For our German readers, the German weekly Junge Freiheit, to which I hope to contribute regularly, features an interview about Into the Cannibal’s Pot, conducted by Moritz Schwarz. Highlights of the English version should run in the US and South Africa in the coming months.
MORE @Junge Freiheit. (I suspect the archive has to be searched for this issue: © JUNGE FREIHEIT Verlag GmbH & Co. www.jungefreiheit.de 20/14 /09. Mai 2014.)
Ilana Mercer, Liberty, Multiculturalism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Correctness, The West
“Originality is rare in punditry these days,” writes Joseph F. Cotto, who is “a scholar and columnist from central Florida.” “Every time a new narrative-of-the-day arrives, we take refuge in groupthink rather than thinking for ourselves. Not Mercer … [who] is one of America’s leading paleolibertarian voices, [with] “a prominent column on WorldNetDaily.”
Mr. Cotto recently interviewed this writer for the Washington Times’ community pages. You can read the interview, “Self-Segregation Trumps Imposed Multiculturalism,” at WND. Here are excerpts:
JOSEPH F. COTTO: This seems like one of the most polarized eras in American politics. Why do you think that our country’s political atmosphere has become so divisive?
ILANA MERCER: I think you are correct in your assessment regarding the unparalleled polarization of American society. Have you noticed how commentators on both sides of received political wisdom attempt to diminish the fact you articulate by referring to America’s fractious history? Nevertheless, this is a complex issue that is hard to answer briefly. I’ll try. In the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” economist Milton Friedman underscores this important point: “The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”
Underway today in the USA is a monumental clash between individualism and collectivism; between the forces of reason and reality, against force and coercion. The “philosophical” differences between the Republikeynesians, on the one hand, and the Democrats, on the other, are insignificant. The first believe individual rights should be carefully calibrated by central planners; the latter believe these natural rights can be overridden.
There is also a cultural dimension to these irreparable divisions. We are today, thanks to social engineering, a deracinated and divided society. We are no longer what John Jay termed “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and custom.” There can be no unity without community. The glue of togetherness is gone, replaced by a flimsy, fluid, and thoroughly fake unity peddled by politicians. “Ideas” they call it. On the one day, it’s a crusade for democracy; on the next, it’s a war against racism.
COTTO: Multiculturalism is spreading rapidly across the Western world. This has led not only to cultural barriers, but tremendous religious and ethnic conflicts. What are your views on the subject?
MERCER: Multiculturalism as practiced in the West amounts to top-down, centrally enforced and managed integration. Show me a historical precedent where forced integration has worked. As it works across the Anglo-American and European spheres, one group (the founding, historical majority) is forced by self-anointed and elected elites—no contradiction there—on pain of public and professional ostracism, to submerge its history, heroes, customs, culture, language, and pander to militant minorities, who’ve been acculturated by the same elites in identity-politics warfare. …
… An interesting new book, reviewed by one Barnaby Rogerson, makes the point that the Levant of the 18th century was peaceful and prosperous (and surprisingly libertine), because it was made up of “a grid of self-governing communities.” Integration between disparate communities was not enforced. And surprise, surprise: communities freely chose to live in complete segregation. This freedom fostered “remarkable tolerance” among diverse communities across the cities of the Levant of that time. “Deals before Ideals, City before State, Trade before Politics,” as the reviewer puts it. This freedom of association was the source of strength. These autonomous ethnic communities were free of the top-down, punitive, forced integration that has become the hallmark of the 19th-century nation-state that usurped their authority. …
This interview, “Self-Segregation Trumps Imposed Multiculturalism,” continues at WND.
If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.
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Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Paleoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Race, South-Africa, The West
Writing for Alternative Right.com, “an online magazine of radical traditionalism,” the illustrious Derek Turner, editor of the UK-based Quarterly Review, has reviewed Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa. “Unusually amongst” paleoconservatives, plain conservatives, and left-libertarians, Derek has engaged with the material in the detail and depth his fans have come to expect from him, starting with the distillation of this writer’s paleolibertarianism:
“Ilana Mercer is a well-known controversialist on the American right, who writes a deservedly popular WorldNetDaily column and somehow finds time to maintain both a website and blog.
