Category Archives: Nationhood

UPDATED (9/26/022): Giorgia Meloni Has A Philosophy Of Liberty; GOP Candidates Have Positions, Talking Points, Bereft of Philosophy

Argument, Europe, Family, Individual Rights, Liberty, Nationalism, Nationhood, Political Philosophy, Republicans

‘The GOP has to stick to positions, talking points, because the Republicans don’t hold a philosophy, much less one that can support concepts like nationalism, nation-state and national sovereignty’

Unlike most of our GOP candidates, who promote positions, as opposed to a philosophy of liberty (even the very nice ones such as Kari Lake)—Giorgia Meloni, prime minister elect of Italy and leader of Brothers Of Italy, bases her opinions on a systematic philosophy which is central to her core beliefs.

Liberty to Meloni is not the party’s talking points—positions and political plank—as it is for the GOP—“God, Groceries, Gas,” as one hack summed it up on Hannity. Rather, Meloni holds a philosophy of liberty which she grasps. Thus she quotes GK Chesterton not for the meaty words, but to shore up a philosophy. Coming from her, Chesterton doesn’t ring hollow.

What do I mean? Example: Meloni talks about “the nation state” and a “political sovereignty that belongs to the citizens of that state.”

The GOP confines itself to noodling against open borders, but for legal immigration (they love it) and against illegal immigration. The GOP has to stick to positions, talking points, because the Republicans don’t hold a philosophy, much less one that can support concepts like nationalism, nation-state and national sovereignty.

Meloni knows that individual rights are not deracinated, free-floating entitlements that attach naturally to every person who can then show up on the West’s doorstep demanding these abstracted rights be defended and optimized. No, this position is that of the Republicans and Democrats. Their positions justify open borders to varying degrees and an adventurous foreign policy to varying degrees.

A party that holds positions bereft of philosophy will never restore the nation. Why, the concept of a nation (not nation-state) Republicans reach for only to promote and project Lincoln-like visions of political might and can-do optimism.

On the other hand, Meloni, an Italian nationalist, will want to slow immigration to a halt because she believes that everything that is good in Italy comes from its Italian essence.

Suffice it to say that, in her references, the Italian prime minister elect evinces erudition and knowledge.

Alas, as I’ve been told, Meloni is wishy-washy on the vaccine and I note that she suffer the Ukraine euphoria, although is about Italy First.

https://gettr.com/post/p1s9u5762ab

* Screen capture image via NYT

NEW COLUMN: Mourning The Queen— But Did Elizabeth II Drop The Ball?

Africa, Britain, Colonialism, Communism, Constitution, Democracy, Etiquette, Nationalism, Nationhood, Race, Socialism

NEW COLUMN is “Mourning The Queen— But Did Elizabeth II Drop The Ball?” It is now on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

Excerpt:

It cannot be denied that Queen Elizabeth II of blessed memory partook in the decision to support the unchecked majority rule of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, my homeland.

Like her Majesty at the time, most politicians and public intellectuals thought nothing of delivering South Africa into the hands of professed radical Marxist terrorists. Yet any one suggesting such folly to the wise Margaret Thatcher risked taking a hand-bagging.

The Iron Lady had ventured that grooming the ANC as South Africa’s government-in-waiting was tantamount to “living in cloud-cuckoo land.” (Into The Cannibal’s Post: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, p. 147.)

But what do you know? Queen Elizabeth did just that! Over Mrs. Thatcher’s objections, in 1987 the queen had bullied Prime Minister Thatcher to sanction South Africa.

And in 1979, noted British paleolibertarian Sean Gabb, the queen also muscled Mrs. Thatcher to go back on her election promise not to hand Rhodesia over to another bunch of white-hating black Marxists.

Most disquieting to decency: Although search engines are energetically scrubbing this fact from the Internet—the Queen had knighted Robert Mugabe. Mugabe was chief warlord of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia (may that country rest in peace).   

To quote Into the Cannibal’s Pot, the book aforementioned:

“By the time the megalomaniac Robert Mugabe was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II (1994)—and given honorary doctorates from the Universities of Edinburgh (1984), Massachusetts (1986), and Michigan (1990)—he had already done his “best” work: slaughtering some 20,000 innocent Ndebele in Matabeleland (1983). Western conventional wisdom was no wiser. (And the United Nations responded invariably by … condemning Israel.)” P. 134.

Sidebar:

Mugabe was nothing if not consistent in his contempt for all life.

Question: What do you call a “person” who butchers and barbeques baby elephant?

Answer: A motherf–ker. Lowbrow Robert Mugabe, as Foreign Policy magazine had reported in 2015, “celebrated his 91st birthday followed by a lavish party with an exotic menu, reportedly including barbequed baby elephant.”

