you can go from hero to zero pretty fast. That’s just how it works, how it has to work. I put it to people that this is also how a serious public intellectual culture that is bullshit-averse would have to work.
In this essay, I have not, mostly for tactical reasons, chosen to call out people by name. Obviously, I could have. Various prominent people who should know better fell for the Murmansk hoax. And the people who fell for the Cologne hoax (and then wrote higher-order bullshit on the subject) constitute a veritable Who’s Who of the alt-right ethno-nationalist commentariat. In the long run, though, there is just too much at stake here to be playing softball and trying to spare certain people’s ample egos. We are at a crucial stage in history and what is at stake here is reclaiming sanity, basic morality, and some kind of future for our children. And if that requires some people’s egos to be bruised, that ain’t much of a price to pay. The casualties of war are usually far worse.
If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for your attention. Now the time has come to roll the credits and play the closing theme music…
♫ Cryin’ won’t help ya ♫
♫ Prayin’ won’t do ya no goo-oo-ood…♫
♫ When da Muslim Rape Army ♫
♫ comes to yer nay-bar-hoo-ood… ♫
(begin gradual fade-out….)
♫ All last night ♫
♫ I sat in the Gasthaus and moaned….♫
♫ When da Muslim Rape Army comes…
♫ I won’t have no home… ♫
(etcetera, etcetera…)
Fan mail (as well as hate mail) can be directed to Revusky at HeresyCentral.
[…] First half hour: Jonathan Revusky of HeresyCentral.is discusses the racism/Islamophobia of the alt right…and the hypocrisy of its mainstream critics, who have helped kill 32 million Muslims by playing along with the 9/11 false flag incitement to genocide. Jon addresses some of these issues—and debunks an alt right urban legend—in his article “The Muslim Rape Army Is Coming to Getcha!” […]