Category Archives: English

ESSAY (News Updated 6/14/024): The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?

English, Ethics, Foreign Policy, GAZA, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Judaism & Jews, Literature, Middle East, Military, Morality, Natural Law, War

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Without a doubt, The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is the voice of the Jewish-Israeli commonwealth ~ilana

NEW ESSAY IS “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?” It was a main feature on The Unz Review. A terser version, which I excerpt here, is “What Does the War in Gaza Show Us About Israeli Society?” on The New American, as well as “Sad To Say, but, By the Numbers, Israeli Society Is Systemically Sociopathic” on LewRockwell.com. Power & Market, at Mises.org, featured “Is Israeli Society as Sick as the Regime?” June 1.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2024/05/jewish-state-genocidal-israeli-society-sick/

Excerpt: 

…. That the Jewish State is genocidal is not in dispute. But, what of Israeli society? Is it sick, too? What of the Israeli anti-government protesters now flooding the streets of metropolitan Israel? How do they feel about the incessant, industrial-scale campaign of slaughter and starvation in Gaza, north, center and south?

They don’t.

In desperate search for a universal humanity—a transcendent moral sensibility—among the mass of Israelis protesting the State; I scoured many transcripts over seven months. I sat through volumes of video footage, searching as I was for mention, by Israeli protesters, of the war of extermination being waged in their name, on their Gazan neighbors. I found none.

Much to my astonishment, I failed to come across a single Israeli protester who cried for anyone but himself, his kin and countrymen, and their hostages. Israelis appear oblivious to the unutterable, irreversible, irremediable ruin adjacent.

Again: I found no transcendent humanity among Israeli protesters; no allusion to the universal moral order to which international humanitarian law, the natural law and the Sixth Commandment give expression. I found only endless iterations among Jewish-Israelis of their sectarian interests.

For their part, protesters merely want regime change. They saddle Netanyahu solely with the responsibility for hostages entombed in Gaza, although, Benny Gantz (National Unity Party), ostensible rival to Bibi Netanyahu (Likud), and other War Cabinet members, are philosophically as one (Ganz had boasted, in 2014, that he would “send parts of Gaza back to the Stone Age”). With respect to the holocaustal war waged on Gaza, and spreading to the West Bank, there is no chasm between these and other squalid Jewish supremacists who make up “Israel’s wartime leadership.”

If you doubt my findings with respect to the Israeli protesters, note the May 11 droning address of protester Na’ama Weinberg, who demanded a change of government. Weinberg condemned the invasion of Rafah and a lack of a political strategy as perils to both hostage- and national survival. She lamented the “unspeakable torture” faced by the hostages. When Weinberg mentioned “evacuees neglected,” I lit up. Nine-hundred thousand Palestinians have been displaced from Rafah in the last two weeks. Forty percent of Gaza’s population. My hope was fleeting. It soon transpired that Weinberg meant citizens of Israeli border communities evacuated. That was the extent of Weinberg’s sympathies for the “slaughter house of civilians” down the road. Hers was nothing but a lower-order sectarian sensibility.

The grim spareness of Israeli protester sentiment has been widely noticed.

Writing for Foreign Policy, an American mainstream magazine, Mairav Zonszein, scholar with the International Crisis Group, observes the following:

‘The thousands of Israelis who are once again turning out to march in the streets are not protesting the war. Except for a tiny handful of Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians, they are not calling for a cease-fire or an end to the war—or for peace. They are not protesting Israel’s killing of unprecedented numbers of Palestinians in Gaza or its restrictions on humanitarian aid that have led to mass starvation. (Some right-wing Israelis even go further by actively blocking aid from entering the strip.) They are certainly not invoking the need to end military occupation, now in its 57th year. They are primarily protesting Netanyahu’s refusal to step down and what they see as his reluctance to seal a hostage deal.’

Public incitement continues apace. Genocidal statements saturate Israeli society. The “lovely” Itamar Ben Gvir has provided an update to his repertoire, the kind chronicled so well by the South Africans (this one included). On May 14, to the roar of the crowd, Israel’s national security minister urged anew that Palestinians be voluntarily encouraged to emigrate (as if anything that has befallen the Palestinians of Gaza, since October 7, has been “voluntary”). He was speaking at a settler rally on the northern border of Gaza, in which thousands of yahoos watched the “fireworks” on display over Gaza, and cheered for looting the land of the dead and dying there.

