“Not a week goes by when Fox-New phenom Glenn Beck doesn’t make libertarian pedants and purists bristle. Examples? The mushy slogan ‘Faith, Hope, Charity’ on which, Beck insists, the old republic was founded. I’m with Beck’s favored founder Ben Franklin who said that “he who lives upon hope will die fasting.”
Then there is charity: Americans hardly need a nudge in that direction as they are already abundantly charitable. Our countrymen are also constant in their faith ? to a fault perhaps, as too much faith in mystical forces beyond one’s control may compound feelings of helplessness.
Conversely, Beck could be more reverential in his approach to the free market to which the Talker often refers in rather pedestrian, almost statist terms. ‘It is the system that we have; it’s a system that works’ are refrains Beck is fond of repeating.
If instead of waxing fat about “Faith, Hope, and Charity” Beck built on life, liberty, and property,” his viewers would come to understand that the voluntary free market is a sacred extension of life itself. …
In the context of the man’s incalculable contribution to liberty, these are, all-in-all, minor quibbles—all the more so given that Glenn Beck has now taken his most significant step in defense of freedom and constitutional order. Beck has seen the writing on the tottering walls of Empire, and has dedicated himself to that humble foreign policy espoused by the founders. …”
A good few posts ago, I observed that “in his groundbreaking series on the American Progressive Movement, Fox News personality Glenn Beck, previously an unambiguously pro-war military-booster, was inching towards examining his support for the kind of state expansion (via warfare) the founders would have abhorred.
Glenn made the final leap today to a non-interventionist foreign policy emphasizing American interests and self-defense and no nation building. He said the words, “I am with Ron Paul.” This could be good for the country—unless Beck is forced by his backers (FoxNews) to back down.
“It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.”
I will post the Beck YouTube feature as soon as it’s up (readers are welcome to beat me to it).
“The example we set now is what pisses everyone off: We say we’re going to spread democracy, but we bed dictators, we bow to Saudi princes, when it’s to our advantage. George Washington wanted us to be like the Swiss: Enemy of none, friend to all. Places like Germany — hey, we’re glad you are all straightened out, but we’re pulling out, you’re on your own. We’re not staying. We need to get out of the Korean Peninsula and Japan. No longer will we be the world’s loiterers.
The United States spends approximately $102 billion annually to maintain troops, equipment, fleets and bases overseas — if you count Iraq and Afghanistan it jumps to $250 billion. Well, I’m tired of being the world’s policeman. And in many cases we are the world’s loiterers. We need to have a “no loitering” policy.
That policy comes from the progressives. The Republicans say we’ll send in the “green helmets” and just nation build our way to global security. The liberals want to do it through the United Nations; they want to send in the “blue helmets” — which we pay for.
This doesn’t work. I don’t want to nation build. I don’t want a global government or military force.
And for all the Don Rumsfelds out there watching who are cursing me out right now because they think no time is a good time to cut defense spending. Well, maybe this will help. This chart shows who accounts for all military spending in the world.
Almost half of all military spending in the world — 47 percent — is America. The next biggest spender is Europe — that’s not even a country, they spent $289 billion on military-related expenses. We almost spent that much outside our country for our own defense!
So don’t tell me we can’t afford to cut back. Clearly we can.
And when we are in a situation like Afghanistan, we fight to win it. With all of our technology today, why can’t we get in and out of Afghanistan in a couple of years? Because the politicians have their grimy little fingers on everything. Take the military off the leash; if you decide to go to war, unhook those dogs and get the hell out of the way.”
Update II (April 16): Together with the Cato Institute, the author of the blog Downsizing the Federal Government in particular, Beck has been running pragmatic, hour-long workshops on where and how much to slash. Pretty much everything. The man is a force of nature.
