There's a wonderful piece here, called Armies of Bitterness.
Very much worth your while.
The blog, which is new to me, is called Toughgod's Blog.
Monday, February 28, 2011
The best-laid plans
Tim Heydon discusses the relationship between rising food prices, globalization, and the 'popular uprisings' in Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere in the Arab world.
Presuming that the 'popular uprisings' are just that, and that they were not fomented by outsiders as many have speculated, it is thought that rising food prices on staple foods provoked the unrest. As we are seeing rising food prices here (along with rising prices, generally) this is something we have to think about.
Heydon says in his piece that
I surmised some time ago that the idea behind globalizing is in part the idea that the various regions (I started to say, 'nations', silly me) are to specialize, and this, in order that we not be self-sufficient and self-sustaining. I think I wrote on this blog that this forced interdependency, even when it comes to basic foodstuffs, is a way of making us hostages, in a sense, to each other. If we are all dependent on people on the other side of the world for the necessities of life, we are very vulnerable, at the mercy of people (the Chinese, for instance) who are surely not our friends or well-wishers.) I think this forced interdependence is a diabolical idea, in all sense of that word. But Heydon believes that is a part of what is going on.
And as he says, that's why our manufacturing capacity has been destroyed or offshored for the most part, with no seeming regrets among our overlords.
A friend and I were talking recently about the utter insanity of our getting seafood from the other side of the world instead of from local waters, while presumably much of our locally-caught seafood goes to who-knows-where. Read the packagaging labels at your local supermarket; very few food products (or non-food products) are made here. Most products say, at best, 'Distributed by..' someplace in another U.S. state, perhaps, but very little says 'Product of the USA', as it should. We are taking a gamble when we eat anything, really, given China's record of pushing toxic products of all kinds onto the passive world. For the latest instance of that, Time.com reports on the toxic metal contamination of Chinese rice
Most people, rather than being justifiably alarmed by the many instances of contamination, simply shrug their shoulders and go on buying the stuff. Maybe among the adulterants in the food products is something that makes us passive, docile, and stupid.
I'm only half-joking when I say that.
Along with the artificial population explosion in the UK and our country, via mass uncontrolled immigration, we are in a bad way when it comes to being able to feed ourselves and be self-sufficient. But the idea is that we not be self-sustaining, and that either our ''own'' political classes, and/or the people in China who control our flow of goods, will have power over us by that fact.
This can hardly end well. Now, as the price of gas threatens to hit $5 a gallon soon, prices will surely continue their upward climb.
What next? Do our political classes think they can control and use this crisis that they have engineered, or will it backfire on them?
Heydon concludes by saying that an era of scarcity will put paid to this globalizing experiment that is under way. Another way to look at that is that we need to regain some kind of control over our own lives by producing what we need for ourselves, as was our forefathers' intention. We can't wait for this experiment to fail completely before we decide to work towards more sovereignty over our own lives and more self-sufficiency.
Presuming that the 'popular uprisings' are just that, and that they were not fomented by outsiders as many have speculated, it is thought that rising food prices on staple foods provoked the unrest. As we are seeing rising food prices here (along with rising prices, generally) this is something we have to think about.
Heydon says in his piece that
"Globalisation depends on the specialisation or division of labour and Ricardo’s theory of Comparative Advantage. New Labour positioned this country into the Global economy as specialising in financial services. Hence its love affair with the City which has brought us to such disaster, and its total lack of concern for the export of our manufacturng [sic] industry and the huge increase in the population of an already crowded country.''
I surmised some time ago that the idea behind globalizing is in part the idea that the various regions (I started to say, 'nations', silly me) are to specialize, and this, in order that we not be self-sufficient and self-sustaining. I think I wrote on this blog that this forced interdependency, even when it comes to basic foodstuffs, is a way of making us hostages, in a sense, to each other. If we are all dependent on people on the other side of the world for the necessities of life, we are very vulnerable, at the mercy of people (the Chinese, for instance) who are surely not our friends or well-wishers.) I think this forced interdependence is a diabolical idea, in all sense of that word. But Heydon believes that is a part of what is going on.
And as he says, that's why our manufacturing capacity has been destroyed or offshored for the most part, with no seeming regrets among our overlords.
A friend and I were talking recently about the utter insanity of our getting seafood from the other side of the world instead of from local waters, while presumably much of our locally-caught seafood goes to who-knows-where. Read the packagaging labels at your local supermarket; very few food products (or non-food products) are made here. Most products say, at best, 'Distributed by..' someplace in another U.S. state, perhaps, but very little says 'Product of the USA', as it should. We are taking a gamble when we eat anything, really, given China's record of pushing toxic products of all kinds onto the passive world. For the latest instance of that, Time.com reports on the toxic metal contamination of Chinese rice
''The polluting effects of China's rapid industrialization are hardly news. But the industrial clusters cropping up in the nation's farm belts present new problems. Food safety in China in the past few years has primarily been framed as a problem of corruption in the supply chain, as was the case in the melamine scandal, or the overuse of pesticides, insecticides and chemical fertilizers in agriculture. Crop contamination by heavy metals from nearby industry that soak into the soil did not start this year — in fact the rice samples used to determine the 10% contamination rate were taken back in 2007 — but the scope of the problem is just beginning to be fully comprehended.''
Most people, rather than being justifiably alarmed by the many instances of contamination, simply shrug their shoulders and go on buying the stuff. Maybe among the adulterants in the food products is something that makes us passive, docile, and stupid.
I'm only half-joking when I say that.
Along with the artificial population explosion in the UK and our country, via mass uncontrolled immigration, we are in a bad way when it comes to being able to feed ourselves and be self-sufficient. But the idea is that we not be self-sustaining, and that either our ''own'' political classes, and/or the people in China who control our flow of goods, will have power over us by that fact.
This can hardly end well. Now, as the price of gas threatens to hit $5 a gallon soon, prices will surely continue their upward climb.
What next? Do our political classes think they can control and use this crisis that they have engineered, or will it backfire on them?
Heydon concludes by saying that an era of scarcity will put paid to this globalizing experiment that is under way. Another way to look at that is that we need to regain some kind of control over our own lives by producing what we need for ourselves, as was our forefathers' intention. We can't wait for this experiment to fail completely before we decide to work towards more sovereignty over our own lives and more self-sufficiency.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Today's heroes have not always been so...
And today's villains were once heroes.
The picture posted above is of Robert E. Lee and his generals. It was an interesting experience recently, on a forum where British as well as Canadian and a couple of Americans gather, a picture like the one above was posted. It was identified only as General Lee (who was noted by the English commenters as being of English descent) and his generals. I was pleasantly surprised that a couple of the men from the UK recognized many of the generals, while the American who was there confessed that he knew who none of them were, apart from General Lee. Everybody in the South surely knows Robert E. Lee's face, but my fellow Southern American did not know the others, not even Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson, whose face is also very well-known in the South -- or used to be.
I confess I can't name them all, though I recognize, from other pictures I've seen, John Bell Hood, my great-granddad's commanding officer. Then of course J.E.B. Stuart, and the very topical Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Braxton Bragg. Can anybody else name the others? It seems our history is being neglected. It's pretty bad when someone in England knows our history and our heroes better than we do.
Not altogether off topic, at the Guardian website, there is an article discussing the fact that at the time of the American War Between the States, the majority of British 'liberals' sided with the Confederacy, and held a negative view of Abraham Lincoln.
The writer of the article cites material from a book by Amanda Foreman, called A World On Fire.
The writer also mentions that the Guardian itself was conflicted over which side to take, given their anti-slavery position. But oddly (to the article's writer, at least) it seemed that the Guardian's support for the principle of self-determination resulted in their taking a very anti-Lincoln stance.
It's interesting that some cracks are beginning to appear in the façade of Lincolnolatry, at least in this country. Lately there has even been some public discussion of Lincoln's support for repatriating freed slaves to Africa. Yet it seems that the Guardian and its readers are not cognizant of that fact.
The following quote from Lincoln is not one with which most Americans or British people are familiar with these days:
Those words were Lincoln's from the fourth Lincoln-Douglas Debate, which took place on September 18, 1858. They are quoted in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings (New York: Library of America, 1989)on p. 636.
As for the fact that many in England were pro-Confederate, that is what I was taught as a child in school, so it is not a new revelation to me. But I will be looking for the release of 'A World On Fire'. It promises to be interesting.
The picture posted above is of Robert E. Lee and his generals. It was an interesting experience recently, on a forum where British as well as Canadian and a couple of Americans gather, a picture like the one above was posted. It was identified only as General Lee (who was noted by the English commenters as being of English descent) and his generals. I was pleasantly surprised that a couple of the men from the UK recognized many of the generals, while the American who was there confessed that he knew who none of them were, apart from General Lee. Everybody in the South surely knows Robert E. Lee's face, but my fellow Southern American did not know the others, not even Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson, whose face is also very well-known in the South -- or used to be.
I confess I can't name them all, though I recognize, from other pictures I've seen, John Bell Hood, my great-granddad's commanding officer. Then of course J.E.B. Stuart, and the very topical Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Braxton Bragg. Can anybody else name the others? It seems our history is being neglected. It's pretty bad when someone in England knows our history and our heroes better than we do.
Not altogether off topic, at the Guardian website, there is an article discussing the fact that at the time of the American War Between the States, the majority of British 'liberals' sided with the Confederacy, and held a negative view of Abraham Lincoln.
The writer of the article cites material from a book by Amanda Foreman, called A World On Fire.
''Foreman stumbled on her subject while researching her bestselling 1999 biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. In the family archives she discovered that the heir to the Devonshire title – later the eighth duke – had spent Christmas Day 1862 making eggnog for Robert E Lee's Confederate cavalry officers in Virginia.
This Devonshire heir, though, was not some deranged rightwing romantic but one of the pillars of Victorian Liberalism. As Lord Hartington, he served in Gladstone's first two Liberal cabinets, introduced the secret ballot into British law, pulled troops out of Afghanistan in the 1880s, was leader of the Liberal party in opposition, nearly became PM, and finally broke with Gladstone over home rule for Ireland, becoming leader of the breakaway Liberal Unionists – an irony for a man who had sided with the Confederates 20 years previously.
Yet as Foreman shows, Hartington's support for the south was anything but unusual among liberal and progressive 1860s Britain. This country was almost as torn over the civil war as Americans themselves. Many went to fight. The war even crossed the Atlantic, with a battle between Union and Confederate ships in the Channel in 1864. The political parties, and Lord Palmerston's Whig government, were split down the middle over the issues.''
The writer also mentions that the Guardian itself was conflicted over which side to take, given their anti-slavery position. But oddly (to the article's writer, at least) it seemed that the Guardian's support for the principle of self-determination resulted in their taking a very anti-Lincoln stance.
''The Guardian's anti-Lincoln obsession reached its heights in the April 1865 editorial on, of all things, the president's assassination. "Of his rule we can never speak except as a series of acts abhorrent to every true notion of constitutional right and human liberty," the paper wrote, before tactfully adding that "it is doubtless to be regretted that he had not the opportunity of vindicating his good intentions".
It's interesting that some cracks are beginning to appear in the façade of Lincolnolatry, at least in this country. Lately there has even been some public discussion of Lincoln's support for repatriating freed slaves to Africa. Yet it seems that the Guardian and its readers are not cognizant of that fact.
The following quote from Lincoln is not one with which most Americans or British people are familiar with these days:
"I will say, then, that I am not nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races - that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with White people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the White and black races which will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the White race."
Those words were Lincoln's from the fourth Lincoln-Douglas Debate, which took place on September 18, 1858. They are quoted in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings (New York: Library of America, 1989)on p. 636.
As for the fact that many in England were pro-Confederate, that is what I was taught as a child in school, so it is not a new revelation to me. But I will be looking for the release of 'A World On Fire'. It promises to be interesting.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
'Best British films'
Here is a list of the '100 Best British Films', according to 150 'experts', people in the film industry. I find these kinds of lists interesting, even though I usually don't agree with many of the choices made. Now, if the results were based on the movie-watching public's assessment, that would be more interesting to read, for me, although I think I could predict what the popular choices would be.
When such lists are based on critics' preferences, I usually find that I haven't even seen many of the films in question, since I more or less boycott movies today, and have not watched most new releases for many years. But as it happens, I've seen a few of the films on the list, namely, the following:
The Railway Children (1970)
School for Scoundrels (1960)
Zulu (1964)
Night and the City (1950)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
I'm Alright Jack (1959)
Dr No (1962)
Billy Liar (1963)
Piccadilly (1929)
The Man in the White Suit (1951)
Dead of Night (1945)
Whisky Galore! (1949)
Blackmail (1929)
Gregory's Girl (1981)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974)
Local Hero (1983)
The Fallen Idol (1948)
The Ladykillers (1955)
The Wicker Man (1973)
I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)
Great Expectations (1946)
The Innocents (1961)
A Canterbury Tale (1944)
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
Black Narcissus (1947)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
The Third Man (1949)
I blogged in the past about the film 'A Canterbury Tale', which I enjoyed. There are a few well-liked ones among the ones I listed above, films that I've seen more than once, like The Ladykillers, The Man in the White Suit, I Know Where I'm Going, and Great Expectations.
Another movie I've watched several times, and found compelling, was Black Narcissus. Beautiful cinematography, unusual story.
The movie 'Zulu' impressed me more than I expected, as I had thought that political correctness had already set in by then, but it had not yet got its death-grip on our world in 1964.
As always, it's the older movies that I prefer, and generally the older the better. The oldest one on that list that I've seen is Piccadilly, which was not a movie I would watch more than once, but the 1920s has a certain allure for me.
The Third Man is #2 on the list, and I suppose deservedly so. It held my interest, though to me the setting (post-war Vienna, looking rather grim and depressing) and the characters were not especially sympathetic. But like most of Orson Welles' movies, it was interesting, though not very likeable.
There are a couple of my favorites that were not on the list, such as The Lavender Hill Mob and The Four Feathers. But then it's all fairly subjective, isn't it? I can see that a given movie may be technically impressive but if I don't become absorbed in the characters and the story, it will not be on my list of best movies.