“It’s the media’s fault,” you’ll protest. “Israelis, like Americans, are merely brainwashed by their media.”

Inarguably, Israeli media—from Arutz 7, to Channel 12 (“[Gazans need] to die ‘hard and agonizing deaths’), to Israel Today, to Now 14 (“We will slaughter you and your supporters”), and the lowbrow, sub-intelligent vulgarians of i24—are a self-obsessed, energetic Idiocracy.

These media feature excitable sorts, volubly imparting their atavistic, primitive tribalism in ugly, anglicized, Pidgin Hebrew. And, each one of these specimen always has a “teoria”: a theory.

Naveh Dromi is a lot more appealing in visage and voice than i24’s anchor Benita Levin, a harsh and vinegary South African Kugel. Dromi is columnist for a Ha’aretz, the most highbrow of Israel’s (center-left) dailies. Ha’aretz once had intellectual ballast. In her impoverished Hebrew, Dromi has tweeted about her particular “teoria”: “a second Nakba” is a coming. Elsewhere she has rasped a-mile-a-minute about “the Palestinians as a redundant group.” Nothing crimsons her lovely cheeks.

Such statements of Jewish supremacy pervade Jewish-Israeli media. But, no; it’s not the Israeli media’s fault. The closing of the Israeli mind is entirely voluntary.

According to a paper from Oxford Scholarship Online, the “media landscape in Israel” evinces “healthy competition” and declining concentration. “[C]alculated on a per-capita basis,” “the number of media voices in Israel,” overall, “is near the top of the countries investigated.”

Israel has a robust, and privately owned media. These media cater to the Israeli public, which has a filial stake in lionizing the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), in which each and every son and daughter serve. For this reason, avers Ha’aretz’s Gideon Levi, in his many YouTube television interviews, the military is the country’s golden calf.

Mainstream public opinion, Levi insists, molds the media, not the obverse.

Levi attests that right-wing and left-wing media are as one when it comes to the subject of the IDF and the Palestinian People. And in this, Israeli media reflect mainstream public opinion. It is the public that wishes to see nothing of the suffering in Gaza, and takes care never to disparage or doubt the IDF. For their part, military journalists are no more than embeds, in bed with the military.

At least until now, Israelis have been largely indifferent to their army’s orgiastic, indiscriminate bloodletting in Gaza. Most were merely demanding a return of their hostages, and the continuance of the assault on Gazans, punctured by periodic cease fires.

So, is Jewish-Israeli society sick, too?

When “88 percent of Jewish-Israeli interviewees” give “a positive assessment of the performance of the IDF in Gaza until now” (Tamar Hermann, “War in Gaza Survey 9,” Israel Democracy Institute, January 24, 2024), and “[a]n absolute majority (88%) also justifies the scope of casualties on the Palestinian side”; (Gershon H. Gordon, The Peace Index, January 2024, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tel Aviv University)—it is fair to conclude that the diabolical IDF is, for the most, the voice of the Jewish-Israeli commonwealth.

Consider: By January’s end, the Gaza Strip had, by and large, already been rendered uninhabitable, a moonscape. Nevertheless, 51 percent of Jewish-Israelis said they believed the IDF was using an appropriate amount (51%) or not enough force (43%) in Gaza. (Source: Jerusalem Post staff, “Jewish Israelis believe IDF is using appropriate force in Gaza,” January 26, 2024.)

Note: Polled opinion was not split between Israelis for genocide and Israelis against it. Rather, the division in Israeli society appeared to be between Jewish-Israelis for current levels of genocide versus those for greater industry in what were already industrial-levels and methods of murder.

Attitudes in Israel have only hardened since: By mid-February, 58 percent of this Jewish cohort was grumbling that not enough force had been deployed to date; and 68 percent did “not support the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza.” (Jerusalem Post Staff, “Majority of Jewish Israelis opposed to demilitarized Palestinian state,” February 21, 2024.)

Scrap the “hardened” verb. Attitudes in Jewish Israel have not merely hardened, but bear the hallmark of societal sociopathy.

