If I knew nothing about Yarvin I would just assume he was engaging in communist apologia for the Soviet camps. In many cases, if a German soldier ended up in a Soviet camp, the death rate was as high as 90%. Very few German soldiers ever returned home. Yarvin's equivocation is insulting to their memory.
Your characterization of the moral and historical contortions which bubble up in the pro-Nazi online right were really on point. Nothing more to say about it really, except thanks.
I remember pointing out (in comments at Gray Mirror) once that he had stolen vast amounts of his ideology from The Sovereign Individual, without so much as a single citation or footnote (he had mentioned the book in the article, so I thought it was apropos to note his plagiarism).
He deleted the entire (free) article (not just my comment, but the entire article), edited it to remove all mention of The Sovereign Individual, then reposted it paywalled.
It was originally called "How to (not) talk to journalists", and it was reposted as "The journalist-rationalist showdown". This was mid-Feb 2021. I think I still have the before and after MAFF archives of it lying around somewhere.
Now I review the MAFFs (my god, when is MAFF going to come back), it turns out the article was originally posted as "How to (not) talk to journalists". The name was then changed to "The journalist-rationalist showdown". I think (speaking from memory) that this is the point at which I made my comment (which I thought I had copied down somewhere, but cannot now find), at which point the article (at first free) was changed to paywalled, then edited.
(The bit he cut out involves him jesting at Balaji Srinivasan, and in passing he calls Balaji a "sovereign individual", which text was a link to Amazon's listing of the book.)
After searching my notes file, I finally found the comment I had left (glad I had the presence of mind to keep a copy):
"After reading The Sovereign Individual a few years ago, it became obvious how much of your work at UR was transparently stolen from TSI with absolutely no attribution at all. (I wrote a whole list of them; it is buried in my notes file somewhere.)
You finally give TSI a plug now though, so that's good. It is a superb book (PDFs of which are available online, if you look) and I highly recommend it.
(I'll go back to reading the entry now.)"
That was the comment that caused him to panic and remove the "sovereign individual" mention (which apparently necessitated the excision of the entire Balaji section).
Thanks for writing this. Coming from Poland, I was first perplexed by the western left wing, which unironically praises Stalin, the Soviet Union, China and demonizes America. But little did I know that there’s a western right wing now that perhaps hates the Soviet Union but hates America at least as much if not more, so tries to drag its name in the mud through these crazy beliefs.
PS. I come from Silesia specifically which is a German-Polish borderland. Everyone here knows which post-war victor was the nice one and which was not.
"To get around this, he’s constructed an entire elaborate anti-American historical mythology11, one in which the US is primarily responsible for the decline of monarchy in Europe, both the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, Mao’s victory in the Chinese Civil War, decolonization, WWII, and the Cold War (in which the USSR was actually a puppet of the US left, another insane belief)."
I think the mythology here is more right than wrong. US intervention in WWI finished off whatever European monarchies were not in decline. The US State Department was, under FDR's guidance, working towards decolonization after WWII. China was 'lost' to the Communists, although the American motivation was more disgust towards Chiang's performance in the war. FDR and the American left believed the USSR could be used like a puppet at the time, and only split later on.
Partial credit systems as generous as these are why grades signal nothing any more. I'm not sure why people need to be so "nice" about glaring errors. It's Yarvin's own schtick that "mostly right" means entirely wrong, right? His "law of sewage" says he's sewage.
Not meant as a general endorsement of Yarvin and his writing, but more broadly that the Anglo-American empires, cultures, traditions should be viewed with suspicion and skepticism rather as things to try and reinstate.
No argument from me there. I prefer the much cleaner cases for that skepticism, such as Sharman's Empires of the Weak and Outsourcing Empire or Farrell's Underground Empire. Farrell has a good substack here, https://www.programmablemutter.com/
When I encountered Yarvin's writing over a decade ago and I first considered his historical arguments with some moderate credulity, I found the history Year Zero by Ian Buruma an excellent clarification of this post-WWII period that convincingly falsified his "Straussian Wikipedia-close-readings". I did not continue to be interested in Yarvin's writing, and it deserves no credulity at all.
That was a horrible time and horrible things happened, but Yarvin's interpretations are nonsense. Thanks for the clear corrective, here.
Easy. The Germans started it. If you start it, you better be able to finish it. If you can't finish it, you will suffer consequences beyond your wildest nightmares.
The Red Army raping its way through Germany is another good example. The Germans started it but couldn't finish it, so they got what they got.