I do notice that most people's favorites are the newer ones. It seems that for most audiences today, what matters is the technical wizardry, or the sensationalistic aspects: bigger, louder, more. There's not much taste for subtlety or nuance or understatement. Everything must be over the top and excessive or people say it's 'boring.'
What do you say? Would your list be similar to this one?
When such lists are based on critics' preferences, I usually find that I haven't even seen many of the films in question, since I more or less boycott movies today, and have not watched most new releases for many years. But as it happens, I've seen a few of the films on the list, namely, the following:
The Railway Children (1970)
School for Scoundrels (1960)
Zulu (1964)
Night and the City (1950)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
I'm Alright Jack (1959)
Dr No (1962)
Billy Liar (1963)
Piccadilly (1929)
The Man in the White Suit (1951)
Dead of Night (1945)
Whisky Galore! (1949)
Blackmail (1929)
Gregory's Girl (1981)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974)
Local Hero (1983)
The Fallen Idol (1948)
The Ladykillers (1955)
The Wicker Man (1973)
I Know Where I'm Going! (1945)
Great Expectations (1946)
The Innocents (1961)
A Canterbury Tale (1944)
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
Black Narcissus (1947)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
The Third Man (1949)
I blogged in the past about the film 'A Canterbury Tale', which I enjoyed. There are a few well-liked ones among the ones I listed above, films that I've seen more than once, like The Ladykillers, The Man in the White Suit, I Know Where I'm Going, and Great Expectations.
Another movie I've watched several times, and found compelling, was Black Narcissus. Beautiful cinematography, unusual story.
The movie 'Zulu' impressed me more than I expected, as I had thought that political correctness had already set in by then, but it had not yet got its death-grip on our world in 1964.
As always, it's the older movies that I prefer, and generally the older the better. The oldest one on that list that I've seen is Piccadilly, which was not a movie I would watch more than once, but the 1920s has a certain allure for me.
The Third Man is #2 on the list, and I suppose deservedly so. It held my interest, though to me the setting (post-war Vienna, looking rather grim and depressing) and the characters were not especially sympathetic. But like most of Orson Welles' movies, it was interesting, though not very likeable.
There are a couple of my favorites that were not on the list, such as The Lavender Hill Mob and The Four Feathers. But then it's all fairly subjective, isn't it? I can see that a given movie may be technically impressive but if I don't become absorbed in the characters and the story, it will not be on my list of best movies.
I do notice that most people's favorites are the newer ones. It seems that for most audiences today, what matters is the technical wizardry, or the sensationalistic aspects: bigger, louder, more. There's not much taste for subtlety or nuance or understatement. Everything must be over the top and excessive or people say it's 'boring.'
What do you say? Would your list be similar to this one?
Friday, February 25, 2011
It ain't over til it's over
Yet another in the endless 'Surrender, Dorothy' series from the media. Today a headline trumpets
Texas demographer: 'It's basically over for Anglos'
There are some depressing comments at the Houston Chronicle blog, the usual melting pot drivel, but the real prize comments come from Free Republic. Some samples of the FReeper wit and wisdom:
And:
So the clueless and the colorblind are heard from.
Next, the inevitable 'we're doomed' posts, always popular everywhere this subject is discussed:
The first Mr. Clueless-and-colorblind returns to dispense more of his wisdom:
And there's more if you are in a masochistic mood.
I think that sadly, the FReepers pretty much represent a cross-section of the Republican voters of this country, and you can see how little ethnoloyalty or even basic knowledge of American history, genetics, culture, or anything else they possess. It was not always so on that Forum.
One side note here: it is disheartening to see how often, even on the 'realist' blogs, men will indicate that they are OK with outmarrying amongst Mexicans, Asians, and so on. And yet women are said to be more likely to outmarry. I don't know how it is possible to be an ethnopatriot and think outmarriage is OK if the women chosen as partners are of certain groups. You either are loyal to your people and your family line, or you are not. There is no kinda-sorta there.
Reading various blogs and forums, I am starting to think the doomsayers may be right -- or maybe it's just that their attitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The question becomes, are these people salvageable? Is it realistic to think that we can 'reach out' and pull these people from the demographic conflagration that is America? Or must they be written off as basically ineducable and irredeemable? Ignorance is indeed bliss for some people. So these guys must be very blissful.
Maybe there is one in a thousand, or one in five thousand, that will one day get it. The rest, who do get it but who are total pessimists, will simply resign themselves bitterly to what they see as an inevitable fate.
I think we have to soldier on without some of these people who will never 'get it', because it is a waste of effort and an exercise in futility to think we can 'wake everybody up.' To use an analogy that I've used before, I recall the story that when Paul Revere, Samuel Prescott, and William Dawes rode out on that night in April, 1775, to warn the Middlesex folk that 'the Regulars' were coming, many people were angered at being awakened. Rather than wanting to help spread the alarm, or to prepare to defend themselves and their neighbors, they preferred to sleep on. They'd rather not know what was happening. I've often wondered why.
I suppose it is easier to cynically pronounce that we're powerless and the situation is hopeless, rather than having to roll up one's sleeves and prepare.
Texas demographer: 'It's basically over for Anglos'
'Looking at population projections for Texas, demographer Steve Murdock concludes: "It's basically over for Anglos."
Two of every three Texas children are now non-Anglo and the trend line will become even more pronounced in the future, said Murdock, former U.S. Census Bureau director and now director of the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas at Rice University.
Today's Texas population can be divided into two groups, he said. One is an old and aging Anglo and the other is young and minority. Between 2000 and 2040, the state's public school enrollment will see a 15 percent decline in Anglo children while Hispanic children will make up a 213 percent increase, he said.
The state's largest county - Harris - will shed Anglos throughout the coming decades. By 2040, Harris County will have about 516, 000 fewer Anglos than lived in the Houston area in 2000, while the number of Hispanics will increase by 2.5 million during the same period, Murdock said. The projection assumes a net migration rate equal to one-half of 1990-2000.''
There are some depressing comments at the Houston Chronicle blog, the usual melting pot drivel, but the real prize comments come from Free Republic. Some samples of the FReeper wit and wisdom:
''When you have an immigrant group build up enough strength to "go forth and multiply" the best looking chicks are going to go for the guys with the best jobs, and there goes the old ethnic purity.
Even by Harry Truman's time it was common for an American to have half a dozen ethnicities lurking in the ol'woodpile.
Their Anglo-Chokras are struggling to present themselves AND they will! More than one Mexican momma is going to cry herself to sleep seeing that "the blond girl" has her little boy!''
And:
That Blond Girl just might be one of my GrandDaughters.
Blond Hair, Yes.
Blue Eyes, Yes.
1/4 Mestizo
Last name of Galvez.
Point well taken.
Many of the young people today are not so hungup on the whole Race thing.
People need to look past all the superficial stuff and concentrate on the person Values.
19 posted on Friday, February 25, 2011 5:05:58 PM by SwedeBoy2''
So the clueless and the colorblind are heard from.
Next, the inevitable 'we're doomed' posts, always popular everywhere this subject is discussed:
''Looking at population projections for Texas, "It's basically over for Anglos.
It was over years ago for Texas...
In fact, you're likely seeing the last White Governor of Texas...Eventually, the illegals will turn the Alamo into a medical clinic for illegal aliens.
No joke... ''
The first Mr. Clueless-and-colorblind returns to dispense more of his wisdom:
BTW, I'm aware that there's a tribe that used to own bunch of territory running from Kansas down to Waco ~ they eventually lost even their very dimished [sic] reservation during theCivil War.
They've outmarried to the degree that 'blond" is normal ~
BTW, everybody knows how they use the term "Anglo" West of the Mississippi. Still, if I were you and had any "anglo blood" I'd take my dirk and cut a hole in my arm to let it leach out. You just don't want any of that stuff ya' know. Scotts and Sa'ami are best by test!''
And there's more if you are in a masochistic mood.
I think that sadly, the FReepers pretty much represent a cross-section of the Republican voters of this country, and you can see how little ethnoloyalty or even basic knowledge of American history, genetics, culture, or anything else they possess. It was not always so on that Forum.
One side note here: it is disheartening to see how often, even on the 'realist' blogs, men will indicate that they are OK with outmarrying amongst Mexicans, Asians, and so on. And yet women are said to be more likely to outmarry. I don't know how it is possible to be an ethnopatriot and think outmarriage is OK if the women chosen as partners are of certain groups. You either are loyal to your people and your family line, or you are not. There is no kinda-sorta there.
Reading various blogs and forums, I am starting to think the doomsayers may be right -- or maybe it's just that their attitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The question becomes, are these people salvageable? Is it realistic to think that we can 'reach out' and pull these people from the demographic conflagration that is America? Or must they be written off as basically ineducable and irredeemable? Ignorance is indeed bliss for some people. So these guys must be very blissful.
Maybe there is one in a thousand, or one in five thousand, that will one day get it. The rest, who do get it but who are total pessimists, will simply resign themselves bitterly to what they see as an inevitable fate.
I think we have to soldier on without some of these people who will never 'get it', because it is a waste of effort and an exercise in futility to think we can 'wake everybody up.' To use an analogy that I've used before, I recall the story that when Paul Revere, Samuel Prescott, and William Dawes rode out on that night in April, 1775, to warn the Middlesex folk that 'the Regulars' were coming, many people were angered at being awakened. Rather than wanting to help spread the alarm, or to prepare to defend themselves and their neighbors, they preferred to sleep on. They'd rather not know what was happening. I've often wondered why.
I suppose it is easier to cynically pronounce that we're powerless and the situation is hopeless, rather than having to roll up one's sleeves and prepare.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Strange times
This story and a later one are interesting in a couple of ways. First, though, we all knew, those of us who care about these things, that this was a deliberate plan. We knew that it was being carried out contrary to the wishes of the people of the UK, just as the same kind of thing is going on here and in all Western countries. An excerpt:
But the fact that this is being discussed so openly is the interesting thing. Can any American reading this blog imagine one of our large daily newspapers acknowledging such a thing? I can't. The Washington Times is the only thing approaching a 'conservative' major daily paper, and it is politically correct in its way. I confess I have not read the Washington Times lately, because it is so predictably Republican and 'safe.' But though stories about border violations (Border Patrol agents shot by illegal immigrants or drug gangs, etc.) they did not address immigration policy, or the very fact that our country was being transformed, even though it may be the biggest story of our lifetimes.
So, the British media is sometimes more open and frank than our own media on this issue, at least. And given the fact that the UK overall seems to keep a much tighter control over people's speech and behavior, this is not what we would expect.
A commenter says:
This is a very civil and factual comment, but I think in some of our papers, the moderators would delete it. The first sentence alone would probably doom the comment to deletion.
Most such articles in the Telegraph seem to elicit hundreds of comments, so there are obviously strong feelings on the part of many people in the UK, where immigration is concerned.
We here in the States have some latitude as to freedom of expression, but politically incorrect comments on newspaper websites are often deleted or heavily moderated, and usually are met with obnoxious responses from leftist readers -- who may in fact be people who are paid to shout down politically incorrect comments on the Internet, or they may just be true believer leftists. In any case, I would say that outside the blogosphere, viewpoints that are politically incorrect are just not heard, not allowed to be heard. Some news websites are more lenient than others, but a great deal of censorship goes on.
This is also true of talk radio, which used to be considered a bastion of conservatism. So other than blogs, these issues are pretty much ignored.
Most Americans on 'conservative' blogs jeer at the British for being too passive and supine when it comes to the transformation and ethnic cleansing that is going on, but I question whether that is an accurate impression; it may be that there are things going on beneath the surface.
Before someone tells me that I am imagining this to be true, just indulging in wishful thinking, I think that one advantage that the people of the UK have is that they are not afflicted with this national neurosis regarding slavery, racial amends, and proving our lack of 'racist' inclinations. While American 'conservatives' are scouring the landscape, searching the farthest horizons for 'conservative blacks' to promote to leadership, the British, French, et al seem relatively free of this strange affliction, thus enabling them to think more clearly about the situation. Until we Americans can disentangle ourselves from this obsession, we will forever be spinning our wheels.
I don't count the British out just yet; we don't know what may happen. And there are signs of life in France as well, though now ''our'' government is presuming to teach the French how to have better rapport with their 'minority populations.' It would be laughable, were it not so tragic.
Somebody needs to teach the American people, particularly those of the colorblind Republican persuasion, how to shed their peculiar hangups so that this country might be able to see clearly again.
Official figures to be published on Thursday will confirm that foreign immigration under Labour added more than three million to our population.
At the same time nearly one million British citizens voted with their feet, some saying that they were leaving because England was no longer a country that they recognised.
How could all this have happened in the teeth of public opposition? Even the Labour government’s own survey last February showed that 77 per cent of the public wanted immigration reduced, including 54 per cent of the ethnic communities, while 50 per cent of the public wanted it reduced ‘by a lot’.
[...]
The strongest evidence for conspiracy comes from one of Labour’s own. Andrew Neather, a previously unheard-of speechwriter for Blair, Straw and Blunkett, popped up with an article in the Evening Standard in October 2009 which gave the game away.
Immigration, he wrote, didn't just happen; the deliberate policy of Ministers from late 2000...was to open up the UK to 'mass immigration.'
But the fact that this is being discussed so openly is the interesting thing. Can any American reading this blog imagine one of our large daily newspapers acknowledging such a thing? I can't. The Washington Times is the only thing approaching a 'conservative' major daily paper, and it is politically correct in its way. I confess I have not read the Washington Times lately, because it is so predictably Republican and 'safe.' But though stories about border violations (Border Patrol agents shot by illegal immigrants or drug gangs, etc.) they did not address immigration policy, or the very fact that our country was being transformed, even though it may be the biggest story of our lifetimes.
So, the British media is sometimes more open and frank than our own media on this issue, at least. And given the fact that the UK overall seems to keep a much tighter control over people's speech and behavior, this is not what we would expect.
A commenter says:
''Immigration has utterly ruined this country. Our homogenous British population gave us a stable society to which everyone belonged to, with everyone sharing the same culture and values. Mass immigration of foreign people and their cultures has thrown a very large spanner in the works, one which is rapidly eradicating the cultural and ethnic identity of our country. I really fear for the future of our country. It's the British people who made this country great, but they are now being replaced.
