Nationalism Redux

A nationalist future, courtesy of the folks at Game Designers' Workshop…

Nationalism gets a bad rap these days.

There’s no use denying it…we all know its true. And I guess it’s an understandable response, especially after all that…well, unpleasantness in the first half of the last century.

So now it’s pretty much a gratuitous platitude, an incontrovertible truism, that nationalism equals bad, and globalism—or internationalism, cosmopolitanism, or whatever the hell else you want to call it—equals good. Borders and patriotism and cultural pride (but only insofar as European and European diaspora countries are concerned) are all terribly wicked, and it’s a hackneyed commonplace that they led to the wars and evils of the twentieth century; therefore, the reverse is unquestionably good and righteous, whence the open borders and multiculturalism and NGOs and ever more closely integrated foreign policies that bedevil the peoples of the West—especially those in the Anglosphere and NATO countries.

In our reductionist, dualist vision of the world, globalism is sold as the antidote to nationalism, which has been forever consigned to the dustbin of history. Globalism, in other words, is the good and heavenly pole whither all the right-thinkers and do-gooders naturally congregate; nationalism is the evil and hellish pole that’s reserved for the bad guys, the right-wingers and Twitter anons and sinful backsliders.

And who knows? Maybe, once upon a time, amidst the smoldering ruins of the Second World War, that puerile vision of the world might even have made a certain kind of sense.

Or maybe it never did, and was always just a bill of goods sold to a weary world by a handful of people—I daren’t call them a cabal—who found themselves in a pretty position in the wake of that war, a heaven-sent opportunity to place themselves at the top of the heap, and remake the world order so as to benefit them in perpetuity.

The always insightful and perspicacious elitologist (is that a word?) Academic Agent, writing at

The Forbidden Texts

, has been doing yeoman’s work in untangling the Regime’s sordid and incestuous power relations. He speaks often of “The Octopus,” whose tentacles are government (“the Crown”), law (“the Bench”), finance (“the Chest”), NGOs and transnational organizations (“the Network”), civil and intelligence services (“the Chamber”), religious institutions (“the Church”), think tanks and universities (“the Head”), and—last but hardly the least—the incessant media (“the Mouth”).

It’s all very distasteful and disagreeable, but it’s extremely edifying and instructive, and Academic Agent’s work happens to be a prime example of the serious efforts underway in Dissident Right circles to truly understand and map out the reality of power in our increasingly totalitarian world.

And it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of those efforts. “Know thy enemy,” the old Chinese maxim advises—so we’d best understand who it is that rules us if we would build a better future.

Academic Agents also has an interesting take on the composition of the Ruling Class (yes, it must always be capitalized), and it is his considered opinion that this lofty stratum of our society’s Optimates comprises three competing factions:

“Broadly we can call these the Neocons embodied in the American Military-Industrial Complex, the Techno-Globalists as symbolised by the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab, and, finally, the Third Worldists, as embodied by George Soros and his Open Society Foundation…The ultimate aim of the Neocons is to remake the world in America’s image, in other words to subordinate every tradition and culture under the Lesbian Stiletto heel of liberal democracy so that everyone can enjoy unlimited anal sex and a never-ending cavalcade of black people on television. Meanwhile, the Techno-Globalists are much more practically focused, on things like energy and food and technology, and their ultimate aim is to establish a global governance structure or even formal government. And, finally, the Third Worldists simply want to equalise the relative standings of the West and the third world. In my view, the real struggle is between the Neocons and the Techno-Globalists, while the Third Worldists typically represent a distraction for the left and right to squabble over. Very generally, the response to Covid saw Techno-Globalists grow their power while the war between Russia and Ukraine has seen Neocons claw a lot of power back. Of course there are many elites, for example, The Dark Lord, Tony Blair, who have a foot firmly in both camps. But eventually, the Techno-Globalists will have to see the Neocons as a rival castle. Neocons seek to maintain American and Israeli hegemony, while the Techno-Globalists are more genuinely universalist. Neocons use the instruments of American power while Techno-Globalists use the instruments of trans-national power such as the UN, the WHO, Climate Change protocols, and so on. The Neocon powerbase is what you might call the Washington Swamp backed generally by organised Jewish groups and wonk think tanks, while the Techno-Globalist powerbase is corporate backed generally by a nebulous cluster of NGOs. Neocons typically exercise power through the state, while Techno-Globalists typically exercise it through corporate compliance culture. I mention this because while we might point to general tendencies in the Regime hierarchy, we must recognise that these rival factions operate differently.”

So, according to Academic Agent’s analysis of the hidden powers behind the thrones, we are confronted by a fifth column of anti-nationalist, global empire-builders in one form or another. Even the Neocons are not American nationalists in a traditional sense: they merely wish to leverage existing American military and economic power to cobble together a global liberal-democratic empire.

In other words: “Globohomo,” in the colorful terminology of the Dissident Right. Globohomo, forever, in all its awful glory.

The Techno-Globalists, meanwhile, are John Lennon’s “Imagine” types pure and simple, with the technocratic and organizational heft to someday achieve their Marxist utopia of no countries, no possessions, and no religion, too. The Third-Worldists, I suppose, just wish to level the whole world into a kind of Brazilian favela, with themselves at the top of the heap.

The future, in other words, looks a great deal like the present…only worse.

But, as is my wont, I sometimes enjoy a glimpse of an alternate future—just to spice things up a bit. The trend nowadays is decidedly and seemingly irreversibly in a globalist direction, with ever greater degrees of integration and the top-down imposition of whatever the leftist “current thing” will be fifty…a hundred…two hundred years hence. Undoubtedly that will involve some new sexual identity, but with pederasty and bestiality already on the horizon, one shudders to think of what the Left will dream up next for their mindless adherents to screw.

