Category Archives: History

National Review Stands Athwart Historic Conservatism Of Burke, Kirk

Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Donald Trump, History, Neoconservatism

Most of the National Review recruits who’ve enlisted Against Trump are conservatives in name only, as Jack Kerwick’s learned allusion to conservatism’s founding philosophers concludes. NRO’s promotion of “‘American Exceptionalism,’ the radically ahistorical doctrine that America is not a historically and culturally-specific country but an ‘idea,’ an abstract ‘proposition,'” makes this lot unconservative.

One might say National Review stands athwart historic conservatism (to borrow from founder William F. Buckley’s famous mission statement to stand athwart history).

“National Review vs. Trump?” by Jack Kerwick (published, surprisingly, by TownHall.com):

… NR’s contributors are indeed correct that Trump is not any sort of conservative in the classical or traditional sense of the word. But neither are Trump’s “conservative” critics conservative in the classical or traditional sense of the word.

Undoubtedly, Trump has never read, if he’s even heard of, Edmund Burke, “the patron saint” of conservatism. I would be surprised if he’s even heard of, let alone read, the work of the 20th century’s American reincarnation of Burke, Russell Kirk. Chances are even slimmer yet that he’s familiar with Michael Oakeshott’s classic essay, “On Being Conservative,” or George Nash’s and Paul Gottfried’s seminal studies of the conservative movement in America.

The one contemporary nationally-renown figure who is more philosophically approximate to Burke and Kirk than anyone else—Pat Buchanan—Trump at one time ridiculed. Nor has Trump been any more generous to either Ron or Rand Paul, both of whom, though widely regarded as “libertarian,” are nevertheless conservative just insofar as they are (or at least seem to be) committed to federalism, our Constitution.

Yet here’s the rub: What’s true of Trump in all of these respects is at least as true of many of his critics in the NR symposium.

Granted, I’m sure that there are many among the latter who have heard of Burke. Since Kirk’s name was at one time on NR’s masthead, some of them have probably heard of him as well. However, Kirk’s name is scarcely ever, if at all, mentioned by any contemporary “conservatives.” And on those rare occasions when Burke’s name is dropped, it is almost always in connection with a single line of his: “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

For Buchanan and the Pauls (especially the Elder), many of the Trump critics at NR have reserved nothing but contempt. …

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UPDATED: State of Disunion Stars Two Chief Dividers

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, History, Nationhood, Politics, Republicans, States' Rights, The State

A most divisive president, Barack Obama, will be devoting his last State of the Union extravaganza to dispelling the conviction that he, Obama, has been an extraordinarily divisive and antagonistic president. Even Obama’s decision not to mention the capture, today (1/12/2016), by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard of 10 American marines will prove divisive. But hey, legacy before loyalty. In that tradition, hubristic Obama will be speaking to the things that unite America, namely his legacy.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who’ll be delivering the Republicans’ SOTU response, is an equally divisive figure, having chosen, last year, to excise a part of Southern history: Haley tore down the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia from the State House grounds, even though the Confederate flag “never flew over an official Confederate building,” and “was a battle flag intended to honor the great Robert E. Lee.”

I won’t be dignifying Il Duce’s last SOTU address. Instead I’ll excerpt the 2010 WND column about this “Stalinesque Extravaganza.” Just about everything in the column, “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State,” still obtains:

Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution requires that the president “shall from time to time give to Congress information of the state of Union.” Like everything in the Constitution, a modest thing has morphed into a monstrosity.

A “Stalinesque extravaganza” that ought to offend “anyone of a republican (small ‘r’) sensibility” is how National Review’s John Derbyshire has described the annual State of the Union address. “American politics frequently throws up disgusting spectacles. It throws up one most years in January: the State of the Union speech,” writes Derbyshire in “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism,” in which John (he’s a friend) goes on to detail how “the great man” is announced, how he makes an entrance; the way “the legislators jostle to catch his eye” and receive his favor. (This year, the most repulsive among the representatives staked out aisle seats for themselves, starting early in the morning.)

“On the podium at last, the president offers up preposterously grandiose assurances of protection, provision, and moral guidance from his government, these declarations of benevolent omnipotence punctuated by standing ovations and cheers from legislators” (p. 45). The president of the USA is now “pontiff, in touch with Divinity, to be addressed like the Almighty.”

The razzmatazz includes a display of “Lenny Skutniks” in the royal box. These are “model citizens chosen in order to represent some quality the president will call on us to admire and emulate.” Last year it was the family of the girl who was murdered by the Tucson shooter. This year’s “Lenny Skutnik” was Debbie Bosanek, Warren Buffett’s secretary. Bosanek is supposed to embody the Barf(fett) Rule, described by the Divine One thus: “If you make more than a million dollars a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.”

“We Are Doomed” deconstructs this monarchical, contrived tradition against the backdrop of the steady inflation of the presidential office, and the trend “away from ‘prose’ to ‘poetry’; away from substantive argument to “hot air.” In Obama’s simplistic scheme of things—as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, “for the third straight Address, the President’s speech was written at an eighth-grade level”—to recreate the glory of America, it is essential to reinvent the state. Since Obama has no understanding of how the economy works and why it collapsed, he honestly thinks that centrally planned political projects are every bit as productive as profit-driven investments of private property.