- Oliver, Surrey, G Britain
This is a very civil and factual comment, but I think in some of our papers, the moderators would delete it. The first sentence alone would probably doom the comment to deletion.
Most such articles in the Telegraph seem to elicit hundreds of comments, so there are obviously strong feelings on the part of many people in the UK, where immigration is concerned.
We here in the States have some latitude as to freedom of expression, but politically incorrect comments on newspaper websites are often deleted or heavily moderated, and usually are met with obnoxious responses from leftist readers -- who may in fact be people who are paid to shout down politically incorrect comments on the Internet, or they may just be true believer leftists. In any case, I would say that outside the blogosphere, viewpoints that are politically incorrect are just not heard, not allowed to be heard. Some news websites are more lenient than others, but a great deal of censorship goes on.
This is also true of talk radio, which used to be considered a bastion of conservatism. So other than blogs, these issues are pretty much ignored.
Most Americans on 'conservative' blogs jeer at the British for being too passive and supine when it comes to the transformation and ethnic cleansing that is going on, but I question whether that is an accurate impression; it may be that there are things going on beneath the surface.
Before someone tells me that I am imagining this to be true, just indulging in wishful thinking, I think that one advantage that the people of the UK have is that they are not afflicted with this national neurosis regarding slavery, racial amends, and proving our lack of 'racist' inclinations. While American 'conservatives' are scouring the landscape, searching the farthest horizons for 'conservative blacks' to promote to leadership, the British, French, et al seem relatively free of this strange affliction, thus enabling them to think more clearly about the situation. Until we Americans can disentangle ourselves from this obsession, we will forever be spinning our wheels.
I don't count the British out just yet; we don't know what may happen. And there are signs of life in France as well, though now ''our'' government is presuming to teach the French how to have better rapport with their 'minority populations.' It would be laughable, were it not so tragic.
Somebody needs to teach the American people, particularly those of the colorblind Republican persuasion, how to shed their peculiar hangups so that this country might be able to see clearly again.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
It tolls for thee
This story broke last week.
Texas Hispanics Fuel State's Population Growth
This story is not surprising, since Texas became majority nonwhite a few years back.
There's been some gloating around the conservative discussions about this online, since so many people from other immigrant-saturated states were criticized by Texans for letting mass immigration overwhelm them. Texans are advertised to be of sterner stuff, and more willing to defend their territory which was so hard-won.
So what happened to the famed Texan spirit?
Naturally I have a bias toward Texas, but I can be objective enough to say that in a sense Texas has been weakened by a couple of factors. The first one that comes to my mind is that Texas, like much of the South, has been heavily colonized by Northerners, even before illegal (and legal) immigration began to be utterly out of control. For economic reasons many Yankees came to Texas and other Southern states probably starting, in earnets, during the recession of the 70s. The high-tech industry in Texas was a magnet for a long while, luring many people from outside the South and eventually, outside the U.S.
The population started to grow a lot then, and this influx alone started to erode the old Texas culture and demographics.
One way and another, there are fewer descendants of the old Texas colonist stock now, while there are vastly increasing percentages of immigrants from all over the world, some who came legally, most illegally. But a great many people in Texas, it's probably safe to say, have no ties whatsoever to the core events of Texas history and no part in the heritage of that state.
Another element in this story is the fact that there has always been a Spanish-speaking population in Texas, considering that it was once part of Mexico. However there is a mistaken belief that Texas was heavily populated by Mexicans who were then conquered by Anglo colonists and made subject to them. This idea presupposes that the Mexicans you see in Texas today are the 'original' indigenous people, the rightful owners of the land, in much the same way that the liberal storyline makes Indians the rightful owners of the Americas, and our ancestors evil interlopers. The fact is, it's probably likely that the average Spanish-speaker you see in Texas is a relative newcomer, if he hasn't just swum the Rio Grande.
Yes, there was a Spanish-speaking (though not necessarily Mexican) population in Texas at the time of the Anglo-American colonists' arrival. I have read estimates of the total population as low as 20,000, and if that sounds like a lot of people, the territory in question was even larger than the present-day state of Texas, so that number shows it was sparsely populated. And it must also be remembered that many of the Spanish-speaking residents were of actual Spanish, meaning European, Iberian blood, very dissimilar to most of today's Mexicans.
And the fact that there has always been a certain percentage of Hispanic people in the state of Texas has led to a certain complacency about their presence. Most people in Texas take the presence of Mexicans for granted, and many Texans, especially today's politically corrected ones, will vociferously defend Mexicans, and will tell you emphatically that ''they fought at the Alamo alongside the Anglos'' or similar stories. Yes, there were some who did fight against Santa Anna's troops at the Alamo, but you can see the defenders' names listed, and note that there was hardly a 50-50 partnership.
I count roughly twelve names, of all those listed, who were Mexican or of Spanish descent. They were far outnumbered by Anglo-Americans.
Incidentally, the list is one of the 'revised' ones, which has added names that were not included in the original roll. (Interestingly for me, at least two of the new names are known kinsmen of mine, though I was already aware of another kinsman who died there.)
If you are interested, this link tells the story of how the list was 'corrected', although I can't help wonder if some of this was political 'correcting.'
For example, this quote is telling:
Oh, yes, all the history we know has been biased and colored by our prejudices, and let's remember, there are many versions of the truth, and who are we to try to exclude 'conflicting narratives?'
As usual, I'm digressing. My point was that Texas has been politically corrected to some extent like every place else, and the schools have been dumbed down to accommodate multiculturalism.
I will say, too, that in recent years, the social sanctions against intermarriage, which used to be very strong, have largely disappeared. And what happens when people marry out of their group is that group bonds and allegiances are weakened and eventually disappear. That's why all advertising and entertainment pushes the outmarrying meme so relentlessly these days. France's Sarkozy has come right out and said we need more métissage.
So yes, more Anglo Texans have Mexican-American neighbors and Mexican-American spouses and half-Mexican children or grandchildren, etc. And this makes people excessively optimistic that in time, ethnic conflicts will evaporate away and we will all get together and wonder why we used to be so mistaken, and we'll all have a good old laugh about the bad old days.
It's true that many Mexican-descended Texans have roots in the state that go back at least a few generations. Most of these are people who speak English accent-free, or close. They are fairly well assimilated to American (Anglo/White) ways, and they do not present the culture clash problems posed by recent immigrants. Some (few) may side with the older-stock Texans on matters of immigration, but I sense that many of the younger people may suddenly discover their Hispanic roots and reverse-assimilate, as has happened with many young European-born descendants of non-European immigrans. Why not, when the host culture is too cowed to defend itself, and the natural inhabitants of the country seem willing to capitulate? Exotic roots have a certain cachet in this multicult-dominated world, and in the last analysis, blood will out. Blood is thicker than water. It's thicker than 'assimilation.' Blood is thicker than civic citizenship.
I think some Texans may begin to realize that they have been too sanguine about the presence of millions of immigrants, and too quick to assume that they will all 'fit in' and be good neighbors . I suspect that there are some clueless people who think that the Latinos will be magnanimous in victory if we are accepting of them and affable towards them. I don't share that optimism.
One more factor that has enabled this situation to grow out of hand is that Texas is a big state, and there are still pockets where immigrants have not come to be a sizeable presence -- yet. As long as people still have a familiar and homogeneous community to retreat to, they will not feel the pressing nature of the problem.
We will see in the next few years whether Texas submits to Californication or whether the old Texas spirit that motivated our ancestors reasserts itself. Time is growing short; if people remain inert, then Texas will go gently into that night.
Texas Hispanics Fuel State's Population Growth
HOUSTON — A phenomenal surge in Hispanics has fueled the population growth in Texas, which gained more people over the last decade than any other state, according to United States Census Bureau figures released on Thursday.
People who identify themselves as Hispanic accounted for two-thirds of the state’s growth in the last decade. Hispanics now make up 38 percent of the state’s 25.1 million people, up from 32 percent a decade ago.
At the same time, demographers say, the growth in the population of white people who are not Hispanic has slowed markedly, rising by only 4 percent. Non-Hispanic whites now make up just 45 percent of the Texas population, down from 52 percent in 2000.''
This story is not surprising, since Texas became majority nonwhite a few years back.
There's been some gloating around the conservative discussions about this online, since so many people from other immigrant-saturated states were criticized by Texans for letting mass immigration overwhelm them. Texans are advertised to be of sterner stuff, and more willing to defend their territory which was so hard-won.
So what happened to the famed Texan spirit?
Naturally I have a bias toward Texas, but I can be objective enough to say that in a sense Texas has been weakened by a couple of factors. The first one that comes to my mind is that Texas, like much of the South, has been heavily colonized by Northerners, even before illegal (and legal) immigration began to be utterly out of control. For economic reasons many Yankees came to Texas and other Southern states probably starting, in earnets, during the recession of the 70s. The high-tech industry in Texas was a magnet for a long while, luring many people from outside the South and eventually, outside the U.S.
The population started to grow a lot then, and this influx alone started to erode the old Texas culture and demographics.
One way and another, there are fewer descendants of the old Texas colonist stock now, while there are vastly increasing percentages of immigrants from all over the world, some who came legally, most illegally. But a great many people in Texas, it's probably safe to say, have no ties whatsoever to the core events of Texas history and no part in the heritage of that state.
Another element in this story is the fact that there has always been a Spanish-speaking population in Texas, considering that it was once part of Mexico. However there is a mistaken belief that Texas was heavily populated by Mexicans who were then conquered by Anglo colonists and made subject to them. This idea presupposes that the Mexicans you see in Texas today are the 'original' indigenous people, the rightful owners of the land, in much the same way that the liberal storyline makes Indians the rightful owners of the Americas, and our ancestors evil interlopers. The fact is, it's probably likely that the average Spanish-speaker you see in Texas is a relative newcomer, if he hasn't just swum the Rio Grande.
Yes, there was a Spanish-speaking (though not necessarily Mexican) population in Texas at the time of the Anglo-American colonists' arrival. I have read estimates of the total population as low as 20,000, and if that sounds like a lot of people, the territory in question was even larger than the present-day state of Texas, so that number shows it was sparsely populated. And it must also be remembered that many of the Spanish-speaking residents were of actual Spanish, meaning European, Iberian blood, very dissimilar to most of today's Mexicans.
And the fact that there has always been a certain percentage of Hispanic people in the state of Texas has led to a certain complacency about their presence. Most people in Texas take the presence of Mexicans for granted, and many Texans, especially today's politically corrected ones, will vociferously defend Mexicans, and will tell you emphatically that ''they fought at the Alamo alongside the Anglos'' or similar stories. Yes, there were some who did fight against Santa Anna's troops at the Alamo, but you can see the defenders' names listed, and note that there was hardly a 50-50 partnership.
I count roughly twelve names, of all those listed, who were Mexican or of Spanish descent. They were far outnumbered by Anglo-Americans.
Incidentally, the list is one of the 'revised' ones, which has added names that were not included in the original roll. (Interestingly for me, at least two of the new names are known kinsmen of mine, though I was already aware of another kinsman who died there.)
If you are interested, this link tells the story of how the list was 'corrected', although I can't help wonder if some of this was political 'correcting.'
For example, this quote is telling:
"The Alamo problem, as in all of history, is that we think what happened in the past is static," said Stephen L. Hardin, a historian at Victoria College, who wrote about the Alamo battle in the revised handbook. "When evidence to the contrary pops up, it shakes up things and we deny the new because it challenges long-held beliefs."
Oh, yes, all the history we know has been biased and colored by our prejudices, and let's remember, there are many versions of the truth, and who are we to try to exclude 'conflicting narratives?'
As usual, I'm digressing. My point was that Texas has been politically corrected to some extent like every place else, and the schools have been dumbed down to accommodate multiculturalism.
I will say, too, that in recent years, the social sanctions against intermarriage, which used to be very strong, have largely disappeared. And what happens when people marry out of their group is that group bonds and allegiances are weakened and eventually disappear. That's why all advertising and entertainment pushes the outmarrying meme so relentlessly these days. France's Sarkozy has come right out and said we need more métissage.
So yes, more Anglo Texans have Mexican-American neighbors and Mexican-American spouses and half-Mexican children or grandchildren, etc. And this makes people excessively optimistic that in time, ethnic conflicts will evaporate away and we will all get together and wonder why we used to be so mistaken, and we'll all have a good old laugh about the bad old days.
It's true that many Mexican-descended Texans have roots in the state that go back at least a few generations. Most of these are people who speak English accent-free, or close. They are fairly well assimilated to American (Anglo/White) ways, and they do not present the culture clash problems posed by recent immigrants. Some (few) may side with the older-stock Texans on matters of immigration, but I sense that many of the younger people may suddenly discover their Hispanic roots and reverse-assimilate, as has happened with many young European-born descendants of non-European immigrans. Why not, when the host culture is too cowed to defend itself, and the natural inhabitants of the country seem willing to capitulate? Exotic roots have a certain cachet in this multicult-dominated world, and in the last analysis, blood will out. Blood is thicker than water. It's thicker than 'assimilation.' Blood is thicker than civic citizenship.
I think some Texans may begin to realize that they have been too sanguine about the presence of millions of immigrants, and too quick to assume that they will all 'fit in' and be good neighbors . I suspect that there are some clueless people who think that the Latinos will be magnanimous in victory if we are accepting of them and affable towards them. I don't share that optimism.
One more factor that has enabled this situation to grow out of hand is that Texas is a big state, and there are still pockets where immigrants have not come to be a sizeable presence -- yet. As long as people still have a familiar and homogeneous community to retreat to, they will not feel the pressing nature of the problem.
We will see in the next few years whether Texas submits to Californication or whether the old Texas spirit that motivated our ancestors reasserts itself. Time is growing short; if people remain inert, then Texas will go gently into that night.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
'Fake people' on social networks?
These days I am not likely to doubt much that I read when it comes to the powers-that-be and their antics.
I think we've discussed similar things in passing here, the idea (which has been admitted in various places) that paid operatives or provocateurs or disinformation agents stir things up on blogs, forums and other places. Why not do the same in the most popular internet venues, the social networking sites?