Her views are probably best described as paleo-libertarian. The book’s provocative title, which probably cost her potential readers, is borrowed from Ayn Rand, but the author tempers capitalist principles with respect for national identities and cultural traditions. Unusually amongst conservatives, she combines Israelophilia and dislike of Islam with trenchant opposition to American military adventurism. Unusually amongst libertarians, she is an outspoken critic of current US immigration policy as subversive of social order as well as fiscal responsibility. She has now turned her sights on her former homeland of South Africa – both for its own sake and because she feels its tenebrous present contains urgent indicators for America.”
Read the complete review, “RSA-USA—Beloved, Benighted Countries,” on AltRight.com.
In it, Derek zeroes in on the book’s salient statistics—the murder, rape, unemployment, food production (or lack thereof), emigration, ratio of taxpayers to tax consumers, etc—that characterize “the nouvelle regime.” Mr. Turner, a most sensitive writer—has also picked up on the things that vex and pain this author: the pathos and paradoxes inherent in Afrikaner—and, by extension, western—identity, “the fraught final days of apartheid,” and “the unresolved tension,” the consequence of “fleeing from a once-beloved country, and leaving behind … fine people, black as well as white, who had not the Mercers’ good fortune of possessing a second passport and remittable funds.”
[The author’s inner-conflict and sense of privacy have, obviously, resulted in some confusion. To clarify: My (WASP) husband, the consummate individualist, was the force of nature that yanked me away from South Africa. I had wanted to remain in that country; my husband could not wait to get out. He was right. He suffers no survivor’s guilt; his wife does, which is what our perceptive reviewer has picked-up.]
Mr. Turner also knows how to make a South African smile by throwing in a fitting Afrikaans bon mot: “the most verkrampte variety of bigot.”
Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa is available from Amazon.
UPDATE I: “She does not offer any SA solutions,” writes Derek. I believe there are no quick-fix “solutions,” as we in the West like them served. But in the final chapter, “Conclusion: Saving South Africans S.O.S.,” the propositions of emigration and secession are explored. (“Look Inside” the book.) And, in particular, emigration under the refugee program is spelled out, with reference to the value of an influx of Afrikaner farmers to the US, in the context of the economic depression: To go by Austrian analysis, farming is one of the nascent industries that is expected to thrive.
“South Africa’s commercial farmers are among the best in the world, if not the best. They have to contend with a plethora of problems—the vagaries of the weather, constant drought, rising taxes on everything from the rain on their trees to municipal levies (for which they receive nothing), and excessively high toll road costs. South Africa’s land tenure laws make it difficult to dismiss workers, let alone remove these workers from their properties, and they are besieged by land invasions and squatters. They are the victims of crop and stock theft, more murders per capita of their group than any other community on earth. They are burnt out, their fences are destroyed, and they are intimidated to the point where many have abandoned their farms.12
Despite a life of graft and grief, most persist and persevere. These are just the kind of men and women whom America, once a frontier nation, needs on its road to ‘financial sobriety.'”
[Page 249.]
Immigration will probably fail to “save South Africans S.O.S.,” not because I have not offered up such a solution—I have—but because of the ill-will and malevolence infesting Western powers, including the American government, whichever the party.
Granted, my exploration of secession is theoretical, rather than a pragmatic. This is because, as I state somewhere in that chapter, it is not for those of us who are safely ensconced in the West to draw up the boundaries of a viable (not landlocked) Anglo-Afrikaner state in that part of the world. The reader should note, moreover, that the kind of solution that would comport with a respect for individual liberties, and the sanctity of life and property are unlikely because of the lemming’s lunacy evinced by left-liberals, both in that country and without it. These are the suicidal sorts who infest the institutions of state and civil society—they are unwilling to entertain the manifest evils of democracy, especially in societies riven by race. This reality is spelled out in the book.
UPDATE II (Nov. 29): Here is an example of the liberal lemming’s lunacy of which I wrote above. Read EUSEBIUS MCKAISER’s “When the Walls Come Down,” published (approvingly) in the New York Times. A South African liberal, MCKAISER’s bit of whimsy offers no analysis, only lamentation over the reality dictated by crime in South Africa.
What can one do when left-liberals, who believe in crying and turning the other cheek, are at the helm? I speak to these philosophical problems in the book. More about this repulsive mindset, pervasive across the West, in “Sacrificing Kids To PC Pietism.”
