Category Archives: Democracy

UPDATE II: Clueless in South Africa With Mrs. Obama (Apartheid in Black & White)

Africa, Classical Liberalism, Communism, Crime, Democracy, History, Ilana Mercer, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Racism, South-Africa

The following is excerpted from “Clueless in South Africa With Mrs. Obama”:

First Lady Michelle Obama is touring this writer’s birthplace, South Africa. “[Nelson] Mandela’s legacy in the battle for South African democracy,” wrote one rapt reporter, who followed the FLOTUS around Johannesburg, “defines much of Obama’s visit.” It was only natural that “her next stop” would be “the Apartheid Museum, which chronicles the rise and fall of white rule.”

Apartheid was a contemptible caste system. Forgotten, however, in the recriminations over apartheid are the facts as they are documented in my just-released book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.”

…Had the sainted Mandela ascended to power in the 1960s instead of languishing on Robben Island and in Pollsmoor Prison [Mrs. Obama’s destinations in Cape Town], he would have nationalized the South African economy and banned private enterprise.” That’s what the ANC’s Charter called for in 1955. That’s what South Africa’s black-ruled neighbors to the north did.

…While black Africa and East Europe circled the drain due to communism, South Africa was experiencing an economic explosion, courtesy of the National Party’s relatively conservative economics. An oasis in the African desert, South Africa’s then gold-backed economy grew at an annual rate of six percent during the 1960s. …

More facts the Museum of Apartheid, graced by Mrs. Obama and the first daughters, will not be releasing, but I will, in “Clueless in South Africa With Mrs. Obama.”

AND IN “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.”

Hard-copies are available both from Amazon and from the Publisher.

Hurry: Publisher is currently offering free shipping, including to our readers in South Africa. To purchase, click on the “Buy From StairwayPress” Button.

Please note that you can purchase the lower-cost Kindle copy of “Into The Cannibal’s Pot,” without having to own a Kindle – all you need is a PC. This hyperlink describes the free Amazon software application for the PC. So you do not require a gadget to read the book on Kindle.

UPDATE I: The online museum Mrs. Obama will not have clicked to visit: Afrikaner Genocide Museum.

My book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is dedicated “To my Afrikaner brothers, betrayed.”

Will those Afrikaners stand up and support this effort on their behalf?

A note to the dessicated western academic who has no idea what living a precarious life is like: I generally don’t like to link to unauthenticated images. However, I document thousands of such grisly murders in my book. They are based on meticulously kept records, the sources for which are cited in the book. So what you see here is what’s in my book, only I appended names to each precious soul that departed in such agony.

UPDATE II (June 25): APARTHEID IN BLACK & WHITE. Derek: My book deals with the complexities of apartheid. Once you read it, your take on this aspect of my analysis would be especially edifying to Amazon review readers. It’s a complex topic and the book addresses this complexity (from the classical liberal perspective). A reader who has an interest in a particular aspect of the topic—in Derek’s case apartheid—is encouraged to read the book with a view to reviewing, on Amazon, how I dealt with a particular aspect of interest.

Don’t send reviews to me; post them to Amazon. Inside chatter does nothing to further debate or understanding.

The French Vs. The American Revolution

Ann Coulter, Conservatism, Democracy, Europe, History, Political Philosophy, Republicans

Ann Coulter’s point (in her book Demonic, apparently), as to the difference between the blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious French Revolution and the American Revolution is important, although neither new nor original. The “Revolution in France” is how the great Edmund Burke referred to the French Revolution. Burke believed that replacing monarchy with (a murderous) morobcracy was fundamentally, well, unFrench.

I have not seen Ms. Coulter’s citations. I don’t read her books (other than Treason, a book that did more than follow the tired theme, “liberals bad; conservatives good). Still, it would be interesting to see who Ms. Coulter cited in support of her recycled thesis.

