Category Archives: History

Happy Birthday, Pat Buchanan

America, Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, History, IMMIGRATION

Tom Piatak writes a great column about a great American (with whom I’ve disagreed, a fact that has nothing to do with the man’s prescience and patriotism): “Pat Buchanan At 70: ‘He Told You So, You F****ing Fools!’” Read it on VDARE.COM, naturally:

“Both Bush and McCain swallowed the neoconservative line whole. Both see the mission of the United States as using its blood and treasure to spread’ ‘global democratic capitalism.’ Both welcome the mass immigration that is radically transforming the United States. … neither views America as a real country at all, but as the embodiment of an abstract political creed—the ‘first universal nation.’

Buchanan long ago warned that allowing neoconservatives to set the agenda would be calamitous for conservatives. His warning was unmistakably vindicated when the Republicans lost Congress in 2006. And if the American electorate rejects Bush and McCain next Tuesday, it will be rejecting neoconservatism, pure and simple.

Of course, Buchanan opposed the Iraq War that has cast its shadow over Bush’s presidency. He foresaw that removing Saddam Hussein would greatly strengthen Tehran and that an occupation of Iraq would be both costly and deadly.

More generally, Buchanan recognized that the end of the Cold War meant that America must begin reexamining its global commitments and pursuing a foreign policy in line with the one recommended by the Founders—and that failure to do so would be costly.”

The complete column on VDARE.COM.

A July Fourth Toast To Thomas Jefferson—And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition

Founding Fathers, Government, History, IMMIGRATION, Liberty, Natural Law, The West

I’m delighted to inform you that I will be joining the valorous VDARE.COM family with a regular monthly column.

Here is an excerpt from the first. It’s titled “A July Fourth Toast To Thomas Jefferson—And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition”:

“…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 Normans’ malign influence 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! …”

Read the rest on VDARE.COM.

Updated: Honest Abe’s Anguish

History, Iraq, Just War, Literature

“[W]hile small-time functionaries like Scott McClellan can be big enough to express remorse, self-reproach is rare in the leaders they serve. A breast-beating Bush: now that would provide a truly teachable moment.

Although never belabored, it is believed that Abraham Lincoln may have suffered misgivings for his role in ‘the butchering business’—J. R. Pole’s turn-of-phrase. Pole is Rhodes Professor Emeritus of American History and Institutions at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford.

Before Pole, a number of prominent historians had floated the idea that Lincoln might have wrestled with remorse for shedding the blood of brothers in great quantities. …”

Read more about the literary “clues to Lincoln’s possible contrition” in “Honest Abe’s Anguish,” my new WorldNetDaily.com column.

Update (June 22): TIME magazine reports that “Scott McClellan … said President Bush has lost the public’s trust by failing to open up about his Administration’s mistakes and backtracking on a promise be up front about the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.”

The man does have a knack for stating the obvious.

Or as I wrote in this column, McClellan has “hindsight rather than insight on his side; what he [is] imparting [is] neither new nor even newsworthy.”

But in America the simple are celebrated.

Wright as American as Idi Amin

Africa, America, Christian Right, History

“Hagee’s Hebraic bond goes back to John Winthrop and the New England Puritans. Revivalism, evangelicalism, the faith of happy-clappers—this branch of Protestantism, and its beliefs, is also as American as apple pie. The First and Second Great Awakenings were epochal events in early America, instrumental in the Revolution. And later in Abolition. …

The particularism of Afrocentrism, Wright’s creed, is as American as Idi Amin was. Both alien and idiotic is Wright’s fealty to ‘Black values’ and the Dark Continent—where everywhere black bodies are stacked up like firewood, to paraphrase the talented Keith Richburg, a black American journalist.”

The complete column: “Wright As American As Idi Amin.” Comments are welcome.