The bombing of Dresden was widely discussed and often criticized at the time, and has remained a subject of debate and criticism ever since. You won't red-pill anyone who isn't a total ignoramous by brining it up.
One minor quibble; the Aktion Reinhardt extermination camps (what people think of when they hear death camps) were shut down at the end of 1943. From then on (except for Romanian Jews) the policy was slow starvation/overwork, the same thing done with Poles and Russians. Evil, but not killing everyone who got to the camps. (It also answers the "If the Holocaust was real, how did so many Jews survive, then?", idiocy.)
I think it’s pretty fair to blame the rapid and complete dissolution of European colonial empires and the victory of the PRC on America (obviously the USSR played an even greater role), but I never understood why people want to make it out that Americans were starving German POWs or wanted to genocide Germans. Maybe Morgenthau did, but not the American generals and not FDR by that point in the war. There’s plenty of evidence from the time that suggests most American men in service didn’t even view the war as an ideological one, at least no more than WWI was.
This isn't correct. Operation Reinhard (extermination of Jews in the General Government, i.e. occupied parts of Poland not annexed to Reich) indeed ended in November 1943 with the last transports from the Warsaw ghetto. But this wasn't the end of death camps themselves.
Chełmno reopened in 1944 to kill the remaining 80,000 Jews from Łódź (Łódź was directly annexed to Reich, so was not a part of the Operation Reinhard, even though mass transits to Chełmno carried on throughout 1942). And then of course gas chambers in Auschwitz reached their peak murder rate in 1944, with the transports of Hungarian Jews.
Interesting stuff. I was skeptical of Yarvin’s claim because I had seen a documentary about a POW camp for German soldiers that was opened early in the war inside the US. The prisoners were seemingly treated well, well enough in fact that several ended up staying in the US after the war. It was odd to me that POWs would be treated so well in one camp while their compatriots were being starved at another.
I would also add: wars require quick strategic decision making and a desire to win if they are to be pulled off. Errors and atrocities will happen in the name of victory. Is it regrettable: yes, is it surprising: no. What is more remarkable was the long term magnanmity over of the Western allies forced by fear of a Soviet rollover that prevented much worse things happening.
Also, this is nothing compared to Yarvin's attempt to wade into the Shakespeare authorship question: it has few real arguments and the emotional tone of a man drinking vodka mixed with yogurt out of a straw at 4 in the morning.
The fact that people hate the Establishment Left doesn’t make them “right-wing”. Many of these types are much more left-wing in their approaches and “ideals”. This piece is ruined by its poor associations.
This is not Moldbang's only pseudo-story. His statement about the special leftism of the WASP elite in the United States and Jewish assimilation into the "leftist WASP culture" is also absurd.:
I see what you mean! I tried clicking on The Jew in American Politics (part 7 OMG) simply because I thought it absurd that he is SO obsessed about the subject. I found the following astute comment by a reader quoting, then shredding Moldbug:
""From this, I arrived at an estimate that about 40% of the Communist Party militants in 1947 were Jewish."
This is at a time when only around 4% of politically-active adults were Jews."
The person who left the comment used his website URL. It does not discredit him. It also supports your observation about Yarvin's absurdity and penchant for pseudo-history
If I knew nothing about Yarvin I would just assume he was engaging in communist apologia for the Soviet camps. In many cases, if a German soldier ended up in a Soviet camp, the death rate was as high as 90%. Very few German soldiers ever returned home. Yarvin's equivocation is insulting to their memory.
Perfect rebuttal to this nonsense.
Your characterization of the moral and historical contortions which bubble up in the pro-Nazi online right were really on point. Nothing more to say about it really, except thanks.
Mencius Moldbug, 2015: "Read old books"
Curtis Yarvin, 2025: "A single Wikipedia page"
I remember pointing out (in comments at Gray Mirror) once that he had stolen vast amounts of his ideology from The Sovereign Individual, without so much as a single citation or footnote (he had mentioned the book in the article, so I thought it was apropos to note his plagiarism).
He deleted the entire (free) article (not just my comment, but the entire article), edited it to remove all mention of The Sovereign Individual, then reposted it paywalled.
Sounds bad. Do you remember the name of the article? Might be retrievable at the Wayback Machine.
It was originally called "How to (not) talk to journalists", and it was reposted as "The journalist-rationalist showdown". This was mid-Feb 2021. I think I still have the before and after MAFF archives of it lying around somewhere.