Some of the sources I cite, in addition to Burke, are in “Thomas Paine: 18th Century Che Guevara” (October, 2010):

“… one rarely hears Burke mentioned in American public discourse, yet my countrymen know and love Thomas Paine, who sympathized with the Jacobins and spat venom at Burke for his devastating critique of the blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious ‘Revolution in France’ …
‘Even Thomas Jefferson seems not to have grasped at first how different the French and American Revolutions were. The confusion continues today. Paine belongs to the Che Guevara ascendancy, which admires nothing unless a good dose of murder is present. There are American scholars, however, like Peter Stanlis, and Francis Canavan, who appreciate the utter consistency of Burke’s outlook with the main tendencies of American civilization. Burke said the French Revolution was murderous and would have terrible consequences. He was borne out, not only by the bloody course of the Revolution itself, but by the Communist and Nazi menaces, which drew their inspiration from and surpassed in their wickedness, the pathology of Revolutionary France. The USA played a huge part in defeating these modern despotisms, and modern France very little.”

From ‘Syria’ With Love

BAB's A List, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Journalism, Media, Middle East, Nationhood, Propaganda, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

Like the PLO (Jenin) and the KLA (Kosovo), Americans are lying for their cause—fame and a seat on Oprah’s (concave) couch.

BY NEBOJSA MALIC

The most curious thing about the case of Amina Arraf is that it was exposed as a fraud.

For those unfamiliar with the story, a blogger purporting to be a young Syrian woman (“Gay Girl in Damascus”) has been posting for the last several months – by the strangest of coincidences, just as the anti-government protests in Syria got going. Then, on June 6, a post purportedly from the blogger’s cousin claimed she had been detained by the Syrian police, whereabouts and fate unknown. This caused an uproar on the blogs, Facebook, Twitter and whatnot, as the entire conflict in Syria came to be seen through the prism of “Amina Arraf,” a Damascene lesbian.

Except she was a fraud. “Amina Arraf” was actually an American man, (aptly) named Tom McMaster. All the photos featured on the blog were from his Syrian trip. The photo purporting to be Amina was of Jelena Lecic, a London-dwelling Serb. The speed with which the hoax unraveled was simply amazing.

McMaster’s “apology” on the blog rang hollow: “While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground.”

Well, all right then. It doesn’t matter that Tom just lied to the entire world for months. Or that he hasn’t given anyone any reason to believe he actually knows what is actually going on in Syria. It doesn’t matter – he FEELS strongly about it, so he’ll just make up some stuff and serve it with a side of gay rights. The audience will love it.
Both the mainstream media and the internet, suckered by McMaster’s sock-puppetry, are now making excuses. Well, Assad’s Syria is a repressive dictatorship, so there was no way to verify the story, and uh…

Horse-hockey! People didn’t bother challenging the Araf fiction because it was a fiction they wanted to believe. The story had it all – a plucky young woman, gay no less, going up against an “oppressive” regime Washington has hated for a long time. Even now, when the whole thing has been exposed as a massive fraud, most people take the underlying assumptions behind it in stride: that the government in Damascus is evil and needs to be overthrown. Why, they are sending tanks against its own people! (Psst: so did Clinton at Waco.)

It isn’t the first time something like this is happening. Back in 1998, a CBC reporter named Nancy Durham visited the Serbian province of Kosovo, covering a terrorist outfit known as the “Kosovo Liberation Army.” She was told a heart-rending story by a girl, Rajmonda, who claimed to have lost her sister to “Serbian aggressors.” The story aired in January 1999, just as the Western public opinion was mobilizing for a war on Serbia (then still called Yugoslavia). The war began in March and lasted till June, when NATO occupied Kosovo and let the KLA run wild. Returning to look in on Rajmonda, Durham found her family very much alive and well. She had been conned. The whole thing was a KLA trick. Anything for the cause. Yet even as Nancy Durham apologized for being duped and, in turn, duping her audience (the only reporter covering the Balkans that has done so), she still called Rajmonda’s town by its Albanian name, Skenderaj (instead of Srbica). It was a reflection of the “reality” the KLA was creating with the help of NATO troops and the mosaic of lies such as Rajmonda’s story, which they’d fed to all the Western reporters.

