Category Archives: History

UPDATED: Anti-Federalists Prophesied The End Of Freedom (Gave Us The Bill Of Rights)

Constitution, Federalism, Founding Fathers, History, Political Philosophy, States' Rights, The State

“Anti-Federalists Prophesied The End Of Freedom” is the new column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“On the eve of the federal convention, and following its adjournment in September of 1787, the Anti-Federalists made the case that the Constitution makers in Philadelphia had exceeded the mandate they were given to amend the Articles of Confederation, and nothing more. The Federal Constitution augured ill for freedom, argued the Anti-Federalists. These unsung heroes had warned early Americans of the “ropes and chains of consolidation,” in Patrick Henry’s magnificent words, inherent in the new dispensation. …

… As “strong advocates of States’ Rights,” Anti-Federalists held that “self-government, independence, and individual liberty were best protected at the local level. A distant and powerful central government,” the kind cooked up at the Philadelphia convention, was anathema to these “cherished values.” To that end, Anti-Federalists fought to preserve the “loose-knit relationship” that had existed between the “Confederation government and the States.” …

… As the saying goes, “a prophet is not without honor save in his own country.”

To observe Obama (and predecessor) in action is to realize that Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry and New York Anti-Federalist “Cato” were prophets who deserve a lot more honor in their own country. Both forewarned of an imperial presidency in the making. “‘The president,’ wrote “Cato,” has so much power that his office ‘differs very immaterially from the establishment of monarchy in Great Britain.'”

Indeed, President Barack Obama habitually “uses executive orders to circumvent federal legislation.” He exempts his “friends or political cronies” from oppressive laws his subjects must obey. And he orders the suspension of “duly enacted [immigration] law”—even “barring enforcement”—because he does not like the law.

A propagandized population has a hard time choosing worthy heroes. It is high time Americans celebrate the Anti-Federalists, for they were correct in predicting the fate of freedom after Philadelphia.

To deny that the Anti-Federalists were right is to deny reality. …

The complete column is “Anti-Federalists Prophesied The End Of Freedom.” Read it on WND.

Featured on Barely A Blog:

* “Nelson Mandela, ‘The Che Guevara of Of Africa.’”*

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 CONVERSATION:

• At the WND Comments Section. Scroll down and “Say it.”

• On my Facebook page.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” this week’s “Return To Reason” column.

UPDATE: BILL OF RIGHTS. The Anti-Federalists gave it to us. Absent their insistence on instantiating individual liberties in the Constitution, we’d have been without the the Bill of Rights.

UPDATED: JFK’s America (Not Yet A Police State)

America, Democrats, English, History, Homeland Security, Pop-Culture

On Friday, November 22, it will be 50 years since President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. CNN has used the upcoming commemoration to avoid covering Obamacare, filling every spare moment of the last week or so with documentary footage of the 1963 events. (The Jonestown massacre’s 30th anniversary was also put to the same use by the nitwork.)

The footage shows an America that is so much more united in mannerisms, grief; better spoken, more refined, reserved, and appropriately attired. It is an endearing and innocent America that is revealed in these records. What was so bad about that bourgeoisie society? Not much when compared to today’s America.

JFK and his stunning wife were rather conservative individuals. Jacky was certainly very proper. She also despised Martin Luther King and Linden Johnson.

Jacqueline Kennedy, as revealed from audio recordings of her historic 1964 conversations with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., held a low opinion of Martin Luther King. America’s most engaging first lady called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “terrible,” “tricky” and “a phony.”

“His associations with communists” is why Jacky’s husband ordered the wiretaps on King. Mrs. Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Robert Kennedy—recounts Patrick J. Buchanan in “Suicide of a Superpower”—”saw to it that the FBI carried out the order.”

Stark too is the contrast between this erudite, educated, exquisite Renaissance woman and Michelle Obama, our current, generally disgruntled First Lady.

UPDATE: (11/18): Not Yet A Police State. In light of the police state that the USA has become, it is quite illuminating to see a different America reflected in CNN’s documentary about the JFK assassination. Reporters form scrums around the individuals they follow. Streets are not cordoned off in deference to power. Like the press, “commoners” have access to the politicians who serve them. And so it should be.

‘Assad’s Pro-Zionist Grandfather and the Betrayal of the Alawites’

History, Islam, Israel, John McCain, Lebanon, Middle East, The West

Writing at Chronicles magazine, Eugene Girin offers a slice of Syrian history you won’t get from that moron McCain and his media acolytes:

“From 1920 to 1936, Syria’s Alawites enjoyed their own separate autonomous state in French-ruled Syria. First, it was known explicitly as the Alawite State and from 1930 to 1936, as Latakia Governorate. In response to pressure from the Sunni majority, France dissolved the Alawites’ state and forcibly incorporated it into the Sunni-dominated areas.”

“Needless to say, the Alawites (as well as the Christians and Druze) were appalled by France’s surrender to the Muslims and pleaded with the mandate authorities to protect them. In an eerie echo of today’s situation in Syria, 450,000 Alawites, Druze, and Christians signed a letter to the French authorities, part of which stated”:

“The ‘Alawis believe that they are humans, not beasts ready for slaughter. No power in the world can force them to accept the yoke of their traditional and hereditary enemies to be slaves forever….”

