Category Archives: Democracy

UPDATE II: Why I Am So Sad (It’s not About Libya, Israel or 9/11)

Democracy, Elections, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, Human Accomplishment, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Israel, libertarianism, Middle East, Private Property, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry

The current column, now on WND, is “Why I Am So Sad.” An excerpt:

“I AM SO SAD—and it is not because a justifiably angry crowd of Libyans in Benghazi stormed an embassy that represents the brute force that destabilized their lives for decades to come.

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.”

To those who imagine the death of our diplomats in Libya turns on American free-speech, I say this: You have no right to deliver your disquisition in my living room. You have only the right to request permission to so do from this (armed) private-property owner.

By extension, you have no universal right to “free speech” on another man’s land. More so than to America’s diplomats—Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran.

I AM SO SAD—and it is not because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen a most inopportune time to insert himself into the middle of a rancorous American election season, and by so doing, make Mitt Romney’s foreign policy bellicosity look good to a war-weary people that can ill-afford it.

Now is not a good time, Bibi. Israel is a wedge issue in the coming election. If Israelis love Americans as Americans love Israel, they need to understand that, “The Titan is Tired”:

We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own—be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, wherever. And we don’t need our friends looking to us to do so.

I AM SO SAD—and it is not because another 9/11 has come and gone. The polls indicate that Americans want to move on; have moved on. Perhaps Americans have realized that it behooves our “overlords who art in DC” to keep them stuck in grief. By stunning us like cattle to the slaughter, the statists have been able to perpetrate in our name crimes way worse than 9/11.

I AM SO SAD because … ”

The complete column, “Why I Am So Sad,” can be read now on 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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UPDATE I: In answer to a Facebook reader, my saying that, “More so than to America’s diplomats – Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran” is not collectivist. It is, overall, correct, not least as a just sentiment intended to discourage interventionism.

Moreover, as a libertarian thinker, I choose to offer meaningful insights that comport with reality, rather than score reductive, pedantic points for the sake of theoretical purity. Tell the Arabs rioting that YOU are one of them b/c you, an American, bought the city their ancestors inhabited for centuries. I’m a private property absolutist, but the institution of private property has a cultural and historical dimension and context.

UPDATE II (Sept. 14): For describing a reality the US brought on itself with its Lawrence of Arabia complex, I am accused by a reader of “sympathizing with these al Qaeda people.”

For one, how in logic do you arrive at sympathy for savages from this:

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.”

Force breeds force; nation building where you have no business imposing your will—will results in what transpired in Libya. Fact: Those idiotic and arrogant interventions have a price. These are the people our diplomats were working with in a patronizing foolish way. I just heard Hillary say as much. This was, in part, a reaction to imposed authority. Yes, Hillary is trying to separate the attackers from her lovely rebels. Our reader is buying what Hillary is selling because it feeds into a storyline neocons simply can’t resist.

I suggest the reader mine the Archives here. I’ve documented this vehement hate for the US—beginning in our decade long expeditions to the region—that have seen the US remain over there indefinitely.

Americans do not understand the culture. The writer actually grew up in the region, so I have a better inkling. I hear Hillary declare that the ambassador was working with the “rebels” and that they had come to love him. Oh yes? That’s Lawrence-of- Arabia type romantic rot. And can you be that dumb? A smile and outward charm don’t mean they like you! But our navel-gazing, patronizing (unarmed) diplomats think that everyone should love the US despite its actions in the region, in general, and in Libya, in particular.

I suggest the reader reconsider the logic of his accusation. Calling reality as it is does not imply sympathy for the offending parties on my part. I suppose the reader would prefer that I fulminate irrationally like some of the neoconservative Jihadi and Sharia trackers whom he probably follows. (And who never even mention the possibility that we should, as true patriots, defend our own porous borders, before we violate and then presume to “defend” the boundaries of other nations.)

Sober Up About The Arab Spring

Democracy, Islam, Middle East, Reason

“Romanticism is man’s revolt against reason,” wrote the great classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises. Minds ravaged by the rot of romanticism were everywhere on display in mainstream media’s coverage of the “unfinished revolutions of the new Middle East.”