Back to the matter of Beck’s “I’m with Ron Paul on foreign policy” statement: This too is a very important development. Beck is pulling away from the neoconservative pack at Fox. By declaring war on their gratuitous wars he has driven a wedge between himself and the likes of Hannity, O’Reilly, Krauthammer, Kristol, and all the followers (I don’t know a Republican ditto head who doesn’t go along with the war-all-the-time = a strong national defense formula). The unity of the ditto heads on war policy was unshakable.
Again: By denouncing the war talisman, Beck, a major star on the Right, has created oscillation in the ossifying GOP. He has broken a united front which—thanks to the likes of Hannity, Coulter, Malkin, O’Reilly; National Review, Weekly Standards—seemed unchallenged.
A good few posts ago, I observed that “in his groundbreaking series on the American Progressive Movement, Fox News personality Glenn Beck, previously an unambiguously pro-war military-booster, was inching towards examining his support for the kind of state expansion (via warfare) the founders would have abhorred.
Glenn made the final leap today to a non-interventionist foreign policy emphasizing American interests and self-defense and no nation building. He said the words, “I am with Ron Paul.” This could be good for the country—unless Beck is forced by his backers (FoxNews) to back down.
“It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.”
I will post the Beck YouTube feature as soon as it’s up (readers are welcome to beat me to it).
“The example we set now is what pisses everyone off: We say we’re going to spread democracy, but we bed dictators, we bow to Saudi princes, when it’s to our advantage. George Washington wanted us to be like the Swiss: Enemy of none, friend to all. Places like Germany — hey, we’re glad you are all straightened out, but we’re pulling out, you’re on your own. We’re not staying. We need to get out of the Korean Peninsula and Japan. No longer will we be the world’s loiterers.
The United States spends approximately $102 billion annually to maintain troops, equipment, fleets and bases overseas — if you count Iraq and Afghanistan it jumps to $250 billion. Well, I’m tired of being the world’s policeman. And in many cases we are the world’s loiterers. We need to have a “no loitering” policy.
That policy comes from the progressives. The Republicans say we’ll send in the “green helmets” and just nation build our way to global security. The liberals want to do it through the United Nations; they want to send in the “blue helmets” — which we pay for.
This doesn’t work. I don’t want to nation build. I don’t want a global government or military force.
And for all the Don Rumsfelds out there watching who are cursing me out right now because they think no time is a good time to cut defense spending. Well, maybe this will help. This chart shows who accounts for all military spending in the world.
Almost half of all military spending in the world — 47 percent — is America. The next biggest spender is Europe — that’s not even a country, they spent $289 billion on military-related expenses. We almost spent that much outside our country for our own defense!
So don’t tell me we can’t afford to cut back. Clearly we can.
And when we are in a situation like Afghanistan, we fight to win it. With all of our technology today, why can’t we get in and out of Afghanistan in a couple of years? Because the politicians have their grimy little fingers on everything. Take the military off the leash; if you decide to go to war, unhook those dogs and get the hell out of the way.”
Update II (April 16): Together with the Cato Institute, the author of the blog Downsizing the Federal Government in particular, Beck has been running pragmatic, hour-long workshops on where and how much to slash. Pretty much everything. The man is a force of nature.
Back to the matter of Beck’s “I’m with Ron Paul on foreign policy” statement: This too is a very important development. Beck is pulling away from the neoconservative pack at Fox. By declaring war on their gratuitous wars he has driven a wedge between himself and the likes of Hannity, O’Reilly, Krauthammer, Kristol, and all the followers (I don’t know a Republican ditto head who doesn’t go along with the war-all-the-time = a strong national defense formula). The unity of the ditto heads on war policy was unshakable.
Again: By denouncing the war talisman, Beck, a major star on the Right, has created oscillation in the ossifying GOP. He has broken a united front which—thanks to the likes of Hannity, Coulter, Malkin, O’Reilly; National Review, Weekly Standards—seemed unchallenged.