Here it is:
http://web.archive.org/web/20210216113909/https://graymirror.substack.com/p/how-to-not-talk-to-journalists
And yes, no longer visible on his site. Lol.
Ah, there it is, good work. (I no longer have paid access to Gray Mirror, but from the preview at https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown, you can see the entire Balaji section has been excised.)
Now I review the MAFFs (my god, when is MAFF going to come back), it turns out the article was originally posted as "How to (not) talk to journalists". The name was then changed to "The journalist-rationalist showdown". I think (speaking from memory) that this is the point at which I made my comment (which I thought I had copied down somewhere, but cannot now find), at which point the article (at first free) was changed to paywalled, then edited.
(The bit he cut out involves him jesting at Balaji Srinivasan, and in passing he calls Balaji a "sovereign individual", which text was a link to Amazon's listing of the book.)
After searching my notes file, I finally found the comment I had left (glad I had the presence of mind to keep a copy):
"After reading The Sovereign Individual a few years ago, it became obvious how much of your work at UR was transparently stolen from TSI with absolutely no attribution at all. (I wrote a whole list of them; it is buried in my notes file somewhere.)
You finally give TSI a plug now though, so that's good. It is a superb book (PDFs of which are available online, if you look) and I highly recommend it.
(I'll go back to reading the entry now.)"
That was the comment that caused him to panic and remove the "sovereign individual" mention (which apparently necessitated the excision of the entire Balaji section).
"La Wik" was always his main reference on UR. You fell for marketing
The point here is not his sources but his ever-decreasing investment of effort.
His effort was always the same. The marketing is dropping, the mask is slipping
Thanks for writing this. Coming from Poland, I was first perplexed by the western left wing, which unironically praises Stalin, the Soviet Union, China and demonizes America. But little did I know that there’s a western right wing now that perhaps hates the Soviet Union but hates America at least as much if not more, so tries to drag its name in the mud through these crazy beliefs.
PS. I come from Silesia specifically which is a German-Polish borderland. Everyone here knows which post-war victor was the nice one and which was not.
"To get around this, he’s constructed an entire elaborate anti-American historical mythology11, one in which the US is primarily responsible for the decline of monarchy in Europe, both the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, Mao’s victory in the Chinese Civil War, decolonization, WWII, and the Cold War (in which the USSR was actually a puppet of the US left, another insane belief)."
I think the mythology here is more right than wrong. US intervention in WWI finished off whatever European monarchies were not in decline. The US State Department was, under FDR's guidance, working towards decolonization after WWII. China was 'lost' to the Communists, although the American motivation was more disgust towards Chiang's performance in the war. FDR and the American left believed the USSR could be used like a puppet at the time, and only split later on.
Partial credit systems as generous as these are why grades signal nothing any more. I'm not sure why people need to be so "nice" about glaring errors. It's Yarvin's own schtick that "mostly right" means entirely wrong, right? His "law of sewage" says he's sewage.
Not meant as a general endorsement of Yarvin and his writing, but more broadly that the Anglo-American empires, cultures, traditions should be viewed with suspicion and skepticism rather as things to try and reinstate.
No argument from me there. I prefer the much cleaner cases for that skepticism, such as Sharman's Empires of the Weak and Outsourcing Empire or Farrell's Underground Empire. Farrell has a good substack here, https://www.programmablemutter.com/
Is that an Abundance guy? I don't know how you can reconcile that with believing in Anglo-America as a decadent and acidic force.
There are two guys mentioned there. As far as I know neither is an abundance guy. Farrell was linked. Sharman is here: https://www.polis.cam.ac.uk/staff/professor-jason-sharman
Farrell, at least, seems to endorse the Abundance agenda and DNC leadership: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/we-need-usable-futures
When I encountered Yarvin's writing over a decade ago and I first considered his historical arguments with some moderate credulity, I found the history Year Zero by Ian Buruma an excellent clarification of this post-WWII period that convincingly falsified his "Straussian Wikipedia-close-readings". I did not continue to be interested in Yarvin's writing, and it deserves no credulity at all.
That was a horrible time and horrible things happened, but Yarvin's interpretations are nonsense. Thanks for the clear corrective, here.
Nice, now write up a defense of Dresden.
Easy. The Germans started it. If you start it, you better be able to finish it. If you can't finish it, you will suffer consequences beyond your wildest nightmares.
The Red Army raping its way through Germany is another good example. The Germans started it but couldn't finish it, so they got what they got.