Robots? Too tame…not edgy and subversive enough. Holograms? Too insubstantial. How about all those aliens the government whistleblowers keep talking about these days?

Who knows—perhaps that whole “clap them alien cheeks” meme from the halcyon days of Storm Area 51 was more prescient than anyone ever imagined. Give it a few decades and it might just become the future Left’s newest slogan in the sexual revolution.

Hell, at the rate things are going, it might only be a few years…

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Anyhow, I got to thinking about what a nationalist future might look like…and, as often happens, I recalled an old role-playing game from the eighties. It really is amazing what one can learn from old role-playing games from the eighties; those nerds seemed to have dreamed up just about every worthwhile scenario in their pursuit of new settings and adventures.

The particular game I’m thinking of was called 2300 AD, originally titled Traveller: 2300, and it was put out by the prolific Game Designers’ Workshop, better known perhaps for such settings as the science-fiction space opera Traveller, the steampunkish Space: 1889, and the horror fantasy Dark Conspiracy.

In any case, 2300 AD, like all the best games, was short lived, with an initial run of only about four years before poor sales put it in an early grave. But it’s no less fascinating for all that. The premise for the setting was derived from an earlier—and very popular—RPG from the Game Designers’ Workshop called Twilight: 2000, which was basically just a near-future military game that took place in the year 2000, after civilization and the entire world order is shaken up and nearly obliterated in the wake of a nuclear war afterwards called, evocatively, “The Twilight War.”

In 2300 AD, we see this world advanced three centuries in the future, and we behold a new world order—one in which the Westphalian system is alive and intact, and the nation-state is still the basic unit of human civilization. No ESG scores, global governance boards, and NGOs here, folks.

Nationalism is back, it’s better than ever, and it’s reaching for the stars.

The most intriguing aspect of the game design for 2300 AD was that it didn’t rely on a simple brainstorming session or the imagination of any one designer to dream up what the future would look like. Instead, the Game Designers’ Workshop team gathered for an epic role-playing session, called “The Game,” in which different employees assumed the role of different countries, starting from the world dispensation after the Third World War depicted in Twilight: 2000, and played against one another in five- or ten-year turns until they’d advanced the historical clock by about three hundred years.

Closeup of the “Mideast” portion of the original game board used in “The Game.”

So, the future world depicted in 2300 AD was largely the result of chance and skillful gameplay, and not the imaginations or biases of its designers. And that influence shows, as the resulting world order is not one that many would have predicted or ever dreamt up.

For one thing, the number one nation in the world of 2300 is France…yes, you read that correctly. France is now the Third French Empire, the earth’s preeminent military and economic power, and the Tricolor flies over much of Africa (including a colossal space elevator called “The Beanstalk” in Gabon). More importantly, the French are unquestionably the dominant pioneering power in space.

That’s the other thing: something called the “Stutterwarp” drive was invented not too long after The Twilight War, and this has allowed man to spread to the stars at faster-than-light speeds. The result is something rather like the “Scramble for Africa” in the nineteenth century, but now with France leading the pack in the race to establish new colonies among the near stars.

Hell, there’s even a Foreign Legion—in space!

But the French aren’t the only game in town. In fact, despite the devastation of the Third World War, the cultural, political, military, and economic axis of the earth has reverted back to Europe, with the United Kingdom and Germany closely rivaling the Frogs in this wild, multipolar future.

The US is still around, of course, a little worse for wear, and minus a few southwestern states (seized by the Mexicans after the war), as well as Texas, which seceded long ago to become a powerful nation-state of its own. The Lone Star country even has an offworld colony or two…heaven forfend.

But that’s okay, too, because an American colony world applied for statehood and was admitted to the Union, so it turned out to be a wash in the end.

Anyhow, there’s a lot more. The nations still fight wars on earth, and among the stars first contact has been made with a number of truly bizarre and thoroughly alien intelligent species, including one—an insect-like race called “the Kafers”—which pose a serious threat to human hegemony in space.

The starship Bayern.

There are also expeditions that probe deeper into the galaxy, with an advanced German scientific research institute outfitting the giant starship Bayern to travel to the Pleiades, 400 light-years away, where the expeditionaries discover a race of almost god-like, four-dimensional beings.

It’s all a lot of fun, and it’s a blast to read about this future world of 2300 AD. But what I find most fascinating is that this is all in the context of a nationalistic future—and nationalism, in the late eighties, was as much of a swear word then as it is now. Even so, the folks at Game Designers’ Workshop developed a setting in which nationalistic competition and rivalries conspired to create a positive and adventurous future of limitless possibilities and exploration.

It’s a man’s future, I suppose, and I guess that’s the problem; it’s also an unabashedly right-wing future, though the designers would probably refute that. There’s no eating of bugs. No living in pods. No tip-toeing around hurt feelings. No social credit scores, Pride flags, gender confusion, thug-worshipping, and no illegal immigrants.

You don’t want to live in Honduras? Guatemala got you down? Africa not what it used to be? You go to the colonies. That’s where you’ll find men exploring, discovering, homesteading strange new worlds, killing each other, killing aliens…really, just having a blast.

I don’t know if that’s what a nationalistic future would really look like. Probably not; there are just too many variables. But I do know one thing: that’s what I’d want it to look like.

Because, Christ, this micromanaged globalist bullshit is becoming so damned tiresome…