“Eugene Terre’Blanche, leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) that seeks the establishment of a homeland for the Afrikaners of South Africa, was alone at his homestead over the Easter period, when two farmhands bludgeoned the sixty-nine-year-old separatist to a pulp with pangas and pipes. Based on hearsay—and their abiding sympathy for savages—news media across the West are insisting that the motive for the murder was a “labor dispute.” …
… The brutality of the racially motivated murders of white farmers in South Africa, and, increasingly, of whites in general, is one aspect of these crimes. Mr. Terre’Blanche was unrecognizable. Two weeks before he was slaughtered, seventeen-year-old Anika Smit was raped, her throat slashed sixteen times and her hands hacked off and removed from the scene.
Both acts of butchery were unremarkable in Mandela’s South Africa.
The dehumanization of the victim—Crimen injuria in South African law—is another feature of these feral acts. When they were finished with him, Terre’Blanche’s killers pulled down the old man’s pants, exposing his privates. Slain white farmers are often displayed like trophies by their black killers.
Mr. Terre’Blanche was a victim of a farm murder, plain and simple.” …
Malama “threw a BBC journalist out of a press conference, accusing him of ‘white tendency’ and calling him a ‘bastard,’ ‘bloody agent’ and ‘small boy.'”
The BBC, chief obfuscator on matters South African, is made to eat dirt by a Frankenstein that is of its own creation. The West pushed for raw democracy in South Africa, and is now recoiling in horror at its former proteges and at what they’re, predictably, doing to the place.
Update I (April 10): The Funeral.
To our reader in the Comments Section: I did not see the Nazi salute in the footage I watched of Eugene Terre’Blanche’s funeral. However, I have never claimed the AWB was a savory organization. What I said is that as volatile as Terre’Blanche was, he and his cause (self-determination for whites) had come to appear civilized—civilized and prophetic—as compared to the people of whom he had warned, now running the country.
In the interviews I’ve watched, I saw gleeful black folks in Ventersdorp; and dignified resigned Afrikaners. That’s all I saw.
Now, is the AWB multicultural and non-racial; no. They believed that were South Africa—a country built by Boer and British—to fall into the hands of a black majority, it would go the way of the rest of Africa. That’s why they were separatists. Theirs was not a racial war but a war of self-preservation and survival.
Americans who’ve long since forgotten what it is to fight for their national life—and life—think that such South Africans were having fun fooling around with Nazi-looking insignia. Yes, there is unsavory stuff about the AWB. I did not understand nor sympathize with them back in the day. But I recognize now that the drive behind such an organization was a desperate attempt to forestall black majority rule, as it was believed that should that come to pass, the country they loved would be lost.
Were they right? You tell me.
Update III: I have very little patience for the South African Institute for Race Relations in all its sanctimony. I’ve been drawing on some of their factual work for my own book, but overall, they have been deniers of the racial aspect of Boer murders. That is criminal negligence. Unjust. And worse.
Nevertheless, the SAIRR teases apart some of the dynamics behind the uptick in the ANC’s racial incitement against whites (using barbarian front man, Malema):
the party is acutely aware that its support base of poor black South Africans has begun to turn against it. Violent protest action against the ruling party is now commonplace around the country.
In order to shore up support in the black community the ANC increasingly appears to be seeking to shift the blame for its delivery failures onto the small white ethnic minority, which today comprises well under 10% of the total population of South Africa. Here parallels may be read to the behaviour of Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe when that party realised that its political future was in peril. The ANC Youth League’s recent visit to Zanu-PF which saw it endorse that party’s ruinous polices are pertinent here.
Note: You can incite racial violence all you want in my neck of the woods, or among most white South Africans; murder will not be resorted to. Boer are being killed en masse because there are a lot of blacks who want to kill them.
From hereon in the much-anticipated press release descends into the same liberal clichés and solecisms.
“… a resurgent right wing will be numerous. It is most unlikely that this right wing will take the form of camouflage clad henchmen on horses in shows of force.”