What about what Solzhenitsyn said in 200 Years Together?
https://files.catbox.moe/khk98o.jpg
https://files.catbox.moe/pti3tl.jpg
Doesn't seem like they were the ones starting anything according to him.
The bombing of Dresden was widely discussed and often criticized at the time, and has remained a subject of debate and criticism ever since. You won't red-pill anyone who isn't a total ignoramous by brining it up.
This is a superb piece. I hope it gets wider circulation.
One minor quibble; the Aktion Reinhardt extermination camps (what people think of when they hear death camps) were shut down at the end of 1943. From then on (except for Romanian Jews) the policy was slow starvation/overwork, the same thing done with Poles and Russians. Evil, but not killing everyone who got to the camps. (It also answers the "If the Holocaust was real, how did so many Jews survive, then?", idiocy.)
I think it’s pretty fair to blame the rapid and complete dissolution of European colonial empires and the victory of the PRC on America (obviously the USSR played an even greater role), but I never understood why people want to make it out that Americans were starving German POWs or wanted to genocide Germans. Maybe Morgenthau did, but not the American generals and not FDR by that point in the war. There’s plenty of evidence from the time that suggests most American men in service didn’t even view the war as an ideological one, at least no more than WWI was.
This isn't correct. Operation Reinhard (extermination of Jews in the General Government, i.e. occupied parts of Poland not annexed to Reich) indeed ended in November 1943 with the last transports from the Warsaw ghetto. But this wasn't the end of death camps themselves.
Chełmno reopened in 1944 to kill the remaining 80,000 Jews from Łódź (Łódź was directly annexed to Reich, so was not a part of the Operation Reinhard, even though mass transits to Chełmno carried on throughout 1942). And then of course gas chambers in Auschwitz reached their peak murder rate in 1944, with the transports of Hungarian Jews.
So many Martians likely lost. Think about how much further mathematics would be if Hitler was even a little less cruel.
Interesting stuff. I was skeptical of Yarvin’s claim because I had seen a documentary about a POW camp for German soldiers that was opened early in the war inside the US. The prisoners were seemingly treated well, well enough in fact that several ended up staying in the US after the war. It was odd to me that POWs would be treated so well in one camp while their compatriots were being starved at another.
I would also add: wars require quick strategic decision making and a desire to win if they are to be pulled off. Errors and atrocities will happen in the name of victory. Is it regrettable: yes, is it surprising: no. What is more remarkable was the long term magnanmity over of the Western allies forced by fear of a Soviet rollover that prevented much worse things happening.
Also, this is nothing compared to Yarvin's attempt to wade into the Shakespeare authorship question: it has few real arguments and the emotional tone of a man drinking vodka mixed with yogurt out of a straw at 4 in the morning.
Richard Hanania has endorsed this, so I am just going to assume that you are full of shit.
The fact that people hate the Establishment Left doesn’t make them “right-wing”. Many of these types are much more left-wing in their approaches and “ideals”. This piece is ruined by its poor associations.
True, but they call themselves "right wing" and have an obnoxious habit of insisting that they are the only true right wing.
This is very impressive, especially considering how quickly you put it together. And may I say, you have done a service by publishing it.
This is by far the best thing I’ve read on substack.
This is not Moldbang's only pseudo-story. His statement about the special leftism of the WASP elite in the United States and Jewish assimilation into the "leftist WASP culture" is also absurd.:
https://racehist.blogspot.com/2011/11/jewish-liberalism-allinsmith-study.html
https://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/10/political-background-and-identification.html
https://racehist.blogspot.com/2013/09/ipsos-reuters-2012-presidential-polling.html
http://racehist.blogspot.com/2013/09/inverse-relationship-between-percentage.html?m=1
http://racehist.blogspot.com/2013/09/yankees-and-womens-suffrage.html?m=1
http://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-jew-in-american-politics-part-7.html?m=1
http://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/06/gender-and-politics-among.html?m=1
http://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/10/religious-backgrounds-of-us-professors.html?m=1
http://racehist.blogspot.com/2015/08/more-on-student-radicalism-at-harvard.html?m=1
I see what you mean! I tried clicking on The Jew in American Politics (part 7 OMG) simply because I thought it absurd that he is SO obsessed about the subject. I found the following astute comment by a reader quoting, then shredding Moldbug:
""From this, I arrived at an estimate that about 40% of the Communist Party militants in 1947 were Jewish."
This is at a time when only around 4% of politically-active adults were Jews."
The person who left the comment used his website URL. It does not discredit him. It also supports your observation about Yarvin's absurdity and penchant for pseudo-history