Category Archives: Nationhood

UPDATED: Desperately Seeking Desperadoes in Diapers

Business, Founding Fathers, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Nationhood

“Desperadoes in Diapers” is the current column, now on The Quarterly Review. An excerpt:

“First they came: thousands of unaccompanied illegal minors rushing the South-Western border. Then came the theories as to why they came. Determined not to miss a trick, America’s traitor elite—open-border interests and enemies of private-property rights—called the arrivals refugees, victims of nativist Know-Nothings who want invaders turned away. The desperadoes in diapers were also said to have fallen victim to a sudden deterioration in conditions in Central America. No proof has been advanced for the claim that, all of a sudden, things in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have worsened. Because they reason in circles, no-border advocates deploy no logic to justify their claims. Only this did these Aristotelians say:

That Central American minors are arriving, hat-in-hand, is in itself proof that their homes have become uninhabitable. Quod erat demonstrandum (as Erik Rush likes to say); Q.E.D.; case proven.

Having been given the go-ahead by media mogul Rupert Murdoch—he came out for de facto limitless importation of third-world immigrants—his employees at Fox News cued the violins. Shepherd Smith was weeping and gnashing his teeth: “Not politics, but the disgusting conditions in their countries have sent these kids to our shores,” he asserted. “What is a caring nation to do? Their parents love them so much; they gave them to smugglers for a better life.”

However poor, this here mother would never have handed over her daughter to a smuggler. But what do I know about parental love? No more than the nation’s first president knew about the glue that was meant to keep America together.

In his Farewell Address, George Washington presented what historian Paul Johnson calls “an encapsulation of what [he] thought America was, or ought to be, about.” America, said Washington, “is a country which is united by tradition and nature. ‘With slight shades of difference, you have the same Religion, Manners, Habits and Political Principles.’”

What a dummy!

“The children, the children,” wailed Fox News’ Megyn Kelly. “It’s all about the children. We are the United States, what do we do about the children?” Such showy “humanitarianism” invariably means the following: Working people in the U.S., with children of their own to mind, will be roped into supporting the children of the world. Enslave one set of people to whom American politicians are beholden by law, for the benefit of another.

Where’s the humanity for the non-consenting host population? …

Read the compete column. “Desperadoes in Diapers” is now on The Quarterly Review..

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UPDATE (7/3): Myron Robert Pauli: “I liked the quote of John Quincy Adams. Historian David McCullom said he was the most intelligent of our Presidents. His nickname was Old Man Eloquent. When one plots the trajectory from John Quincy (‘America does not go around in search of monsters to destroy …. She might become the dictatress of the world’) Adams to Bush-II and Obama, it makes me want to cry. – – – Arguably, I am a classical liberal but not a libertarian anarchist OR a welfare-socialist. I do not want foreign mobs taking $$ and turning the country even more socialistic nor do I want to have to turn my own home into a personal fortress to keep out the horde. The reality of modern America is that Washington and Adams would essentially be intellectual outcasts in America of 2014.”

UPDATED: We Are The World, We Are The Children (‘The Barbarians Control The Gate’)

IMMIGRATION, Labor, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Nationhood

“The children, the children, it’s all about the children. We are the United States, what do we do about the children?” That was Fox News’ Megyn Kelly showing off her humanitarian credentials, regarding the crossing of thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America into America (WND). This “humanitarianism” invariably means that working people in the US, with children of their own to mind, are roped into supporting the children of the world.

Via Fox News:

Illegal immigrant minors are crossing into the U.S., and border patrol is overwhelmed and unable to care for them. The government has been putting them on buses and “dumping” them on street corners in cities like Phoenix, Ariz. Military bases in Texas, California and Oklahoma are also being used to house them.
The problem could reportedly go from bad to worse. Officials say 6,560 unaccompanied minor aliens crossed the border in 2011. This year, it’s estimated that the number will jump to more than 90,000.
This is a crisis of the federal government’s creation, and the fact that the border remains unsecure – now apparently intentionally – while this operation continues full-steam ahead is deplorable,” Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said in a statement.

Michelle Malkin reports that “military bases are stealthily being used to redistribute, house, process, and release the illegal border crossers,” who arrive on base by the planeload.

Word about America’s free-for-all immigration policies has reached the untapped pool of potential dependents, across central America.

Via KRGV.COM:

Central Americans say news reports in their countries are encouraging them to make the journey north to the United States. A mother and child told CHANNEL 5 NEWS that the message being disseminated in their country is, “go to America with your child, you won’t be turned away.” …Bercian Diaz said she has no family in the United States. Her hope of staying here relies on her little girl. She said the message in her country is that America’s borders are open to all families.

Where’s the humanity for Americans working to support the president’s charities?

The right thing to do is to send these people back whence they came, and ask liberal bleeding-hearts stateside to send their own money, in the form of donations, to these illegal immigrants IN THEIR HOMES OF ORIGIN.

