The name of the first month of the year, January, comes from the Roman god, Janus, who was two-headed, with one head facing forward and the other, backward.
As we come to the end of another year, it's natural to look forward. But it's necessary first to look back and take stock, and muse on both achievements and setbacks, in our personal lives as well as in the world and the country.
At the end of 2007 I see immigration as still the number one issue facing our country (and probably the West in general) just as I did at the start of this year. And it does not take psychic powers to predict that immigration, whether our corrupt leaders acknowledge it or not, will be the most pressing issue in 2008. Not 'terror' and not the Middle East perpetual war, but borders and immigration and the threat to the very character of our country. Underlying this situation, of course, is the deeper issue of our out-of-touch, remote elites, and the fact that our government is completely detached from the will of the people, and by all appearances, indifferent at best to those they claim to represent and serve. At worst, they are more or less openly hostile to us, and seem to have declared war on us. Beyond that fact is the nagging question of why so many of us seem blithely oblivious to that state of affairs, and are happily prepared to vote for more of the same of what is doing us in. It is as though a patient is being slowly poisoned by his doctor, to whom he is slavishly attached, and continues to use the same doctor although his health is obviously failing and his life is ebbing. We need some new physicians, folks. As it is, it looks like we have the political equivalents of Dr. Kevorkian attending to us, and we don't want to admit it.
In some ways, however, the state of our country shows a few hopeful signs. It does seem as though there are increasing signs of awakenings, and of a resurgent sense of our national consciousness, after decades of decline and of multicultural indoctrination.
I see this in little ways, in everyday conversations among everyday people; there are a few rumblings here and there, although they are not nearly as vigorous as they ought to be.
In other ways, the signs are discouraging. The country, like the rest of the West, is seemingly farther down the road toward demographic transformation than we were last year. If the latest Census Bureau figures, released the other day, are accurate, we in America are now receiving another 'migrant' every 30 seconds. That is a staggering figure to contemplate, and it is probably a low estimate, like all the immigration statistics fed us by our mendacious bureaucrats.
So as our country heads toward multicultural oblivion, the question now is whether we can act to stop or even slow down the changes to our country.
Obviously, I am still here blogging away, and still doing what I can in whatever way I can, refusing to give in to resignation or fatalism. Yet there are those out there who preach those attitudes, the most recent and egregious example being the Dallas Morning News editorial staff, with their smarmy, politically correct paean to the Illegal Immigrant as 'Texan of the Year.'
In response, I nominate the Dallas News editorial staff as Turncoat of the Year.
That disgraceful column needs to be dealt with in another blog entry, but for now I will just say that, bad as it is, it is just one more example of a long-running campaign by the ideologues of the old media, who are the greatest friends the illegal invaders could ever pray to have. They work tirelessly, these media propagandists, to create sympathy for illegal (and legal) immigrants, regardless of the merit of the immigrants. And just to vary up their propaganda, they switch from the tearjerker mode to the cynical 'embrace-the-inevitable', lie-back-and-enjoy-it, line.
They serve the same function that Tokyo Rose served for the Japanese government in World War II. They work 24/7 at wearing us down, making us resigned, and then alternately berating us as bigots and racists. They are demoralizing many people, but I wonder if they are overplaying their paltry hand, and actually provoking a backlash by arousing the ire of many otherwise disengaged readers.
So we must not give in and accept the invitation to passivity by accepting the idea that 'we can't deport 12 million people' and 'we need immigrants to keep our economy afloat' and all the rest of those unprovable assertions.
So many of the often-repeated mantras which resurface in every conversation or discussion about this issue refuse to go away. For example, my long-time readers will know that the phrase that I find most irksome and stupid is some variation of "as long as it's legal, I have no problem with any immigration. It's only the illegal kind I object to.' Yet this phrase lingers on, with few people challenging it. Why? Is it just habit, by now? Or are people really so obtuse that they can't see the problem with that statement? Or are people so self-conscious about any statement that might be called 'racist' that they hurry to cover themselves? If I accomplish one thing in 2008 I would like to get people to stop saying that phrase or any variation thereof.
Another variation I see on places like Free Republic is 'I'm not anti-immigrant, I'm anti-ILLEGAL immigrant.' This is said triumphantly in response to some article which refers to 'anti-immigration activists' and it is seen as a refutation of the 'anti-immigrant' label and a foolproof defense against the race card. Wrong. The opposition considers everybody who is not pro-open borders as racist. Period. You can cover yourself with protestations about legality and illegality and it makes not a whit of difference. To the opposition, all desire to control immigration, even in the most modest and limited fashion, is bigotry.
Let them call names. Stop playing their game by their rules. They win as long as we do that.
If we are going to prevail in this struggle, we have to stop counterproductive habits like the Politically Correct protestations about legality and illegality. Those who think that legality would make mass immigration just dandy are just not thinking.
Another unhealthy (but more politically incorrect) attitude I encounter is that of playing one minority group off against another. I hear a distressing number of people saying that 'the illegals have a much better work ethic than blacks.' What's that got to do with anything? Some people because they have had negative interactions with blacks will express a kind of Schadenfreude about illegals displacing blacks from jobs or from neighborhoods. I don't see anything to be pleased about there. And I don't see any proof of the supposed superiority of illegal Hispanics as compared to blacks.
Wishing for illegals to supplant American-born blacks is misguided to say the least.
One of the biggest obstacles to the recovery of our country is not only our corrupt political system, but their enablers in the media. However, for now, at least, we have the Internet, with some alternative voices being heard that would never get a chance in our controlled media. And the Internet, for now, is relatively free, though there are efforts to suppress real alternative voices.
We have to make the best possible use of the freedom we still have, while we still have it, and 2008 will be a crucial year, I think, not only because of the upcoming election but because I think we are coming to a point of no return. If we don't succeed in regaining our sense of ourselves and our traditions, and a common purpose, if we continue to be divided amongst ourselves while enemies come in and pillage our deteriorating homelands, we will have lost the opportunity we had.
There's still time. I believe that, and I will go into the New Year with a resolve to do all that I can. I hope that all people of goodwill have that same determination.
Monday, December 31, 2007
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Exploiters and ideologues
Over at the Cambria Will Not Yield blog, CWNY reviews a book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead.
I haven't read the book, although it sounds interesting. For those who don't know the story behind it, it's about the anthropologist Margaret Mead and her study of adolescence in Samoan culture, which was the basis for her book Coming of Age in Samoa.
The writer of the book himself is also an anthropologist, and apparently had been a follower of Mead:
I remember years ago when I took several anthropology courses in college; I briefly considered an anthropology major until these courses disabused me of that idea. But at the time I studied anthropology, Mead's research in Samoa was still considered valid; apparently the truth had not yet been revealed. But the fact is that the liberals who dominate the anthropology field were quick to believe Mead's findings and to pass them on as gospel -- because they wanted to believe. They came with a preconceived image of 'primitive cultures' as being superior, because natural and unspoiled. They fully believed in the Rousseauian idea of the 'noble savage', of primitive tribal beings as the naive but pure children of nature.
And they particularly wanted to believe that the noble savage embodied all the things they wished for Western society, including 'free love', unbridled sexuality, polymorphous perversity, a lack of inhibitions. So they seized on Mead's research as just what was needed to preach that modern Western society needed more of the above; only thus would we be really healthy and 'integrated' people, once we were freed of our silly Christian European puritanism.
Mead, plainly and simply, was a leftist ideologue, who brought certain preconceptions to her work. She no doubt wanted, even if only unconsciously, to find certain things which would corroborate her ideology. Most often, I found this to be true among those that work in the 'social sciences'. It may be unconscious, or it may be conscious, but they bring biases and an agenda to their work.
During my feminist days, I remember that Mead was very much lionized by feminists as being a role model and a pioneer in exposing the falseness of sex roles.
The kinds of ideas she promulgated have been very influential in much of the currently pervasive liberalism:
And we have all seen just how much a relatively small group of 'committed' liberal ideologues have managed to change the world to their liking, even despite the fact that Mead's research has been shown to be dubious at best. The fact that her Samoan informants probably lied to her and told her what she wanted to hear has not apparently fazed her supporters, or caused the anthropology world to recant their enthusiasm for the Noble Savage ideal. So what if her research is discredited, and her subjects lied or spun stories? What's the liberal word -- truthiness? The particulars may be inaccurate but the overall 'truth' is there underlying it, and besides, the ideology is what matters, not the trivial facts.
And this incident was not the last time the anthropological world was hoaxed. Another story we heard in college was about this wonderful tribe that had been discovered in the remote wilds of the Philippines, the Tasaday tribe. Our wide-eyed anthropology prof told us how these people were peaceful and childlike; they did not know war or violence. Why, they had no word for 'war'!
Later it was revealed that this tribe was not what it seemed.
According to this story, the hoax was perpetrated by a Filipino official
And this paragraph, though amusing in a sad way, shows the dilemma of the liberal anthropological world in dealing with primitive tribes:
So preserving these tribes in a museum-like setting, with their cultures intact, is more important than saving their lives, or helping them to improve their conditions?
This only illustrates, though it does not explain, the liberal mindset.
However, even the impulse to preserve the primitive cultures in their traditional setting is more laudatory than the current craze among the liberal do-gooders and government elites: bringing stone-age people to Western countries, where they will both encounter culture shock and engender it among their hosts, as they try to enter a 21st century culture.
The social sciences' adulation of primitive cultures, and the more primitive and 'other' the better, is at the heart of our current policy of allowing mostly Third World immigration to the West. Of course there are the cold-eyed corporate elites who want these people here for exploitation and possibly to foment discord, but hand in hand with them, in a strange alliance, are the starry-eyed academics who idolize the noble savage ideal in their minds. This latter group of people will stop at nothing in trying to remake the world to conform to their ideology-driven image of what should be. We see this partnership at work in the story about the Tasaday and the collusion between the exploitative politician and the utopian anthropologists.
Liberals, it's clear, should never be allowed near the levers of power, or attain any position of authority or influence until they have proven themselves capable of interacting with reality instead of trying, as is their wont, to conform reality to their utopian ideologies. We are now seeing, in the deteriorating society around us, the fruits of their harebrained social engineering.
I haven't read the book, although it sounds interesting. For those who don't know the story behind it, it's about the anthropologist Margaret Mead and her study of adolescence in Samoan culture, which was the basis for her book Coming of Age in Samoa.
The writer of the book himself is also an anthropologist, and apparently had been a follower of Mead:
And indeed, Freeman admits, he himself was a Mead enthusiast when he began his follow-up research, until he discovered that Mead’s research was flawed and inaccurate. He even includes, in the book, a letter from Mead to himself in which she concedes that her research was inaccurate.
What Freeman unearths is that Samoa was not the uninhibited sexual paradise that Mead described in her book. Mead spent most of her time “researching” the Samoan culture in a Navy hotel and never really lived with the Samoans. She got her information about the sexual practices of young Samoan girls from two girls, who, Freeman reveals, were just indulging in the Samoan custom of telling tall tales. They never dreamed that Mead would take them seriously.
But Mead, who had studied under the cultural determinist Franz Boas, was determined to give her mentor the research he wanted. And the liberal world wanted to believe that there was a tropical paradise devoid of Western cultural guilt about sexual matters.''
I remember years ago when I took several anthropology courses in college; I briefly considered an anthropology major until these courses disabused me of that idea. But at the time I studied anthropology, Mead's research in Samoa was still considered valid; apparently the truth had not yet been revealed. But the fact is that the liberals who dominate the anthropology field were quick to believe Mead's findings and to pass them on as gospel -- because they wanted to believe. They came with a preconceived image of 'primitive cultures' as being superior, because natural and unspoiled. They fully believed in the Rousseauian idea of the 'noble savage', of primitive tribal beings as the naive but pure children of nature.
And they particularly wanted to believe that the noble savage embodied all the things they wished for Western society, including 'free love', unbridled sexuality, polymorphous perversity, a lack of inhibitions. So they seized on Mead's research as just what was needed to preach that modern Western society needed more of the above; only thus would we be really healthy and 'integrated' people, once we were freed of our silly Christian European puritanism.
Mead, plainly and simply, was a leftist ideologue, who brought certain preconceptions to her work. She no doubt wanted, even if only unconsciously, to find certain things which would corroborate her ideology. Most often, I found this to be true among those that work in the 'social sciences'. It may be unconscious, or it may be conscious, but they bring biases and an agenda to their work.
During my feminist days, I remember that Mead was very much lionized by feminists as being a role model and a pioneer in exposing the falseness of sex roles.
The kinds of ideas she promulgated have been very influential in much of the currently pervasive liberalism:
In subsequent field work, on mainland New Guinea, she demonstrated that gender roles differed from one society to another, depending at least as much on culture as on biology, and in her work in Bali with her third husband, Gregory Bateson, she explored new ways of documenting the connection between childrearing and adult culture, and the way in which these are symbolically interwoven.
[...]
She affirmed the possibility of learning from other groups, above all by applying the knowledge she brought back from the field to issues of modern life. Thus, she insisted that human diversity is a resource, not a handicap, that all human beings have the capacity to learn from and teach each other.