When asked, in particular, “to what extent should Israel take into consideration the suffering of the Palestinian population when planning the continuation of the fighting there,” Jewish-Israelis sampled have remained consistent through the months of the onslaught on Gaza, from late in October of 2023 to late in March of 2024. The Israel Democracy Institute, a polling organization, found that,

‘[D]espite the progress of the war in Gaza and the harsh criticism of Israel from the international community regarding the harm inflicted on the Palestinian population, there remains a very large majority of the Jewish public who think that Israel should not take into account the suffering of Palestinian civilians in planning the continuation of the fighting. By contrast, a similar majority of the Arab public in Israel take the opposite view, and think this suffering should be given due consideration.’ (Tamar Hermann, Yaron Kaplan, Dr. Lior Yohanani, “War in Gaza Survey 13,” Israel Democracy Institute, March 26, 2024.)

Large majorities of the Israeli Center (71 percent) and on the Right (90 percent) say that “Israel should only take into account the suffering of the Palestinian population to a small extent or should not do so at all.”

Let us, nevertheless, end this canvas with the “good” news: On the “bleeding heart” Israeli Left; “only” (I’m being cynical) 47 percent of a sample “think that Israel should not take into consideration the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza or should do so only to a small extent, while 50 percent think it should consider their plight to a fairly large or very large extent.” (Ibid.)

In other words, the general run of the Jewish-Israeli Left tends to think that the plight of Gazans should be considered, but not necessarily ended.

On the facts, and, as I have had to, sadly, show here, both the Israeli state and civil society are driven by Jewish supremacy, the kind that sees little to no value in Palestinian lives and aspirations.

LIBERTARIAN METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM

Commensurate with the surveys shared above, and as many have quite reasonably concluded, Jewish-Israeli civil society is sick, too. As uncomfortable as it is for the libertarian methodological individualist; the facts dictate, alas, that, on the matter of the mass murder of the Palestinians of Gaza; Jewish-Israeli society does not stand apart from the Jewish State.

But if such generalizations can be made; don’t they betray the libertarian fidelity to methodological individualism?

No. Stating statistical verities does not violate methodological individualism.

Provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, generalizations are not incorrect. To the contrary: Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from representative samples.

Human action is governed by probabilities and generalities. People make prudent personal and economic decisions in their daily lives as to where scarce and precious resources—one’s life and property—are best invested. They do so based on reliable, aggregated data or on shared common-sense assessments.

When broad statements and assessments about aggregate group characteristic are both true and crucial to our understanding; libertarian methodological individualists needn’t demand that these be expunged from our formulations.

So, while we must take great care as libertarian methodological individualists to separate state from society, and each member of society from the next—treating each individual on his or her merit in our dealings—generalizations about certain group characteristics are, in aggregate, valid. They do not in any way flout the imperative to treat each and every individual as an individual.

We risk disarming ourselves of the firearm of truth, analytical and empirical, if we discard the aggregate group findings surveyed so far.

With shuddering clarity, I can say then, that, in symbiosis, Israel—state, society—and its Anglo-European sponsors share the blame for the sacking of Gaza. Israelis, by and large, have become a solipsistic sorority of Jewish supremacists. Palestinians have paid a terrible price for this systemic Israeli sociopathy. …

 ….THE REST. NEW ESSAY, “The Jewish State Is Genocidal, But Is Israeli Society Sick, Too?, is a main feature on The Unz Review. “What Does the War in Gaza Show Us About Israeli Society?” is on The New American, as well as “Sad To Say, but, By the Numbers, Israeli Society Is Systemically Sociopathic” on LewRockwell.com.

https://www.ilanamercer.com/2024/05/jewish-state-genocidal-israeli-society-sick/

UPDATE (5/24): How diabolical is this American-English speaking IDF soldier? How emblematic!

UPDATE 5/26: Sated settlers and offspring, a fat family, instruct their young on how to help starve other human beings. Refined spirituality.

This IDF soldier, fluid and forthcoming in a telephone interview, so eager to talk about his exploits in Gaza—he might wear fatigues, but he does not camouflage the wanton murder in his heart. He is what brave men would call a coward.