Capitalism, Etiquette, Family, Homeland Security, Ilana Mercer, IlanaMercer.com, Multiculturalism, Pop-Culture, The State
After nine years with WND, it was time to meet the people who have been brave enough to showcase my column for that duration; the people who patiently field my (weekly) pedant’s requests for this or the other editorial correction.
Unfortunately, I was unable to stay for the duration of the WorldNetDaily 2010 Conference, which was held at the Doral Golf Resort & Spa, in Miami. This was the case because my mother is visiting with us from The Netherlands, and was home birdie-sitting all alone on Yom Kippur.
“WND And Me” sums up the role of WND in my career, such as it is.
Never, “in all my years with WND.com, the Internets leading, largest independent website,” have I so much as been censored—not even when, in July of 2003, I likened Bush’s ‘Bring ’em on grin’ to the grimace ‘on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis.'”
WND’s intrepid editors have fielded many a missive demanding I be dropped. ‘Guys,’ complained one devotee, “I am about to boycott your splendid website…Ilana’s views are just too … out of sync with other contributors on your site [when it comes to the invasion of Iraq].” What the reader failed to comprehend was that WND was not looking for conformity—at least not from me. And for that I am grateful. I am temperamentally not suited to obedience, not when truth is at stake.
Here I am with the gifted Albert Thompson (already a dear friend), who practically ran the event, and WND’s lovely young book editor, Megan Byrd:
With Joseph Farah at the WND cocktail party.
With the one-and-only Erik Rush, who, I discovered, is also a gifted musician
Jerome Corsi and former Assistant Secretary of State, Alan Keyes.
Dining out with Sean.
UPDATE I (Sept. 19): Snapshots From The Journey.
I am giving in to hyperbole, but when the large African-American woman—employed by the American taxpayer to torment the same subjects at the airport—summoned me with a crooked finger for a pat down, I thought of the film “Midnight Express.” And in particular, the scene where Billy Hayes’ far-from-delightful Turkish jailer schemes to enjoy some time alone with the young American.
America’s airports are ugly places, where statism interfaces with the squalor of mass society. The workforce at the nation’s airports is, mostly, a malicious, affirmatively appointed contingent of minorities, mainly imported. All speaking Pidgin English, and each one singularly focused on exacting revenge on thinner, richer, paler, perceived oppressors.
The poor are first to complain about capitalism, but it has given them cheap travel (and cheap everything else). Once-upon-a-time a trip was a special occasion. You dressed in your finest for it. Now, every tom, dick and harry can afford to fly. Thus the airport’s often-inhospitable waiting lounges are filled with the detritus of humanity; slack-jawed youths talking at the top of their voices, or texting feverishly, mouths agape. Or shamelessly scenting the ether with the orificial end product of nasty food. (Yes, I kid you not.)
Everywhere apparent are “women lost to shame,” to use Edmund Burke’s description of the new breed of woman loosed upon humanity by the Jacobin forces of the Revolution in France. I refer to the kind that spills out of her hot pants and blouses and carries on like a harlot.
A tea shirt popular at the Miami International Airport was one that read, “Miami Bitch.” Many women had voluntarily donned this thing, and it was the cause of much guffawing among them. In “Idiocracy” mode, a semantic trick achieved with vowels elicited a lot of laughter.
Of course, one does see the odd lady among the feral females.
Miami: From the little I saw of it, Miami is a hellishly hot, flat, hellhole. I can see why Tom Tancredo called Miami a Third World place. English is not a first language there. The word that encapsulates that spot’s work ethic is “mañana”: tomorrow.
What can one add about those unpleasant, ugly, old flight attendants? That profession too was once the preserve of females young, pretty and single, who got the opportunity to see the world. By the looks of it, youth and pulchritude are exclusionary criteria; banished, except, I am told, on airplanes flown by China, Singapore and Dubai.
When we emigrated from South Africa to Israel I was a little girl. I remember being awed by the beauty and gentility of the El Al airhostesses. These days, a look from the Delta flight attendants, all in their dotage, is enough to unsettle the most seasoned traveler.
UPDATE II (Sept. 21): These images have now been added to the gallery.