[...]
In a society becoming increasingly pessimistic about the human capacity to change, she insisted on the importance of enhancing and supporting that capacity. She believed that cultural patterns of racism, warfare, and environmental exploitation were learned, and that the members of a society could work together to modify their traditions and to construct new institutions. This conviction drew her into discussions of the process of change, expressed in the slogan, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.”
And we have all seen just how much a relatively small group of 'committed' liberal ideologues have managed to change the world to their liking, even despite the fact that Mead's research has been shown to be dubious at best. The fact that her Samoan informants probably lied to her and told her what she wanted to hear has not apparently fazed her supporters, or caused the anthropology world to recant their enthusiasm for the Noble Savage ideal. So what if her research is discredited, and her subjects lied or spun stories? What's the liberal word -- truthiness? The particulars may be inaccurate but the overall 'truth' is there underlying it, and besides, the ideology is what matters, not the trivial facts.
And this incident was not the last time the anthropological world was hoaxed. Another story we heard in college was about this wonderful tribe that had been discovered in the remote wilds of the Philippines, the Tasaday tribe. Our wide-eyed anthropology prof told us how these people were peaceful and childlike; they did not know war or violence. Why, they had no word for 'war'!
Later it was revealed that this tribe was not what it seemed.
According to this story, the hoax was perpetrated by a Filipino official
Now the question was, who organized this incredible hoax? All roads led to Elizalde. Some of the Tasaday came forth and admitted conspiring with him. One man gave this revealing account:
"We didn't live in caves, only near them, until we met Elizalde...Elizalde forced us to live in the caves so that we'd be better cavemen. Before he came, we lived in huts on the other side of the mountain and we farmed. We took off our clothes because Elizalde told us to do so and promised us if we looked poor that we would get assistance. He gave us money to pose as Tasaday and promised us security from counter insurgency and tribal fighting."
It became evident that Elizalde had been manipulating the Tasaday for his own personal gain.
Also, when Marcos's dictatorship ended, Elizalde was the first crony to leave the Philippines, taking with him $35 million dollars from the non-profit PANAMIN organization that he had started specifically for the Tasaday.
Elizalde ended up in Costa Rica. He squandered all the money, became addicted to drugs, and died impoverished in 1997. Instead of a hero, he is now known as the perpetrator of the greatest anthropological hoax since piltdown man.''
And this paragraph, though amusing in a sad way, shows the dilemma of the liberal anthropological world in dealing with primitive tribes:
The Tasaday Hoax led many anthropologists to reconsider how they deal with indigenous tribes. It is a situation full of dilemmas. Anthropologists are often faced with situations where members of the tribe they are studying die on a regular basis from easily curable diseases. But administering medicine may be the first step toward the loss of a culture. Many tribes actually express desire to become more technological. Anthropologists usually pressure them not to do so. One Brazilian indigenous tribal chief, after hearing such a recommendation, is quoted saying, "Do they think we like not having any clothes? It may be the way of our ancestors, but the bugs bother us..." Should tribes like these be exposed to the modern world? There are no easy answers.''
So preserving these tribes in a museum-like setting, with their cultures intact, is more important than saving their lives, or helping them to improve their conditions?
This only illustrates, though it does not explain, the liberal mindset.
However, even the impulse to preserve the primitive cultures in their traditional setting is more laudatory than the current craze among the liberal do-gooders and government elites: bringing stone-age people to Western countries, where they will both encounter culture shock and engender it among their hosts, as they try to enter a 21st century culture.
The social sciences' adulation of primitive cultures, and the more primitive and 'other' the better, is at the heart of our current policy of allowing mostly Third World immigration to the West. Of course there are the cold-eyed corporate elites who want these people here for exploitation and possibly to foment discord, but hand in hand with them, in a strange alliance, are the starry-eyed academics who idolize the noble savage ideal in their minds. This latter group of people will stop at nothing in trying to remake the world to conform to their ideology-driven image of what should be. We see this partnership at work in the story about the Tasaday and the collusion between the exploitative politician and the utopian anthropologists.
Liberals, it's clear, should never be allowed near the levers of power, or attain any position of authority or influence until they have proven themselves capable of interacting with reality instead of trying, as is their wont, to conform reality to their utopian ideologies. We are now seeing, in the deteriorating society around us, the fruits of their harebrained social engineering.
Is there a method to our elites' madness?
Or are they all just crazy, with their multicultural mania?
Over at Refugee Resettlement Watch, (H/T John S Bolton at The Open City and its Natural Enemies)
there is a linked story from the Shelbyville, Tennessee paper about how the Somalis who have been resettled there as 'refugees' have reacted to the hospitality shown them.
Somalians respond poorly to hospitality
Brian Mosely
Wow. I am stunned to find such an honest story in any newspaper; I commend the writer, Brian Mosely, for his honesty. How does it happen that a newspaper dares to deviate from the approved PC template? It's unheard of.
I've read countless stories about refugees who are dropped down in some hapless American heartland city or town, usually one which is conspicuously non-diverse, and the focus is always on the trials and travails of the poor suffering refugee. No newspaper in my recollection has ever reported on the difficulties the town experiences with suddenly having whole groups of people from an alien culture thrust on them, usually without their consent. If such difficulties are touched on at all, it is only in reference to the refugees' experience. The emphasis will be on the 'xenophobia' of the local people, and their reluctance to adjust to the refugees. The story then becomes the 'racism' of heartland America, with predictable moralizing from the liberals who are advocating for the refugees. Nobody tells of the troubles experienced by the local people. Until this article.
I like the reference to Star Trek; it's appropriate. Why don't we, with our supposed reverence for 'diversity', try to leave people and their cultures intact, instead of trying to mix everybody together in some mad experiment? The fictional 'Federation' at least tried to practice non-interference with alien cultures.
Well, I would say that the movie depiction has a basis in reality; I remember too vividly the TV news images of Somalis dishonoring the half-dressed corpses of the troops who were shot down by those warlords. At the time I was still quite a liberal, but I experienced a visceral response to the sight of American boys' remains being trampled and dragged by these savages. And savages is the appropriate word. If we can't apply the term 'savage' to them and their behavior, we may as well drop the word from our lexicon.
So those people I saw on TV, jumping up and down on the bodies of dead Americans, are the kin of the people we are now having to welcome into our communities. Oh, but we mustn't stereotype or generalize; it was just a small minority of extremists who actually did that, you see, even though it looked like a whole crowd of people rejoicing over our dead sons and brothers in their streets.
But the Somalis who come here are different kinds of people, surely. Aren't they?
The word seems to be out that Americans are all stupidly soft and deferential, and that demanding things is the appropriate way to deal with us.
I didn't read the comments on the website, but the above gives me hope that there are some people, somewhere, in this country, who are not content for America to be the doormat of the world, and for Americans to be viewed as everybody's sugar daddies and servants.
John S. Bolton, at his above-linked blog Open City always has a unique take on these things, and he asks whether there is not some method to this madness of our country being forced to receive the most unassimilable and often hostile groups of people. I have given a lot of thought to this situation, too, and it seems so counterintuitive, so completely contrary to all common sense, that I sometimes conclude that our elites have all gone quite insane, seized with some kind of communicable madness. However that is not a useful explanation; John S. Bolton believes that there is a purpose to the elites' seeming irrationality:
It seems to be as plausible an explanation as any that I have heard; otherwise it makes absolutely no sense.
It does appear that the idea is to provoke discord and possibly open conflict. How else do we explain it?
Over at Refugee Resettlement Watch, (H/T John S Bolton at The Open City and its Natural Enemies)
there is a linked story from the Shelbyville, Tennessee paper about how the Somalis who have been resettled there as 'refugees' have reacted to the hospitality shown them.
Somalians respond poorly to hospitality
Brian Mosely
Over the past few years, this community has given a helping hand and opened their arms to the new arrivals from Somalia.
In return, many of these refugees have given Shelbyville the finger.
When I began researching this story about the Somalis, I knew it would be controversial. We were aware that many in Shelbyville were having serious concerns about hundreds of Sunni Muslims moving here.
But as I began to talk with officials and others about our new neighbors, I was stunned by the reaction. Practically every person I spoke with locally said they had done everything possible to help out the refugees in adjusting to their new home and were treated very badly in return.
On the other hand, some I contacted for background on this story seemed to be so blinded by political correctness that they would excuse any behavior, no matter how upsetting or disruptive, as "part of their culture."
Did anyone involved in integrating these folks into American society stop to think that many in the heartland of America might not share this overly optimistic and myopic view of cultural diversity?
Unfortunately, the feelings and views of the communities the Somalis move to are almost never taken into account. Indeed, they are expected to simply keep their mouths shut and accept the newcomers without question. Those who protest are labeled racists by the various groups involved in resettling the refugees.''
Wow. I am stunned to find such an honest story in any newspaper; I commend the writer, Brian Mosely, for his honesty. How does it happen that a newspaper dares to deviate from the approved PC template? It's unheard of.
I've read countless stories about refugees who are dropped down in some hapless American heartland city or town, usually one which is conspicuously non-diverse, and the focus is always on the trials and travails of the poor suffering refugee. No newspaper in my recollection has ever reported on the difficulties the town experiences with suddenly having whole groups of people from an alien culture thrust on them, usually without their consent. If such difficulties are touched on at all, it is only in reference to the refugees' experience. The emphasis will be on the 'xenophobia' of the local people, and their reluctance to adjust to the refugees. The story then becomes the 'racism' of heartland America, with predictable moralizing from the liberals who are advocating for the refugees. Nobody tells of the troubles experienced by the local people. Until this article.
Suddenly introducing a society that is literally hundreds of years behind the times in the ways of hygiene, mannerisms, culture and the treatment of women into 21st Century America is a recipe for sociological disaster. It is a massive shock to the Somalis and doesn't do the local communities any favors either.
Indeed, if this was Star Trek, this action would be considered a major violation of the Prime Directive.''
I like the reference to Star Trek; it's appropriate. Why don't we, with our supposed reverence for 'diversity', try to leave people and their cultures intact, instead of trying to mix everybody together in some mad experiment? The fictional 'Federation' at least tried to practice non-interference with alien cultures.
It also doesn't help that the most common image of Somalis in American popular culture is from the Ridley Scott film "Black Hawk Down," which depicts them as brutal, wild-eyed fanatics slaughtering U.S. troops in the name of Allah and barbaric warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid.''
Well, I would say that the movie depiction has a basis in reality; I remember too vividly the TV news images of Somalis dishonoring the half-dressed corpses of the troops who were shot down by those warlords. At the time I was still quite a liberal, but I experienced a visceral response to the sight of American boys' remains being trampled and dragged by these savages. And savages is the appropriate word. If we can't apply the term 'savage' to them and their behavior, we may as well drop the word from our lexicon.
So those people I saw on TV, jumping up and down on the bodies of dead Americans, are the kin of the people we are now having to welcome into our communities. Oh, but we mustn't stereotype or generalize; it was just a small minority of extremists who actually did that, you see, even though it looked like a whole crowd of people rejoicing over our dead sons and brothers in their streets.
But the Somalis who come here are different kinds of people, surely. Aren't they?
There are also the stories that come from other communities that have many locals nervous. For example, in October of last year, Said Biyad, a Bantu refugee from Somalia, killed his four children in Louisville, Ky., and attacked his estranged wife with a blunt object, turning himself into police afterward. He slashed the throats of the children, aged 2 to 8, because his wife "disrespected" him, he said.
A difference in culture, no doubt.''
The word seems to be out that Americans are all stupidly soft and deferential, and that demanding things is the appropriate way to deal with us.
If Shelbyville's Somali community really wishes to "integrate into different societies to live together and to make our future here," as Imam Haji Yousuf told me, that process must work both ways. The arrogant sense of entitlement demonstrated by these new additions to Shelbyville must stop.
One can not expect a community to keep bending over backwards to help folks, only to treated with rudeness, disrespect and hostility. At some point, our welcoming attitude and southern hospitality will turn into resentment and distrust.
And as the comments posted on our website demonstrates, that is already occurring, in far greater numbers than we ever imagined.''
I didn't read the comments on the website, but the above gives me hope that there are some people, somewhere, in this country, who are not content for America to be the doormat of the world, and for Americans to be viewed as everybody's sugar daddies and servants.
John S. Bolton, at his above-linked blog Open City always has a unique take on these things, and he asks whether there is not some method to this madness of our country being forced to receive the most unassimilable and often hostile groups of people. I have given a lot of thought to this situation, too, and it seems so counterintuitive, so completely contrary to all common sense, that I sometimes conclude that our elites have all gone quite insane, seized with some kind of communicable madness. However that is not a useful explanation; John S. Bolton believes that there is a purpose to the elites' seeming irrationality:
This is how the power-greedy operate now: they find a way to bring in ill-behaved, highly objectionable people, enemies even, then try to worsen the misbehavior, and when they succeed in provoking a response, they smear the opposition as racism, fascism, xenophobia, discrimination, etc.
With opponents on the defensive, no one remembers to say that the use of smearing and other fallacies indicates that there is no rational argument for giving more power to the power-greedy.