Jack Kelley, a USA Today reporter, was busted in 2004 for making up many of his stories. He also covered the conflict in Yugoslavia, and his story of a war diary “proving” Serb atrocities fell firmly into the fake category. Interestingly enough, the source Kelley quoted, “humanitarian activist” Natasa Kandic, weaseled out of the entire affair claiming that, while she personally hadn’t seen the diary in question, surely the claim of atrocities contained therein was true. You see, Kandic makes a pretty penny spinning tall tales of Serbian atrocities, and even gets access to the New York Times editorial pages. The fact that she’d fed Kelley a line of bull never hurt her reputation – because the publishers of her drivel wanted and needed her atrocity porn to be true.

Last, but not least, I vividly remember this sort of behavior during the Bosnian War (1992-1995). During the last year of the war, I worked with a host of Western journalists covering the war from Sarajevo, where I used to live. As their interpreter, I accompanied them to interviews and also translated the local media coverage. Imagine my surprise a year later, when I came across some of their archived articles while I was studying in the US (thanks to the wonders of computerized university libraries, then in infancy) and discovered a substantially different account of what had taken place.

We saw the same things, heard the same words, yet they reported something quite unlike what I had seen and heard. They reported what the audiences back home wanted to hear: vicious villains and virtuous victims, black hats and white hats, and in the end a noble West riding to the rescue, too late for many but better late than never. Some went on to become celebrities, others got into positions of power from which to start more “humanitarian” crusades. And their myth about the Bosnian War still stands, despite the steady trickle of revelations about its fictional character.

In 2004, an unnamed Bush administration official (later said to have been Karl Rove), contemptuously dismissed NY Times reporter Ron Suskind as someone belonging to the “reality-based community“:

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

While it sounds like unbelievable hubris, I don’t doubt for a moment that Rove (if that was indeed him) fully believed this then, or that he still does. It helps explain the entire Bush presidency, but also that of his successor. It doesn’t matter what actually goes on, only what people believe is going on. Everything becomes contingent on perception management. It’s Orwellian. It’s Hollywood. It’s the world our rules live in, and most of us go along.

To borrow a famous line from an Aaron Sorkin play, we can’t handle the truth. We want the lies, because the lies are what we’ve been conditioned to expect and digest. And our rulers believe they can will the world to conform to their desires. They were proven wrong over a thousand years ago, by a Viking named Knud who shamed his fawning courtiers by pretending to believe their platitudes and trying to command the tide.

Knud went on to conquer England. Modern-day emperor wannabes can’t even conquer Afghanistan, and not for the lack of trying. But in the minds of their subjects and their own, they are all-powerful, invincible and unquestionable, even as the tide is coming.

****
Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.

UPDATE IV: Don’t Believe Michelle Obama (“Respec”)

Affirmative Action, America, Christianity, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, History, Political Correctness, Political Philosophy, South-Africa

In time for the release of my new book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa,” this week’s WND column explains what the book is about and why it is an important read at this juncture in our history. Here’s an excerpt from “Don’t Believe Michelle Obama”:

“Michelle Obama will travel to South Africa later this month. The First Lady’s trip coincides with the release of my new book, ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.’ And not a moment too soon. (Read the Preface on VDARE.COM.) ‘Into The Cannibal’s Pot’s’ will dispel any myths Michelle Obama is likely to help perpetuate about this writer’s former homeland.

So why is this book so very crucial at this juncture in our history? Simply this: It is essential that we curb the naïve enthusiasm among American elites, and those they’ve gulled, for radical, imposed, top-down transformations of relatively stable, if imperfect, societies, including their own. As the example of South Africa demonstrates, a highly developed Western society can be dismantled with relative ease. In South Africa, this deconstruction has come about in the wake of an almost overnight shift in the majority/minority power structure. In the U.S., a slower, more incremental, but equally detrimental, transformation is underway. …

America’s intellectual ‘Idiocracy’—the president and the “Untamed Ids” of the media, liberal, libertarian, and conservative—are egging on revolution in the Middle East. Post-apartheid South Africa should serve to remind this retinue of romantics that stable societies, however imperfect, are fragile. They can, and will, crumble in culturally inhospitable climes. For better or for worse, societies are built slowly from the soil up, not from the sky down. And by people, not by political decree. …”

The complete column is “Don’t Believe Michelle Obama.”

