Category Archives: Nationhood

UPDATED (3/17) NEW COLUMN: The Open-Border Fetish Is Turning Into A Symbol Of Death

China, Globalism, Homeland Security, Ilana Mercer, IMMIGRATION, Israel, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Russia

“For open-border offenders to talk-up open borders during a killer pandemic is scandalous—as scandalous as it would have been for Harvey Weinstein to be talking-up rough sex during his sentencing for sexual assault.”—–ilana mercer, American Greatness.

NEW COLUMN, “The Open-Border Fetish Is Turning Into A Symbol Of Death,” is  at the American Greatness.

An excerpt:

Taking its cues from the American Left, the Israeli left is all for national and individual self-immolation. But nobody who matters in that country has been listening to the Left babble on about “racism” and “Sinophobia.”

Against the advice of its liberal think tanks—and to protect its nationals from the Wuhan virus pandemic—the Jewish State had, early on, closed its doors to “more and more of eastern Asia, starting with China, continuing to Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Thailand, South Korea and Japan.”

China is Israel’s second-largest trading partner.

To follow were tough travel restrictions and a quarantine regimen on territories in Europe, in line with unfolding coronavirus contingencies. Israel has since extended the quarantine to all arrivals. Consequently, of the 9 million Israelis, 100 cases of COVID-19 have been recorded so far, but no deaths.

What is proving more difficult for the Jewish State is adding “New York and the states of Washington and California to its restricted list.” Israeli public health officials recommend it, but Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is being muscled by Vice President Mike Pence to keep his country open to those COVID-19 hot zones.

Following transmission of the coronavirus from Wuhan to Washington State, I wondered, in a mild tweet, posted with links to the Israeli policy, why Americans didn’t deserve this kind of diligence from their government.

Came the strident reply, also on Twitter: “Because, unlike Israel, the U.S. is not a postage-stamp-sized garrison state. The U.S. needs to tailor its response to the disease to its role as global economic power.”

Stalin apologist Walter Duranty summed up this Jacobin perspective perfectly. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Breaking a few old eggs, in an old-age home, in King County, Washington State, is what it apparently takes to make that great global omelet.

To the extent that it safeguards the well-being of its own people, the defensive measures taken by Israel comport with the role of government. “Whether they are armed with bombs or bacteria, stopping weaponized individuals from harming others—intentionally or unintentionally—falls perfectly within the purview of the night-watchman state of classical-liberal theory.”

Look to other nationalistic countries for the connection between borders closed and the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As reported by CNBC, Russia had sealed its borders with China as hermetically as possible, late in January. Matters are fluid, but at this writing, Russia has only 34 cases of coronavirus and no deaths. The infected are said to be Russians returning from Italy.

Likewise, Mongolia closed its borders with China in late January. Only a single case has been reported there. Singapore has reacted patriotically with all its scientific and cerebral might to what was termed there the “Wuhan flu.” It is now over the worst. The great Lee Kuan Yew would be proud. “The response in the U.S. has essentially been the opposite,” laments an envious geneticist writing at the Technology Review.

For open-border offenders to talk-up open borders during a killer pandemic is scandalous—as scandalous as it would have been for Harvey Weinstein to be talking-up rough sex during his sentencing for sexual assault.

The open-border fetish is turning into a symbol of death, not freedom. For the correlation between borderless countries and infection rates seems unmistakable—certainly when one looks at Italy and the EU nexus of nuts to which it belongs. For Brussels, the undisturbed free flow of people across European borders is sacrosanct. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “The Open-Border Fetish Is Turning Into A Symbol Of Death,” is  at the American Greatness, epistolary home of Victor Davis Hanson and Michelle Malkin.

* Image here. Thanks for fair-use permission.

UPDATED (3/17):

UPDATE II (3/4/020): Corona Virus: No Restrictions On Arrivals From Italy, Japan & Other Outbreak Countries

Egalitarianism, Globalism, Healthcare, IMMIGRATION, Nationhood, Pseudoscience

UPDATE I (2/29/020): Of course the state doesn’t want the citizens to purchase face masks, hence the incessant, neurotic, total discrediting of N95 face masks. I made the logical point to my husband the other day to the effect that, while the virus is minuscule, COVID-19 is delivered in a larger medium of bodily fluids or spray. Some barrier to the medium in which it is delivered is better than none. Likewise, Dr. John Campbell, a somewhat befuddled British physician, is not prepared to dishonestly declare face-masks useless.  Listen.

UPDATE II (3/4/020): It’s probably too late for us here in the US. But, but, can we at least dream of a government that looks after its nationals like Israel, imposing tough new travel restrictions on 5 European nations due to fears of corona virus? Details: “Israel severely restricts entry from Europe due to virus.”

Original Feb 29 Post:

The US has no restrictions on arrivals from some hot spots of the Corona Virus outbreak. Passenger screening from those source countries—Italy, for instance—is lackluster to put it mildly.

How do we know this? Not from Fox News, but from Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City.

The progressive mayor recommended that “travel restrictions … be extended to include more countries.”

“Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand. Anyone needs to be screened and if they have symptoms they need to be quarantined,” de Blasio said.

Who would have expected one of the most progressive officials in the country to voice such a sensibly conservative sentiment!

On the other hand, Fox News is cheering indiscriminately and unproductively for everything President Trump does, or doesn’t do, on the COVID-19 front. By so doing, the faithful at Fox are inadvertently harming Americans.

So, we arrive at a paradoxical position where a progressive like de Blasio is first to say what needs to be said!