Ever the source of deafening demagoguery, the president promised pay dirt to businesses that heeded his call to greatness. Should a company “relocate to a community that was hit hard when a factory left town,” the president will plunder (private property), print (funny-money), and beg (borrow) in order to help these friends-in-fascism to “finance a new plant, equipment, or train for new workers.”

In the spirit of brute-force statism, the POTUS also promised a Trade Enforcement Unit to police “unfair trading practices,” and a “Financial Crimes Unit to “crack down on large-scale fraud.” And he, BHO, will corral corporations into “model partnerships” with community colleges, while simultaneously redesigning the curricula and websites of said colleges.

Il Duce’s next derring-do? Send him the bill, and Obama will even instruct the provinces to incarcerate local kids in high school “until they graduate or turn 18.”

To keep the student-loan bubble afloat, America’s potentate wants to mandate more loans at fixed prices, as well as expand federally financed research and development. Nowhere is it authorized by the Constitution, but—don’t you know it?—without “federally financed labs and universities” and “public research dollars,” the Internet and assorted “technologies to extract natural gas out of shale rock” would never have come about.

Having used the military to great political effect, Obama now intends to deploy the Department of Defense, no less, in the “clean energy business.” In Obama’s very elementary thinking—eighth-grade elementary—the DOD is bound to do a bang-up job.

From financial aid (for foreign students) to an affirmative-action placement in Harvard Law School, Barry Soetoro is a Frankenstein of the state’s creation. If not for government, Obama would have never managed to write himself into history. As a product of the state, Barry Soetoro sees it as the source of all possibilities.

And so the president forges ahead with plans to grow the Dead Zone of government.

(From “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State.”)

UPDATE: So was it good for you? Did the earth move? Barack Obama’s presidency was to be, by his account “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment – this was the time – when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.”

Those were the words of the Messiah himself, excerpted from the nomination victory speech in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Muslims, Not Nazis, Invented Yellow Cloth With Which To Tag Jews

Donald Trump, History, Islam, Judaism & Jews

To demonstrate how victimized she felt by Donald Trump, a swaddled Muslim woman (a flight attendant, no less; I hope with Air Islam!) appeared at Trump’s Rock Hill, South Carolina rally wearing what the WaPo described as the “yellow eight-pointed stars, reminiscent of the six-pointed stars Jews were forced by the Nazis to wear on their clothing during the Holocaust. On the eight-pointed stars, a common symbol in the Islamic world, was this message: ‘Stop Islamophobia.’”

As Donald Trump questioned the motives of Syrian refugees at a Friday night rally, saying they “probably are ISIS,” a woman sitting in the stands of the sports arena behind him silently stood. She was wearing a white hijab and a blue T-shirt that read: “Salam, I come in peace.”
Trump kept speaking, but soon the crowd erupted, holding up their campaign signs and chanting: “Trump! Trump! Trump!” That was the formal signal for security to remove her from the rally — even though she stood quietly, not saying anything.

For her theatrics, the woman, Rosa Hamid, had appropriated a symbol of Jewish oppression. Worse. Hamid has a Chutzpah, considering Muslims invented this Mark of Cain for Jews. It was not the Nazis who dreamt up the yellow cloth with which they tagged Jews; it was “introduced by the caliph who succeeded the prophet Mohammad.”

From “DID MOHAMMED INVENT PROFILING?”:

When it comes to the sensitive topic of racial or ethnic profiling, Muslims, historically, were innovators in their own right. The Nazis were not the originators of the yellow cloth with which they tagged Jews. The odious tagging rag has its origins in the laws of the Charter of Omar—a set of vicious anti-infidel rules that were applied to Jews with extra vim. These laws were introduced by the caliph who succeeded the prophet Mohammed.

Prior to the prophet, Jews and Arabs did indeed live in relative harmony, but when Mohammed failed to convert the Jews to Islam, the proselytizing prophet of peace exterminated at least one Jewish tribe, etched the Holy Koran with anti-Jewish vitriol, and launched centuries of brutality against Jews. Arabs also preceded the Nazis by centuries when they devised the Jewish ghetto, that dwelling demarcator known in Arabic as the hara or mella. Following the Arab conquest in the seventh century, Jewish life in the Islamic world became fraught with massacres, blood libel, and plunder. Synagogues were regularly torn down, and Jews were impelled to pay special head and property taxes. … (January 9, 2002)

(January 9, 2002.)

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Did The Tripoli Pirates Pirate The Authentic Islam, Mr. Kilmeade?

History, Islam, Neoconservatism, Political Correctness, Terrorism

Brian Kilmeade, a Fox News Channel personality—with all the non-cerebral baggage that phrase carries—has written a book, Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War That Changed American History. In it, to judge by a recent Factor interview he gave this last week, Kilmeade pretty much co-opts Jefferson as a neocon fighting 21st century America’s War On Terror.

Yes, Kilmeade gave an in-house interview recently to a Bill O’Reilly replacement. (Good luck finding transcripts or even a video clip in the age of the no-information, no-organization, big-picture, icon-oriented website.)

Kilmeade’s silliest utterance during that Factor interview was to say that the Muslim Tripoli Pirates had been practicing Islam in the way IT WAS NOT MEANT TO BE PRACTICED.

My question is this: Did the Tripoli Pirates pirate The Authentic Islam, Mr. Kilmeade? If so, when in the course of its bloody history and borders does The Authentic Islam kick in?