This way the power-greedy control the issues; they bring in the people who cause public outrage, and the issues are already set up for officials and others to respond with their accustomed replies (which are mainly smears). They are prepared, but those who value freedom-from-aggression appear to be always caught off balance.
[...]
Now we have two closely inter-related motives. The power-greedy can win if they provoke smearable opposition to the aggrandizement of their power, and they can win the dictatorship itself, if they can get full-scale insurgency going.
The same methods can be used in complementary manner for both objectives. These two methods have the valuing of objectionable diversity in common; they fit together rhetorically as well as pragmatically.
Now does it make sense why, the worse trouble we can expect from a foreigner, the more those who wish for more power, would prefer for that foreigner to be brought here, and close to your relatives?''
It seems to be as plausible an explanation as any that I have heard; otherwise it makes absolutely no sense.
It does appear that the idea is to provoke discord and possibly open conflict. How else do we explain it?
Saturday, December 29, 2007
A troubling case
This is a story I posted over on the Forum a couple of days ago, and which has received little notice. Yet it troubles me in several ways.
Threat in Maine, the whitest state, shakes local NAACP
First of all, please notice the headline the NYT attaches to the story. The fact that Maine is 'the whitest state' seems to carry an implication that this is indicative of a greater propensity for 'hate'. In the New York Times' world, of course, white=hate, so this is not really surprising but still troubling.
Now: before somebody puts words in my mouth, the fact that an elderly (75-year-old) white man supposedly made a threat against the NAACP or black people is not something I intend to defend; although generally I think that if the man has reached 75 years of age and has not heretofore committed violence against others, he is not likely to at this stage of his life.
If, however, he made such a threat, in a credible way, certainly notice should be taken. I don't condone threats, racial or any other kind, from whatever quarter. But the fact is, the man in question has apparently been charged with no crime, although the article says:
And of course Mr. Sawyer has had his firearm taken away. But if he has not been convicted or even charged, how can his gun be taken away? Are our Second Amendment rights so attenuated that it takes merely the word of one witness (in a doctor-patient context) to lose one's right to bear arms? And will Mr. Sawyer's compulsory 'medical treatment' and 'counseling' (read: re-education) involve confinement? Does he have no rights at all, or is he, as an old-stock American, entitled to no such privileges?
It looks as though, judging by the lack of comments over on the forum (save one) I am alone in my concerns about this case. It is about more than just one senior citizen in Maine; it's about the rights of American citizens, especially those of the majority white population. It appears as though 'some are more equal than others.'
How many times have non-whites threatened whites and those of differing races? I suspect there are too many cases to count in an average, say, week in this country. We have seen a number of prominent blacks and Hispanic making very hateful and threatening statements against whites with no consequence whatsoever. For example:
Then there was the speech by ''Dr.'' Kamau Kambon:
This kind of thing is so routinely spoken by various minority 'activists' that it is met only with yawns from most people. Somehow we dismiss it as venting or just rhetoric. But why does Mr. Sawyer up in Maine not receive the same benefit of the doubt as these 'minority activists'? And the doctor, who is apparently the only witness who asserts that 'threats' were made: who is he? (Oops, of course I mean 'he or she'; how sexist of me to assume the doctor is a man.) But who is the Veterans Administration doctor? A medical doctor? A psychiatrist? What? And do doctors routinely report such conversations as these to authorities?
It may be that these things are happening around America and I just haven't heard of such a case before. I think of the increasing role medical practitioners are being asked to play in gathering information on citizens, supposedly for our own good, of course. Children are being asked questions during doctors' visit about whether or not their parents own guns, or whether there are drugs in their house. When I visit my doctor I am invariably asked about domestic violence, and about whether I am safe in my home. Many of these lines of questioning seem intrusive and one wonders what use is made of the responses; is the government tracking certain data this way?
But to return to the case of Mr. Sawyer, who has been disarmed and ordered into some kind of 'treatment' for his 'sickness', this should be troubling to those who care about personal privacy, freedom, and our Constitutional rights. A number of issues are at stake here. Should anybody lose their right to bear arms, which is a crucial right for a free society, on the strength of one person's assertions? Can one lose one's Second Amendment rights without having been convicted of a felony? Maine's Constitution says:
Can someone be ordered to enter 'counseling' and 'medical treatment' based on their holding or expressing politically incorrect views (such as Mr. Sawyer's purported statement that 'Maine should be a white state)? Another thing which troubles me about this case is that Mr. Sawyer's name and town are mentioned very explicitly. Why? Our media are very scrupulous about not mentioning the names of people involved in various scrapes with the law, or people who are accused but not yet convicted of a crime. The old media are now obsessive about omitting any mention of a suspect's race, even when there is supposedly a manhunt going on, with a dangerous criminal roaming free. They are more careful to avoid any possibility of 'racial profiling' and probably also worried lest the public notice that most of the crimes are being committed by certain groups of people. So they cover the facts up as long as they can. But Mr. Sawyer's name is right out there for the public to see. What's the point of this?
Suppose Mr. Sawyer becomes the target of the racial agitators, like Joe Horn, who shot two burglars in Pasadena, Texas, was. Suppose Mr. Sawyer has an angry mob congregating around his door and making threats? And of course he has been disarmed and left a sitting duck for any self-righteous liberal who wants to make an example of him or 'teach him a lesson.'
So I can see no good reason for publishing Mr. Sawyer's name. Shame on the New York Times. Where are their journalistic ethics? Of course we know the NYT is not the paragon of journalistic virtue they pretend to be, after their many missteps. We all know they have an agenda, and that the Grey Lady is a woman of easy virtue.
A further injustice is that only majority white people are held to rigid standards about 'hate speech' or racial threats. We all know that racial threats are made by minorities on a regular basis, and these are almost never treated as crimes. There is a manifest injustice based on race in the way these laws are applied and enforced. It is evident that 'hate crime' laws are designed to be employed against only one group of people, to benefit another broad category of people. This violates the idea that we are all equal before the law.
And if this kind of thing can happen, and is happening now, we should be very concerned about our rights and freedoms. I am concerned that too few Americans display any zeal for preserving their Consititutional rights and freedoms. With such a passive and apathetic population, the PC tyrants have free rein.
One more thing which strikes me: the name Sawyer has been in New England since the days of the earliest English colonies. The Sawyers are one of the original Mayflower families. It seems Mr. Sawyer is symbolic here of old America, and he is being made an example of. Out with the old, on with the new.
Threat in Maine, the whitest state, shakes local NAACP
BANGOR, Me. — In October, the N.A.A.C.P. chapter for northern Maine got shocking news. A man from a nearby town had threatened to shoot “any and all black persons” attending the group’s meetings at an old stone church here, and state prosecutors were worried enough to seek a restraining order.
First of all, please notice the headline the NYT attaches to the story. The fact that Maine is 'the whitest state' seems to carry an implication that this is indicative of a greater propensity for 'hate'. In the New York Times' world, of course, white=hate, so this is not really surprising but still troubling.
Now: before somebody puts words in my mouth, the fact that an elderly (75-year-old) white man supposedly made a threat against the NAACP or black people is not something I intend to defend; although generally I think that if the man has reached 75 years of age and has not heretofore committed violence against others, he is not likely to at this stage of his life.
If, however, he made such a threat, in a credible way, certainly notice should be taken. I don't condone threats, racial or any other kind, from whatever quarter. But the fact is, the man in question has apparently been charged with no crime, although the article says:
This month a state judge signed an order barring Mr. Sawyer from threatening, using violence against or even speaking to any of the chapter’s members. It also requires him to stay at least 150 feet away from anywhere the N.A.A.C.P. meets. A hearing has been delayed for six months while Mr. Sawyer gets medical treatment and counseling, Mr. Harnett said.
And of course Mr. Sawyer has had his firearm taken away. But if he has not been convicted or even charged, how can his gun be taken away? Are our Second Amendment rights so attenuated that it takes merely the word of one witness (in a doctor-patient context) to lose one's right to bear arms? And will Mr. Sawyer's compulsory 'medical treatment' and 'counseling' (read: re-education) involve confinement? Does he have no rights at all, or is he, as an old-stock American, entitled to no such privileges?
It looks as though, judging by the lack of comments over on the forum (save one) I am alone in my concerns about this case. It is about more than just one senior citizen in Maine; it's about the rights of American citizens, especially those of the majority white population. It appears as though 'some are more equal than others.'
How many times have non-whites threatened whites and those of differing races? I suspect there are too many cases to count in an average, say, week in this country. We have seen a number of prominent blacks and Hispanic making very hateful and threatening statements against whites with no consequence whatsoever. For example:
"Go back to Simi Valley, you skunks! Go back to Woodland Hills! Go back to Boston! Go back to Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims! Get out! We are the future. You are old and tired. Go on. We have beaten you. Leave like beaten rats. You old white people, it is your duty to die." Augustin Cebada, Quoted in Barbara Coe, Reconquista, The Takeover of America, California Coalition for Immigration Reform, 1998, p. 20
"We are here to say that violence and racism and hatred of the white man in America is just as American as apple and cherry pie." Khallid Abdul Muhammad, quoted in Las Vegas Review-Journal and Sun, June 14, 1998, pg. 3A
"We have an ageing white America. They are dying. They are ****ting in their pants with fear!… I love it!"-Professor Jose Angel Gutierrez, University of Texas, Arlington, from a speech in Jan. 1995, quoted in Coe, 'Reconquista, The Takeover of America
Then there was the speech by ''Dr.'' Kamau Kambon:
A Raleigh activist and bookstore owner told a panel at Howard University Law School on Oct. 14 that the solution to many of the problems faced by black people is the extermination of “white people off the face of the planet.” Dr. Kamau Kambon, who taught Africana Studies 241 in the Spring 2005 semester at North Carolina State University, also said this needs to be done “because white people want to kill us.”
This kind of thing is so routinely spoken by various minority 'activists' that it is met only with yawns from most people. Somehow we dismiss it as venting or just rhetoric. But why does Mr. Sawyer up in Maine not receive the same benefit of the doubt as these 'minority activists'? And the doctor, who is apparently the only witness who asserts that 'threats' were made: who is he? (Oops, of course I mean 'he or she'; how sexist of me to assume the doctor is a man.) But who is the Veterans Administration doctor? A medical doctor? A psychiatrist? What? And do doctors routinely report such conversations as these to authorities?
It may be that these things are happening around America and I just haven't heard of such a case before. I think of the increasing role medical practitioners are being asked to play in gathering information on citizens, supposedly for our own good, of course. Children are being asked questions during doctors' visit about whether or not their parents own guns, or whether there are drugs in their house. When I visit my doctor I am invariably asked about domestic violence, and about whether I am safe in my home. Many of these lines of questioning seem intrusive and one wonders what use is made of the responses; is the government tracking certain data this way?
But to return to the case of Mr. Sawyer, who has been disarmed and ordered into some kind of 'treatment' for his 'sickness', this should be troubling to those who care about personal privacy, freedom, and our Constitutional rights. A number of issues are at stake here. Should anybody lose their right to bear arms, which is a crucial right for a free society, on the strength of one person's assertions? Can one lose one's Second Amendment rights without having been convicted of a felony? Maine's Constitution says:
Every citizen has a right to keep and bear arms for the common defence; and this right shall never be questioned. Article I, section 16.
Can someone be ordered to enter 'counseling' and 'medical treatment' based on their holding or expressing politically incorrect views (such as Mr. Sawyer's purported statement that 'Maine should be a white state)? Another thing which troubles me about this case is that Mr. Sawyer's name and town are mentioned very explicitly. Why? Our media are very scrupulous about not mentioning the names of people involved in various scrapes with the law, or people who are accused but not yet convicted of a crime. The old media are now obsessive about omitting any mention of a suspect's race, even when there is supposedly a manhunt going on, with a dangerous criminal roaming free. They are more careful to avoid any possibility of 'racial profiling' and probably also worried lest the public notice that most of the crimes are being committed by certain groups of people. So they cover the facts up as long as they can. But Mr. Sawyer's name is right out there for the public to see. What's the point of this?
Suppose Mr. Sawyer becomes the target of the racial agitators, like Joe Horn, who shot two burglars in Pasadena, Texas, was. Suppose Mr. Sawyer has an angry mob congregating around his door and making threats? And of course he has been disarmed and left a sitting duck for any self-righteous liberal who wants to make an example of him or 'teach him a lesson.'
So I can see no good reason for publishing Mr. Sawyer's name. Shame on the New York Times. Where are their journalistic ethics? Of course we know the NYT is not the paragon of journalistic virtue they pretend to be, after their many missteps. We all know they have an agenda, and that the Grey Lady is a woman of easy virtue.
A further injustice is that only majority white people are held to rigid standards about 'hate speech' or racial threats. We all know that racial threats are made by minorities on a regular basis, and these are almost never treated as crimes. There is a manifest injustice based on race in the way these laws are applied and enforced. It is evident that 'hate crime' laws are designed to be employed against only one group of people, to benefit another broad category of people. This violates the idea that we are all equal before the law.