Updated 5/27 Memorial Day: A Poem

“The Final City.” A Poem by Samer Abu Hawwash, translated by Huda Fakhreddine
May 24, 2024:

The Final City
(to the soul of my soul)

In the ruins of this final city,
in this night of nights,
by your small bed
torn apart by monsters,
I stand naked,
stripped of myself
and of everything.

With these scarce hands I cradle you.
I embrace you and lift you up,
as far as my heart can reach.
How light you are now, my little one,
and how heavy this air.
How heavy this body
that once belonged to you.

I carry you,
but is this really you?
Can a man carry his soul
as a dead man carries his blood-stained shirt?
Is a man born from his own tears
as a tree is born from its leaves?
Is a grandfather born with his granddaughter
as a jasmine blossom is born with its scent?

I carry you, my little one,
as if I were carrying the stones,
the souls, the blood, the screams,
the shadows, the days, ….

….Complete poem, here, at the Literary Hub.

Updated 5/29: I have become an admirer of the Electronic Intifada led by Ali Abunimah, Nora Barrows-Friedman and their remarkable team.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheElectronicIntifada

EI’s quiet tone feels second nature. Their personalities shine.

This is their latest stream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlfFtT0WdnE   A physician, Tarek Loubani, head of Glia solidarity physicians, gives one the most eloquent renderings of the acts of a “genocidal, maniacal army in Gaza.”  “When I was in Ukraine,” says Dr. Loubani, who had brought his medical team to that battle theater, “I never worried that the Russians would bomb me.” “The Russians,” he attested, absolutely obey the imperative to respect medical teams. In Gaza, all medical teams are forfeit, targets for extermination by the IDF, have been targets for extermination.

Dr. Loubani also spoke to the imperative NOT to forgive those who have done nothing, said nothing, until now. Never forgive, never forget. Ali Abunimah chimed in and made a brilliant point:

People often reflect on history’s tragedies and their lessons. Said Ali, and I paraphrase: If you did nothing and said nothing during the genocide in Gaza, we KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU WOULD HAVE DONE DURING THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST. Absolutely nothing.

The august Mr. Tucker Carlson is a conservative with enormous political sway in powerful political precincts and among the people. He is purported to have persuaded former President Trump, in 2019, to lay off Syria. His X posts (which I have not followed since his near-complete silence on Gaza) receive tens of millions of impressions each.

Mr. Carlson is independent, untethered to a paying employer. He comes from money and, to his great credit, has made, some say, hundreds of millions more. Many months into the genocide in Gaza, Tucker lent his platform to a representative of the Christians of Palestine. Prior to that, came a quick Carlson quip about war crimes. Israel’s. Nothing much else of monumental significance.

To this, Mr. Carlson has since added some disinterested mumbling as to there being no US national interest in Gaza.

Never forgive, said Dr. Loubani.

Update (6/4/024) :

Via OCHA, June 3, 2024

Israeli bombardment from the air, land, and sea continues to be reported across much of the Gaza Strip, resulting in further civilian casualties, displacement, and destruction of houses and other civilian infrastructure. Ground incursions and heavy fighting also continue to be reported, particularly in Rafah. Intensified hostilities following the issuance of evacuation orders and the Israeli military operation in Rafah have so far forced the displacement of about one million people, amid a decline in the entry of humanitarian aid.
Between the afternoons of 31 May and 3 June, according to MoH in Gaza, 195 Palestinians were killed and 720 were injured, including 40 killed and 150 injured in the past 24 hours. Between 7 October 2023 and 3 June 2024, at least 36,479 Palestinians were killed and 82,777 were injured in Gaza, according to MoH in Gaza.

Treatment of more than 3,000 children suffering from acute malnutrition is at risk of interruption if nutrition supplies are not distributed, UNICEF warns.
No bakeries are currently functional in Rafah and public health concerns are beyond crisis levels in Khan Younis and Deir al Balah, according to the World Food Programme.
The Emergency Committee for North Gaza municipalities declared Jabalya town, Jabalya Refugee Camp, Beit Lahya and Beit Hanoun as “disaster zones.” Humanitarian space continues to further shrink, report UNRWA and the Protection Cluster.

