Category Archives: Conservatism

Updated: White South African Granted Asylum In Canada

Canada, Conservatism, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Democracy, IMMIGRATION, Republicans, South-Africa

He was called a “white dog” and a “settler” by his black countrymen, and was attacked seven times by said people, including three stabbings inflicted during muggings and robberies. Then he moved to Canada, which has granted him refugee status. Now “Brandon Huntley, 31, originally from Cape Town, South Africa” gets to live where his life will not be imperiled daily.

The British Telegraph reports on this landmark case: “It is thought to be the first time a white South African man has been granted refugee status in Canada claiming he was the victim of black aggression.”

“‘I find that the claimant would stand out like a ‘sore thumb’ due to his colour in any part of the country,’ tribunal panel chair William Davis was quoted as saying.”

The Ottawa Sun reveals more than the British paper is prepared to:

The decision also took into account testimony by Laura Kaplan, 41, the sister of Huntley’s lawyer, who immigrated to Canada last year from her native South Africa.

Laura Kaplan testified about being threatened by armed black South Africans and the torture of her brother Robert in 1997 when a gang of black men broke into his house, tortured him for eight hours, shot him three times and left him for dead.

Davis said the evidence of Huntley and Laura Kaplan “show a picture of indifference and inability or unwillingness” of the South African government to protect “White South Africans from persecution by African South Africans.”

Reuters is quick to second the “The African National Congress’ response: “The ANC views the granting by Canada of a refugee status to South African citizen Brandon Huntley on the grounds that Africans would ‘persecute’ him, as racist,’ the party said in a statement.”

That’s rich. The sadistic atrocities described in this article could not possibly be a manifestation of seething racial hatred, now could they?

On the status of mercy in America I quote the American Renaissance: “there has been a trickle of South Africans applying for asylum in the United States on the grounds of racial persecution. Almost all have been deported.”

Update (Sept. 2): The Republicans, the Party of Lincoln, are least likely to feel sympathy for the plight of South African whites.

Here’s a relevant excerpt from my book, © Into the Cannibals’ Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa:

Ronald Reagan favored ‘constructive engagement’ with South Africa, together with a tough resistance to communist advances in the Third World. But political pressure, not least from the Republican majority, mounted for an increasingly punitive stance toward Pretoria. This entailed an ‘elaborate sanctions structure,’ disinvestment, and a prohibition on sharing intelligence with the South Africans.

For advocating ‘constructive engagement,’ members of his Republican party issued a coruscating attack on Reagan. Senator Lowell P. Weicker Jr., in particular, stated: ‘For this moment, at least, the President has become an irrelevancy to the ideals, heartfelt and spoken, of America.’ Republicans had slipped between the sheets with the fashionable left.

The radical Republicans like to forget how completely conservative Reagan was about forcing change in South Africa. Conservative and wise. There is not one Republican, bar Ron Paul, who is as weary of democracy and mass society as was Reagan.

Update II: The French Revolution Revived

Conservatism, Debt, Economy, Europe, Federal Reserve Bank, Founding Fathers, Inflation, Liberty, Political Philosophy

“Everything human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit,” is how the Brilliant Edmund Burke, supporter of the American colonists, described the illiberal, irreligious, intolerant French Revolution. In return, the punk Thomas Paine spat worthless venom at Burke for his devastating critique of that blood-drenched Revolution. Like contemporary Americans, Paine’s fealty was to the Jacobins, who, for his troubles, almost had him guillotined. The Rights of Man, in particular, is intended as a refutation of Edmund Burke’s critique. Naturally, it does nothing of the sort.

There is no affinity between the French and American founding ideas. And Paine’s proto-socialism—he advocated welfare financed by taxes—is quintessentially unAmerican. Yet Paine is beloved of Americans; of Burke I seldom hear. I intend to change that here on BAB.