Is it any wonder Dr. Gabb took a different measure of her Majesty in 2012, dubbing her “Elizabeth the Useless“? Gabb’s “Sixty Years a Rubber Stamp” unfurls a list of her Majesty’s acts of constitutional omission, if not unconstitutional commission. …

…THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “Mourning The Queen— But Did Elizabeth II Drop The Ball?,” is now on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

* Screen picture via Daily Mail

NEW COLUMN: Bar Meghan Markle From The Great Lady’s Funeral

Britain, Conservatism, Constitution, Democracy, English, Globalism, Nationalism, Nationhood, South-Africa

NEW COLUMN is “Bar Meghan Markle From The Great Lady’s Funeral.” It’s a feature on WND, Unz Review, and The New American.

It’s no secret I favor monarchy over mob rule, namely democracy aka mobocracy.

“From pundits on our side of the pond, however, the monarchy regularly draws nasty barbs. Trashing the British monarchy appears to be their way of asserting American exceptionalism. I wager that were the conservative, periwigged Englishmen who founded America to pounce back on to the ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ TV set—the only place they’d be welcomed, given their ‘Ultra MAGA’ bent—the founders, too, would favor the monarchy over the current American mobocracy.”

… consider the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the tawdry, quintessentially American saga they had inflicted on the queen. That the British monarchy stands for the last vestiges of ancient English tradition is not in dispute. But what do the Americanized Harry Windsor, formerly known as Prince Harry, and Meghan Markle represent? …

MORE on WND, Unz Review, and The New American.

A different measure of her Majesty was taken by British paleolibertarian and friend Sean Gabb. In 2012, Dr. Gabb dubbed Elizabeth II “Elizabeth the Useless.”

Brilliant piece, facts all new to me in “Sixty Years a Rubber Stamp” By Sean Gabb:

“The Queen has not sustained our national identity. … she has allowed many people to overlook the structures of absolute and unaccountable power that have grown up during her reign. She has fronted a revolution to dispossess us of our country and of our rights within it.”

“The Queen should have resisted the Offensive Weapons Bill and the Firearms Bill, that effectively abolished our right to keep and bear arms for defence. She should have resisted the Bills that abolished most civil juries and that allowed majority verdicts in criminal trials.”

“She should have resisted the numerous private agreements that made our country into an American satrapy. She should have insisted, every time she met her Prime Minister, on keeping the spirit of our old Constitution. There have been many times since 1972 when she should have acted. …”

“… she has acted only twice in my lifetime to force changes of policy. In 1979, she bullied Margaret Thatcher to go back on her election promise not to hand Rhodesia over to a bunch of black Marxists. In 1987, she bullied Thatcher again to … sanction South Africa. … MORE.

What are we to expect from Charles III?

Nothing, says Dr. Gabb, today.

He is old and stupid and possibly malevolent. Nor do I expect anything of William V, assuming he is ever allowed to succeed. George V was unfortunate in his progeny, and its quality has been dropping ever since. If all else had been sound, monarchs of low intellectual quality might not have been a problem – though I suspect it would always have had damaging effects given that our constitution is monarchical and in need of some ability at the top. But they were stupid at a time when intelligent monarchs were an essential safeguard against a political class that, since about 1940, has never risen above the worthless.

* Screen pic image via Sean Gabb.

UPDATED (7/5/022): Independence Day Is Not About Firecrackers And Cookouts

America, English, Founding Fathers, Liberty, Nationhood, Political Philosophy, Secession

“notwithstanding the claims of the multicultural noise machine, the Declaration was as mono-cultural as its author. 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
SEE: “A July Fourth Toast To Thomas Jefferson—And The Declaration,” by Ilana Mercer, July 4, 2019

UPDATED (7/5/022): Thomas Jefferson & The Jacobins “From my reading of Dumas Malone’s 6 vol. Jefferson And His Times,” writes BAB writer Juvenal Early, “I’m to the point where Jefferson has just returned from France, where he’d witnessed the first few months of the Revolution. He had been there 5 years and he continued to detest the whole idea of the king, and was still much opposed to England. The England most recently of Edmond Burke and Dr. Johnson, as we know. So Jefferson was naturally inclined toward the Jacobins, very good friends with his fellow Mason the Marquis de Lafayette. Also a very reverent friend of that most radical of the founders (I think) Mr Franklin.”

So, yes, TJ was pretty radical by American standards when he joined Washington’s administration. He was even a little suspect in some corners, for having too favorable a view of the French Revolution. He would cool off on the Revolution later, I think. I’ve heard that. But I haven’t got to that part. A long way to go.