I think we've discussed similar things in passing here, the idea (which has been admitted in various places) that paid operatives or provocateurs or disinformation agents stir things up on blogs, forums and other places. Why not do the same in the most popular internet venues, the social networking sites?
''The US government is offering private intelligence companies contracts to create software to manage "fake people" on social media sites and create the illusion of consensus on controversial issues.
[...]
Some good news
Arizona Senate panel passes birthright citizen law
Here is the Arizona Star's report on the bill.
AZ bill would ban illegal immigrants from driving, college
Contrast the situation in Arizona with that of, oh, let's say Wisconsin, at least as of a few years ago.
However, since then,
And here:
According to this site Wisconsin has an estimated 41,000 illegal immigrants, a figure which sounds ridiculously low to me.
Apparently Wisconsin still offers medical care to pregnant women regardless of their illegal status.And it also provides medical care for 'anchor babies' or citizen children of illegals, according to the info in that pdf file at the link.
If we look at the states in the most financial trouble, it is evident that the states with the largest numbers of immigrants are the ones in dire straits, for the most part.
And the need for 'state services such as Medicaid' which 'serve the poor and near-poor' is directly tied to the number of immigrants and refugees, I would say. Some would insist that the poor economy is the only factor, but how does it make sense to add millions more immigrants and 'refugees' each year to an economy which already has such a high unemployment rate? And the numbers keep on mounting, with illegals entering this country every hour of every day. And that's not counting the millions of legal immigrants.
Even the immigrants who work usually draw some sort of state or federal benefits, such as Medicaid, Food Stamps, school lunches, WIC, and subsidized housing, as well as SSI, which is very much used by older immigrants (legal in most cases) who are brought here by their children or grandchildren.
There is just no honest way to disconnect the immigration issue from the economic crisis all across this country.
Meanwhile, people look for scapegoats among their own people, while passing over the immigration aspect of the story. Americans these days, especially White Americans, are too quick to condemn their own fellow Whites who are on unemployment, or older people who are on Social Security, while scarcely mentioning the role played by immigrants in this disaster. After all, one's own folk are safe targets for condemnation, as always, while the immigrants, though a source of some grumbling are usually excused and their role ignored, especially by the 'respectable Republicans' whose main concern is not to be called a name.
Kudos to Arizona for their efforts to do something to staunch the flow of 'taxpayer dollars to illegals.' And Wisconsin will have to recant its political correctness, or else the majority population will again have to foot the bill for the powers-that-be and their generosity to the replacement populations.
Here is the Arizona Star's report on the bill.
AZ bill would ban illegal immigrants from driving, college
SB 1611, set for hearing this afternoon, also would put companies that do not use a federal database to check the status of new workers out of business. And it would require cities to evict anyone in public housing who cannot prove legal presence in this country.[Emphasis mine]
Senate President Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, described the legislation as not doing much at all.
"This is cleanup," he said. "All it does is do what the voters have passed in terms of no taxpayer dollars for illegals."
Contrast the situation in Arizona with that of, oh, let's say Wisconsin, at least as of a few years ago.
Wisconsin's efforts to give sanctuary to illegal immigrants by granting them official state documents have evidently been successful. According to the DMV personnel we interviewed, there has been a veritable flood of illegal immigrants besieging DMV offices to get IDs and licenses over the past four years. Illegal immigrants arrive at DMV stations almost daily. On some days they represent the bulk of a service center's customers, especially in the southeastern and mid-eastern parts of the state. Because of the extra time that DMV officials must spend aiding foreign license applicants, costs rise.
Estimates of the number of illegals who have Wisconsin IDs and driver's licenses are somewhere in the area of 350,000 to 400,000. According to one DMV source, the number cannot be affirmed with specificity because for years there "was an 'informal' agreement between the Madison DMV and the local Social Security office. If the DMV found someone there illegally, the person would be referred to the local Social Security office, which would somehow issue the person a number.... Thus many illegals appear to have valid Social Security numbers in our system and cannot be distinguished from genuine citizens." Apparently, the informal agreement was dropped sometime after 9/11.
The increased costs at the DMV centers are undoubtedly a drop in the bucket compared to the costs that the illegals impose on the state and county welfare systems. All of the DMV agents whom we interviewed affirmed that it is a common occurrence for illegal immigrants to use Wisconsin QUEST cards (which are used to get foodshare benefits) and Wisconsin Forward cards (which are used to access Medicaid and Badgercare healthcare programs) as proof of their identity when applying for licenses and IDs, indicating that the first priority for many illegals upon entering the state is to obtain welfare benefits at taxpayer expense.''
However, since then,
The Wisconsin legislature approved a new budget and it forbids illegal aliens from obtaining driver's licenses. The budget does, however, allow children of illegal aliens who attend Wisconsin high schools to qualify for in-state tuition.''
And here:
Some illegal immigrant high school graduates will be able to attend Wisconsin state universities by paying in-state tuition, under a provision in the two-year budget Gov. Jim Doyle signed into law Monday.
Wisconsin now becomes the 11th state to enact such a law.
To qualify, students would have to reside in the state for three years, graduate from a Wisconsin high school or earn an equivalency degree here.
The students would have to apply through the normal channels.
It's estimated from 400 to 650 illegal immigrants annually graduate from state high schools, but they must pay out-of-state tuition if they enroll in the state university system or technical colleges.
[...]
State Rep. Pedro Colón (D-Milwaukee) first introduced the in-state college tuition measure in 1999, when he was new to the Assembly.''
According to this site Wisconsin has an estimated 41,000 illegal immigrants, a figure which sounds ridiculously low to me.
Apparently Wisconsin still offers medical care to pregnant women regardless of their illegal status.And it also provides medical care for 'anchor babies' or citizen children of illegals, according to the info in that pdf file at the link.
If we look at the states in the most financial trouble, it is evident that the states with the largest numbers of immigrants are the ones in dire straits, for the most part.
"The recession is causing state and local tax revenues to fall steeply at the same time that high unemployment and rising poverty are increasing the need for state services such as Medicaid and other programs that serve the poor and near-poor," McNichol said. "The change in the number of food stamp recipients is the single best early warning measure of what is happening to poverty in a state."
And the need for 'state services such as Medicaid' which 'serve the poor and near-poor' is directly tied to the number of immigrants and refugees, I would say. Some would insist that the poor economy is the only factor, but how does it make sense to add millions more immigrants and 'refugees' each year to an economy which already has such a high unemployment rate? And the numbers keep on mounting, with illegals entering this country every hour of every day. And that's not counting the millions of legal immigrants.
Even the immigrants who work usually draw some sort of state or federal benefits, such as Medicaid, Food Stamps, school lunches, WIC, and subsidized housing, as well as SSI, which is very much used by older immigrants (legal in most cases) who are brought here by their children or grandchildren.
There is just no honest way to disconnect the immigration issue from the economic crisis all across this country.
Meanwhile, people look for scapegoats among their own people, while passing over the immigration aspect of the story. Americans these days, especially White Americans, are too quick to condemn their own fellow Whites who are on unemployment, or older people who are on Social Security, while scarcely mentioning the role played by immigrants in this disaster. After all, one's own folk are safe targets for condemnation, as always, while the immigrants, though a source of some grumbling are usually excused and their role ignored, especially by the 'respectable Republicans' whose main concern is not to be called a name.
Kudos to Arizona for their efforts to do something to staunch the flow of 'taxpayer dollars to illegals.' And Wisconsin will have to recant its political correctness, or else the majority population will again have to foot the bill for the powers-that-be and their generosity to the replacement populations.
Speaking of...
...Reconstruction, as we were a couple of posts ago, there is an informative piece at SWB on that subject and related matters. It's so seldom that anyone writes about this subject truthfully and the politically correct point of view has gone unchallenged for so long, it is long overdue that the other side is presented.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Exhibit A
It's pretty hard to keep on keeping on when there is so much of this kind of rhetoric (please read the many comments) out there. Can this (our) people be saved from oblivion?
Many of the people in the discussion profess Christianity. Apparently they never read the part of the Bible which says 'a house divided against itself cannot stand.'
One example of the rhetoric about Baby Boomers:
I don't suppose there is any point whatsoever in laying out my arguments for how all this decay started out decades before the Boomers (born from 1945 onward) were born. I've tried, and to no avail.
I throw out this challenge: what have the succeeding generations done, beside blame everybody else (a very childish trait, by the way). What have they done to right things?
At least I can say I did not vote for this present regime, unlike most 'millennials' and others.
But it's getting very hard to convince myself that our people are worth saving.
Can anybody make a case that they are? I need to hear it just about now.
Many of the people in the discussion profess Christianity. Apparently they never read the part of the Bible which says 'a house divided against itself cannot stand.'
One example of the rhetoric about Baby Boomers:
"I say we Logan's Run them. Stick a disc in their hand, and when the retirement money runs out, it turns black."
Kill them ,and then what?
Turn them into food, as in "Soylent Green'?
Sorta of Un-Christain, [sic] is it not?Actually, suffering from the results of your choices is quite a Christian concept. While I may not advocate "Logan's running" them, I can certainly understand how younger generations might view disposing of the Baby Boomers as an act of self-defense. The Boomers screwed over their own children and grandchildren to live as they pleased. They are despicable. If anything, allowing them to participate in society until their disk turns black rewards those who were sensible while limiting the damage done by the majority.''
I don't suppose there is any point whatsoever in laying out my arguments for how all this decay started out decades before the Boomers (born from 1945 onward) were born. I've tried, and to no avail.
I throw out this challenge: what have the succeeding generations done, beside blame everybody else (a very childish trait, by the way). What have they done to right things?
At least I can say I did not vote for this present regime, unlike most 'millennials' and others.
But it's getting very hard to convince myself that our people are worth saving.
Can anybody make a case that they are? I need to hear it just about now.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
The loyalty test
Our symbols and our heritage are under attack.
And who speaks up for them, or for us?
Don't count on this man to defend us. Hear what he has to say in the short video at the link.
Is there any politician who is able to speak forthrightly, without trying to play coy and have it both ways?
This AP story gives us the PC revisionist line about General Forrest, but they don't tell you the background of the 'society' which is the focus of all the controversy. I would like to ask somebody who is ritualistically denouncing that group if they can tell me just how and why it began. I would like to hear their version of the conditions that existed in the occupied South after the "Late Unpleasantness". I suspect they would be speechless because they know next to nothing about that era, about that time and place.
Schools do not teach about that part of our history, the Reconstruction Era, a euphemism if there ever was one. And whatever little is taught is selectively biased in the usual way. Add to that the Hollywood movies and pseudo-documentaries that present a dishonest account, and people know less than nothing. What they think they know is false.
As if Barbour's evasiveness and spinelessness on the Forrest issue weren't enough, we recently learned that he was involved in lobbying on behalf of Mexico.
I guess Barbour does not remember the stories that appeared after Katrina, in which American workers were hired for jobs rebuilding New Orleans, and were then turned away after they traveled there, being told that Mexican workers had been given the jobs. The reports said many of the men were devastated, because they needed the work. Cheap labor and capitalist greed work well together.
Anybody who says that Americans won't work or can't work as hard as the sainted immigrant is ignorant or dishonest.
So Barbour, like most of our politicians, fails the test of loyalty to his own.
That's what I am looking for first and foremost in everybody these days: loyalty. It's getting pretty scarce.
And who speaks up for them, or for us?
Don't count on this man to defend us. Hear what he has to say in the short video at the link.
Is there any politician who is able to speak forthrightly, without trying to play coy and have it both ways?
This AP story gives us the PC revisionist line about General Forrest, but they don't tell you the background of the 'society' which is the focus of all the controversy. I would like to ask somebody who is ritualistically denouncing that group if they can tell me just how and why it began. I would like to hear their version of the conditions that existed in the occupied South after the "Late Unpleasantness". I suspect they would be speechless because they know next to nothing about that era, about that time and place.
Schools do not teach about that part of our history, the Reconstruction Era, a euphemism if there ever was one. And whatever little is taught is selectively biased in the usual way. Add to that the Hollywood movies and pseudo-documentaries that present a dishonest account, and people know less than nothing. What they think they know is false.
As if Barbour's evasiveness and spinelessness on the Forrest issue weren't enough, we recently learned that he was involved in lobbying on behalf of Mexico.
''Though Barbour is currently considering whether to sign an Arizona-style immigration bill that passed in the Mississippi House in January, he took a softer stance last September on what to do about immigrants illegally in the country. Barbour told Human Events that though the United States must secure its border: "Common sense tells us we're not gonna take ten or twelve or fourteen million people and put them in jail and deport them. We're not gonna do it, and we need to quit--some of the people need to quit acting like we are, and let's talk about real solutions."
Barbour also praised "the Spanish speakers that came in to help rebuild" the state after Hurricane Katrina. "There's no doubt in my mind some of them weren't here legally. Some of them were, some of them weren't. But they came in, they looked for the work--if they hadn't been there, if they hadn't come and stayed for a few months or a couple of years, we would be way, way, way behind where we are now."
I guess Barbour does not remember the stories that appeared after Katrina, in which American workers were hired for jobs rebuilding New Orleans, and were then turned away after they traveled there, being told that Mexican workers had been given the jobs. The reports said many of the men were devastated, because they needed the work. Cheap labor and capitalist greed work well together.
Anybody who says that Americans won't work or can't work as hard as the sainted immigrant is ignorant or dishonest.
So Barbour, like most of our politicians, fails the test of loyalty to his own.
That's what I am looking for first and foremost in everybody these days: loyalty. It's getting pretty scarce.
"Big Other"
Jean Raspail Speaks of "Big Other"
Jean Raspail is interviewed for French TV about his book, 'Camp of the Saints.' The phrase 'Big Other' is his pun on the familiar 'Big Brother', and is the title of the new preface to his book.
You can view the video at GalliaWatch, where Tiberge offers excerpts translated into English. If your French is good enough, you can watch the complete interviews at the links on GalliaWatch.
From her excerpts:
Read the rest at the link.
Jean Raspail is interviewed for French TV about his book, 'Camp of the Saints.' The phrase 'Big Other' is his pun on the familiar 'Big Brother', and is the title of the new preface to his book.
You can view the video at GalliaWatch, where Tiberge offers excerpts translated into English. If your French is good enough, you can watch the complete interviews at the links on GalliaWatch.