Via 972: I would not wish to ever again associate with Israelis ever after the genocide.

Many people, especially young Palestinians, see the bloody history of the conflict and ask themselves, “How can we live with them after all they’ve done to us?” This is a sentiment that is almost certainly growing in the face of the current onslaught. (“Can Palestinians imagine a future with Israelis after this war?”)

Update 6/14/024: Extensive excerpt of “Sad To Say, but, By the Numbers, Israeli Society Is Systemically Sociopathic” on LewRockwell.com  by Kevin MacDonald, in his “The Extreme Hyper-Ethnocentrism of Jews on Display in Israeli Attitudes Toward the Gaza War,” May 28, 2024.

The Gatwick Archipelago: Savagery On-The-Thames

Britain, English, Etiquette, Europe, Homeland Security, Racism, Regulation, The State, The West

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In civilized Singapore, as opposed to savage Gatwick, ‘any airport staffer who even hinted at attempting such behavior towards the general public would incur serious jail time at best, and a good hearty caning at worst’

My Australian book editor, for whose integrity I can vouch, reports as follows from the freakorama war zone of London airport “security”:

After 20 years of enduring the chief “entertainment” spectacle offered at America’s biggest international airports – namely, the enthusiasm with which certain uniformed security guards molest as many female passengers as they can while still avoiding formal charges of sexual assault – I thought that I was pretty much inured to anything that modern airport culture could inflict upon hapless travelers. I was wrong.

Why was I wrong? Because until this morning, I had never been to Gatwick in London.

The difference between even the worst TSA behavior stateside, and on the other hand what goes on at Gatwick, is like the difference between a teenage street punk and an Obergruppenführer. No, Gatwick’s uniformed thugs don’t inflict their sexual advances on anyone. And no, unlike the original Obergruppenführers, they don’t hate Jews more than they hate anyone else. They prefer to spend most of their working hours screaming apoplectically, in some lunatic patois that bears scarcely any relation to intelligible English.

I had to chaperone through Gatwick an octogenarian female acquaintance with intermittent dementia. Naturally I did not expect that anything remotely resembling actual politeness would be shown to her or me. I merely expected that I would be able to comprehend the putative English of the bellowing bullies who snatched away our passports without the smallest suggestion of saying “please”, since after all they were too busy shoving and pushing my octogenarian companion from wheelchair to trolley (she is also too lame to walk more than a few steps unaided).

Curiously enough, each time I asked them a perfectly civil question about how long they planned on delaying our exit from the airport, and why they were treating us – along with numerous other passengers – like common criminals, their bellowing abruptly stopped. Perhaps they had been suddenly stricken with deafness. An understandable bodily reaction to hearing their own screeching voices over, presumably, decades. (They were not, shall we say, characterized by obvious youthfulness.)

Similar silences greeted my polite requests for the location of the airport’s Uber access. I formed the conviction that at present-day Gatwick, Uber is the equivalent of a clandestine abortion clinic in Ireland circa 1954. All the locals know about it, but not one will admit to it, although the Hibernian analogy might well break down when one remembers that at least the Irish – unlike the People’s Republic of Gatwick’s commissars – can speak English.

Altogether it took a scarcely credible two and a half hours between the time we disembarked at Gatwick (following a 23-hour flight from Melbourne) and the time that we finally found an Uber driver prepared to transport my octogenarian companion to her London hotel. It should go without saying that several of the most obviously insolent staffers wore jackets emblazoned with the words “Happy to Help.”

Why must this petty thuggery against complete and harmless strangers occur at all? Doubtless people like my companion and myself are, admittedly, just cradle-to-grave losers in the wider scheme of things.

Yet among the millions of Gatwick arrivals being subjected to Third World ululations are, it is safe to assume, foreign businesspeople lured to England by modish cant about post-Brexit London being “Singapore-on-the-Thames.” What possible self-interest can be served by treating these foreign businesspeople as if they smelled like Boris Johnson’s vomit?

Earth to Gatwickians: you can gargle all you like about post-Brexit London being “Singapore-on-the-Thames.” But you need to remember that in the actual Singapore, any airport staffer who even hinted at attempting such behavior towards the general public would incur serious jail time at best, and a good hearty caning at worst.