But not only mainstream. The same wishful thinking infected the garden-variety, left-libertarian column. To wit:

“A long-oppressed people finally rises up and braves tanks, secret police thugs, and the inertia of routine humiliation to say: ‘Enough’!”

Tunisia received a more sober analysis from the same source. Still, an analysis that uncouples cultural and religious factors from the events on the ground is bound to end in a disconnect. (“Ah, how the hell did we get from A to B?”)

The missing link: “Democracy was not sprung as Athena was from her father’s head.” Not every person who longs to breathe free is willing to let the other guy breathe (or walk around with a head on his shoulders, for that matter).

Sentimental gushing about THE ARAB UPRISING notwithstanding, those of us who’ve lived in the region have remained skeptical and disinterested, befitting the non-interventionist mindset.

John R. Bradley’s AFTER THE ARAB SPRING, reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, will sober up the dreamer in no time:

Consider Tunisia, a small, literate country where abortion is legal and sex education taught in a world-class education system, all thanks to Habib Bourguiba, who led the fight for independence from France and ruled “with an iron fist” for thirty years. The still-beloved Bourguiba held power by limiting political freedoms but granting social ones and raising middle-class living standards.
Here was a “Muslim authoritarian country” that got it right. It might have continued, had Bourguiba’s successor, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, been less greedy and arrogant, his wife less ostentatious and her family less thuggish and opportunistic. Tunisians objected, but what did they get? Bradley paints a sinister portrait of Rashid Ghannouchi, leader of the Islamist Ennahda party and head of Tunisia’s elected interim government. When Ghannouchi states “we want a system based on coalitions since only this will protect us from tyranny”, Bradley hears “a power sharing deal”, where liberals have some say in the economy while the Islamists “pursue [their] social agenda of Islamizing Tunisian society from below … [eradicating] the country’s secular inheritance [and] dragging Tunisia, chanting and ululating, back to the Middle Ages”. Far from empowering the people, the Jasmine Revolution was “the dumbest most selfdefeating uprising in history” and the Arab Spring a dismal failure that “socially and economically has put back countries like Tunisia, Yemen and Syria by decades”.

UPDATE II: Clint Eastwood Keeps it Local, Lively and … Liberty-Oriented

Democracy, Film, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Political Correctness, Private Property, Propaganda

If it were Yoko Onanism who jousted in public with a (symbolic) empty chair, the left would call it performance art.

Clint Eastwood is not a member of the pack animals on the left. For this reason, he has become the focus of terribly unkind cuts, following the “12-minute discourse” he delivered at the Republican National Convention.

In response to the rabid responses to his Empty Chair routine—and characteristically—Eastwood spoke first not to the country’s moron menagerie, but to a local, award-winning, libertarian-leaning newspaper, The Carmel Pine Cone.

Seceding from the palsied haters is classic Clint Eastwood.

More interesting than the rather quotidian details Eastwood furnished in the interview is the background of the TCPC’s editor. PAUL MILLER was clearly entrenched in the establishment (CBS and NBC), before breaking away to focus on “the [local] struggle between property rights and environmental regulations, the machinations of the California Coastal Commission, and on the epidemic of ADA lawsuits against small businesses.”

The vaunted vote Miller has exposed too for the farce it is “in a series of reports, ‘Voter Fraud: Simple as 1, 2, 3,’ [which] involved registering a fictitious person to vote. That story was featured on the CBS News program, ’60 Minutes,’ on November 1, 1998.”

Yes, there are a LOT of people here in the US who vote for a living—for dibs on the livelihood of those who work for a living—a topic CBS will not be exploring anytime soon, and certainly not before the election.

Anyhow, to hate Clint Eastwood is to hate the best of America. I begrudge Eastwood only two things: The first is “Invictus,” a “reverential biopic” about the sainted Nelson Mandela.

The second is that he made too few Dirty Harry films.