OMIGOD. Would that such a resurgence took such a form; why would putting the fear of God into men with murder on their minds be so bad? How is a show of force from an attacked minority a bad thing when the alternative is to put your faith in a fat, functionally illiterate, corrupt constabulary that roots for Malema?
These people (SAIRR) make me sick.
More useful facts:
• the ANC depends greatly on the tax income paid by white South Africans to balance South Africa’s books.
• it depends entirely on the food produced by a small number of white farmers to feed the country.
• white South Africans still dominate the skills base of the country.
• and most importantly, much white opinion since the early 1990s has been moderate. White South Africa has been willing and often eager to cooperate with the Government in building an open, non-racial, and prosperous South Africa
Update IV (April 11): The British Daily Mail has decided that the raised arms at Terre’Blanche’s funeral are Nazi salutes. Is it so, or is it the interpretation of media that have not bothered to inquire what the raised arm means? I myself do not know. The flag emblem, as explained on the AWB website, isn’t intended as Nazi insignia.
Here’s what we know which belies the stupid, malevolent fixation of a hostile, ignorant media: This tiny minority is being systematically killed off; this tiny minority doesn’t wish to exterminate, a la Nazis, the 38 million blacks surrounding it; all the AWB wants is a place they can call their own, in the country they founded, away from those who want to kill them.
Have I distilled the facts without the fanciful? I think so.
Update V: To geniqu4u, thanks for writing:
• I hope you get my book when it’s out. I compare the number of deaths in detention under 40 years of apartheid with the number of murders in the New South Africa. More people die in ten weeks under Mandela’s SA than died in detention over 40 years of white rule. Ordinary blacks are missing the old SA. That’s how bad it is.
• Africa was immeasurably improved under colonialism; before that it was a morass of tribal internecine warfare of unimaginable cruelty; there were no roads, no infrastructure, education, health care, security. As I’ve written in “Blaming Colonialism Invalid, Even In Academe,” “Colonialism, dependency and racism—all highly politicized constructs—are beginning to be seen as humbugs, untrue and unhelpful, in explaining—and hence, helping—the Third World. What was once ‘conventional wisdom that brooked no dissent,’ in the words of Lawrence E. Harrison, is rarely mentioned today in intellectually respectable quarters. South Africa’s black population’s longevity, education, and numbers were markedly increased under white minority rule. Naturally, to describe reality is not to condone apartheid.”
• I don’t know where you get your data on African farming methods, but not one point you make is factual. South African blacks were never anything but subsistence farmers who had often done untold damage to the land, stripping it via indiscriminate grazing. The Afrikaner has been, in general, a good custodian of the land and the natural environment. There is no commercial, large-scale farmer in the world like the Afrikaners, who’ve turned an arid, impossible-to-farm land into oases with technology, innovation, dedication, and hard work. There isn’t a farmer who loves his live stock more than the Afrikaner. Most of the white-farmed land being seized under the land distribution policies of the ANC and given over to blacks has gone to seed. Beautiful, high tech installations taken from their owners (who feed the country, nay, the continent) and given to blacks have been reduced to rubble. The cruelty to the live stock is beyond belief; cattle dying of thirst, hunger and disease. I tell it in my book.
TimesOnLine: “South Africa’s white-dominated farming unions have greeted the threat of nationalisation with alarm. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, when multi-racial elections were held, 15m acres of farmland have been transferred to black ownership. Much of it is now lying idle, creating no economic benefit for the nation nor its new owners. Last year South Africa became a net importer of food for the first time in its history.
Update VI (April 12): Glenn Beck joined the ignoramus media by referring dramatically to the rise of extremism in South Africa, gleaned at a glance from the so-called Nazi-like salute at the funeral of Eugene Terreblanche. Thus, in order to conclude that the non-violent gathering of people at the funeral was the party deserving of condemnation—Glenn required nothing more than a symbolic gesture from them. Ignorance is bliss.
The insularity of American headline makers is alarming.