For my part, my own mind is made up. Never, once my current visit to the British capital is over, will I dream of setting foot in London again.

I note, incidentally, that Paris’s population is comparable to London’s. And heaven knows, France’s recent experiences of terrorism have been in every respect more horrible.

But not a hint of Gatwick-style insolence did I detect last February at Paris’s Charles De Gaulle Airport. There, every staffer treated me with unfailing civility and decency, although no-one could claim that my spoken French was more than adequate.

Are not Parisian airport officials sometimes rude, impatient, brusque? Indeed yes: when they want to be. Especially when they need to interrogate certain members of the flying population, whom the officials have good reason to suspect of unhealthy interest in Bataclan renovating.

What I have never seen the slightest suggestion of, in Paris, is the state of utterly unconscious,  generalized expectoration against the human race (I mean expectoration in the most literal, salivary sense) which is now the standard Gatwick default mode. France is a nation of realists, who perceive what disastrous public relations it would be if they gave all airport jobs to howling hoodlums.

One acknowledgment of contrition, nevertheless, I do owe regarding Gatwick. In a flash of impatience, when recounting the matter to a friend, I likened Gatwick to a zoo. This comparison was a disgusting libel on the animal kingdom, to which I hereby extend profuse apologies.

A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson, Author of The Declaration, And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition

Classical Liberalism, English, Founding Fathers, Government, History, Political Philosophy

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‘Let us … toast Thomas Jefferson—and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that sired and inspired him’—ILANA MERCER, July 4, 2019

The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate—has been mocked out of meaning.

To be fair to the liberal Establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked “through the night” to set the full text on “a handsome folio sheet,” recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in Liberty And Freedom. And President (of the Continental Congress) John Hancock urged that the “people be universally informed.”

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it “an expression of the American Mind.” An examination of Jefferson‘s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the mind of the collective mentality of the D.C. establishment “American” in any meaningful way. For the Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig—an American Whig whose roots were in the English Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

By “all men are created equal,” Jefferson, who also wrote in praise of a “Natural Aristocracy,” did not imply that all men were similarly endowed. Or that they were entitled to healthcare, education, amnesty, and a decent wage, à la Obama.

Rather, Jefferson was affirming the natural right of “all men” to be secure in their enjoyment of their “life, liberty and possessions.”

This is the very philosophy Hillary Clinton explicitly disavowed during one of the mindless presidential debates of 2007. Asked by a YouTubester to define “liberal,” Hillary revealed she knew full-well that the word originally denoted the classical liberalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But she then settled on “progressive” as the appropriate label for her Fabian socialist plank.

Contra Clinton, as David N. Mayer explains in The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson, colonial Americans were steeped in the writings of English Whigs—John Locke, Algernon Sidney, Paul Rapin, Thomas Gordon and others. The essence of this “pattern of ideas and attitudes,” almost completely lost today, was a view of government as an inherent threat to liberty and the necessity for eternal vigilance.

Jefferson, in particular, was adamant about the imperative “to be watchful of those in power,” a watchfulness another Whig philosopher explained thus: “Considering what sort of Creature Man is, it is scarce possible to put him under too many Restraints, when he is possessed of great Power.”

“As Jefferson saw it,” expounds Mayer, “the Whig, zealously guarding liberty, was suspicious of the use of government power,” and assumed “not only that government power was inherently dangerous to individual liberty but also that, as Jefferson put it, ‘the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.’”

For this reason, the philosophy of government that Jefferson articulated in the Declaration radically shifted sovereignty from parliament to the people.

But Jefferson‘s muse for the “American Mind” is even older.

The Whig tradition is undeniably Anglo-Saxon. Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England‘s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights. As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated.

Philosophical purist that he was, moreover, Jefferson considered the Norman Conquest to have tainted this English tradition with the taint of feudalism. “To the Whig historian,” writes Mayer, “the whole of English constitutional history since the Conquest was the story of a perpetual claim kept up by the English nation for a restoration of Saxon laws and the ancient rights guaranteed by those laws.”

If Jefferson begrudged the malign influence of the Normans on the natural law he cherished, imagine how he’d view our contemporary cultural conquistadors from the South, whose customs preclude natural rights and natural reason!