From her excerpts:
''And The Camp of the Saints ends badly… badly or well, according to your opinion. There are four hundred pages. Imagine all the questions it raises in our minds - on a social level, on the national level, but also on the inner level of each person. What do you do? If you allow in such a mass, what happens to the country? If you don't allow them in where is your Christian charity? Where is your pity, and many other things like that…
[...]
If civilizations have disappeared it is because they were engulfed by the tidal wave of the more advanced newcomers. With us, the situation is the reverse. We have an old civilization in Europe, in France, and we find ourselves before gigantic masses of people. Europe does not have a billion people, yet we face hundreds of thousands, millions, billions. Logically, we should be forced to defend ourselves, but how?
[...]
In truth, charity does not consist of opening our doors and our arms to invaders. No, it does not consist in returning the flags of Lepanto, as Paul VI did, to the Turks, who have no knowledge of repentance. It does not consist of kissing the Koran as Pope John-Paul II did, in an unfortunate gesture.
No, it does not consist in offering lands of our old Christian country, as the French bishops have done, to build mosques or worse, to accept the transformation of churches into mosques. That is the opposite of charity, a turning away from charity; it is inversion, subversion, corruption.''
Read the rest at the link.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Love, loathing, and loyalty
I have had this post simmering for a day now, and I have been dragging my heels about writing it, but I suppose it will keep nagging at my mind until I write it.
We have likely all heard the often-repeated saying ''A society (or civilization) can be judged by how it treats the least (or weakest) of its members.'' Who said that? It is credited to several people, including Mohandas Gandhi, (the MLK of India and the hero of lefty new agers everywhere). A close approximation of that sentence was also spoken by Hubert Humphrey, a Democrat politician and presidential candidate who was defeated by Richard Nixon in 1968.
Pearl S. Buck, a popular writer and leftist activist of the mid-20th century said something similar:
This piece by Tim Heydon, about the National Health Service report on elderly care in the UK hospital system, posted at Sarah, Maid of Albion provoked a kind of strong reaction in me. I reacted, understandably, to the disturbing content of the article -- and to the comments attached thereto at Sarah's blog.
And it was more than that. It was the cumulative effect of a number of callous comments, or downright hateful comments posted by 'conservatives' of various stripes, everywhere from Free Republic to the comments section on this blog, over the last few months.
We've been hearing a lot about the proposed government-run health care system that looms in our future, and its proposals to curtail health care for those over 60 and those with chronic conditions. The gist of it all is that such people are being increasingly talked of as being a drain on the economy and a waste of space and resources. And in a way, this is all the culmination of many decades of propaganda which exalts youth, beauty, and perfect health, as being the epitome of human worth. The counterculture of the 60s, with its adolescent narcissism and its unhealthy obsession with 'health' has taken its toll. It's been a long time since America respected its elder citizens.
No doubt there have always been people who did not respect their elders, even their own parents, but they have not been brazen or bold enough to display their callousness and resentment openly, as we see now. And this is even among 'conservatives', many of whom name the name of Christ, and profess to believe the Bible.
I blame the decades of leftist propaganda. Leftists are odd in that they claim to care for society's ''weakest members'' and the helpless and the poor, but when you look at what they actually do, they clearly don't care. They have had their consciences seared 'as with a hot iron.' They claim to care about children, but support abortion.
But they don't even pretend to care about the old and the infirm, unless said old and infirm are of a victim group of some sort. They obviously, emphatically, don't care about their own blood kin and countrymen.
And I am going to make the same charge against many of the callous fiscal conservatives who would pull the plug on granny, their own and everyone else's, if it meant lower taxes for them, or less of a burden on them financially. And if their granny is sitting on a sizable fortune, so much the better if she pops her clogs sooner rather than later.
When I had deserted the liberal camp, I still, for a long time, could not bring myself to identify as a 'conservative' because to me, conservatives were all too often grasping and mean (in both senses of the word), eager to judge others who they deemed 'deadbeats'. I wrote about this a few weeks ago in the context of the debate over extending unemployment benefits. There is incredible hardness of heart among many Republicans and among many libertarians who spent their adolescence reading Ayn Rand. They truly do believe selfishness is the ultimate virtue. They truly despise the man who is experiencing hard times.
That's to be expected if one is a nonbeliever, but it is just not possible to hold those attitudes if one is a Christian.
I truly think we are being sifted now, and that we will see who is a real Christian, and who has a heart for his neighbor or his brother, and who is living only for Self and money.
And even if this does not matter to you on moral grounds, think of it this way: do we really love our people, or are we really even loyal to our folk if we despise some large segment of them?
For some people, their despised group is Christians. Well, that category includes most of our ancestors up until recently, so if you loathe Christians, you loathe your own forefathers, your blood and kin, as well as your European and American heritage, which was bound up, like it or not, with Christianity. Our ancestors lived and died for it. Go ahead and despise them and all they believed in, but forfeit your right to claim you care about your people or heritage.
And can anyone say he cares about ''the existence of our people'' if he hates his elders, or the elders of our people in general? I say categorically: no. It is not possible to have contempt and a cold heart towards your elders and still claim you care about our people, your people, or your nation.
So I say, if you name the name of Christ, you cannot hate your own people, especially your elders who raised you and taught you and nurtured you when you were weak and helpless and dependent.
Despise the weak, if it makes you feel tough, but remember you too will likely be weak one day, or ill one day, and possibly broke one day. How much comfort will Ayn Rand be then?
And if you claim to be an ethnopatriot yet loathe large segments of your people, then your claim is dubious.
I am reminded of an old 'Peanuts' cartoon, in which 'crabby' Lucy Van Pelt says ''I love mankind; it's people I can't stand.''
Do you hate the old, or Christians or the Europeans or the Anglo-Saxons/WASPs, White women -- and still claim you love your race? You can't love an abstract notion of your people, or your idealized version of your people. You have to love the flesh-and-blood, imperfect people that you see around you.
It seems that for some people, loving their folk means that they love those people who are exact mirror images of themselves: people with the same ideology or belief system, people of similar ethnic identification, people who speak the same shibboleths. What kind of love is it that loves only that which mirrors onself very closely? Loving those like ourselves is a necessary balance to the insane xenophilia that is force-fed to us day in and day out, but it can be carried too far. If we love only that very small coterie that is on the same page with us ideologically, or generationally, then our love is too narrow to enable us to prevail in this crisis.
Like many of us, I have family members whose political views are absolute anathema to me, yet I can still love them as my flesh and blood. After all they might come around and see common sense one day. That is where 'charity' comes in; I may not like my lost relatives very much but I can be patient with them and loyal to them when the chips are down. That is all that is required for the disparate elements among our people to work together. Your family, warts and all, will always be your family.
We don't all have to love each other in the warm and fuzzy sense. We should be loyal to one another if we intend to continue as a people.
We cannot afford the division and constant infighting.
Our enemies are trying to ensure that we all turn on each other and become hopelessly divided. Divide and rule.
In fact, I am going to have to convince myself, for the sake of keeping up my morale, that all the cold-hearted ones out there, the misanthropes and the nihilists are really just provocateurs or operatives pretending to be on our side, in order to sow division. If I believed there really were so many hard, bitter hearts on our side, people who would turn their backs on their elders, I would not be able to continue this effort any longer. What would it all be for? Why save a people that is no longer a cohesive and loyal group in any case? Why save a people that won't save their own? Why save a people that have so little love for their own kin?
Some people on our side, when accused of being 'haters', have offered the rote response that we don't hate anybody; we are acting out of love for our own people. Well, where is the evidence of that love? It is increasingly hard to find out there.
Maybe the charge of 'hatred' fits -- but only in the sense that many of us hate our own, far more than we hate the sainted Others. And that is sad.
The most tragic thing about a protracted struggle like ours, and the long-term onslaught of propaganda, is that we have started to believe the rhetoric of the Left, and have become a kind of reflection of the Left. We merely react to their manipulations, and have lost track of what we once were, and become something our ancestors would not even recognize.
As for me and this blog, I had hoped that I would be able to post more positive things about our heritage and our people, to call us back to an awareness of what we might be at our best.
Can it be done? Can we change things? Awash as we are in this sea of ugliness and lies, it becomes harder and harder to see the other shore.
We have to believe it's possible, as an act of sheer will.
We have likely all heard the often-repeated saying ''A society (or civilization) can be judged by how it treats the least (or weakest) of its members.'' Who said that? It is credited to several people, including Mohandas Gandhi, (the MLK of India and the hero of lefty new agers everywhere). A close approximation of that sentence was also spoken by Hubert Humphrey, a Democrat politician and presidential candidate who was defeated by Richard Nixon in 1968.
Pearl S. Buck, a popular writer and leftist activist of the mid-20th century said something similar:
“Yet somehow our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members.”
This piece by Tim Heydon, about the National Health Service report on elderly care in the UK hospital system, posted at Sarah, Maid of Albion provoked a kind of strong reaction in me. I reacted, understandably, to the disturbing content of the article -- and to the comments attached thereto at Sarah's blog.
And it was more than that. It was the cumulative effect of a number of callous comments, or downright hateful comments posted by 'conservatives' of various stripes, everywhere from Free Republic to the comments section on this blog, over the last few months.
We've been hearing a lot about the proposed government-run health care system that looms in our future, and its proposals to curtail health care for those over 60 and those with chronic conditions. The gist of it all is that such people are being increasingly talked of as being a drain on the economy and a waste of space and resources. And in a way, this is all the culmination of many decades of propaganda which exalts youth, beauty, and perfect health, as being the epitome of human worth. The counterculture of the 60s, with its adolescent narcissism and its unhealthy obsession with 'health' has taken its toll. It's been a long time since America respected its elder citizens.
No doubt there have always been people who did not respect their elders, even their own parents, but they have not been brazen or bold enough to display their callousness and resentment openly, as we see now. And this is even among 'conservatives', many of whom name the name of Christ, and profess to believe the Bible.
I blame the decades of leftist propaganda. Leftists are odd in that they claim to care for society's ''weakest members'' and the helpless and the poor, but when you look at what they actually do, they clearly don't care. They have had their consciences seared 'as with a hot iron.' They claim to care about children, but support abortion.
But they don't even pretend to care about the old and the infirm, unless said old and infirm are of a victim group of some sort. They obviously, emphatically, don't care about their own blood kin and countrymen.
And I am going to make the same charge against many of the callous fiscal conservatives who would pull the plug on granny, their own and everyone else's, if it meant lower taxes for them, or less of a burden on them financially. And if their granny is sitting on a sizable fortune, so much the better if she pops her clogs sooner rather than later.
When I had deserted the liberal camp, I still, for a long time, could not bring myself to identify as a 'conservative' because to me, conservatives were all too often grasping and mean (in both senses of the word), eager to judge others who they deemed 'deadbeats'. I wrote about this a few weeks ago in the context of the debate over extending unemployment benefits. There is incredible hardness of heart among many Republicans and among many libertarians who spent their adolescence reading Ayn Rand. They truly do believe selfishness is the ultimate virtue. They truly despise the man who is experiencing hard times.
That's to be expected if one is a nonbeliever, but it is just not possible to hold those attitudes if one is a Christian.
I truly think we are being sifted now, and that we will see who is a real Christian, and who has a heart for his neighbor or his brother, and who is living only for Self and money.
And even if this does not matter to you on moral grounds, think of it this way: do we really love our people, or are we really even loyal to our folk if we despise some large segment of them?
For some people, their despised group is Christians. Well, that category includes most of our ancestors up until recently, so if you loathe Christians, you loathe your own forefathers, your blood and kin, as well as your European and American heritage, which was bound up, like it or not, with Christianity. Our ancestors lived and died for it. Go ahead and despise them and all they believed in, but forfeit your right to claim you care about your people or heritage.
And can anyone say he cares about ''the existence of our people'' if he hates his elders, or the elders of our people in general? I say categorically: no. It is not possible to have contempt and a cold heart towards your elders and still claim you care about our people, your people, or your nation.
So I say, if you name the name of Christ, you cannot hate your own people, especially your elders who raised you and taught you and nurtured you when you were weak and helpless and dependent.
Despise the weak, if it makes you feel tough, but remember you too will likely be weak one day, or ill one day, and possibly broke one day. How much comfort will Ayn Rand be then?
And if you claim to be an ethnopatriot yet loathe large segments of your people, then your claim is dubious.
I am reminded of an old 'Peanuts' cartoon, in which 'crabby' Lucy Van Pelt says ''I love mankind; it's people I can't stand.''
Do you hate the old, or Christians or the Europeans or the Anglo-Saxons/WASPs, White women -- and still claim you love your race? You can't love an abstract notion of your people, or your idealized version of your people. You have to love the flesh-and-blood, imperfect people that you see around you.
It seems that for some people, loving their folk means that they love those people who are exact mirror images of themselves: people with the same ideology or belief system, people of similar ethnic identification, people who speak the same shibboleths. What kind of love is it that loves only that which mirrors onself very closely? Loving those like ourselves is a necessary balance to the insane xenophilia that is force-fed to us day in and day out, but it can be carried too far. If we love only that very small coterie that is on the same page with us ideologically, or generationally, then our love is too narrow to enable us to prevail in this crisis.
Like many of us, I have family members whose political views are absolute anathema to me, yet I can still love them as my flesh and blood. After all they might come around and see common sense one day. That is where 'charity' comes in; I may not like my lost relatives very much but I can be patient with them and loyal to them when the chips are down. That is all that is required for the disparate elements among our people to work together. Your family, warts and all, will always be your family.
We don't all have to love each other in the warm and fuzzy sense. We should be loyal to one another if we intend to continue as a people.
We cannot afford the division and constant infighting.
Our enemies are trying to ensure that we all turn on each other and become hopelessly divided. Divide and rule.
In fact, I am going to have to convince myself, for the sake of keeping up my morale, that all the cold-hearted ones out there, the misanthropes and the nihilists are really just provocateurs or operatives pretending to be on our side, in order to sow division. If I believed there really were so many hard, bitter hearts on our side, people who would turn their backs on their elders, I would not be able to continue this effort any longer. What would it all be for? Why save a people that is no longer a cohesive and loyal group in any case? Why save a people that won't save their own? Why save a people that have so little love for their own kin?