Most liberal media are lamenting a reduction of travel from China and energetically conjuring counter-intuitive reasons as to why all travel restrictions somehow exacerbate epidemics.

The CDC and NIH officials have generally been mum on travel restrictions into the US, issuing only “travel advisories.”

That conservatives (other than Tucker Carlson) are not covering matters touching on insufficient screening at airports is shameful and counterproductive. It feeds into the distrust of Republican media.

Now, that’s the mindset of a pathologically liberal nation! The free flow of anything into the US must not be disrupted even when such promiscuous liberalism might be lethal.

Note how liberals use the same arguments to advocate against borders and against erecting barriers to disease transmission.

* Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

 

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UPDATED (2/26): Corona Virus: When In Doubt Just How Remiss YOUR Government Is, See What Israel Is Doing

China, Economy, Foreign Policy, Government, Healthcare, Israel, Nationhood

“Israel is among the countries that responded most dramatically to the Corona Virus outbreak; many others—the USA, for example—found mainly travel warnings to be sufficient.

When in doubt about just how remiss YOUR government is, see what Israel is doing—despite China being Israel’s second-largest trading partner, and despite its liberal “think tanks” advising otherwise.

Jerusalem Post:

… In recent weeks, Israel has closed its doors to more and more of eastern Asia, starting with China, continuing to Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Thailand, and as of Sunday, South Korea and Japan, in response to the coronavirus’s spread through the continent and beyond. … “These countries have to understand our motivations. At this time, we have to take steps to defend Israel against the coronavirus, because public health is most important.”

Israeli non-thinking thank tank:

Jerusalem Institute for Security Studies researcher Alex Pevzner explained that “the government and people of China are very sensitive to their image and standing in the world. If Chinese citizens read that Israel closed off its borders to the Chinese, it reflects negatively on the [Israeli] government.” …

* Image courtesy Al Jazeera. “Corona Virus outbreak: Israel blocks arrivals from Seoul.”

UPDATE (2/26):

Israel has done the smartest thing re Corona: total ban on incoming travelers … “and blocked foreign travelers from ALL affected regions from entering. Here in the U.S., #CDC officials dodged questions on expanding travel restrictions and screening.” Israel is also ” … conducting boot camps to train hospital personnel in more rigorous infection control.”

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NEW COLUMN: D’oh! Looks Like Democracy Dies In Diversity

America, Democracy, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Nationalism, Nationhood, Racism

NEW COLUMN, “D’oh! Looks Like Democracy Dies In Diversity,” is now on WND.COM and The Unz Review.  Fans of American Greatness, whose editor maintains extraordinary standards, can catch “Democracy Dies In Diverse Societies” there, too.

An excerpt:

“Dissatisfaction with democracy within developed countries is at its highest level in almost 25 years,” say researchers at the University of Cambridge. “The UK and the United States had particularly high levels of discontent.”

No wonder. Certainly, America is a severely divided country. “Severely divided societies are short on community,” and “community is a prerequisite for majority rule,” argues Donald L. Horowitz, a scholar of democracy, at Duke University.

Having studied “constitutional engineering” in divided societies like South Africa, Horowitz has concluded that, “In societies severely divided by ethnicity, race, religion, language, or any other form of ascriptive affiliation, ethnic divisions make democracy difficult, because they tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. An ethnic party with a majority of votes and seats can dominate minority groups, seemingly in perpetuity.” (Journal of Democracy, April 2014.)

The Democratic Party has morphed into such a political organ. It’s responding to the fact that minorities in the U.S. will soon form a majority. This rising majority, as polling trends indicate, will speak in one political voice, for most immigrants to the United States are not from Europe and Canada, but from Latin America and Asia, south and east. And this cohort of immigrants is reliably progressive: It votes Democratic.

Likewise, the poor and the unskilled are well-represented among our country’s immigrant intake. It’s the way we roll. Poor immigrants favor the rearranging of the income curve in their new home.

The policy establishment preaches well-meaning pieties. All these energetically imported, fractious minorities, claims our ruling Idiocracy, will relinquish race and tribe as unifying principles, and adopt our U.S. constitutional design and “our values.”

Democrats know better. Oh, the founding population, they expect, will naively hitch its existential survival to a political dispensation called liberal democracy.

The duped, historic majority of the U.S. will willingly cede political and institutional dominance in return for the constitutional safeguards—for the abstractions—offered by democracy. This, Democrats know only too well.

Moreover, being pushover-passive on matters domestic, Caucasian America is generally pro-immigration, the more exotic and culturally incongruent, the better. It makes for a warm and fuzzy feeling about The Self. But while Americans don’t see race; the people they’re importing see nothing but race.

Take Indian Americans. They’re a relatively new addition to the United States’ top-down, state-planned, multicultural mess of pottage. Most Indian-Americans have “arrived in America over the past two decades.” But they are highly aggressive politically and reliably Democrat.

By the Economist’s telling, “Capitol Hill, for example, is crammed with staff and interns of Indian-American heritage. They also appear to be ‘over-represented’ in academia, the media and other influential posts.” And, it is their indisputable habit to deploy and grow “informal networks, as well-connected Indian-Americans find jobs for each other’s offspring.”

Caste and ethnicity: It’s what the scrupulously candid English magazine is here hinting at, ever so genteelly.  …

…  READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “D’oh! Looks Like Democracy Dies In Diversity,” is now on WND.COM and The Unz Review, and on American Greatness .