And if this kind of thing can happen, and is happening now, we should be very concerned about our rights and freedoms. I am concerned that too few Americans display any zeal for preserving their Consititutional rights and freedoms. With such a passive and apathetic population, the PC tyrants have free rein.
One more thing which strikes me: the name Sawyer has been in New England since the days of the earliest English colonies. The Sawyers are one of the original Mayflower families. It seems Mr. Sawyer is symbolic here of old America, and he is being made an example of. Out with the old, on with the new.
Too content with the status quo
I came across this piece at Lew Rockwell.com and it describes a cultural phenomenon that is part of America's problems.
Christmas Music: A Postmortem Reflection
Karen De Coster
She is exactly right. It is all about dumbing down the 'holiday' music and making it as innocuous and neutral (no mention of Christ or Christianity) as possible, so as not to provoke the perpetually offended, or even the potentially offended.
This is a subject that I have brought up with a lot of people during the Christmas season over the past, say, five years. That's around the time when there seems to have been some kind of edict passed down that any religious Christmas song was banished from the commercial airwaves. Some of the people to whom I've mentioned this subject claim they haven't noticed anything different in our Christmas musical fare, but it's glaringly obvious.
I often wonder about how these things happen as if by some agreed-upon signal. The change seemed to be noticeable all of a sudden. Is there some kind of group mind in the media, so that all those executives are part of some kind of gestalt? Or are there directives passed down from on high, from the FCC or somewhere, that are not made public?
Why did the media suddenly decide that the old religious songs were no longer publicly acceptable, and only the bland, banal 'holiday songs' were fit to be heard?
I notice the trend accelerated after 9/11; did this all begin as an effort to placate the growing Moslem population? Or the increasingly vocal atheist malcontents?
The old news media insist on politically correcting their news and 'information', the entertainment outlets of the old media empire politically correct the 'entertainment' they present to us. But just as the Internet provides a less controlled, more demotic alternative to the old news media, satellite radio and the Internet offer an alternative source of music. The old media with their narrow and restricted content will, I hope, be superseded by the new media because the latter actually provides a choice.
The old media court the few at the expense of the majority, and this is true of the news media and the 'entertainment' media. One wonders how profitable this can be over the long term; would it not make more economic sense to go after the majority? Why is it suddenly practical or profitable to ignore the many in favor of a small segment of the population?
The majority of the population, unfortunately, are content to passively, uncritically accept the inferior products that are offered us. This seems to be a weakness of the American people these days; we acquiesce too easily, and are content with the pabulum that dominates the media.
And this is true in all areas of life; too many people are quite content with the dumbed-down selection of Presidential candidates who are presented to us as the best our country has to offer. Sometimes one wonders if the most unpalatable candidates are presented alongside the anointed one that the elites want to place in the White House, so as to make that pre-selected candidate appear more desirable.
It seems that whether we are talking about music or politics, we are too passive in accepting whatever is put before us. Until we begin to assert our will and exercise the power that rightfully belongs to the majority, we will be given only a Hobson's choice of inferior alternatives. We will get more of what we tolerate.
Christmas Music: A Postmortem Reflection
Karen De Coster
While surfing the web recently, I noted that one Christmas music-hating blogger asks, "Why do I have to hear Little Drummer Boy on the radio over and over again?" The answer is fairly straightforward: the giganta-corp, media conglomerates turn out uninspiring, repetitive rubbish they think the dumbed-down listeners want to hear.
The problem with radio is that it is a government-controlled medium. It is government-regulated because the airwaves are considered to be a public good. Oh sure, the media conglomerates are "private" in the sense that they are publicly-owned corporations, but they operate on publicly-owned airwaves and are nothing more than government propaganda mills. They offer the public a service – superficially "free" music – and what you typically hear on their radio stations reflects the reality that there is no free-market price system to encourage a higher-quality, more diverse product.
So often, you hear people say they "hate" Christmas music – they are tired of the same old, repetitive songs that drive them batty year-after-year. This is because most consumers of commercial radio are content with the status quo found on the government airwaves. They don’t seek alternatives because radio, with all its talk, news, and music, is supposed to be "free." People are conditioned to believing that certain goods have to be public goods, and accordingly, the idea of paying for a competing product seems highly unreasonable.
Consequently, when we listen to the "all Christmas music" stations post-Thanksgiving, we hear ruthless renditions of Santa Baby and Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer. Sure, these dumbed-down, pseudo-Christmas songs appeal to the inner imbecile in some – but not all – of us. The more immediate problem is that the recurrent comic relief being passed off as Christmas music suffers from an old disease known as "political correctness."
[...]
The real problem with the current crop of Christmas songs on the radio is that Christmas, and the music that goes along with it, has become politically incorrect. Christmas music, these days, has come to mean "holiday" music, minus the Christmas. The word Christmas, you see, has become taboo in a period where diversity reigns – except for when it comes to a traditional, Christian celebration like Christmas. The publicly-owned airwaves have long been expunging traditional, religious Christmas music in favor of secular tunes and clownish melodies that reflect a generic "holiday" theme. Of course, broad-category tunes like those can’t possibly offend those who celebrate atheism and demand that age-old customs be banished from the public airwaves. Thus we hear "safe" songs like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and Happy Holidays replacing more conventional themes that center on the birth of Christ or the celebration of religious life.
[...]
You can expect to hear Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer at the beginning, middle, and end of the hour, and in between, Nat King Cole’s Christmas Song battles with some version, any version, of Winter Wonderland for most airplay. Nat King Cole, in fact, has a magnificent catalog of Christmas songs that never see the light of day due to their traditional flavor.
[...]
Only those songs with the secular, fluff lyrics are heard in the normal rotation, while the traditional, popular Christmas songs receive very little time on air.''
She is exactly right. It is all about dumbing down the 'holiday' music and making it as innocuous and neutral (no mention of Christ or Christianity) as possible, so as not to provoke the perpetually offended, or even the potentially offended.
This is a subject that I have brought up with a lot of people during the Christmas season over the past, say, five years. That's around the time when there seems to have been some kind of edict passed down that any religious Christmas song was banished from the commercial airwaves. Some of the people to whom I've mentioned this subject claim they haven't noticed anything different in our Christmas musical fare, but it's glaringly obvious.
I often wonder about how these things happen as if by some agreed-upon signal. The change seemed to be noticeable all of a sudden. Is there some kind of group mind in the media, so that all those executives are part of some kind of gestalt? Or are there directives passed down from on high, from the FCC or somewhere, that are not made public?
Why did the media suddenly decide that the old religious songs were no longer publicly acceptable, and only the bland, banal 'holiday songs' were fit to be heard?
I notice the trend accelerated after 9/11; did this all begin as an effort to placate the growing Moslem population? Or the increasingly vocal atheist malcontents?
The old news media insist on politically correcting their news and 'information', the entertainment outlets of the old media empire politically correct the 'entertainment' they present to us. But just as the Internet provides a less controlled, more demotic alternative to the old news media, satellite radio and the Internet offer an alternative source of music. The old media with their narrow and restricted content will, I hope, be superseded by the new media because the latter actually provides a choice.
The old media court the few at the expense of the majority, and this is true of the news media and the 'entertainment' media. One wonders how profitable this can be over the long term; would it not make more economic sense to go after the majority? Why is it suddenly practical or profitable to ignore the many in favor of a small segment of the population?
The majority of the population, unfortunately, are content to passively, uncritically accept the inferior products that are offered us. This seems to be a weakness of the American people these days; we acquiesce too easily, and are content with the pabulum that dominates the media.
And this is true in all areas of life; too many people are quite content with the dumbed-down selection of Presidential candidates who are presented to us as the best our country has to offer. Sometimes one wonders if the most unpalatable candidates are presented alongside the anointed one that the elites want to place in the White House, so as to make that pre-selected candidate appear more desirable.
It seems that whether we are talking about music or politics, we are too passive in accepting whatever is put before us. Until we begin to assert our will and exercise the power that rightfully belongs to the majority, we will be given only a Hobson's choice of inferior alternatives. We will get more of what we tolerate.
Freedom and separation?
Over at the Forum, commenter cabbageroll has started a topic: Freedom and Separatism.
She asks:
''Does "Inherent Human Freedom" allow people to declare independence/secede from their countries?''
This has bearing on a lot of the issues we have discussed here, like various independence movements in Europe as well as with the War Between the States aka the War of Secession or the 'Civil War' in this country. It's a subject that seems to be more relevant than ever these days. So I hope some of you will click over to the Forum and add your two cents to the discussion.
She asks:
''Does "Inherent Human Freedom" allow people to declare independence/secede from their countries?''
This has bearing on a lot of the issues we have discussed here, like various independence movements in Europe as well as with the War Between the States aka the War of Secession or the 'Civil War' in this country. It's a subject that seems to be more relevant than ever these days. So I hope some of you will click over to the Forum and add your two cents to the discussion.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Assault on citizens by invaders
Via Immigration Watchdog:
Read the rest at Immigration Watchdog.
I wonder if this will convince the people who insist that Hispanic illegals are hard-working family values people who just want a better life?
Nah. Some people are impervious to reality, and these kinds of attacks have happened before, with little notice being taken.
What will it take?
The United Church of Christ in Simi Valley, CA is harboring an illegal alien fugitive named Lilliana. Save Our State and No More Invasion have held protests every Sunday for months.
This past weekend three members of No More Invasion were viciously attacked by four Hispanic vigilantes that live directly across the street from the United Church of Christ. The Americans were simply standing on the sidewalk in front of the church holding signs and American flags when they were attacked.
Two young Hispanic women (one in her 20’s, the other 17) and two Hispanic men in their 20’s walked across the street to the American protesters and assaulted them. The vigilantes attacked the elderly man without warning, scratching, and punching until he was bloody. Then they attacked the American women. The Hispanics vigilantes pulled their hair and scratched them while the male Hispanics hit them with fists.
Read the rest at Immigration Watchdog.
I wonder if this will convince the people who insist that Hispanic illegals are hard-working family values people who just want a better life?
Nah. Some people are impervious to reality, and these kinds of attacks have happened before, with little notice being taken.
What will it take?
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Just a caveat
My previous post on the Bhutto assassination and the 'War on Terror ' seems likely to elicit some of the same kind of ad hominems and childish name-calling as my post of last night, having to do with Ron Paul and the Lincoln/slavery/War Between the States issue.
My patience is at an end; disagree if you must but if name-calling and ad hominems and profanity are the only way you can make your point, then please don't bother. I will edit, delete, or ban as needed.
I recently said I don't want the discourse to be dragged down to that level on this blog; there are lots of places where that kind of thing is routine, but not here on my blog.
My whole reason and purpose for starting this blog was to air some thoughts and ideas that I saw as being excluded from the public discussion and debate. I had seen as much political correctness on the so-called 'right' as on the left, and many of its ardent practitioners are unable or unwilling to even admit that their politics are just another variation of liberalism, albeit in Republican or 'conservative' drag. It is precisely those politically correct 'conservatives' who inspired me to start this blog. If you are one of those PC 'conservatives' then this is a heads-up that you will encounter views here that anger you and probably provoke you to profanity, ad hominem attacks, or snarkiness. I don't intend for this blog to be a combat zone. I intend for it to be a place of civil discussion, preferably among people who agree on some very basic principles. One of the most basic principles here is that political correctness is not tolerated.
Open minds, however, are welcome here; if you are angered or moved to self-righteousness by politically incorrect views, please do us both a favor and move on to one of the many, many politically correct 'right-wing' blogs where your preconceptions won't be challenged or disturbed, and where you won't be offended and angered.
You get what you give on this blog; if you display a civil, grown-up attitude you will receive the same. If you are abusive, combative, and insulting, you will get a cold shoulder and maybe a ban. Such is life.
Thank you for observing my rules of civility and decorum. Those of you who seek honest discussion of conservative, traditionalist, ideas are welcome. Others, you have been informed of what to expect.
My patience is at an end; disagree if you must but if name-calling and ad hominems and profanity are the only way you can make your point, then please don't bother. I will edit, delete, or ban as needed.
I recently said I don't want the discourse to be dragged down to that level on this blog; there are lots of places where that kind of thing is routine, but not here on my blog.
My whole reason and purpose for starting this blog was to air some thoughts and ideas that I saw as being excluded from the public discussion and debate. I had seen as much political correctness on the so-called 'right' as on the left, and many of its ardent practitioners are unable or unwilling to even admit that their politics are just another variation of liberalism, albeit in Republican or 'conservative' drag. It is precisely those politically correct 'conservatives' who inspired me to start this blog. If you are one of those PC 'conservatives' then this is a heads-up that you will encounter views here that anger you and probably provoke you to profanity, ad hominem attacks, or snarkiness. I don't intend for this blog to be a combat zone. I intend for it to be a place of civil discussion, preferably among people who agree on some very basic principles. One of the most basic principles here is that political correctness is not tolerated.
Open minds, however, are welcome here; if you are angered or moved to self-righteousness by politically incorrect views, please do us both a favor and move on to one of the many, many politically correct 'right-wing' blogs where your preconceptions won't be challenged or disturbed, and where you won't be offended and angered.