UPDATE (6/13): Pat Buchanan on “pitchfork populists”:

Talk radio, led by Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin, pounded Cantor on the issue of illegal immigration, the emotive power of which our Beltway elites will never understand.
For like Eurocrats, the leaders of our Beltway parties call to mind the “sophisters” and “calculators” of Edmund Burke’s depiction.
They do not understand people of the heart to whom illegal and mass immigration means the disappearance of the country they grew up in and the dispossession of their children of what is most precious to them. …

A good one from Diana West:

It isn’t that the barbarians are at the gate. The barbarians control the gate. …
… Children are usually just children, but when 130,000 of them are expected to storm the border in the coming year, they more closely resemble an advancing column, a kind of foreign legion of child-mercenaries raised abroad with cynical promises of booty in the form of cradle-to-grave taxpayer charity.
But who will fight “children”? This is the audacity of this latest Obama “crisis”: Trojan horse as “humanitarian crisis.” For the literary set, call it “Camp of the Saintlets,” a twist on the prophetic “Camp of the Saints,” the 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail envisioning an apocalyptic “invasion” of Europe by successive boatloads of Third World nationals, which is today old news out of Spain, Italy and other nations. …
… Of course, there is an undeniable genius to this form of border attack. All “the kids” from the rest of the world (do you really think Central America is the end?) have to do is serve as pitiful proxies of the assault. Once vanquished by pangs of conscience, however false, we’ll support them forever. We’ll have to. Have you taken a look at your local police department’s massive and bristling military hardware lately? Just shut up and watch as this newfangled children’s crusade turns our border, the concept of nationhood itself, into dust. Welcome to Obamaland.
Of course, even the 17-year-old gangbangers among the youngsters aren’t the masterminds or generals. Like American citizens, they are pawns, dupes, lured by promises Washington may indeed extract from Us, the People. “Go to America with your child, you won’t be turned away,” one Guatemalan mother told a radio station in the Rio Grande Valley. She is right. Come one, come all. …

What Is True Patriotism?

Homeland Security, Military, Nationhood, Propaganda, War

American soldiers are “citizens of the world,” I wrote in “The International Highway to Hell.” “We pay their wages, but their hearts belong in faraway exotic places with which Main Street U.S.A can hardly hope to compete” for affection. This year’s Memorial Day Message” is gentler than that 2005 antiwar.com column, which was not as understanding about the specter of “misplaced loyalties,” where,

soldier after American soldier burbles on about how freeing Iraqis [Libyans, Afghans, etc.] inspires him … Or, if injured, … how eager he is to get back to his “buddies,” those he considers his real family. …

Celebrated on Memorial Day are “the … self-destructive sentiments too many American soldiers express – their willingness to give their lives for Iraqis [Libyans, Afghans, etc.]; their wish to rejoin their battalions as soon as they heal from being carved up in combat.”

But these point to a “profound alienation from all that’s important.”

And what it important? Not to live a contradiction and a lie, the one Jack Kerwick pinpoints in “The Consequences of American Patriotism” :

if morality consists in the observance of universal principles like “human rights,” then one of two things follow.
Either the partiality that we have toward our spouses, our friends, and our families is beyond the moral realm altogether, or it is actually immoral. There is no way to avoid this conclusion. Any morality affirming universal principles requires impartiality. In glaring contrast, the intimate relationships from which we derive our identities — “the little platoons,” as Burke described them — require partiality.
Thus, either patriotism is a moral fiction or our “little platoons” are.

Or perhaps “patriotism” is a devotion to “our little platoons”?

Perturbed I was back in 2005 “by the sight of compatriots who remain vested in a foreign polity.”

And convinced I was—still am—that “healthy patriotism is associated with robust particularism – petty provincialism, if you like – and certainly not with the deracinated globalism exhibited by our GI Joes and Janes.”

UPDATED: Contra The US, Shame Is Not Dead In South Korean Politics

Asia, Barack Obama, Bush, Justice, Morality, Multiculturalism, Nationhood

It may be symbolic, but the offer of resignation made by “South Korea’s prime minister … over the government’s handling of a deadly ferry sinking,” and the death of hundreds of children, is not insignificant. And it is in stark contrast to the conduct of the American government and bureaucracy.

In the US, government uses its alphabet soup of agencies to spy on (NSA), intimidate (IRS), humiliate (TSA), and dispossess (ICE) the American people. Contra South Korea, nobody ever pays for these infractions, much less offers himself up for punishment or public shaming.

Assassin Sam deploys the most formidable military in the world to eradicate entire countries in the name of a mockery of freedom (Iraq)—and nobody ever resigns, much less offers to resign. Not Cheney, not Bush (of the WMD fame), not Colon Powell; not Condoleezza the skeeza (“who had categorically denied she possessed the analytical wherewithal to connect the dazzlingly close dots between Arab men practicing their aeronautical take-off skills and terrorism”), and not Obama (the abominable creature who drops drones on faraway villagers, leveled Libya, nationalized a 1/6 of the private economy and robbed many millions of their healthcare), nor dominatrix Lois Lerner (a vile and corrupt Obama operative), on and on.

In South Korea, shame and honor still play a corrective role in national politics:

… South Korea’s prime minister offered to resign Sunday over the government’s handling of a deadly ferry sinking, blaming “deep-rooted evils” and irregularities in a society for a tragedy that has left more than 300 people dead or missing and led to widespread shame, fury and finger-pointing.
The resignation offer comes amid rising indignation over claims by the victims’ relatives that the government didn’t do enough to rescue or to protect their loved ones. Most of the missing and dead were high school students on a school trip. Officials have taken into custody all 15 people involved in navigating the ferry that sank April 16, a prosecutor said. …
… “As I saw grieving families suffering with the pain of losing their loved ones and the sadness and resentment of the public, I thought I should take all responsibility as prime minister,” Chung said. “There have been so many varieties of irregularities that have continued in every corner of our society and practices that have gone wrong. I hope these deep-rooted evils get corrected this time and this kind of accident never happens again.”

MORE.

UPDATE (4/27): Myron Robert Pauli writes: “… not to mention Slick Willie whose conduct was probably not criminal due to prosecutorial sandbagging and irrelevance but whose conduct was shameful enough to merit resignation. The woman in charge of GSA during the “hooker conference in Vegas” scandal did resign not that it did her any good [the lower level malefactors were not punished and, in typical overreaction, government scientists WERE and continue to be severely restricted].