Naturally, Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.

The settlers spilt their own blood “in acquiring lands for their settlement,” he wrote with pride in A Summary View of the Rights of British America. “For themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and for themselves alone they have right to hold.” Thus they were “entitled to govern those lands and themselves.”

And, notwithstanding the claims of the multicultural noise machine, the Declaration was as mono-cultural as its author.

Let us, then, toast Thomas Jefferson—and the Anglo-Saxon tradition that sired and inspired him.

©2019 ILANA MERCER
Originally: “A July Fourth Toast To Thomas Jefferson—And The Declaration,” by Ilana Mercer, July 4, 2019

‘The Magus’ By John Fowles: A Sublime Work of Art

Aesthetics, Art, English, History, Literature, The West, War

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It is remarkable how many individuals who cannot write, much less conjugate the verb to “spit” (past tense “spat,” in proper English), have attempted to review John Fowles’s The Magus.

Nick Dybek—Dybbuk, the possessed, is a better name for him—for example. No idea who he is but his grubby English alone disqualifies him from even glancing at this work.

I tried to grapple with The Magus (published in 1965, rev. ed. 1977) when barely into my twenties. I had just left Israel having returned to South Africa, so my command of English was not up to the task. I struggled.

The prosaic mind will not possess the necessary imagination and love of beauty for a book that brilliantly plays with your mind, but takes you through exhilarating labyrinths of art, history, the follies of mysticism and psychiatry, other mid-century fads of Europe and England; a lost natural world where the Greek Islands were pristine not yet swamped with smelly tourists; to metaphysics, political philosophy and the phoniness of dying for the state, for a peddled patriotism, not to mention the best description EVER of the killing fields and suicidal battle technique and posture practiced in World War One:

“…the whole butcher’s shop of war”. And, “I saw only Thanatos.” “A desert of the dead.”

Stunning writing (which only writers who craft sentences could appreciate). 

I feel good for I have used “Thanatos” in my book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot, as the most apt concept to describe the drive of the white man who gives up his birthright. But I can understand the trouble an idiot reviewer would have, for most would be unfamiliar with the term and its provenance.

The Magus achieves the purpose of great literature:

If you can’t put down a work of over 600 pages—a novel has achieved its purpose. Of course, the English is exquisite and the author ever-so old Oxbridge educated. Not pretentious; just truly educated as once provided by a traditional, classical liberal arts education in the English Ivy League.

I think people who are pedantic and reductive in their oppositional inability to assimilate art and beauty will see all kinds of “isms” in this book: ” “leftism,” “postmodernism”. I disagree with such a miserable and immiserating approach to art.

Literature is either good or bad. It either takes you on a scintillating trip or mires you in dour tedium. The postmodernism tag, moreover, seems to be used as a cudgel by those who inhabit the American English department, or are of its mindset, where postmodernism was perfected—the kind of reader who has never read gorgeous English prose, and wishes to appear sophisticated by raping the literature with artificial constructs.

National Review pegged this old work correctly, as thoroughly traditional in its sweeping style.

For heaven’s sake: John Fowles was an English gentleman born in 1926. He described the mid-twentieth-century as “androgynous”! If our author toyed with the idea that the sexes had merged then; imagine his thinking had he lived today.  Nuance, folks, not labels.

I’m only on page 247 and may well regret my enthusiasm. But, for now, I second the august dust-jacket reviewers on my copy, from National Review to the Charlotte Observer, to that of New York Review of Books, whose verdict was:

* “One of the most ambitious novels of the decade….”
* “Brilliant and colossal….Impossible to stop reading.”
* “A marvel. John Fowles is a master of literary magic…”
* “The book is genius throughout and often beautifully written….”
* Mr. Fowles has accomplished an imaginative tour de force, comparable to the more exciting work of Nabokov, brilliant, elegant, inventive, profound without solemnity… It is an extraordinary novel…”
* “…Fowles writes his way beautifully through the demands of text which calls for every kind of descriptive passage.”

These are observations that could not be made today. The last is particularly smart, for the storyline and the breadth of the thing–The Magus–are formidable. The text—this grand superstructure—demands the bone and blood of the author, which it gets.