I'm sure everyone has the bad habit of looking up unfamiliar words on Google before finishing reading a text, shortening the attention span and all that. Well reading the last article of Steve Sailer, where he strangely doesn't mention HBD (I guess he wants Pinker to be able to respond), I ended up reading about the Khodynga Tragedy.
It basically happened that during the celebrations of Tsar Nicholas II coronation festivities,1896, they had this panem et circenses oh so Christian charitable places where meat and beer were given away to the loyal subjects of the crown. Over time rumors flew that the free stuff was running out, so people ended up running in, pushing whatever came on their way, with the result of 1300+ people dead, trampled.
If such an accident happened today in say, the US, we on the HBD sphere would be writing one after another posts claiming how Idiocracy is coming, we-told-you-so, how this proofs HBD, and wishing government would just get around abolishing welfare so the left half of the bell curve would just die off and spare us the shame. As a matter of fact fatal stampedes happen all the time in India, and the usual reaction is just some amused grin.
What would liberals do, though?
Well if the ruler happened to be a non-leftist, they would be astroturf gatherings in all big cities raving about how the government is responsible and Capitalism kills people. Its really not hard to imagine, it happens all the time.
So what happened back in Russia? Us reactionaries tend to think than in the old imperial/monarchical days, leftist scum was treated like it deserved, and their demagogic propaganda was not spread with impunity as today. Well, wrong. There was a massive stupor all around the capital, so big the impact was that the new Tsar and his wife went to hospitals to attend the wounded! And the oh so compassionate Tsar Nicolas declined to attend a party in his honor hosted by the French ambassador. Better brains than his told him that you don't decline France's hospitality to mourn for some stupid peasants, and in the end he did attend the party.
Despite the government giving big sums of money to the families of the dead, the fact that the Tsar of all Russias dared to attend a diplomatic ball instead of crying the death of his subjects caused a wave of indignation, with the intelligentsia claiming that he would die an early death because of it.
This is in the, we are told today, dark and spooky totalitarian monarchy of Tsarist Russia, where the Tsar had absolute power, unlike the enlightened democracies of the West. Well, absolute my ass. It seems to be the Tsarist authorities were no more absolutist, or rightist, than Bush Jr. That is, they were fake monarchists who caved to all leftist pressure, playing the leftists game. And they lost, of course.
This links with Jim's point, in a truly insightful article on his blog. European monarchies were not reactionary polities at all. They played the game that Western democracies decided, they were subject to the same fashions and pressures. They surrendered their legitimacy to leftist demotist thought, surely because they couldn't argue against the Christian pedigree of socialist egalitarianism. And because Whites are a religious people, if one party has a better theology than yours, given enough time, they will replace you, kill you and your family. That's what happened to all European monarchs.
Rich people play the compassion game, i.e. we are good people because we give free stuff to the poor. But giving things to the poor, means you accept the poor people deserve free stuff. And they deserve free stuff because we are all equal. But if we are all equal, thus we should achieve full equality. And in order to have equality, socialism always trumps charity. So when leftists demand compassion, what they are asking is for socialism. Always.
The biggest proof of this is that Chinese or Indians don't do charity.