Let me begin with an excerpt from Reflections on the Revolution in France, where Burke speaks about the proliferation of fiat money (“fictitious representation”). He does so a great deal in this magnificent tract. Burke hammering on about “current circulating credit,” “defiance of economical principles,” and “bankruptcy” could not be more germane in fin de siècle America:

“At present the state of their treasury sinks every day more and more in cash, and swells more and more in fictitious representation. When so little within or without is now found but paper, the representative not of opulence but of want, the creature not of credit but of power, they imagine that our flourishing state in England is owing to that bank-paper, and not the bank-paper to the flourishing condition of our commerce, to the solidity of our credit, and to the total exclusion of all idea of power from any part of the transaction. They forget that, in England, not one shilling of paper money of any description is received but of choice; that the whole has had its origin in cash actually deposited; and that it is convertible at pleasure, in an instant and without the smallest loss, into cash again. Our paper is of value in commerce, because in law it is of none. It is powerful on ‘Change, because in Westminster Hall it is impotent. In payment of a debt of twenty shillings, a creditor may refuse all the paper of the Bank of England. Nor is there amongst us a single public security, of any quality or nature whatsoever, that is enforced by authority. In fact, it might be easily shown that our paper wealth, instead of lessening the real coin, has a tendency to increase it; instead of being a substitute for money, it only facilitates its entry, its exit, and its circulation; that it is the symbol of prosperity, and not the badge of distress. Never was a scarcity of cash and an exuberance of paper a subject of complaint in this nation.”

[SNIP]

Readers: search the online volume, posted on Bartleby.com, and post comments excerpting your favorite tracts.

Update I (August 26): Prof. Dennis O’keeffe is the author of Burke, due out in October of this year.

Update II: Russell Kirk on Burke:

“Written at white heat, the “Reflections” burns with all the wrath and anguish of a prophet who saw the traditions of Christendom and the fabric of civil society dissolving before his eyes. Yet his words are suffused with a keenness of observation, the mark of a practical statesman. This book is polemic at its most magnificent, and one of the most influential political treatises in the history of the world.” (The Essential Russel Kirk, 2007, p. 144)

Updated: Cash-For-Clunkers Cry Babies (& The Tragedy Of The Commons)

Conservatism, Constitution, Economy, Political Economy, Private Property, Republicans, Socialism

I don’t feel sorry for the many car dealers who opted to take taxpayer funds, via the government, and lure equally greedy and gormless customers into junking perfectly good rides, purchasing new ones instead, and taking on more debt. I’m not in the least sorry for them, now that Uncle Sam has stiffed them, no Sirree.

Ridiculous too is the incredulity the auto dealers are feigning at being stiffed (if you can call it that) by their paymaster. “We just expect the same sort of courtesy and treatment from the federal government,” they whimper. Boohoo.

“Dealers across the state are owed more than $3.6 million, according to a dealers’ group which says that so far Uncle Sam has only written three checks totaling about $14,000.”

And:

“You simply can’t ask businesses to front $200,000, $300,000 for any period of time,’ Rep. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., told KRQE News 13. ‘These applications are simply not being processed fast enough.'”

You don’t say!

Equally stupid is the only deduction conservatives can muster: If the government can’t manage the CFC scam, how will it run the unconstitutional, confiscatory, immoral healthcare undertaking.

Of course, they omit the key phrases I just used—“scam, unconstitutional, confiscatory, immoral”—these are nowhere apparent in the debate; although Hitler is. A pretty—and pretty dumb—townhaller, taking her cues from Rush, paired health care and Hitler. Good job.)

There’s a lot conservatives can’t find words for: private property, for one. Principles is another. Nothing works in government because there is no private property. If you were given something to manage that you don’t own, have no stake in, on behalf of millions of people you don’t know, and who have no recourse against your mismanagement, except to whine like wimps—how well would you perform? Why are privately owned homes cared for and public housing trashed? Why don’t Republican and conservative bimbos and beaus of the media ever open a book and learn a few concepts.

Okay make it one crucial concept: the “Tragedy of the Commons.”

Update: To the comment below: The “calculation problem” means nothing to the lay reader. Private property means everything—or ought to. It should be understood to those who bandy about the “calculation problem” that the reason there cannot be rational allocation of resources in a state bureaucracy is because there is no private property. In a free market, the institute of private property ensures that we have prices. Prices are like a compass: pegged to supply and demand they ensure the correct allocation of resources. Conversely, in a nationalized system there are no prices because there is no private property. Absent such knowledge, misallocation of capital is inevitable.

Property precedes all else.