You get what you give on this blog; if you display a civil, grown-up attitude you will receive the same. If you are abusive, combative, and insulting, you will get a cold shoulder and maybe a ban. Such is life.
Thank you for observing my rules of civility and decorum. Those of you who seek honest discussion of conservative, traditionalist, ideas are welcome. Others, you have been informed of what to expect.
Bhutto's assassination and our 'War on Terror'
Of the commentary I've read on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, this piece by Andrew McCarthy at NRO makes the most sense -- although I disagree with his ultimate conclusion.
Benazir Bhutto Killed by the Real Pakistan
Listening to the various presidental candidates' pronouncements on this event gives me the impression that most of them hope to use this to their political advantage; McCain beating his chest and emphasizing his 'experience' in dealing with military matters, and Giuliani grabbing another pretext for reminding us of his superior leadership after 9/11. Thompson seems to be taking a similar tone, as also Hillary Clinton. It seems that overall, the assassination will be used to try to justify even more military (and political) intervention in the Middle East and to 'destroy Al Qaeda' at whatever cost to us in human life or money.
Only Ron Paul said what seems evident to me: our interventionist policies are at least in part a factor in this assassination and the whole chaotic picture there.
In an interview from a few months ago, Benazir Bhutto herself lent some credence to that view:
It seems to me that our policy of meddling in the affairs of Islamic countries in particular comes at too high a cost and with too small a return. How has our experiment in 'democracy' worked so far? We have no great success stories to point to. A while back we were told that the 'elections' in Iraq were a great triumph, yet we can see now that those elections were not the turning point we were assured they would be. And how many lives and how many dollars have we spent since then?
Bhutto's assassination appears to be another instance of our meddling, in the name of 'democracy' and in fighting 'Islamofascism', resulting in unforeseen complications. Some are predicting civil war in Pakistan now, and even if that civil war does not materialize, Pakistan will still be a chaotic, terror-plagued country, and an unreliable 'ally' at best.
We will see whether this event leads to more military involvement on our part, and whether the hawkish candidates make political hay of this story. I am afraid that may be the case, but it may be just as likely that the substantial portion of the American people who are fed up with our 'war on terror' will balk at the idea of an escalation of that conflict, and a deployment of more troops to the Middle East. It could go either way.
Of course, reading the commentary over at the big GOP forums, it's easy to get the impression that this event whets the appetite for more military involvement. Many of the commenters agree very much with Andrew McCarthy's concluding comments:
No, I can't agree with McCarthy there, though his piece made sense until that last paragraph or so.
Leaving aside the fact that we are not waging all-out war against jihadists or anybody else, but fighting a politically correct war against a 'few extremists' who are causing all the trouble, there is still the inescapable fact that, even if we were committed to all-out war against Islamic enemies, Moslems number between 1 billion and a billion and a half worldwide. Rather a staggering number, even if we believe that nonsense about only a 'tiny minority' being pro- jihad. How many troops can we marshal against such a numerous enemy, and in so many places? It's foolishness to think we can militarily defeat or wipe out 'jihadists' singlehandedly, or even with the pitifully few allies we have in our current 'war on terror.'
Since we can't destroy them, and since hoping to convert them either to another religion or to a milder, less violent form of Islam (which does not exist, by the way) the best we can do is to minimize involvement in their affairs. They have plenty of Islamic countries in which to practice their way of life; there is no need for them to be given entree to our countries in the West, because in doing so we entangle ourselves in their affairs and we give them political power in our countries. We have to let them run their countries as they see fit; what else can we do? We are not omnipotent, nor should we try to manipulate the whole world to our advantage. Doing so only increases the resentment and animosity that many Moslems and others already feel towards us.
That is far from saying that 'we cause Islamic terrorism', a position which many people try to attribute to Ron Paul, but it is apparent that the more involvement we have with Islam, the more we welcome Moslems into our country and the more we meddle in their countries, the greater the possibility of conflict and terrorism in our countries.
And there is simply the undeniable fact that we cannot work our will around the world; we cannot, physically, impose our way of life, and more importantly our way of thinking on alien peoples. They are not like us; the foolish utopian universalists on the right who imagine that everybody is interchangeable and that 'everybody wants democracy' are living in a delusional world. And even when given 'democracy', many in the Islamic world use it to install some very tyrannical regimes. Democracy in the sense of the vote or representative rule is only a method, it is not a guarantee that a free society will result.
We need to give up our messianism or our paternalism, and leave the people in the rest of the world to do what they like as long as they don't threaten us. But as long as we invade, intervene in, and invite, the world, we will have to deal with unfortunate consequences.
Benazir Bhutto Killed by the Real Pakistan
A recent CNN poll showed that 46 percent of Pakistanis approve of Osama bin Laden. Aspirants to the American presidency should hope to score so highly in the United States. In Pakistan, though, the al-Qaeda emir easily beat out that country’s current president, Pervez Musharraf, who polled at 38 percent. President George Bush, the face of a campaign to bring democracy — or, at least, some form of sharia-lite that might pass for democracy — to the Islamic world, registered nine percent. Nine!I agree about the 'real Pakistan' -- but I would go further: I would say 'the real Islam.'
If you want to know what to make of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s murder today in Pakistan, ponder that.
There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta.
In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.
Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.''
Listening to the various presidental candidates' pronouncements on this event gives me the impression that most of them hope to use this to their political advantage; McCain beating his chest and emphasizing his 'experience' in dealing with military matters, and Giuliani grabbing another pretext for reminding us of his superior leadership after 9/11. Thompson seems to be taking a similar tone, as also Hillary Clinton. It seems that overall, the assassination will be used to try to justify even more military (and political) intervention in the Middle East and to 'destroy Al Qaeda' at whatever cost to us in human life or money.
Only Ron Paul said what seems evident to me: our interventionist policies are at least in part a factor in this assassination and the whole chaotic picture there.
In an interview from a few months ago, Benazir Bhutto herself lent some credence to that view:
Fortunately for her, the West’s urgent fear of Pakistan as a breeding ground for terrorists has given Bhutto the chance to redefine herself. During most of her exile, she was considered irrelevant by Washington. Then she hired Hillary Clinton’s image-maker, Mark Penn, and began playing up to Musharraf.
When Musharraf’s popularity dove in 2007 after his jailing of judges, lawyers and journalists, Bhutto suddenly emerged as America’s “ideal.” U.S. politicians needed her—progressive, secular, female, willing to compromise—to put a face of democracy on their support for Musharraf’s autocratic rule.
True to form, Bhutto manipulated Musharraf to erase the charges against her, promising not to return to Pakistan until after national elections. She then broke that promise. But once she sensed that even her stalwarts were appalled at an arranged political marriage to a dictator, she spurned Musharraf and became her own woman again.
I sense a dark reflection in both Bhutto’s psychological history and her country’s constant turmoil—a compulsion to repeat past traumas. A prime example is the way she returned to her country on Oct. 18.
Ignoring warnings of terrorist cells plotting to kill her, Bhutto presided from atop a caravan over a parade that took 10 hours to snake through Karachi. Near midnight, the streetlights went out. The police disappeared. Her feet swollen from standing, Bhutto ducked below into a steel command center to remove her sandals. Moments later, a bomb went off. “I had a sickening, sickening feeling,” she tells me. She now believes the bomb was wired to an infant that a man had been trying to hand to her. She recalls saying to the people with her, “Don’t go outside—another blast will follow.” It did.
[...]
Despite the corrosion of her reputation by corruption and compromise, Bhutto appears to be America’s strongest anchor in the effort to turn back the extremist Islamic tide threatening to engulf Pakistan. What would you like to tell President Bush? I ask this riddle of a woman.
She would tell him, she replies, that propping up Musharraf’s government, which is infested with radical Islamists, is only hastening disaster. “I would say, ‘Your policy of supporting dictatorship is breaking up my country.’ I now think al-Qaeda can be marching on Islamabad in two to four years.”
It seems to me that our policy of meddling in the affairs of Islamic countries in particular comes at too high a cost and with too small a return. How has our experiment in 'democracy' worked so far? We have no great success stories to point to. A while back we were told that the 'elections' in Iraq were a great triumph, yet we can see now that those elections were not the turning point we were assured they would be. And how many lives and how many dollars have we spent since then?
Bhutto's assassination appears to be another instance of our meddling, in the name of 'democracy' and in fighting 'Islamofascism', resulting in unforeseen complications. Some are predicting civil war in Pakistan now, and even if that civil war does not materialize, Pakistan will still be a chaotic, terror-plagued country, and an unreliable 'ally' at best.
We will see whether this event leads to more military involvement on our part, and whether the hawkish candidates make political hay of this story. I am afraid that may be the case, but it may be just as likely that the substantial portion of the American people who are fed up with our 'war on terror' will balk at the idea of an escalation of that conflict, and a deployment of more troops to the Middle East. It could go either way.
Of course, reading the commentary over at the big GOP forums, it's easy to get the impression that this event whets the appetite for more military involvement. Many of the commenters agree very much with Andrew McCarthy's concluding comments:
But we should at least stop fooling ourselves. Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence.
If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they’ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.''
No, I can't agree with McCarthy there, though his piece made sense until that last paragraph or so.
Leaving aside the fact that we are not waging all-out war against jihadists or anybody else, but fighting a politically correct war against a 'few extremists' who are causing all the trouble, there is still the inescapable fact that, even if we were committed to all-out war against Islamic enemies, Moslems number between 1 billion and a billion and a half worldwide. Rather a staggering number, even if we believe that nonsense about only a 'tiny minority' being pro- jihad. How many troops can we marshal against such a numerous enemy, and in so many places? It's foolishness to think we can militarily defeat or wipe out 'jihadists' singlehandedly, or even with the pitifully few allies we have in our current 'war on terror.'
Since we can't destroy them, and since hoping to convert them either to another religion or to a milder, less violent form of Islam (which does not exist, by the way) the best we can do is to minimize involvement in their affairs. They have plenty of Islamic countries in which to practice their way of life; there is no need for them to be given entree to our countries in the West, because in doing so we entangle ourselves in their affairs and we give them political power in our countries. We have to let them run their countries as they see fit; what else can we do? We are not omnipotent, nor should we try to manipulate the whole world to our advantage. Doing so only increases the resentment and animosity that many Moslems and others already feel towards us.
That is far from saying that 'we cause Islamic terrorism', a position which many people try to attribute to Ron Paul, but it is apparent that the more involvement we have with Islam, the more we welcome Moslems into our country and the more we meddle in their countries, the greater the possibility of conflict and terrorism in our countries.
And there is simply the undeniable fact that we cannot work our will around the world; we cannot, physically, impose our way of life, and more importantly our way of thinking on alien peoples. They are not like us; the foolish utopian universalists on the right who imagine that everybody is interchangeable and that 'everybody wants democracy' are living in a delusional world. And even when given 'democracy', many in the Islamic world use it to install some very tyrannical regimes. Democracy in the sense of the vote or representative rule is only a method, it is not a guarantee that a free society will result.
We need to give up our messianism or our paternalism, and leave the people in the rest of the world to do what they like as long as they don't threaten us. But as long as we invade, intervene in, and invite, the world, we will have to deal with unfortunate consequences.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Fallout from the Ron Paul - Tim Russert interview
I knew this exchange the other day between Ron Paul and Tim Russert would set off a controversy:
Given that Dr. Paul criticized Abraham Lincoln, who is a near-deity for some, and given that he dared to question whether the sacred cause of 'ending slavery' was worth more than a half-million American lives -- in addition of course to the financial costs -- it was guaranteed that there would be a cry of PC indignation about Dr. Paul's words.
AOL on their home page had a poll asking about Ron Paul's statements regarding Lincoln and the War Between the States. It appears as though the poll has been discontinued. From what I have heard the poll was running against Dr. Paul's point of view. That's not surprising, given the heavy indoctrination the schools administer in their 'history' classes, and given that many people get their information on these matters from unreliable sources like the very Politically Correct History Channel.
Those of us who are Ron Paul supporters will no doubt be subjected to ignorant questions about this issue; I expect to hear 'how can you support a candidate who thinks we shouldn't have ended slavery?' 'How can you support a candidate who thinks the Civil Rights Act was a bad thing?' These issues are so sacrosanct in our society that it's to be expected that many people will have a predictable knee-jerk response and immediately mount their PC high horse and assume their best morally superior air when asking these questions.
I won't take up the Civil Rights Act issue at this time; that will be for another blog entry.
Now, nobody wants to be in the position of attempting to defend slavery, and I am not going to try it. Slavery is history in the Western world -- except in cases where immigrants have re-introduced it into our country -- so if any hyperventilating liberal supposes that anybody is proposing to re-introduce slavery or 'Jim Crow', they can relax and stop being hysterical. But the fact is, the question should be asked: why do we now consider slavery, specifically the slavery once practiced in America, as the ultimate evil, the most heinous crime and sin ever committed, short of 'genocide'? Why are we still rending our clothes about it a century and a half after we put an end to it? Why are the people who make such an issue of slavery unwilling or unable to see any evil in the slavery practiced even now by 'diverse' Third World cultures? The idea that we condemn ourselves, our ancestors, and our culture for every failing while giving Third World people a pass is part of a consistent theme in liberal multicultural ideology. Third-worlders, it seems, are children who are not held accountable for their actions. Where is the equality in that attitude? If we are all equal in every respect, they need to be held accountable to the same unforgiving standards to which we hold Western cultures. Anything else is a kind of 'racism' because it implies that the 'diverse' cultures are, well, primitive and unable to live up to the high standards we apply to our Western culture.