Some people on our side, when accused of being 'haters', have offered the rote response that we don't hate anybody; we are acting out of love for our own people. Well, where is the evidence of that love? It is increasingly hard to find out there.
Maybe the charge of 'hatred' fits -- but only in the sense that many of us hate our own, far more than we hate the sainted Others. And that is sad.
The most tragic thing about a protracted struggle like ours, and the long-term onslaught of propaganda, is that we have started to believe the rhetoric of the Left, and have become a kind of reflection of the Left. We merely react to their manipulations, and have lost track of what we once were, and become something our ancestors would not even recognize.
As for me and this blog, I had hoped that I would be able to post more positive things about our heritage and our people, to call us back to an awareness of what we might be at our best.
Can it be done? Can we change things? Awash as we are in this sea of ugliness and lies, it becomes harder and harder to see the other shore.
We have to believe it's possible, as an act of sheer will.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
"Civil war" in France
I like the woman's phrase at the end: she says she wants to be the symbol of ''NO!"
Maybe that's my role too.
On an underreported problem
This kind of thing should be reported and discussed much more in the mainstream media. Instead, what stories are done on the subject are feel-good pro-diversity pieces for which the MSM is notorious. Then there are the sob story articles which blame any problems on 'racism' or 'xenophobia', and which lead to PC pontificating from everybody involved, including the supposedly objective 'journalist.'
But this piece by Frank York at WND gives a much more honest account of the issues.
For the record, I think the 'refugees' are doing just what they were brought here to do. Maybe the other half of the Cloward-Piven strategy involves destroying the cohesion of the existing culture. What if the C-P strategy is not just an economic demolition project, but an effort to dissolve the people, as well? What if?
Speculation aside, I am especially pleased to see that the article mentions and credits Refugee Resettlement Watch, and quotes from blogger Ann Corcoran of that blog. She deserves a great deal of credit for the work she does, doing the work that the MSM should be doing. She has been doing a superb job over there, and I am pleased to see the recognition given her.
Way to go, Ann!
But this piece by Frank York at WND gives a much more honest account of the issues.
For the record, I think the 'refugees' are doing just what they were brought here to do. Maybe the other half of the Cloward-Piven strategy involves destroying the cohesion of the existing culture. What if the C-P strategy is not just an economic demolition project, but an effort to dissolve the people, as well? What if?
Speculation aside, I am especially pleased to see that the article mentions and credits Refugee Resettlement Watch, and quotes from blogger Ann Corcoran of that blog. She deserves a great deal of credit for the work she does, doing the work that the MSM should be doing. She has been doing a superb job over there, and I am pleased to see the recognition given her.
Way to go, Ann!
Political classes vs. the people
There is an interesting and informative exchange here on Daniel Hannan's blog on the Telegraph UK website.
I've posted a video or two of Hannan, or linked to articles of his. And readers have warned me that he is not on our side, a fact of which I am aware. But even knowing that I was appalled at his responses on the thread to commenter 'cotewood.'
From one of cotewood's comments:
Cotewood says it all very eloquently, and Hannan's responses seem irritable and shallow -- typical of the politician. I had the vague notion that Hannan might have some greater feeling for his country but it appears he is not much different than the rest. His point about regarding Britishness as a civic identity (which it is, actually, as contrasted to Englishness) tells it all. He is one of those proposition nation people, one of the melting pot advocates.
Here is a kind of encapsulation of the exchange between Hannan and 'cotewood', who is the person some of us know as Guessedworker at Majority Rights, apparently.
What he says about the predicament of his kinsmen and his country applies to our situation, too.
And it seems that the politicians are the same all over the Western world; they owe their allegiances to someone other than their own people, their ethnic brethren.
I've posted a video or two of Hannan, or linked to articles of his. And readers have warned me that he is not on our side, a fact of which I am aware. But even knowing that I was appalled at his responses on the thread to commenter 'cotewood.'
From one of cotewood's comments:
''Yesterday, Daniel Hannan made a remarkable and fundamentally Marxist response to a question I asked him, and I want that comment front-of-house for a while, at least, so those many DT readers who admire him may understand what is really inside his head.
It is cowardice and careerism.
This was my question:
Do the English have the same right to life and land as every other people everywhere, or is there some strange thing about us which demands that we be race-replaced in England by Africans and Asians?
To this Daniel said:
I've already explained why I fundamentally reject your definition of Britishness, and why I am glad we define nationality in civic rather than ethnic terms. The more one thinks about your arbitrary cut-off point, the sillier it is. Why include the Dutch who came over with William III? Or the Hugueonots? Or the Flemish weavers? Or the Normans? Or the Danes? Or the Saxons? Or the Romans?
Now, "the cut-off point" for being one with the English nation is clear to me. With intent or by stupidity, our political class launched a war of word and deed against the English on 22nd June 1948 - the day the Windrush docked. In this war our natural rights and interests, our voice, the very fact of our nature and our existence have been denied.
For me, then, the English remain the true and only people of this land, and can be discovered today only in the descendants of those who were the English before this criminal enterprise began.
Notice that Daniel is saying the same as any Socialist Workers Party member. He says that the English, as they exist in kinship today, are no different to Somalis, Afghans, Albanians, Poles, Jamaicans, Pakistanis, Chinese, Iraqis, Iranians, Turks, Zimbabweans, Libyans ... You name it, that's what the English are. A capacious bag into which anything can be stuffed. Essentially meaningless.
Would he say that to a Jew? No. You can't tell a Jew he has no ethnicity, no collective being of his own that didn't belong to any African or any Arab. So why does he think the English are of so little account?
Why, because he is afraid of the party apparatus. He is afraid that he will be asked by some Pakistani constituent whose grandfather came here in 1954 "Why aren't I English?" He is afraid to tell him, "Because you're Pakistani. You can't be both"
Then we come to the second half of my question: why we English apparently have no right to a place of our own on this earth. With typical libertarian fatuity Daniel replies:
Who has the right to land? He who owns it in law, whether through inheritance, purchase or gift.
But territory is not debated at the level of house deeds and patio areas. This is a pathetic and unworthy evasion. Territory is the guarantor of a people's existence. The land of England is our guarantor. It is what our forefathers laboured to make and to pass down to their posterity - not to Africans and Asians. It is what they fought and died to defend.
The little Tory hides behind a piece of title paper while his people are dispossessed. Where is the true stature of the Englishman in that? I do not see it. And yet Daniel is not ashamed. He is proud to wag a finger at the hated BNP!
Really, this is where England ends, in the evasion and shamelessness of its politicians. God help us.''
Cotewood says it all very eloquently, and Hannan's responses seem irritable and shallow -- typical of the politician. I had the vague notion that Hannan might have some greater feeling for his country but it appears he is not much different than the rest. His point about regarding Britishness as a civic identity (which it is, actually, as contrasted to Englishness) tells it all. He is one of those proposition nation people, one of the melting pot advocates.
Here is a kind of encapsulation of the exchange between Hannan and 'cotewood', who is the person some of us know as Guessedworker at Majority Rights, apparently.
What he says about the predicament of his kinsmen and his country applies to our situation, too.
And it seems that the politicians are the same all over the Western world; they owe their allegiances to someone other than their own people, their ethnic brethren.
Monday, February 14, 2011
PC, Republican style
From what I have seen in the video here, there is hardly a dime's worth of difference between these young people and the ones who storm the stage to harass and silence politically incorrect speakers on campuses. The only difference might be that these people are better-groomed and better-dressed, but still knee-deep in PC.
At the link there is a lengthy discussion going on around the video from CPAC, with the young ''conservatives'' rebuffing Jamie Kelso, and displaying an incredible level of ignorance in their 'arguments' against him.
There seems to be a consensus among many pro-White Americans that the Republican Party, and what is roughly called the 'conservative movement' is either useless or is in effect on the opposing side, along with their Democrat soul mates in political correctness.
However there is still a persistent idea that we can use the GOP as a vehicle for advancing our interests. I think everybody who has read this blog for any length of time knows where I stand. I started out as a more-or-less mainstream 'conservative' or Republican, although I had lost the veneer of political correctness long ago. My 'old American' realist upbringing kicked in and I began to wonder how and why American Whites seemed to have so little in common with our near ancestors. Even my parents generation, and maybe yours, dear readers, held what we now call 'racial realist' attitudes. So why did the 'conservatives' stop conserving, and start mimicking the liberal left, whom they claim to reject wholeheartedly?
Conservatives who don't want to conserve their own people, their own ethnicity, and don't consider their progeny or the future, are no conservatives by any definition I understand.
The Republican Party seems to want to preserve the material goods of life only, and all the hue and cry about 'smaller government' is only to that end. American conservatism has long since lost its soul, or sold its soul.
The 'Tea Party' candidates have proven to be as easily compromised as any other Republican, despite their pandering to the populist sentiments that have surfaced recently.
Personally I think the GOP is impervious to any efforts of White citizens to influence it away from its present policies.
Right now the party is busy recruiting 'diversity', and enlarging the 'big tent' so that one and all may be included, regardless.
Come one, come all, and bring your political correctness and ethnic grievances along.
Some say that this CPAC gathering was not representative of the party as a whole. Some social conservatives in the GOP objected to the pro-gay slant, but in general this seems to be the direction the party is going. Social conservatives are being marginalized, and seem to be fewer in number every year, as the older generations die.
But if you spend enough time on Republican forums on the internet you will see how very politically correct most 'mainstream' Republicans and conservatives have become, especially on racial issues. Most of the FReepers cling to the idea that 'legal immigration: good' while only illegal immigration is bad. Why? Because to state that all immigration should be halted, if only temporarily, is to invite a charge of racism. Some of those on these Republican forums and blogs will become like a pack of baying hounds when they scent anything that resembles 'racism' or anti-Semitism.
We see the behavior of these young people, who are likely from fairly prosperous backgrounds; they have been conditioned to attack when certain taboos are violated. Carleton Putnam in his 'Race and Reality' referred to 'hypnotism' in this connection, and watching some of these PC-saturated people in action makes one think they are under some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion, so quickly do they react to certain triggers. In any case, these are not thinking young people, but knee-jerk liberals, despite their Republican patter.
I don't believe it's an either/or situation, where we must choose between working with these indoctrinated liberal Republicans or simply accepting our demise. Those are not the only two choices.
And if we are in such a dire state that we are forced to try to work with people to whom we are anathema, then we are in such a desperate state that it's far too late for the gradual approach. And in fact I think we really don't have the leisure to use the gradual subtle approach, from within.
This is a subject that has come up before, and I will say the same thing I said to my readers of an earlier time: the point that must be understood is that we don't need to 'win over the masses' or attain a majority of people who agree with us. No great movement of history was ever driven by a majority. It has always been a relatively small group of people, highly-motivated, that has been behind the great movements and causes.
Unfortunately we seem to have a very highly-motivated group of people opposing us, and most unfortunate is the fact that they have enormous amounts of money and the media on their side, as their lackeys. It is hard for a few people to go up against this group of mostly unknown elites and the masses who follow their lead. But numbers don't always guarantee a win; there are any number of times in history in which the few have prevailed over a formidable many.
And again, this politically correct multicultural tower of Babel is an edifice that is built on lies, and is buttressed by lies upon lies. It is in conflict with human nature; it requires constant effort to keep it from collapsing of its own weight.
It takes the expenditure of a lot of energy to keep it standing. It apparently takes a lot of conditioning via the media and via peer pressure to maintain it. The fact that these people who are the power behind the scenes seem to feel the need to double down on the propaganda may mean that they are feeling uncertain of their success.
One more thing: this multicult monstrosity is very costly in terms of money; imagine how much has been spent and is being spent to construct it and to keep up the false façade.
To think that we have to hitch our wagon to the Republican Party is folly; as if that party is not decaying and crumbling along with the system of which it is a part.
I have hopes for the A3P, but we will see where that goes. And before somebody pipes up to tell us that 'no third party will ever succeed' -- I say that is the kind of thing that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if it is accepted as some kind of certainty. The future is not known; there is a first time for everything. And again, the Republican Party (the party of Reconstruction, by the way) began as an upstart third party.
And those of us who are Christian know that there is one other factor to be taken into consideration when pondering the future: God. Atheists and 'halfway-house Christians' as CWNY calls them may scoff, but God is not dead 'nor doth he sleep', as Longfellow wrote. He will have something to say about all this before it is over. In fact, Christians know that we have a glimpse of the direction of the future, and we know what the ultimate outcome will be. It's hubris to imagine that we hold everything in our hands.
Still, we are not to be passive observers, but active doers of what is right, and speakers of the truth.
At the link there is a lengthy discussion going on around the video from CPAC, with the young ''conservatives'' rebuffing Jamie Kelso, and displaying an incredible level of ignorance in their 'arguments' against him.
There seems to be a consensus among many pro-White Americans that the Republican Party, and what is roughly called the 'conservative movement' is either useless or is in effect on the opposing side, along with their Democrat soul mates in political correctness.
However there is still a persistent idea that we can use the GOP as a vehicle for advancing our interests. I think everybody who has read this blog for any length of time knows where I stand. I started out as a more-or-less mainstream 'conservative' or Republican, although I had lost the veneer of political correctness long ago. My 'old American' realist upbringing kicked in and I began to wonder how and why American Whites seemed to have so little in common with our near ancestors. Even my parents generation, and maybe yours, dear readers, held what we now call 'racial realist' attitudes. So why did the 'conservatives' stop conserving, and start mimicking the liberal left, whom they claim to reject wholeheartedly?
Conservatives who don't want to conserve their own people, their own ethnicity, and don't consider their progeny or the future, are no conservatives by any definition I understand.
The Republican Party seems to want to preserve the material goods of life only, and all the hue and cry about 'smaller government' is only to that end. American conservatism has long since lost its soul, or sold its soul.
The 'Tea Party' candidates have proven to be as easily compromised as any other Republican, despite their pandering to the populist sentiments that have surfaced recently.
Personally I think the GOP is impervious to any efforts of White citizens to influence it away from its present policies.
Right now the party is busy recruiting 'diversity', and enlarging the 'big tent' so that one and all may be included, regardless.