UPDATE: Readers can be fabulous. Writes “RandHaf” under “Top Comments,” following Yoko’s Onanism:

wtf is wrong with this cunt
RandHaf 2 weeks ago 27

Why, wasn’t she giving voice to modern-day ennui?

UPDATE I (Sept. 9): Gran Torino is hackneyed rubbish. I had never intended to watch it. It came on today, and I, well, sat. What schmaltz.

Eastwood is also guilty of making on-screen love to Meryl Creep, but that I most certainly did skip. (I never watch chick flicks.)

UPDATE II (9/10): Gran Torino is packed with PC cliches, which, quite stupidly, seem to confirm the un-PC, unmentioned truths, such as what do-or-die diversity does to neighborhoods and neighborliness.

And worse: No wonder older, white men can’t get work! Have all you older white men considered how the protagonist is portrayed in this film?! Why, he has to die for his sins before gaining the respect he deserved from the get-go.

The only realistic lesson once can take away from Gran Torino, a horridly PC effort, is that you don’t owe your relatives a dime if they treat you like dirt. I liked that message (because I’m generally a sucker).

UPDATED: Mindless Response To Mine Massacre (In South Africa)

Crime, Democracy, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Race, Racism, South-Africa, The West

“Mindless Response To Mine Massacre” in South Africa is the current column, now on RT. Here’s an excerpt:

“… You’d have had to experience the onrush of a riled-up African crowd to comprehend the terror among these frightened, likely incompetent, cops entrusted with defending mine operators and other staff still at the site. The last would have endured hours, if not days, of menacing chanting, singing, stomping, all amplified through loudspeakers.

Likewise, the besieged police at Sharpeville [in 1960] would have been petrified, as the ‘unarmed’ mob brandishing pangas, spears and sticks, advanced on their isolated outpost and breached the station’s fence, at the eponymous African township.

In both instances, the cops—white and black, then and now, right or wrong—fought to stay alive.

The media mob has already cut some slack to the black cops who were assailed at Marikana by 3000 miners. The frightened, outnumbered fellows at Sharpeville, who confronted 5,000 to 7,000 frenzied protesters: They’ve been condemned for eternity.

Sharpeville’s ‘villains’ had also attempted to control the crowds with tear gas and batons before that fateful shooting.

Why not ask 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis what a tribe armed with indigenous weapons is capable of doing to a despised, helpless ‘Other’?

Ask the same of some 4000 white South Africans farmers, who once helped feed the continent.

Or, closer to home, let an all-American lass, Amy Elizabeth Biehl, tell you how furious her white skin and good intentions made an ‘unarmed’ crowd, back in Cape Town of 1993.

Silly me. Question those Tutsis—whose blood turned the Kigara River red—all you like, but they will not reply. For they were torn asunder or macheteed by their longtime Hutu neighbors.

Ask the late Ms. Biehl about her ordeal, but she too has been silenced—stabbed and stoned, by an ‘unarmed’ mob with murder on its mind.

As to the 4000 (and counting) Boers—they’re dead and buried too. Interred in the land they had farmed for centuries; culled like springbok on a hunting safari by the same, disarming, inadvertent enemies of peace and prosperity.

In a world awash in floating fiat currency, demand for platinum will remain consistent and predictably high, even as production plummets in one of platinum’s prime producers, South Africa.

That’s guaranteed.

The miners of Marikana told Time magazine that they would not return to work until their wages were doubled (poor productivity be damned). Any scab who stepped in to do ‘their’ jobs would be eliminated. Or so they promised.

And that’s one other thing you can take to the bank. …”

Read the rest of “Mindless Response To Mine Massacre.” It’s now on RT.

Also available from WND or from Amazon is the prophetic “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid.”

Read the editorial reviews.

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.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY:

• At the WND and RT Comments Sections, and on Facebook.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” WND’s “Return To Reason” , and RT’s “Paleolibertarian Column.”

UPDATE (9/1/012): JD Hicks@Jdhickspi encapsulates the realities to which my column speaks (on Twitter):

“@IlanaMercer @RT_com Great perspective.most people have never experienced the existential,visceral threat of an agitated hostile mob.”