Maybe that is in fact the reality but pin a liberal to the wall and ask them to defend that position, and see what happens.
The idea that slavery, as a fruit of 'racism', is a unique evil, surpassing most evils, is something that is assumed in our day. Why? Yes, I know it violates our supposed 'American creed' that 'all men are created equal,' but there are many other outrages which should command the same outrage, but which do not.
Child labor was a great evil, which was practiced until the last century in Western countries; we've all read of children working long hours at hard or dangerous jobs, sometimes going to an early grave because of the harshness of their lives. Why is this not considered at least as serious an evil as slavery? I would argue that it is worse. Obviously slavery is popularly deemed worst, because of the racial issue, which has assumed paramount importance in our weird post-modern morality. Race seems to trump all. We can insult or criticize almost anyone, even God himself, but we can't criticize or fail to properly defer to those of racial 'victim' status.
I truly think that most Americans, without fully informing themselves and thinking it through, have simply accepted that the question of slavery and the War Between the States are issues that must simply not be examined; slavery, so this line of thought goes, was the ultimate evil and therefore sacrificing over half a million lives and laying waste to the South were necessary acts, and the result was worth it.
But was it the most humane thing to emancipate the slaves suddenly by decree, when many or most of them were not prepared or equipped to make the transition to a life of 'freedom'? A gradual freeing would have been wiser as well as more humane. It would have been better to prepare slaves for freedom, but the liberals and radicals of the time were not concerned with real-life consequences, but as always, were only concerned with serving their utopian ideology regardless of the cost in human terms.
Thomas DiLorenzo, who is a scholar who dissents from the Lincoln cult, writes here how paradoxically, libertarian abolitionist Lysander Spooner defended the South's right to secede, and disagreed with Lincoln's actions. [Aside: Spooner is one of my New England kinsmen, so I am related to several abolitionists as well as to Southron slaveowners.]
So really, Ron Paul is not saying something totally novel or 'radical' when he criticizes the War Between the States; he is echoing what others before him, libertarians like Spooner as well as true conservatives, have said.
The War Between the States, which was not strictly the altruistic crusade it purported to be, also left irreparable damage in terms of the relationship between the South and the North; it is hard to forgive and forget when your loved ones have been killed, your home burned to the ground, your crops destroyed, and an occupation government (which the Reconstruction government was) imposed. The North, with Reconstruction, clearly had a punitive agenda in mind. They wanted to utterly humiliate and abase the South. Depriving many citizens of their franchise and their rights as citizens, while putting yesterday's slaves in office, giving them authority over their former masters was malicious in intent, and served no good purpose. It was because of historical episodes like that that my Southron ancestors were firmly anti-Republican for a century. The radical Republicans were the nemesis of Southron people in the post-War era. For that reason many Southron people were staunch Democrats for generations, until the Democrats became insanely liberal and anti-white.
The War Between the States had greater costs than the billions of dollars and the 600,000 lives. It did irreparable damage to North-South relations, it set in motion our current 'politically correct' obsession, and even worse, it turned our Republic away from the Jeffersonian model and towards the Lincolnian, imperial, centralized, big-government model. It is incomprehensible that any conservative who claims to favor smaller government and more local control would think that this change has been for the better.
Confederate General Patrick Cleburne said:
General Wade Hampton:
For Southern patriots, that the South was right as to the principle of State's rights vs. Federal power is not in question.
But as to Dr. Paul's points, there are many ways to approach the question of whether the Civil War was justified, or whether there was not a better way to free the slaves. I think Dr. Paul and others are right; why could we not have freed the slaves as Britain did?
The liberals who are feigning shock over what Dr. Paul said might stop and think: wouldn't the 'peaceful solution' have been prefererable? Or is the peaceful solution only recommended when our enemies are 'Others'?
I really don't see how a liberal can make any kind of consistent and coherent argument against Dr. Paul's statements. I would like to see how the peace-and-love crowd would be able to argue that the War Between the States, with its half a million dead, was justified, when there were other options.
However Dr. Paul decides to respond to this media-driven controversy, I would bet that he will not back down or pander. It would be out of character for him to do so. And above all else, I believe Dr. Paul is a man of integrity and principle. He's stayed true to his principles for his years of public life, unlike most politicians.
MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. "According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery."
REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the--that iron, iron fist..
MR. RUSSERT: We'd still have slavery.
REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn't sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.''
Given that Dr. Paul criticized Abraham Lincoln, who is a near-deity for some, and given that he dared to question whether the sacred cause of 'ending slavery' was worth more than a half-million American lives -- in addition of course to the financial costs -- it was guaranteed that there would be a cry of PC indignation about Dr. Paul's words.
AOL on their home page had a poll asking about Ron Paul's statements regarding Lincoln and the War Between the States. It appears as though the poll has been discontinued. From what I have heard the poll was running against Dr. Paul's point of view. That's not surprising, given the heavy indoctrination the schools administer in their 'history' classes, and given that many people get their information on these matters from unreliable sources like the very Politically Correct History Channel.
Those of us who are Ron Paul supporters will no doubt be subjected to ignorant questions about this issue; I expect to hear 'how can you support a candidate who thinks we shouldn't have ended slavery?' 'How can you support a candidate who thinks the Civil Rights Act was a bad thing?' These issues are so sacrosanct in our society that it's to be expected that many people will have a predictable knee-jerk response and immediately mount their PC high horse and assume their best morally superior air when asking these questions.
I won't take up the Civil Rights Act issue at this time; that will be for another blog entry.
Now, nobody wants to be in the position of attempting to defend slavery, and I am not going to try it. Slavery is history in the Western world -- except in cases where immigrants have re-introduced it into our country -- so if any hyperventilating liberal supposes that anybody is proposing to re-introduce slavery or 'Jim Crow', they can relax and stop being hysterical. But the fact is, the question should be asked: why do we now consider slavery, specifically the slavery once practiced in America, as the ultimate evil, the most heinous crime and sin ever committed, short of 'genocide'? Why are we still rending our clothes about it a century and a half after we put an end to it? Why are the people who make such an issue of slavery unwilling or unable to see any evil in the slavery practiced even now by 'diverse' Third World cultures? The idea that we condemn ourselves, our ancestors, and our culture for every failing while giving Third World people a pass is part of a consistent theme in liberal multicultural ideology. Third-worlders, it seems, are children who are not held accountable for their actions. Where is the equality in that attitude? If we are all equal in every respect, they need to be held accountable to the same unforgiving standards to which we hold Western cultures. Anything else is a kind of 'racism' because it implies that the 'diverse' cultures are, well, primitive and unable to live up to the high standards we apply to our Western culture.
Maybe that is in fact the reality but pin a liberal to the wall and ask them to defend that position, and see what happens.
The idea that slavery, as a fruit of 'racism', is a unique evil, surpassing most evils, is something that is assumed in our day. Why? Yes, I know it violates our supposed 'American creed' that 'all men are created equal,' but there are many other outrages which should command the same outrage, but which do not.
Child labor was a great evil, which was practiced until the last century in Western countries; we've all read of children working long hours at hard or dangerous jobs, sometimes going to an early grave because of the harshness of their lives. Why is this not considered at least as serious an evil as slavery? I would argue that it is worse. Obviously slavery is popularly deemed worst, because of the racial issue, which has assumed paramount importance in our weird post-modern morality. Race seems to trump all. We can insult or criticize almost anyone, even God himself, but we can't criticize or fail to properly defer to those of racial 'victim' status.
I truly think that most Americans, without fully informing themselves and thinking it through, have simply accepted that the question of slavery and the War Between the States are issues that must simply not be examined; slavery, so this line of thought goes, was the ultimate evil and therefore sacrificing over half a million lives and laying waste to the South were necessary acts, and the result was worth it.
But was it the most humane thing to emancipate the slaves suddenly by decree, when many or most of them were not prepared or equipped to make the transition to a life of 'freedom'? A gradual freeing would have been wiser as well as more humane. It would have been better to prepare slaves for freedom, but the liberals and radicals of the time were not concerned with real-life consequences, but as always, were only concerned with serving their utopian ideology regardless of the cost in human terms.
Thomas DiLorenzo, who is a scholar who dissents from the Lincoln cult, writes here how paradoxically, libertarian abolitionist Lysander Spooner defended the South's right to secede, and disagreed with Lincoln's actions. [Aside: Spooner is one of my New England kinsmen, so I am related to several abolitionists as well as to Southron slaveowners.]
Spooner and his entire family were abolitionists for decades prior to the war. He authored The Unconstitutionality of Slavery in 1845, which made him a great hero to the entire abolitionist movement; advocated the nullification of the Fugitive Slave Act by juries (a purely Jeffersonian, states’ rights position); called for slave insurrections aided by abolitionists like himself; and even hatched a plot to kidnap Virginia Governor Henry Wise and hold him as a hostage in exchange for John Brown.
Spooner also saw through the phoniness of the Lincoln regime and its diabolical quest for empire at the expense of hundreds of thousands of American lives. As George H. Smith writes, "Spooner stood nearly alone among radical abolitionists in his defense of the right of the South to secede from the Union" (p. xvii). To Spooner, the right of secession was "a right that was embodied in the American Revolution." Moreover, Lincoln’s war "erupted for a purely pecuniary consideration," not any moral reason.
Spooner’s views on the war are laid out in his famous 1870 essay, "No Treason," published as part of the above-mentioned Lysander Spooner Reader. He understood that the Northern business interests who were the backbone of the Republican Party of his time (also Lincoln’s time), whom he labeled "lenders of blood money," had "for a long series of years previous to the war, been the willing accomplices of the slave-holders in perverting the government from the purpose of liberty and justice . . ." (p. 117). It was such interests, after all, that monopolized (and profited immensely from) the transatlantic slave trade, which was always centered in Providence, Rhode Island and Boston, Massachusetts.
The Northern financiers of the war who lent millions to the Lincoln government did not do so for "any love of liberty or justice," wrote Spooner, but for "the control of [Southern] markets" through tariff extortion (p. 118). Mocking the argument of the "lenders of blood money" as they addressed the South he wrote: "If you [the South] will not pay us our price [i.e., a high tariff] . . . we will secure the same price (and keep control of your markets) by helping your slaves against you, and using them as our tools for maintaining dominion over you; for the control of your markets . . ." (p. 118).
[...]
Referring to President Ulysses S. Grant, Spooner also noted that the Northern business interests who controlled the Republican Party had "put their sword into the hands of the chief murderer of the war," who at the time was hypocritically saying, "Let us have peace" (p. 118). Spooner interpreted the crushing of the Southern secessionists at the hands of "murderers" like Grant as essentially saying: "Submit quietly to all the robbery and slavery [i.e., via tariffs and inflation] we have arranged for you, and you can have peace" (p. 118). The Republican Party rhetoric of "saving the union" and "abolishing slavery" was all a sham, said Spooner. "The pretense that the ‘abolition of slavery’ was either a motive or justification for the war, is a fraud of the same character with that of ‘maintaining the national honor,’" the famous abolitionist wrote (p. 119). It was the U.S. government that established and enforced slavery, he noted. The U.S. flag flew over an American slave society almost twenty times longer than the Confederate flag did.
[...] Spooner also ridiculed Lincoln’s ridiculous and absurd statement in the Gettysburg Address that he was waging war for the principle of "a government of consent," or government of the people, by the people, for the people, as his flowery rhetoric put it. In reality, the type of "consent" created by Lincoln’s war was: "everybody must consent, or be shot" (p. 120). This idea "was the dominant one on which the war was carried on." (Another libertarian icon, H.L. Mencken, was of the same opinion). "All of these cries of having ‘abolished slavery,’ of having ‘saved the country,’ of having ‘preserved the union,’ of establishing a ‘government of consent,’ and of ‘maintaining the national honor,’ are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats," the great abolitionist declared (p. 121).
Lysander Spooner vigorously attacked the Lincoln regime and defended the Confederacy’s right to secede with the libertarian language of natural rights, consent, and social contract. He recognized that this was also the language of Jefferson Davis’s First Inaugural Address, and that the war was not initiated to "free the slaves," something that neither Lincoln nor the U.S. Congress ever said or thought, even if grossly uneducated Americans do today.''
So really, Ron Paul is not saying something totally novel or 'radical' when he criticizes the War Between the States; he is echoing what others before him, libertarians like Spooner as well as true conservatives, have said.