Purchase “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” from Amazon or from the Publisher (who ships free) by clicking on the “Buy” Button of your choice.

UPDATE I (June 10): Ruth, I am against forced integration. I am for free association, as intended by the founded of this great country, and as is egregiously violated by the Civil Rights Act. If you don’t want to hire or serve a Jew (that’s me) because you have misgivings about Jews qua Jews; I support your natural right as a property owner to associate or dissociate at will.

UPDATE II: It’s interesting how the FB thread on WND was hijacked by one jackass’s complaint, instead of being a forum to discuss the substance of the book. Then two people fell into each others’ pixelated arms had a love fest, giving into sheer vanity and sanctimony. America’s reality-show mentality! For a jackass who hates writers who use words he doesn’t know (my favorite kind of writers), the guy sure spent a lot of time dismissing and dissing me. I think I used a term in the column I learned from the editor of my book (Robert Stove): “Untamed Id.” That’s what’s on display here.

I wrote the book b/c people are dying. But it’s become the topic of reality-show like kibitzing on WND’s facebook thread. There’s the Yiddish my Afrikaner reader Mr. Juann Strauss likes. Sorry: It came to me. My late grandpa’s influence. In the USA you have to apologize for your personal idiosyncrasies; for not fitting a mold.

My complete comment posted @WND (visible if you are on Facebook), in response to the complaint, is this: Imagine having to apologize for using the English to the best of one’s ability! Our founding fathers forewarned against an “Idiocracy” rising. “If a nation expects to be …ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” That genius, Thomas Jefferson, also insisted that liberty would be “a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed and enlightened to a certain degree.” That means not being angered by what you don’t know. (A function of a fragile ego.) For the benefit of the reader who heaps scorn on me for failing to mirror his vocabulary and mindset, I recommend avoiding “The Federalist”- and “Anti-Federalist Papers.” Anything our founders wrote is sure to drive him and his ilk to distraction. May I also suggest reaching for a dictionary, or for Google, instead of the ad hominem? I do the first whenever I read words I don’t know, which is often.

UPDATE III: Rob Stove, who posted below, always reserves his funniest comments to email. I’m sorry, Maestro, I’m outing you:

It’s weird. When I was an undergraduate I was perpetually being rebuked by my lecturers because they found my prose “superficial”. Now I’m being rebuked by these lecturers’ sons and daughters, who find my prose “elitist”. Yet it has been the same sort of prose which I’ve written all along!
Back when lecturers were denouncing my stuff as “superficial”, I was getting quite a few articles published in The Canberra Times, The Weekend Australian, and suchlike recognizably serious newspapers, earning fairly substantial sums as a consequence. The 1980s was a veritable paradise for a literate freelancer in this country. Now that I’m officially “elitist”, I can’t even land an article in The Pig-Breeder’s Gazette.
“Elitist” now gets routinely applied in Australia to any remark above the intellectual level of Britney Spears’s navel-lint.

UPDATE IV (June 11): Hey Roger, dodo, if you can figure it out, please post your impressions of the book to Amazon. Unlike jackass, you will read it and offer a comment on the substance of da book, good or bad, or both. I began reading it to refresh my memory in anticipation of interviews. It’s pretty easy sailing. Even my stats have been, as I like to say, de-Sailerized. I.e., made simple, unlike Steve Sailer’s statistics (which are fit for the smarter cohort), so that jackasses can grasp. Oh, stay tuned: sometime soon I will post a column about crappy writing. A few lessons I learned in journalism school in the country of da Hebes where I be getting some of my learning. The column I wrote yesterday on WND is wicked good, according to those criteria. I will compare it with a crap piece of writing, which the likes of Jackass will find heavenly.

Respec to my peeps.