Come one, come all, and bring your political correctness and ethnic grievances along.
Some say that this CPAC gathering was not representative of the party as a whole. Some social conservatives in the GOP objected to the pro-gay slant, but in general this seems to be the direction the party is going. Social conservatives are being marginalized, and seem to be fewer in number every year, as the older generations die.
But if you spend enough time on Republican forums on the internet you will see how very politically correct most 'mainstream' Republicans and conservatives have become, especially on racial issues. Most of the FReepers cling to the idea that 'legal immigration: good' while only illegal immigration is bad. Why? Because to state that all immigration should be halted, if only temporarily, is to invite a charge of racism. Some of those on these Republican forums and blogs will become like a pack of baying hounds when they scent anything that resembles 'racism' or anti-Semitism.
We see the behavior of these young people, who are likely from fairly prosperous backgrounds; they have been conditioned to attack when certain taboos are violated. Carleton Putnam in his 'Race and Reality' referred to 'hypnotism' in this connection, and watching some of these PC-saturated people in action makes one think they are under some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion, so quickly do they react to certain triggers. In any case, these are not thinking young people, but knee-jerk liberals, despite their Republican patter.
I don't believe it's an either/or situation, where we must choose between working with these indoctrinated liberal Republicans or simply accepting our demise. Those are not the only two choices.
And if we are in such a dire state that we are forced to try to work with people to whom we are anathema, then we are in such a desperate state that it's far too late for the gradual approach. And in fact I think we really don't have the leisure to use the gradual subtle approach, from within.
This is a subject that has come up before, and I will say the same thing I said to my readers of an earlier time: the point that must be understood is that we don't need to 'win over the masses' or attain a majority of people who agree with us. No great movement of history was ever driven by a majority. It has always been a relatively small group of people, highly-motivated, that has been behind the great movements and causes.
Unfortunately we seem to have a very highly-motivated group of people opposing us, and most unfortunate is the fact that they have enormous amounts of money and the media on their side, as their lackeys. It is hard for a few people to go up against this group of mostly unknown elites and the masses who follow their lead. But numbers don't always guarantee a win; there are any number of times in history in which the few have prevailed over a formidable many.
And again, this politically correct multicultural tower of Babel is an edifice that is built on lies, and is buttressed by lies upon lies. It is in conflict with human nature; it requires constant effort to keep it from collapsing of its own weight.
It takes the expenditure of a lot of energy to keep it standing. It apparently takes a lot of conditioning via the media and via peer pressure to maintain it. The fact that these people who are the power behind the scenes seem to feel the need to double down on the propaganda may mean that they are feeling uncertain of their success.
One more thing: this multicult monstrosity is very costly in terms of money; imagine how much has been spent and is being spent to construct it and to keep up the false façade.
To think that we have to hitch our wagon to the Republican Party is folly; as if that party is not decaying and crumbling along with the system of which it is a part.
I have hopes for the A3P, but we will see where that goes. And before somebody pipes up to tell us that 'no third party will ever succeed' -- I say that is the kind of thing that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if it is accepted as some kind of certainty. The future is not known; there is a first time for everything. And again, the Republican Party (the party of Reconstruction, by the way) began as an upstart third party.
And those of us who are Christian know that there is one other factor to be taken into consideration when pondering the future: God. Atheists and 'halfway-house Christians' as CWNY calls them may scoff, but God is not dead 'nor doth he sleep', as Longfellow wrote. He will have something to say about all this before it is over. In fact, Christians know that we have a glimpse of the direction of the future, and we know what the ultimate outcome will be. It's hubris to imagine that we hold everything in our hands.
Still, we are not to be passive observers, but active doers of what is right, and speakers of the truth.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
"Conservative" false shepherds
Arlen Williams warns about transnationalists in 'conservative' clothing, as exemplified by Grover Norquist.
The problem is that Norquist is just one of a number of 'conservatives' who is part the globalist/transnationalist web of influence. Another one is Newt Gingrich, as I am sure most of my readers are aware, just as with Norquist.
The fact that Norquist is married to a Moslem wife is not irrelevant here, I think. Is it a chicken-or-egg question, when people who outmarry exhibit this kind of cosmopolitanist attitude? I mean does that kind of attitude lead to outmarriage or does the marriage lead the American spouse in that direction?
The Bush family would seem to be another example, with the Mexican marital ties.
I would think that conservatism, as it used to be understood, would incline people to loyalty towards their own people and country, and intermarriage with someone from a disparate people and religion would indicate a lack of loyalty, or would then diminish loyalty to one's own roots, causing conflicted allegiances.
Williams' article accurately describes the transnational scheme and strategy.
In all of the propaganda that had led directly or indirectly toward the transnational goals, the idea of loyalty to one's own country and people becomes lost and devalued. That needs to be recovered if we are to have any hope of prevailing.
The problem is that Norquist is just one of a number of 'conservatives' who is part the globalist/transnationalist web of influence. Another one is Newt Gingrich, as I am sure most of my readers are aware, just as with Norquist.
The fact that Norquist is married to a Moslem wife is not irrelevant here, I think. Is it a chicken-or-egg question, when people who outmarry exhibit this kind of cosmopolitanist attitude? I mean does that kind of attitude lead to outmarriage or does the marriage lead the American spouse in that direction?
The Bush family would seem to be another example, with the Mexican marital ties.
I would think that conservatism, as it used to be understood, would incline people to loyalty towards their own people and country, and intermarriage with someone from a disparate people and religion would indicate a lack of loyalty, or would then diminish loyalty to one's own roots, causing conflicted allegiances.
Williams' article accurately describes the transnational scheme and strategy.
''Whether they realize it or not, operators such as this, functionally if not by ideology, are transnational progressives on the vanguard, wolves to herd the sheep. And their big tent is so huge, it stretches over a false vision of a unified yet somehow free world. Such conservatives find themselves supporting communitarians such as George W. Bush, who inadvertently (or by plan from the outset ) wind up supporting more and more suzerainty to world empire. But, if not the wolf and sheep allusion, does it smell fishy?
Transnationalism becomes communitarianism, becomes global communism, as the little fish nations are gobbled up by the manipulative, big fish seekers of absolute, New World Order power; all, while that ultimate power "corrupts absolutely." (If "communism" sounds extreme, just call it collectivism, neo-Marxism, or Marxofascism; it is the same. Or, if you don't like the more recently coined words, find the root and call it Babel.)''
In all of the propaganda that had led directly or indirectly toward the transnational goals, the idea of loyalty to one's own country and people becomes lost and devalued. That needs to be recovered if we are to have any hope of prevailing.
...inside an enigma
Often among ethnonationalists, Russia is cited as the only hope for the future. I am always wary of this romanticizing of Russia. I realize many people are disenchanted with, if not downright bitter towards, the United States, and are prone to glamorize Russia. Beware; this is what the old lefties used to do, in their disillusionment with their country, and some eventually learned to their chagrin that the USSR was not the people's utopia they wanted desperately to have it be.
A few months ago, Medvedev and Putin mad statements condemning what they termed 'xenophobia'. So it is not surprising that now, Medvedev has made a speech praising multiculturalism and slamming nationalism.
Reuters quotes him as saying "If we talk about the failure of multiculturalism, then entire cultures can be destroyed, which is a dangerous thing...'
I don't think Russia is any kind of promised land, or a last bastion of 'Western White culture.' I think it is still true to say, as Churchill did decades ago:
To most of us non-Russians, it is. Culturally they are very unlike us in most respects. I haven't been to that country but I have had considerable contact with people from that country.
It may be that things will change, but I don't believe we can count on that. However, to complete the quotation from Churchill,
"... perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest."
Do the ordinary Russian people perceive that multiculturalism is not in their 'national interest'? I am not informed enough to answer that, but it is obvious that their current regime is on board with the globalist agenda, like most of the 'leaders'.
A few months ago, Medvedev and Putin mad statements condemning what they termed 'xenophobia'. So it is not surprising that now, Medvedev has made a speech praising multiculturalism and slamming nationalism.
''The president also said those linked to igniting interethnic hatred will be banned from educating youths.[...]
National accord starts from school, he believes, being the place where 'the basics of a person's view of the world' are laid.
[...]
Illiteracy is the basis of almost all conflicts, and especially interethnic ones, he says.
[...]
Multiculturalism not a failure
The president has pointed out the example of the United States.
'Nobody can insult anyone for their ethnicity, a punishment will follow inevitably. Sometimes people laugh at it, but I think it is better this way than to allow insults', he said. 'Tolerance can't be excessive,' he added."
Reuters quotes him as saying "If we talk about the failure of multiculturalism, then entire cultures can be destroyed, which is a dangerous thing...'
I don't think Russia is any kind of promised land, or a last bastion of 'Western White culture.' I think it is still true to say, as Churchill did decades ago:
"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma..."
To most of us non-Russians, it is. Culturally they are very unlike us in most respects. I haven't been to that country but I have had considerable contact with people from that country.
It may be that things will change, but I don't believe we can count on that. However, to complete the quotation from Churchill,
"... perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest."
Do the ordinary Russian people perceive that multiculturalism is not in their 'national interest'? I am not informed enough to answer that, but it is obvious that their current regime is on board with the globalist agenda, like most of the 'leaders'.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
On 'democracy' and other shibboleths of our age
In the wake of recent events in Egypt, it is disheartening to see so much eagerness among some to intervene there in the cause of 'democracy', 'freedom, or whatever high-flown concepts. And this is after we have seen the results of our intervening in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else we have left our footprint.
I find it troubling that many people on the right apparently do not know that 'democracy' is not only no panacea for all human ills, but that many great thinkers through the centuries have spoken very bluntly against democracy, and not only against democracy, but against representative government in the case of peoples who are ill-suited or ill-prepared for it. It goes against the egalitarian romanticism of our age to point out that not all peoples are able to be self-governing. The idea is -- well, racist and unfair!
And it's good to remind some of the idealists out there that a great deal of evil has been wrought in the name of 'democracy', and a great many scoundrels have pretended to be acting in the name of 'democracy.'
"Democracy does not exist for a long time - it wastes, exhausts and destroys itself. There was never a democracy that didn't kill itself" - Samuel Adams
"The American form of government is the republic. The true freedom does not exist either under despotism or excesses of democracy" - Alexander Hamilton
"Democracy always leads to conflicts and instability, but never provides for the security of the citizens or their property. Usually it is very short at life, and very bloody at death" -- James Madison
"Democracy is the rule of mobs, tempted by newspaper editors" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Democracy - it's the rule of the wishes of the mob, or to be exact ambitions and vices of its leaders. The Founding Fathers of our constitution created a republic, which is more different from a democracy, than a democracy is different from despotism " - Fisher Ames
"I have been always sure, that democracy sooner or late will destroy freedom, or civilization, or both" - Thomas Macaulay
"Democracy - it's the tyranny of majority, or more exact, the majority party, which through fraud or cohesion is manipulating the electoral process" - Lord Acton
''Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion…are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.'' - Charles Carroll, Signer of Declaration of Independence, to James McHenry, November 4, 1800
"Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact." - Balzac
"It doesn't really matter what one writes into a constitution. The important thing is what the collective instinct eventually makes of it." - Oswald Spengler
''The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.'' - Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution
“Democracy is undone by the same vice that ruins oligarchy. But because democracy has embraced anarchy, the damage is more general and far worse, and its subjugation more complete. The truth is, a common rule holds for the seasons, for all the plants and the animals, and particularly for political societies: excess in one direction tends to provoke excess in the contrary direction” - Plato, The Republic
"I wish I could give better hopes of our southern brethren. [Mexico]… what will then become of them? Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government. They will fall under military despotism …" Thomas Jefferson, to Marquis de Lafayette, 4 May 1817
"Before the French Revolution, it was the prevailing opinion of our countrymen, that other nations were not free, because their despotic governments were too strong for the people. Of course, we were admonished to detest all existing governments, as so many lions in liberty’s path; and to expect by their downfall the happy opportunity, that every emancipated people would embrace, to secure their own equal rights for ever. France is supposed to have had this opportunity, and to have lost it. Ought we not then to be convinced, that something more is necessary to preserve liberty than to love it? Ought we not to see that when the people have destroyed all power but their own, they are the nearest possible to a despotism, the more uncontrolled for being new, and tenfold the more cruel for its hypocrisy." - Fisher Ames. The Dangers of American Liberty (1805)
“… it is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty. [Liberty] is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike – a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving – and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it. … [A]n all-wise Providence has reserved [liberty], as the noblest and highest reward for the development of our faculties, moral and intellectual. A reward more appropriate than liberty could not be conferred on the deserving – nor a punishment inflicted on the undeserving more just, than to be subject to lawless and despotic rule. This dispensation seems to be the result of some fixed law – and every effort to disturb or defeat it, by attempting to elevate a people in the scale of liberty, above the point to which they are entitled to rise, must ever prove abortive, and end in disappointment. The progress of a people rising from a lower to a higher point in the scale of liberty, is necessarily slow – and by attempting to precipitate, we either retard, or permanently defeat it.” - John C. Calhoun
“When the men of our State Department, especially after World War II, went all over the world trying to implant our form - freedom, balance in government, downward on cultures whose philosophy would never have produced it, it has, in almost every case, ended in some form of totalitarianism or authoritarianism.” - Francis Schaeffer
"Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. Persuasion and example are the methods taught by the Carpenter of Nazareth, and if we believe in Christianity we should try to advance our ideals by his methods. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home.'' - Rep. Howard H. Buffett, during the Korean War
"After each war there is a little less democracy to save." - Brooks Atkinson
"If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist." - Joseph Sobran
"Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. Their mutual antipathies are much stronger than their jealousy of the government... Above all, the grand and only effectual security in the last resort against the despotism of the government is in that case wanting: the sympathy of the army with the people. Soldiers to whose feelings half or three fourths of the subjects of the same government are foreigners, will have no more scruple in mowing them down, and no more reason to ask the reason why, than they would have in doing the same thing against declared enemies. - John Stuart Mill: Considerations on Representative Government
"There is no social engineering that can radically renovate a civilization and change its character, and at the same time keep it going, for civilization is an affair of the human spirit, and the direction of the human spirit cannot be reset by means that are, after all, mechanical. The best thing is to follow the order of nature, and let a moribund civilization simply rot away, and indulge what hope one can that it will be followed by one that is better. This is the course that nature will take with such a civilization anyway, in spite of anything we do or do not do. Revolts, revolutions, dictatorships, experiments and innovations in political practice, all merely mess up this process and make it a sadder and sorrier business than it need be. They are only so much machinery, and machinery will not express anything beyond the intentions and character of those who run it." - Albert Jay Nock, Journal Forgotten
''[In reference to the 'divine right to self-government' of all peoples]'What troubles me is that any civilized White man should write such nonsense. It discloses a total failure to understand or appreciate his own civilization. He has forgotten, if he ever knew, what centuries of effort it took to develop the capacity for self government. He has no real comprehension of the worth of what his forefathers bequeathed him. Consequently, he can have little pride in himself as the legatee.'' - Carleton Putnam, Race and Reality
I find it troubling that many people on the right apparently do not know that 'democracy' is not only no panacea for all human ills, but that many great thinkers through the centuries have spoken very bluntly against democracy, and not only against democracy, but against representative government in the case of peoples who are ill-suited or ill-prepared for it. It goes against the egalitarian romanticism of our age to point out that not all peoples are able to be self-governing. The idea is -- well, racist and unfair!