The War Between the States, which was not strictly the altruistic crusade it purported to be, also left irreparable damage in terms of the relationship between the South and the North; it is hard to forgive and forget when your loved ones have been killed, your home burned to the ground, your crops destroyed, and an occupation government (which the Reconstruction government was) imposed. The North, with Reconstruction, clearly had a punitive agenda in mind. They wanted to utterly humiliate and abase the South. Depriving many citizens of their franchise and their rights as citizens, while putting yesterday's slaves in office, giving them authority over their former masters was malicious in intent, and served no good purpose. It was because of historical episodes like that that my Southron ancestors were firmly anti-Republican for a century. The radical Republicans were the nemesis of Southron people in the post-War era. For that reason many Southron people were staunch Democrats for generations, until the Democrats became insanely liberal and anti-white.
The War Between the States had greater costs than the billions of dollars and the 600,000 lives. It did irreparable damage to North-South relations, it set in motion our current 'politically correct' obsession, and even worse, it turned our Republic away from the Jeffersonian model and towards the Lincolnian, imperial, centralized, big-government model. It is incomprehensible that any conservative who claims to favor smaller government and more local control would think that this change has been for the better.
Confederate General Patrick Cleburne said:
Surrender means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the War; will be impressed by all the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision.
If this cause, that is dear to my heart, is doomed to fail, I pray Heaven may let me fail with it, while my face is toward the enemy and my arm battling for that which I know is right.
I am with the South in death, in victory or defeat. I believe the North is about to wage a brutal and unholy war on a people who have done them no wrong, in violation of the constitution and the fundamental principles of the government. They no longer acknowledge that all government derives its validity from the consent of the governed."
General Wade Hampton:
If we were wrong in our contest, then the Declaration of Independence of 1776 was a grave mistake and the revolution to which it led was a crime. If Washington was a patriot; Lee cannot have been a rebel."
For Southern patriots, that the South was right as to the principle of State's rights vs. Federal power is not in question.
But as to Dr. Paul's points, there are many ways to approach the question of whether the Civil War was justified, or whether there was not a better way to free the slaves. I think Dr. Paul and others are right; why could we not have freed the slaves as Britain did?
The liberals who are feigning shock over what Dr. Paul said might stop and think: wouldn't the 'peaceful solution' have been prefererable? Or is the peaceful solution only recommended when our enemies are 'Others'?
I really don't see how a liberal can make any kind of consistent and coherent argument against Dr. Paul's statements. I would like to see how the peace-and-love crowd would be able to argue that the War Between the States, with its half a million dead, was justified, when there were other options.
However Dr. Paul decides to respond to this media-driven controversy, I would bet that he will not back down or pander. It would be out of character for him to do so. And above all else, I believe Dr. Paul is a man of integrity and principle. He's stayed true to his principles for his years of public life, unlike most politicians.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Poem: Of time and the moment
A new wind rises out of the hills
of America, and the song it
sings permeates the land.
It is a song of time and the moment.
It is a song of beginnings.
George Washington, the father of our country,
found a fount of new beginnings
when he knelt in prayer.
(Do we kneel today to ask for moments
that reveal some far horizon?)
Thomas Jefferson searched for an enduring
source of strength. And as he claimed
that source, it was a moment that became
for him a new beginning. "God who gave us
life gave us liberty," he said.
(Are we searching now for an enduring
source of strength?)
At Arlington, at every burying ground
where soldiers sleep, the wind is
but a whisper as it tells of memories.
Unnumbered crosses quietly proclaim that freedom
has been dearly bought to bring us
new beginnings.
(How do we honor those who gave
the gift of life?)
A new wind rises out of the hills
of America, and it sings of new beginnings.
We do not need new keys that open
to new worlds,
but old keys, making turns in
old familiar locks such as enduring
honesty, integrity, deep silences, and roots
of faith and hope and love.
Old keys, trusted and tried, that always open
to a world of new beginnings.
Oh, let a new wind rise
out of the hills of America---
now, at Christmas,
and as the old year turns.
-Melva Rorem
of America, and the song it
sings permeates the land.
It is a song of time and the moment.
It is a song of beginnings.
George Washington, the father of our country,
found a fount of new beginnings
when he knelt in prayer.
(Do we kneel today to ask for moments
that reveal some far horizon?)
Thomas Jefferson searched for an enduring
source of strength. And as he claimed
that source, it was a moment that became
for him a new beginning. "God who gave us
life gave us liberty," he said.
(Are we searching now for an enduring
source of strength?)
At Arlington, at every burying ground
where soldiers sleep, the wind is
but a whisper as it tells of memories.
Unnumbered crosses quietly proclaim that freedom
has been dearly bought to bring us
new beginnings.
(How do we honor those who gave
the gift of life?)
A new wind rises out of the hills
of America, and it sings of new beginnings.
We do not need new keys that open
to new worlds,
but old keys, making turns in
old familiar locks such as enduring
honesty, integrity, deep silences, and roots
of faith and hope and love.
Old keys, trusted and tried, that always open
to a world of new beginnings.
Oh, let a new wind rise
out of the hills of America---
now, at Christmas,
and as the old year turns.
-Melva Rorem
Ron Paul on Meet the Press
I didn't see the Tim Russert interview of Ron Paul on Sunday. Truth be told, I don't enjoy such programs; I don't care for the open bias of most of the interviewers and anchor people. When these shows are on, I am usually doing something else and cannot sit down for the length of the show. And I have little patience for watching the whole thing but for those who are interested, here is the YouTube link.
I prefer to read the transcript, although a transcript omits the nuances of the spoken word, body language, and all those other things which give us information about the conversation. But sometimes the written word is more reliable and it is easier to go back and re-read where needed.
Below I've excerpted the parts of the transcript that I found most salient to me. Obviously immigration and sovereignty issues are of paramount importance from my point of view, so these exchanges are of interest:
Personally, I would like to see Dr. Paul take a harder line on immigration, and I would like him to say he favors limiting or decreasing legal immigration. But I think his approach of ending benefits to immigrants (he doesn't specify legal or illegal immigrants here) is a practical one, and if implemented, would discourage immigration and encourage many illegals to go home of their own volition. Does any other candidate propose anything like this?
It's good that Dr. Paul points out that he is not an 'orthodox' libertarian on this issue; if he were an open-borders libertarian I would not dream of voting for him. But he is a practical man, and his views are more conservative than libertarian.
The next question by Russert has to do with the 'birthright citizenship' or 'anchor baby' issue. Russert obtusely challenges Dr. Paul's constructionist bonafides because he wants to amend the Constitution on this issue:
This is an important issue, and Dr. Paul has been consistent in his statements over the years on it, unlike Romney, Huckabee, or Thompson.
And then in this exchange, Dr. Paul shows that he is not just another politically correct panderer. He also makes valid points about the loss of individual liberty which resulted from the Civil Rights Act, and in that sense he is absolutely in sync with the more traditional American view on these issues. It takes courage to say these things, and in a time when political correctness is a real threat to the survival of our culture and our nation, Dr. Paul's willingness to speak the truth is rare, and should be commended. Which of the other 'conservative' candidates would say what he says? Not a one.
The fact that Dr. Paul bases his views on the Constitution and private property rights is consistent with his principles. His opposition to the social engineering inherent in the Civil Rights Act is principled, and it's consistent, as he says, with the old-style Goldwater Republicanism. Only in our modern politically correct age would his views be considered beyond the pale.
And the next question was about the Civil War. I happen to agree that there was a better way to solve the slavery issue than by invading the South, sacrificing so many American lives, and leaving permanent scars on the nation. These days most people consider that war a sacred cause, and Lincoln a near-saint. From a conservative point of view, the war and the subsequent hypertrophy of the federal government have led to a deviation from the original intention of the Founders for this Republic.
Dr. Paul is obviously his own man; even his many and vehement detractors recognize this, but they try to make that into a negative; he is 'out of step' or a 'kook' or an 'ideologue' or whatever, and above all, he 'can't win.'
I think the people who say he can't win are just wishful-thinking or whistling in the dark. As much as many people are clamoring for a change, and lamenting the corruption of our political system, along comes a man who represents real change, and a return to Constitutional principles, and some shy away. I think we are seeing who is really serious about wanting change and getting the country back on track. Most people are inclined to prefer the 'devil they know', business as usual, even if they know deep down that more of the same may be fatal.
I sense that some are absolutely closed-minded towards Dr. Paul, and nothing can change their minds.
However for those who are open-minded and truly concerned to pick the right candidate, I urge you to take another look at Ron Paul. And don't accept second-hand information on what Dr. Paul stands for, or his record in Congress. It's so easy, in this age of the Internet, to search out these things for yourselves. There are a lot of incorrect statements being made about Dr. Paul.
I'll make it easy: here is the link to the Ron Paul archives, which I've posted before. I encourage the open-minded to read his archives, wherein you will see his positions on various issues, in his own words.
Watch the Meet the Press interview at the YouTube link or read the transcript if you prefer.
I will probably have more to say about the misconceptions about Dr. Paul in a later entry, but for now, it's almost Christmas and I plan to take a couple of days away from all this and turn my attention away from politics and the crises in our country to lighter and more comforting matters, like friends, family, faith, home.
It's the time of year to reestablish our ties to the really important and lasting things; that's what anchors us. And that's ultimately what all this is about: preserving those things.
I prefer to read the transcript, although a transcript omits the nuances of the spoken word, body language, and all those other things which give us information about the conversation. But sometimes the written word is more reliable and it is easier to go back and re-read where needed.
Below I've excerpted the parts of the transcript that I found most salient to me. Obviously immigration and sovereignty issues are of paramount importance from my point of view, so these exchanges are of interest:
MR. RUSSERT: Let me ask you about immigration because that's a big issue here, and there has been a profound change. Back when you ran for president, 1988, libertarian, you said, "As in our country's first 150 years, there shouldn't be any immigration policy at all. We should welcome everyone who wants to come here and work." You've changed your view.
REP. PAUL: And, and during that campaign, I remember I got into trouble with Libertarians because I said there may well be a time when immigration is like an invasion and we have to treat it differently. And I think, in one sense, with the welfare state out of control--see, my approach to immigration is somewhat different than the others. Mine is you deal with it economically. We're in worse shape now because we subsidize immigration. We give food stamps, Social Security, free medical care, free education and amnesty. So you subsidize it, and you have a mess. Our hospitals are being closed. Conditions have changed. And I think that we should have--and, and 9/11 has occurred. Why shouldn't we be looking at people coming in? So there's--this, this means that we should look at immigration differently. It's an economic issue more than anything. If our economy was in good health, I--believe me, I don't think there'd be an immigration problem. We'd be looking for workers and we would be very generous.''
Personally, I would like to see Dr. Paul take a harder line on immigration, and I would like him to say he favors limiting or decreasing legal immigration. But I think his approach of ending benefits to immigrants (he doesn't specify legal or illegal immigrants here) is a practical one, and if implemented, would discourage immigration and encourage many illegals to go home of their own volition. Does any other candidate propose anything like this?
It's good that Dr. Paul points out that he is not an 'orthodox' libertarian on this issue; if he were an open-borders libertarian I would not dream of voting for him. But he is a practical man, and his views are more conservative than libertarian.
The next question by Russert has to do with the 'birthright citizenship' or 'anchor baby' issue. Russert obtusely challenges Dr. Paul's constructionist bonafides because he wants to amend the Constitution on this issue:
MR. RUSSERT: You say you're a strict constructionist of the Constitution, and yet you want to amend the Constitution to say that children born here should not automatically be U.S. citizens.
REP. PAUL: Well, amending the Constitution is constitutional. What's a--what's the contradiction there?
MR. RUSSERT: So in the Constitution as written, you want to amend?
REP. PAUL: Well, that's constitutional, to do it. Besides, it was the 14th Amendment. It wasn't in the original Constitution. And there's a, there's a confusion on interpretation. In the early years, it was never interpreted that way, and it's still confusing because people--individuals are supposed to have birthright citizenship if they're under the jurisdiction of the government. And somebody who illegally comes in this country as a drug dealer, is he under the jurisdiction and their children deserve citizenship? I think it's awfully, awfully confusing, and, and I, I--matter of fact, I have a bill to change that as well as a Constitutional amendment to clarify it. ''
This is an important issue, and Dr. Paul has been consistent in his statements over the years on it, unlike Romney, Huckabee, or Thompson.
And then in this exchange, Dr. Paul shows that he is not just another politically correct panderer. He also makes valid points about the loss of individual liberty which resulted from the Civil Rights Act, and in that sense he is absolutely in sync with the more traditional American view on these issues. It takes courage to say these things, and in a time when political correctness is a real threat to the survival of our culture and our nation, Dr. Paul's willingness to speak the truth is rare, and should be commended. Which of the other 'conservative' candidates would say what he says? Not a one.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me ask you about race, because I, I read a speech you gave in 2004, the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. And you said this: "Contrary to the claims of" "supporters of the Civil Rights Act of" '64, "the act did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of" '64 "increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty." That act gave equal rights to African-Americans to vote, to live, to go to lunch counters, and you seem to be criticizing it.
