Category Archives: Argument

NEW COLUMN, “Ukraine’s Azov Battalion: Nazis Or Just Nationalists?”, is currency featured on WND.COM, the Unz Review, CNSNews and The New American.

Excerpt:

Let us be clear on what free speech truly is. The words people speak, write, tweet; the beliefs they are known to hold, the flags they fly, the symbolic, non-violent ceremonies and rituals they enact, the insignia, paraphernalia, the goose-stepping, Hitler salutes they dick around with—all that is protected speech, licit in natural law.

So long as these oddities and idiosyncrasies, whether performed alone or in groups, thoughts harbored or shared in public—so long as no violence accompanies such speech or behavior (prohibited here is violence visited on animals as well); so long as mitts stop at the next man’s face: SPEECH. It’s all speech. It should be free, unfettered and as wild and as wanton as it can be.

Spoken, written, preached: Impolite and impolitic thoughts are nothing more than thought crimes which ought to be ferociously protected by a free people. By logical extension, any accusations of Naziism—if leveled at a belief system, rather than at palpable violent actions—is suspect.

Thoughts and words spoken or written that are not politically polite—for example, racism; Naziism—ought to retain protected status as speech beyond the adjudication of law-makers, bureaucrats, mediacrats, educrats and technocrats.

In fact, “In the current climate,” I had suggested—and considering the inherently paranoid style of American politics—it’s worth contemplating special protections for politically impolite, racist speech.”

“In 1978, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) ‘took a controversial stand for free speech by defending a neo-Nazi group that wanted to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, where many Holocaust survivors lived.” As a free-speech absolutist, a term Elon Musk has revived, I long for the return of what I shall term here the Skokie Standard of free speech and thinking.

In 2022, the once-grand ACLU, however, no longer vigorously defends marginalized speakers and thinkers. Instead, the ACLU defrauds the public about its mission, devoting its resources to the well-popularized causes of the Left’s privileged populations: LGBTQ demands, illegal immigrant claims-making, seekers of abortion-on-tap, looters of property and destroyers of peace and prosperity (in Orwellian speak, “peaceful protesters”).

Thus, other than that the Azov Battalion, a special unit in the Ukrainian military, is oriented toward the ethnic, white Ukrainian nation; other than that Azov insignia and iconography are rooted in national socialism or Naziism—I did not immediately detect evidence in Nebojsa Malic’s well-researched RT piece, “Western media clubs together to white-wash Ukrainian Neo-Nazis,” that the Azov are currently, actively and violently expunging groups such as, say Jews or Roma, based on typically Nazi eugenic ideation.

Azov’s symbols appear to be Nazi, but their actions appear to be merely nationalist, namely a quest to keep Ukraine Ukrainian.

I therefore questioned, during the Hard Truth broadcast, the Nazi designation attached to the Azov Brigade, suggesting that, if Azov are not engaged in acts of violence against the traditional Nazi victims and other ethnics, and are merely a military battalion fighting in the Russia-Ukraine military theater—then the Nazi insignia and paraphernalia are irrelevant. These symbols then fall into the category of ritualistic, offensive speech—thought crimes—the kind for which the Left criminalizes the Right. …

…THE REST…NEW COLUMN, “Ukraine’s Azov Battalion: Nazis Or Just Nationalists?”, is currency featured on WND.COM, the Unz Review, CNSNews and The New American.

UPDATED (4/30) On Patriotism, The Psychopath Teddy Roosevelt, And On America’s Best Presidents

America, Argument, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Ethics, Founding Fathers, History, Nationalism, The State

2 Replies

I just noticed how much junk appears on my LinkedIn feed. Not sure why. I’m never there.

This, Alexander Duncan’s, post is collectivism, pure and simple. Good patriotism ought to mean standing by those select individual members of a commonwealth who deserve it—certainly not all of them, within or without the State. The “little platoons” of America, as Edmund Burke described a man’s social mainstay—his family, friends, coreligionists, coworkers—would be a better object for “patriotism.”

“We are the greatest nation” nonsense is of a piece with this categorical confusion. Are our founding documents great? Yes. Were the Founding Fathers great men, especially the anti-Federalists? Yes. Are the preponderance of people currently residing on the landmass that is America great? No longer.

As to Teddy 1, Theodore Roosevelt: He was not happy unless he was killing something. Like any good psychopath, this politician began with animals, starting, I believe, with shooting a neighbor’s dog when he was 20. He kept it up at obscene levels. See here.

Ivan Eland, author of “Recarving Rushmore,” has “ranked the presidents on peace, prosperity, and liberty”:

When you get down to the brass tacks of which American presidents most embodied the values of peace, prosperity, and liberty (PP & L), you find only few—a handful really—acted wisely, avoided unnecessary wars, “demonstrated restrain in economic crisis” and foreign affairs, practiced free-market capitalism and favored hard money; opposed big government and welfare, and limited executive and federal power.

Ranked No. 1 is the stellar John Tyler. He ended “the worst Indian wars in US history,” practiced restraint in an international dispute, “opposed big government and protected states’ powers.”

Grover Cleveland is second, as an “exemplar of honesty and limited government.”

Martin van Buren excelled—especially in rejecting economic stimulus and national debt and balancing budgets. He ranks third.

Rutherford B. Hayes is fourth. Likewise, he didn’t just preach but practiced capitalism and advocated for black voting rights, while recognizing the ruthlessness of Reconstruction.

UPDATE (4/30): For those to whom Reconstruction is a new term, here: “The Radical Republicans: The Antifa Of 1865“:

…Although Republicans shared “the drive toward revolution and national unification” (the words of historian Clyde Wilson, in The Yankee Problem, 2016), the Radicals distinguished themselves in their support for sadistic military occupation of the vanquished Rebel States, following the War Between the States.

While assorted GOP teletarts may find the rhetoric of Radical Republicans sexy; overall, these characters are villains of history, for helping to sunder the federal scheme bequeathed by the Founding Fathers. In their fanatical fealty to an almighty central government, Radical Republicans were as alien to the Jeffersonian tradition of self-government as it gets.

Today’s Republicans should know that the Radical Republicans were hardly heartbroken about the assassination of Lincoln, on April 14, 1865. A mere month earlier (March 4, 1865)—and much to the chagrin of the Radicals—Lincoln had noodled, in his billowing prose, about the need to “bind up the nation’s wounds and proceed with “malice toward none … and charity for all.”

Radical Republicans were having none of that charity stuff. They promptly placed their evil aspirations in Andrew Johnson. A President Johnson, they had hoped, would be a suitable sockpuppet in socking it to the South some more. ….

… MORE.