“Israel’s liberal Haaretz newspaper recently quoted part of another letter, sent by Alawite leaders to French Prime Minister Leon Blum in 1936. The French surrender to Arab Muslim demands was influenced by the bloody uprising of Muslims in British-ruled Palestine, led by the future ally of Hitler Haj Amin Al-Husseini. The Alawites alluded to the bloody revolt in their plea to the Jewish Blum”:

The condition of the Jews in Palestine is the strongest and most explicit evidence of the militancy of the Islamic issue vis-à-vis those who do not belong to Islam. These good Jews contributed to the Arabs with civilization and peace, scattered gold, and established prosperity in Palestine without harming anyone or taking anything by force, yet the Muslims declare holy war against them and never hesitated in slaughtering their women and children, despite the presence of England in Palestine and France in Syria.
Therefore we ask you to consider the dreadful and terrible fate that awaits the Alawites if they are forced to be annexed to Syria, when it will be free from the oversight of the Mandate, and it will be in their power to implement the laws that stem from its religion.”

One of the six signatories of that letter was Sulayman Assad, the father of Hafez and the grandfather of Bashar. …”

Read “Assad’s Pro-Zionist Grandfather and the Betrayal of the Alawites.”

UPDATE II: Zakaria Second-Hander Speaks On Syria (The Syria & Libya MO)

History, Intellectualism, Media, Middle East, Paleolibertarianism, Pseudo-history, Pseudo-intellectualism

Fareed Zakaria plagiarizer is big in America primarily because of his reliably banal, unoriginal brain. This “gift” is a prerequisite for maintaining the establishment’s status quo. Or, as Jeff Tucker calls it, the “statist quo.”

The equally uncontroversial WaPo—they passed on the Edward-Snowden scoop—has seen fit to feature Zakaria’s hardly scholarly “analysis” of Syria. (Try Efraim Karsh, Professor of Mediterranean Studies at the University of London. The late, anti-imperialist scholar Elie Kedourie was especially interesting.)

It’s hard to know where to begin to dissect Zakaria’s tired stuff. Zakaria Second-Hander reproduces the old colonialism canard, according to which the sorry state of the Middles-East (and Africa) are blamed (by leftists of the liberal and libertarian variety) on borders drawn by colonial forces “along ahistorical lines.”

Wait a sec, didn’t Shaka Zulu consolidate his empire and commit genocide against the region’s tribes before British penetration proper into South Africa?

Zakaria also assumes (like an ass) that dominant minorities have arisen in the Middle-Eat due to … colonialism’s inorganic border-drawing (that’s my descriptive, in case Fareed finds something worth …borrowing, sans citation).

You’d be better advised to read Amy Chua’s remarkable work on market-dominating minorities (or, as she calls them in chinglese “market-dominant minorities”).

Much more than Zakaria’s idiocy, Steve Sailer’s brief observation about the Alawites will tell you something about why they came to dominate (intelligence? Emphasis is mine):

“The Alawites are another complex ethnicity with deep roots. They are despised by the Sunni majority as not being true Muslims. (Alawites are said to celebrate Christmas and Easter.) When the French took control from the Ottomans after WWI, most of the Sunnis shunned joining the colonial security forces. But after centuries of Sunni oppression, the Alawites thought that getting paid by European experts to use guns and push Sunnis around was a great idea.”

And here’s tired Zakaria via the WaPo:

He compares Syria’s war to the 15-year civil war in Lebanon and the war that erupted in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein. In both cases, the wars were as much about vicious competition between sectarian groups as they were about the decisions of military and political leaders. In both cases, power ended up shifting from minority to majority sects. In both cases, civilians were massacred, and minorities suffered terribly. The difference, perhaps, is that the United States took heavy losses in Iraq but stayed out of Lebanon.

His case, then, is that Syria’s war is not something that the United Stated can stop or alter. Zakaria has no illusions about the pain and terror of Lebanon’s civil war but says that the United States was right not to involve itself. (He also points out that Reagan’s decision to bow out in 1984 did not exactly destroy American credibility in the region.) He points to the war in Iraq; even though the United States toppled Iraq’s minority dictator and quickly moved power over to a government that represented the broader population, that did not prevent hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, the formation of many civilian militias that did terrible things and the infiltration by al-Qaeda and affiliated groups. In this thinking, intervening in Syria will not stop the war’s violence, which is after all more about competing sects than it is about the decisions of one leader. …

Yawn on.

UPDATE I: An interesting take on Syria from Jack Kerwick, except that it is predicated on a notion I have a hard time accepting: Obama is NOT an ass with ears, but is quite smart. Moreover, the country doesn’t care about BHO’s strategy. For the first time in a long time, the people are against war. They don’t care about political posturing. Wow. Just wow. I’m so happy.

UPDATE II (9/7): Personally I think Jack here outthinks BHO. The Libya case, which all new antiwar-warriors are ignoring, is textbook as far as BHO’s Syria MO goes, is it not? In other words, Obama did exactly what he is doing now in the case of Libya, except that there he ignored Congress.