REP. PAUL: Well, we should do, we should do this at a federal level, at a federal lunch counter it'd be OK or for the military. Just think of how the government, you know, caused all the segregation in the military until after World War II. But when it comes, Tim, you're, you're, you're not compelled in your house to invade strangers that you don't like. So it's a property rights issue. And this idea that all private property is under the domain of the federal government I think is wrong. So this--I think even Barry Goldwater opposed that bill on the same property rights position, and that--and now this thing is totally out of control. If you happen to like to smoke a cigar, you know, the federal government's going to come down and say you're not allowed to do this.
MR. RUSSERT: But you would vote against...
REP. PAUL: So it's...
MR. RUSSERT: You would vote against the Civil Rights Act if, if it was today?
REP. PAUL: If it were written the same way, where the federal government's taken over property--has nothing to do with race relations. It just happens, Tim, that I get more support from black people today than any other Republican candidate, according to some statistics. And I have a great appeal to people who care about personal liberties and to those individuals who would like to get us out of wars. So it has nothing to do with racism, it has to do with the Constitution and private property rights.''
The fact that Dr. Paul bases his views on the Constitution and private property rights is consistent with his principles. His opposition to the social engineering inherent in the Civil Rights Act is principled, and it's consistent, as he says, with the old-style Goldwater Republicanism. Only in our modern politically correct age would his views be considered beyond the pale.
And the next question was about the Civil War. I happen to agree that there was a better way to solve the slavery issue than by invading the South, sacrificing so many American lives, and leaving permanent scars on the nation. These days most people consider that war a sacred cause, and Lincoln a near-saint. From a conservative point of view, the war and the subsequent hypertrophy of the federal government have led to a deviation from the original intention of the Founders for this Republic.
MR. RUSSERT: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. "According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery."
REP. PAUL: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone, gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was the--that iron, iron fist..
MR. RUSSERT: We'd still have slavery.
REP. PAUL: Oh, come on, Tim. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You, you buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years? I mean, the hatred and all that existed. So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn't sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.''
Dr. Paul is obviously his own man; even his many and vehement detractors recognize this, but they try to make that into a negative; he is 'out of step' or a 'kook' or an 'ideologue' or whatever, and above all, he 'can't win.'
I think the people who say he can't win are just wishful-thinking or whistling in the dark. As much as many people are clamoring for a change, and lamenting the corruption of our political system, along comes a man who represents real change, and a return to Constitutional principles, and some shy away. I think we are seeing who is really serious about wanting change and getting the country back on track. Most people are inclined to prefer the 'devil they know', business as usual, even if they know deep down that more of the same may be fatal.
I sense that some are absolutely closed-minded towards Dr. Paul, and nothing can change their minds.
However for those who are open-minded and truly concerned to pick the right candidate, I urge you to take another look at Ron Paul. And don't accept second-hand information on what Dr. Paul stands for, or his record in Congress. It's so easy, in this age of the Internet, to search out these things for yourselves. There are a lot of incorrect statements being made about Dr. Paul.
I'll make it easy: here is the link to the Ron Paul archives, which I've posted before. I encourage the open-minded to read his archives, wherein you will see his positions on various issues, in his own words.
Watch the Meet the Press interview at the YouTube link or read the transcript if you prefer.
I will probably have more to say about the misconceptions about Dr. Paul in a later entry, but for now, it's almost Christmas and I plan to take a couple of days away from all this and turn my attention away from politics and the crises in our country to lighter and more comforting matters, like friends, family, faith, home.
It's the time of year to reestablish our ties to the really important and lasting things; that's what anchors us. And that's ultimately what all this is about: preserving those things.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Christmas in America
Christmas Across Our Country
from An American Annual of Christmas Literature and Art (1975)
The first Christmas celebration held by Englishmen in America was at Jamestown in 1607:
"The extreme winde, rayne, frost and snow caused us to keep Christmas among the salvages where we were never more merry, nor fed on more plenty of good oysters, fish, flesh, wildfowl, and good bread." - From the record of Captain John Smith
Down East: Christmas at Plymouth, 1620
"We went on shore, some to fell timber, some to saw, some to rive, and some to carry; so no man rested all that day." - From Bradford's Record
The Puritans regarded Christmas as a day of solemn worship.
In 1659 the General Constitution of Massachusetts deemed it necessary to enact this law: "Whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way as a festival shall be fined Five Shillings."
Christmas became a legal holiday in Massachusetts about the middle of the 18th century, and the day began to be celebrated in the real old English fashion around 1790 or the early 1800s.
There were "Hymns and prayer" in the morning.
Boar's heads and peacock pies decorated the tables and Yule-logs burned in the great halls.
Soap-bubble parties were a popular Yuletide amusement in the 1880s and at apple bees, young ladies found their future husband's initial when the peeling was coyly tossed over a shoulder.
Down South - Back in the 1800s, a few days before Christmas, a load of cotton, behind a six-mule hitch, would be decorated with colored streamers and sent to town to be traded for holiday supplies for the plantation. And river packets carried folks back home for Christmas.
Riding to the hounds on Christmas Day has always been popular.
Christmas services have been held in the Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg since 1715.
Open house is the custom at old Southern mansions.
An old plantation legend says that at the stroke of midnight, Christmas Eve, all the farm animals kneel towards the Star.
Fireworks are a Southern contribution to the American Christmas.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
GOP division
A while back, I read this piece called The GOP: A house divided by Darvin Dowdy. It seemed to me that there is a lot of truth in the blogger's assessment of the state of the Republican Party, and more importantly, conservatism and the country at large.
This piece was written before Tancredo dropped out of the campaign, but the writer asks where the donors are for candidates like Tancredo and Hunter? That is a good question; why are their campaigns seemingly underfunded? We see the same phenomenon, though, in the case of McCain and Huckabee, who seem not to be raising much money.
Given the fact that most Americans favor controlling our borders and stopping illegal immigration, it is suprising that there doesn't seem to be much financial support for restrictionist candidates and groups. Why is that?
Why is it that there is so little money going into the restrictionist cause, seemingly? Do we not believe in the people who are heading up these groups? Given the recent Huckabee/Gilchrist/Simcox stories, it would seem there might be some cause for skepticism now. Will that recent bad publicity lead to further fracturing and weakening of the restrictionist cause? Will Tancredo's dropping out further harm the movement -- especially as it appears there is no 'top tier' candidate to take up the mantle of Tancredo?
It seems as if the Republican Party is more divided now than it has been in my memory, and the divisions are stark and rather bitter in some cases. The liberal wing of the Party is contemptuous of the conservative wing, and expects the latter to obediently go along with the liberal GOP agenda and to expect nothing in return.
The party rank-and-file are being asked to choose between various liberal candidates, each of whom has been anointed as being 'electable', and to simply accept that these choices are the only available options.
It seems to me that this aura of 'electability' is bestowed by the media and the party elites, and that simply the title of 'electable' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. These candidates are 'electable' only if we accept the inevitability of their election -- which too many seem to do. If we say in advance that only these 'top tier' candidates stand a chance, we are taking away the voters' right to choose for themselves. It ain't over till it's over. Neither the biased old media nor the party elites have the right to tell us who can be elected or who can't. If they can make that decision for us, they've essentially taken away our voice in the election.
The GOP has divided like some amoeba on a glass slide under a microscope.
There are the Globalists that continue to warn the various GOP candidates and politicians that they will damage their political careers if they take the side of those wanting to seal the border and strictly enforce existing immigration laws. They blame the discontent by GOP voters on the Iraq War, run-away federal spending and scandalous behavior by elected GOP politicians. They delight in pointing to the downfall of those who have taken strong enforcement first stances. J.D. Hayworth lost his congressional seat in Arizona after taking a tough stance on the border. George Allen of Virginia lost his senate seat, some say for the same reason. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. And in the current presidential race the campaigns of both hard line border enforcement candidates, Hunter and Tancredo appear to be sinking like a rock. Their fundraising efforts a total joke. Or so these geopolitical elitists would want us to believe.
And then there’s our side of the divided amoeba. We don’t really have “advisers” and “strategists” telling us what our next move should be. We live every day with the reality of illegal immigration and its negative, downward pull on our social structure. We’ve observed the illegals banding together, marching in the streets of America. Streets that we as taxpayers have paid to build. We saw them waving Mexican flags and burning American flags. Their monumental ingratitude. We’ve watched our politicians allow these illegal hordes to invade our nation and enjoy rights and privileges that actually accede our own. And when we dared to raise complaints regarding this dangerous and worsening situation these same politicians, that we elected, presented us with disrespect, insults and intimidation. Yet we fight on to maintain and protect our nations sovereignty.
Sadly, we are losing. The globalists controlling our party seem to be gaining the upper hand. Both Hunter and Tancredo are nearly out of cash. The other candidates , good men all, will simply not remain on our side in the long term, in my view. They are making all the correct noises now because they want our votes. But when the battle gets intense they’ll fall back on they’re long proven expertise – the art of compromise.''
This piece was written before Tancredo dropped out of the campaign, but the writer asks where the donors are for candidates like Tancredo and Hunter? That is a good question; why are their campaigns seemingly underfunded? We see the same phenomenon, though, in the case of McCain and Huckabee, who seem not to be raising much money.
So the question begs to be answered – why? Why have the campaigns of Hunter and Tancredo faltered? Certainly its not lack of support. Duncan Hunter recently left the entire GOP pack in the dust in the Texas Straw Poll. No one was even close. He’s also won other straw polls. Tancredo did well in the recent Iowa straw. Why are they so upside down in the fundraising department? Would it be fair to say that their followers are a bunch of dunces who go about waving their flags and emotions in the air? Who are so stupid that they can’t figure out that it takes money to run a campaign? God forbid as I count myself among them. Well the jury is not yet in on that verdict yet. But honestly, something simply doesn’t add up. About 60% of Americans support tougher enforcement of immigration laws. Hunter and Tancredo both have large followings. So where are the donors?
Where the heck are these so called Border Watch groups, I ask? Groups like the Minutemen Project? And U.S. Border Watch? Jim Gilchrist’s Wake Up America? And U.S. Border Control? And these are just a few. There are many more org’s of this nature. But when you visit these sites you see no open support for Hunter or Tancredo. No ads, banners or anything. You can’t tell me that there isn’t a way to, legally, get the word out to their members regarding the fundraising woe’s of these 2 candidates. My gosh the entire Borders/Illegals issue is at stake! Certainly the decision makers within these organizations must have enough snap to know that without enlightened politicians and originalist judges on the bench our cause of U.S. sovereignty is doomed! Many of the org’s have become bogged down in the details and have lost sight of the mission. I ask all who read this to begin some kind of email campaign or other correspondence to these org’s immediately. Especially those who might be members of such groups. Put pressure on them to more aggressively work for our 2 valiant candidates Hunter and/or Tancredo. Withhold your donations to these groups until they regain the correct priorities. Inform them, if they don’t know, of the dire fundraising situation that our 2 candidates face and encourage them to formulate an action plan to help keep these campaigns effective financially. These candidates can not be effective without TV/Radio campaigns and that takes money. ''
Given the fact that most Americans favor controlling our borders and stopping illegal immigration, it is suprising that there doesn't seem to be much financial support for restrictionist candidates and groups. Why is that?
So while the fundraising efforts of our valiant candidates Hunter and Tancredo continue to sink into the quagmire, the globalists that have hijacked “our” GOP are standing around in the shadows having a good laugh at our expense. Snickering at us. Also sinking into the quagmire is our cause of sealing the borders and insisting that our elected officials see to it that immigration laws are strictly enforced. Why should they listen to us? We can’t even keep our own candidates in a liquid financial state. So to all of you who still believe that the notion of national sovereign borders is not an antiquated, obsolete concept, I ask you, do you enjoy the sting of defeat? How do you like being laughed at, rebuked and put back into your place by the elitists?
I also put forth the question – is it too late to reverse this negative trend? Is there still time? I believe there is time but none to waste. I welcome your comments. And who is your least-favorite GOP open borders globalist? ''
Why is it that there is so little money going into the restrictionist cause, seemingly? Do we not believe in the people who are heading up these groups? Given the recent Huckabee/Gilchrist/Simcox stories, it would seem there might be some cause for skepticism now. Will that recent bad publicity lead to further fracturing and weakening of the restrictionist cause? Will Tancredo's dropping out further harm the movement -- especially as it appears there is no 'top tier' candidate to take up the mantle of Tancredo?
It seems as if the Republican Party is more divided now than it has been in my memory, and the divisions are stark and rather bitter in some cases. The liberal wing of the Party is contemptuous of the conservative wing, and expects the latter to obediently go along with the liberal GOP agenda and to expect nothing in return.
The party rank-and-file are being asked to choose between various liberal candidates, each of whom has been anointed as being 'electable', and to simply accept that these choices are the only available options.
It seems to me that this aura of 'electability' is bestowed by the media and the party elites, and that simply the title of 'electable' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. These candidates are 'electable' only if we accept the inevitability of their election -- which too many seem to do. If we say in advance that only these 'top tier' candidates stand a chance, we are taking away the voters' right to choose for themselves. It ain't over till it's over. Neither the biased old media nor the party elites have the right to tell us who can be elected or who can't. If they can make that decision for us, they've essentially taken away our voice in the election.
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