And it's good to remind some of the idealists out there that a great deal of evil has been wrought in the name of 'democracy', and a great many scoundrels have pretended to be acting in the name of 'democracy.'
"Democracy does not exist for a long time - it wastes, exhausts and destroys itself. There was never a democracy that didn't kill itself" - Samuel Adams
"The American form of government is the republic. The true freedom does not exist either under despotism or excesses of democracy" - Alexander Hamilton
"Democracy always leads to conflicts and instability, but never provides for the security of the citizens or their property. Usually it is very short at life, and very bloody at death" -- James Madison
"Democracy is the rule of mobs, tempted by newspaper editors" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Democracy - it's the rule of the wishes of the mob, or to be exact ambitions and vices of its leaders. The Founding Fathers of our constitution created a republic, which is more different from a democracy, than a democracy is different from despotism " - Fisher Ames
"I have been always sure, that democracy sooner or late will destroy freedom, or civilization, or both" - Thomas Macaulay
"Democracy - it's the tyranny of majority, or more exact, the majority party, which through fraud or cohesion is manipulating the electoral process" - Lord Acton
''Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion…are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.'' - Charles Carroll, Signer of Declaration of Independence, to James McHenry, November 4, 1800
"Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact." - Balzac
"It doesn't really matter what one writes into a constitution. The important thing is what the collective instinct eventually makes of it." - Oswald Spengler
''The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.'' - Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution
“Democracy is undone by the same vice that ruins oligarchy. But because democracy has embraced anarchy, the damage is more general and far worse, and its subjugation more complete. The truth is, a common rule holds for the seasons, for all the plants and the animals, and particularly for political societies: excess in one direction tends to provoke excess in the contrary direction” - Plato, The Republic
"I wish I could give better hopes of our southern brethren. [Mexico]… what will then become of them? Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government. They will fall under military despotism …" Thomas Jefferson, to Marquis de Lafayette, 4 May 1817
"Before the French Revolution, it was the prevailing opinion of our countrymen, that other nations were not free, because their despotic governments were too strong for the people. Of course, we were admonished to detest all existing governments, as so many lions in liberty’s path; and to expect by their downfall the happy opportunity, that every emancipated people would embrace, to secure their own equal rights for ever. France is supposed to have had this opportunity, and to have lost it. Ought we not then to be convinced, that something more is necessary to preserve liberty than to love it? Ought we not to see that when the people have destroyed all power but their own, they are the nearest possible to a despotism, the more uncontrolled for being new, and tenfold the more cruel for its hypocrisy." - Fisher Ames. The Dangers of American Liberty (1805)
“… it is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty. [Liberty] is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike – a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving – and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it. … [A]n all-wise Providence has reserved [liberty], as the noblest and highest reward for the development of our faculties, moral and intellectual. A reward more appropriate than liberty could not be conferred on the deserving – nor a punishment inflicted on the undeserving more just, than to be subject to lawless and despotic rule. This dispensation seems to be the result of some fixed law – and every effort to disturb or defeat it, by attempting to elevate a people in the scale of liberty, above the point to which they are entitled to rise, must ever prove abortive, and end in disappointment. The progress of a people rising from a lower to a higher point in the scale of liberty, is necessarily slow – and by attempting to precipitate, we either retard, or permanently defeat it.” - John C. Calhoun
“When the men of our State Department, especially after World War II, went all over the world trying to implant our form - freedom, balance in government, downward on cultures whose philosophy would never have produced it, it has, in almost every case, ended in some form of totalitarianism or authoritarianism.” - Francis Schaeffer
"Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. Persuasion and example are the methods taught by the Carpenter of Nazareth, and if we believe in Christianity we should try to advance our ideals by his methods. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home.'' - Rep. Howard H. Buffett, during the Korean War
"After each war there is a little less democracy to save." - Brooks Atkinson
"If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist." - Joseph Sobran
"Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. Their mutual antipathies are much stronger than their jealousy of the government... Above all, the grand and only effectual security in the last resort against the despotism of the government is in that case wanting: the sympathy of the army with the people. Soldiers to whose feelings half or three fourths of the subjects of the same government are foreigners, will have no more scruple in mowing them down, and no more reason to ask the reason why, than they would have in doing the same thing against declared enemies. - John Stuart Mill: Considerations on Representative Government
"There is no social engineering that can radically renovate a civilization and change its character, and at the same time keep it going, for civilization is an affair of the human spirit, and the direction of the human spirit cannot be reset by means that are, after all, mechanical. The best thing is to follow the order of nature, and let a moribund civilization simply rot away, and indulge what hope one can that it will be followed by one that is better. This is the course that nature will take with such a civilization anyway, in spite of anything we do or do not do. Revolts, revolutions, dictatorships, experiments and innovations in political practice, all merely mess up this process and make it a sadder and sorrier business than it need be. They are only so much machinery, and machinery will not express anything beyond the intentions and character of those who run it." - Albert Jay Nock, Journal Forgotten
''[In reference to the 'divine right to self-government' of all peoples]'What troubles me is that any civilized White man should write such nonsense. It discloses a total failure to understand or appreciate his own civilization. He has forgotten, if he ever knew, what centuries of effort it took to develop the capacity for self government. He has no real comprehension of the worth of what his forefathers bequeathed him. Consequently, he can have little pride in himself as the legatee.'' - Carleton Putnam, Race and Reality
Friday, February 11, 2011
Frank Ellis and his open letter
This response from Dr. Frank Ellis, answering David Cameron's speech at the Munich Security Conference, has been making the rounds, and has provoked a lot of discussion and much approbation.
I first saw it at Sarah, Maid of Albion's blog but it has been posted in many places. It's very incisive, very well-written, and he makes points that very much need to be made.
I am doubtful about how much 'mainstream' coverage Ellis will receive from this, though if we had an honest and objective, or even a non-hostile media, it would be widely covered.
This is very apposite right now:
But the most important part, to my mind, is his answer to Cameron's nonsense about multiculturalism and assimilation. Ellis says:
Bravo.
He obviously perceives the dishonesty and the hypocrisy in the blather by Cameron. Not only Cameron, but all the other Western 'leaders' recite the ritual disavowals of multiculturalism, knowing full well that they plan to continue to push that fraudulent ideology on their subjects despite their pretenses at being concerned about their own people, and about the grave problems of multiculturalism.
Despite the transparency of Cameron's attempt to delude his listeners, there are, believe it or not, still people all over the Internet cheering Cameron's supposed conversion. What has happened to people's attention spans that they no longer remember that these empty statements about multiculturalism are now a regular event? They say the words, these ''leaders'' and yet things don't change. Mass immigration goes on unchecked, and the 'hate speech' laws persist, and dispossession proceeds apace. Shouldn't a few people, besides Dr. Ellis, begin to perceive the obvious? The obvious fact is that Western political leaders are not serving their own people, and are in fact serving alien interests, or those of unseen 'elites' who pull their strings.
In any case, Ellis is right on target with this response.
I have noticed that commenters here and there keep saying Ellis is wasting his time because Cameron et al will not listen. It's likely true that none of the political leaders will heed what Ellis says, given that they serve other masters. But the value of Ellis's words are that they are, as in open letters generally, meant to convey a message, or set an example, or to inspire a wider audience. It may be that Ellis is seeking to energize others, to exhort them and perhaps give them courage to speak out or otherwise assert themselves. He may want to encourage more discussion of the dire situation in his country. Those are all reasons that may be motivating him. And I think those motivations are in a sense more worthy than trying to awaken some sense of conscience among the elected officials, which I think is mostly a lost cause. So I hope this statement by Ellis continues to be read and discussed, and that it has a snowball effect. Sooner or later, something has to get through to the somnambulists in our Western countries.
I first saw it at Sarah, Maid of Albion's blog but it has been posted in many places. It's very incisive, very well-written, and he makes points that very much need to be made.
I am doubtful about how much 'mainstream' coverage Ellis will receive from this, though if we had an honest and objective, or even a non-hostile media, it would be widely covered.
This is very apposite right now:
In all the discussions about rising food prices, metals, access to water and productive farm land no one wishes to identify the real problem: specifically the reckless and unsustainable breeding of Third World Populations either in the Third World itself or in the Third World estates that Third-Worlders have been allowed to create in the First World.
You cite what has happened on the streets of Tunis and Cairo as an example of the compatibility of Western values and Islam: ‘hundreds of thousands of people demanding the universal right to free elections and democracy’. Middle-class, English-speaking protesters might well press the right buttons when interviewed by some BBC reporter but the underlying problem of Arab states and Sub-Saharan Africa is massive, out-of-control and unsustainable population growth. This is the Malthusian nightmare writ large and it is being played out all over the Third World. Egypt’s unemployed will remain unemployed (many of them are unemployable in any case). Hunger and hopelessness will gnaw at them. The results are predictable. Democracy and civil society are preposterous and irrelevant abstractions outside of Western Europe and will not feed people, certainly not in Egypt and Sub-Saharan Africa. Where populations spiral out of control, as they are doing in so many parts of the world, violence, exacerbated by religious/ideological fanaticism, is inevitable.''
But the most important part, to my mind, is his answer to Cameron's nonsense about multiculturalism and assimilation. Ellis says:
''Concerning multiculturalism in the United Kingdom you state the following:
Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.
For the avoidance of any doubt your repeated exculpatory use of “we” does not include me and, I suspect, millions of other Britons. Your use of ‘we’ refers to the last Labour government and the xenophiles who sought to impose the anti-white racist cult of multiculturalism on the indigenous population. It is emphatically not the responsibility of the indigenous population ‘to provide a vision of a society to which they [immigrants] feel they want to belong’. If, according to you, the ‘we’ failed to provide this vision, then why did millions of Islamic immigrants join the first wave who could not find this ‘vision’? If they have no ‘vision of society to which they feel they want to belong’ why do they stay? Why not go home to Somalia, Waziristan and Sub-Saharan Africa? That these millions of immigrants have no ‘vision of society to which they feel they want to belong’ yet still stay in the Christian-infidel-infested wasteland of Britain suggests to me that their continued presence in Britain has everything to do with the fantastically generous welfare provision they receive (all the wives included) and absolutely nothing at all to do with any lack of ‘vision of society’.
You have been reported as saying that multiculturalism has failed. I see no clear statement of that in your speech at all. In fact, you claim that it is the indigenous population that has driven Muslims into their parallel societies. That you are still advocating some form of the cult is clear when you argue that ‘instead of encouraging people to live apart, we need a clear sense of shared national identity that is open to everyone’. National identity by its very nature is exclusive, partial and narrow. A national identity that is ‘open to everyone’ is not a national identity. National identity is determined by a combination of genetic, racial, cultural, psychological, geographical, linguistic and mental factors, tempered by the blows of history, by shared suffering in war and peace, by humiliation and glory, by the memory of those gone before. How can my English national identity be open to everyone? The answer is that it cannot. National identity that is open to everyone ceases to be a national identity; national identity that is open to everyone is just another way of promoting multiculturalism without using the m-word. In other words, it is a deceit, a ploy to disarm the critics of multiculturalism who have instinctively and rationally apprehended the cult’s national-identity-hating agenda all along. As an Englishman who still values his national identity I have no desire at all to share it with others.''
Bravo.
He obviously perceives the dishonesty and the hypocrisy in the blather by Cameron. Not only Cameron, but all the other Western 'leaders' recite the ritual disavowals of multiculturalism, knowing full well that they plan to continue to push that fraudulent ideology on their subjects despite their pretenses at being concerned about their own people, and about the grave problems of multiculturalism.
Despite the transparency of Cameron's attempt to delude his listeners, there are, believe it or not, still people all over the Internet cheering Cameron's supposed conversion. What has happened to people's attention spans that they no longer remember that these empty statements about multiculturalism are now a regular event? They say the words, these ''leaders'' and yet things don't change. Mass immigration goes on unchecked, and the 'hate speech' laws persist, and dispossession proceeds apace. Shouldn't a few people, besides Dr. Ellis, begin to perceive the obvious? The obvious fact is that Western political leaders are not serving their own people, and are in fact serving alien interests, or those of unseen 'elites' who pull their strings.
In any case, Ellis is right on target with this response.
I have noticed that commenters here and there keep saying Ellis is wasting his time because Cameron et al will not listen. It's likely true that none of the political leaders will heed what Ellis says, given that they serve other masters. But the value of Ellis's words are that they are, as in open letters generally, meant to convey a message, or set an example, or to inspire a wider audience. It may be that Ellis is seeking to energize others, to exhort them and perhaps give them courage to speak out or otherwise assert themselves. He may want to encourage more discussion of the dire situation in his country. Those are all reasons that may be motivating him. And I think those motivations are in a sense more worthy than trying to awaken some sense of conscience among the elected officials, which I think is mostly a lost cause. So I hope this statement by Ellis continues to be read and discussed, and that it has a snowball effect. Sooner or later, something has to get through to the somnambulists in our Western countries.
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