Category Archives: Propaganda

Apartheid In Black And White: Truth About The Afrikaner (Part 1)

Africa, America, History, Nationhood, Propaganda, Race, Racism, South-Africa

NEW COLUMN is “Apartheid In Black And White: Truth About The Afrikaner (Part 1).” It is now on Townhall.com.

An excerpt:

In a recent translation of Tacitus’ “Annals,” a question was raised as to whether “there were any ‘nations’ in antiquity other than the Jews.” Upon reflection, one suspects that the same question can be posed about the Afrikaners in the modern era.

In fact, in April of 2009, former South African President Jacob Zuma infuriated the “multicultural noise machine” the world over by stating: “Of all the white groups that are in South Africa, it is only the Afrikaners that are truly South Africans in the true sense of the word. Up to this day, they [the Afrikaners] don’t carry two passports, they carry one. They are here to stay.”

Indeed, the Afrikaners fought Africa’s first anticolonial struggles, are native to the land and not colonists in any normal sense. Yet the liberal world order has only ever singled out Afrikaners for having established apartheid, considered by the Anglo-American-European axis of interventionism to be “one of the world’s most retrogressive colonial systems.”

However, while the honing of apartheid by the Afrikaner National Party started in 1948, after Daniel Malan assumed the prime minister’s post, elements of the program were part of the policy first established in 1923 by the British-controlled government.

There was certainly nothing Mosaic about the maze of racial laws that formed the edifice of apartheid. The Population Registration Act required that all South Africans be classified by bureaucrats in accordance with race. The Group Areas Act “guaranteed absolute residential segregation.” Pass laws regulated the comings-and-goings of blacks (though not them alone), and ensured that black workers left white residential areas by nightfall.

Easily the most egregious aspect of flushing blacks out of white areas was the manner in which entire communities were uprooted and dumped in bleak, remote, officially designated settlement sites— “vast rural slums with urban population densities, but no urban amenities beyond the buses that represented their slender lifelines to the cities.”

Still, apartheid South Africa sustained far more critical scrutiny for its non-violent (if unjust) resettlement policies than did the U.S. for its equally unjust but actively violent mass resettlement agenda, say, in South Vietnam. (See Sophie Quinn-Judge, “Lawless Zones,” The Times Literary Supplement, February 26, 2010.)

Or, before that. In his magisterial “History of the American People,” historian Paul Johnson, a leading protagonist for America, details the rather energetic destruction and displacement by Andrew Jackson of the “the oldest American nations,” the Indians.

Nor should we forget subsequent American military misdeeds. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “Apartheid In Black And White: Truth About The Afrikaner (Part 1),” is now on Townhall.com, The Unz Review and WND.com.

UPDATE (7/30): What-Aboutism: A Pale, Weak Defense Of Trump’s Pro-American Tactics With Putin

Argument, China, Foreign Policy, Government, Propaganda, Reason, Russia, The State

Limited government has a constitutional obligation to secure the peace by defending and protecting its constituents—not the world. Duly, and since my values are not yours and vice versa, a limited government doesn’t enforce “our values.” 

POTUS is doing just that with Mr. Putin.

Hence this Breitbart article amounts to a bit of “What Aboutism.”

In “The President’s Controversial Policy Toward Russia: The Good Guys Risk Losing If the Bad Guys Are United — Part One,” the author seems to galvanize FDR and Churchill to argue—what exactly?—that Putin is a Stalin, with whom we have to make strategic common cause?

No idea.

What Aboutism should be added to the list of logical fallacies. It is not a substantive argument to say, “Oh, lookie, FDR did it too, Churchill did it too. You like them. Why not Trump?”

The other “argument” here is that China is worse than Russia, the premise being that we should do battle with the former but not the latter. In other words, the American government, a paragon of perfection, has enemies more worthy than Russia.

It might be that Synophobia is more justified than Russophobia, but the point remains that an American president should pursue not war, but peace and prosperity, albeit through mighty strength. Those are pursued through diplomacy.

UPDATE (7/30):

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Lindsey Graham Lies About The ‘New Syria,’ Which Is Now Safe For Christians & Way More Secular

Christianity, Islam, Jihad, Middle East, Propaganda, Russia

On just about every issue he ran on, candidate Trump was in opposition to Sen. Lindsey Graham. Including Russia. Now Graham, whose popularity as a presidential candidate in 2016 was around 0%, is advising President Trump.

Forty eight seconds in to his July 10 segment on Fox News’ The Story, Graham says, “Putin is not doing anything good in Syria.”

You lie, Lindsey.

The Economist is a superb news magazine—its reporters do old fashioned shoe-leather reporting, rather than rely solely on what the Anglo-American Deep State dishes. Which is how Lindsey gets his news.

More fundamentally, the Economist is liberal and vehemently anti-Trump. Under an ostensibly dim headline, the magazine relays some very promising news about the new Syria, what with the Alawites and their allies having consolidated power, once again.

Remember, “The country has been led by Alawites since 1966, but Sunnis held senior positions in government, the armed forces and business. Even today many Sunnis prefer Mr Assad’s secular rule to that of Islamist rebels.”

“How a Victorious Bashar al-Assad is Changing Syria: Sunnis have been pushed out by the war. The new Syria is smaller, in ruins and more sectarian”:

… the Christian quarter is reviving. Churches have been lavishly restored; a large crucifix hangs over the main street. “Groom of Heaven”, proclaims a billboard featuring a photo of a Christian soldier killed in the seven-year conflict. In their sermons, Orthodox patriarchs praise Mr Assad for saving one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.

Homs, like all of the cities recaptured by the government, now belongs mostly to Syria’s victorious minorities: Christians, Shias and Alawites (an esoteric offshoot of Shia Islam from which Mr Assad hails). These groups banded together against the rebels, who are nearly all Sunni, and chased them out of the cities. Sunni civilians, once a large majority, followed. More than half of the country’s population of 22m has been displaced—6.5m inside Syria and over 6m abroad. Most are Sunnis. …

“We lived so well before,” says a Christian teacher in Homs. “But how can you live with a neighbour who overnight called you a kafir (infidel)?”

For the warring factions, this is a regional conflict . The local powers want “the Iranian-backed Shia militias” to go back whence they came. Russia, seemingly, is urging the same.

Mr Assad’s men captured the last rebel strongholds around Damascus in May. He now controls Syria’s spine, from Aleppo in the north to Damascus in the south—what French colonisers once called la Syrie utile (useful Syria). The rebels are confined to pockets along the southern and northern borders (see map). Lately the government has attacked them in the south-western province of Deraa.

Government departments are functioning. In areas that remained under Mr Assad’s control, electricity and water supplies are more reliable than in much of the Middle East. Officials predict that next year’s natural-gas production will surpass pre-war levels. The National Museum in Damascus, which locked up its prized antiquities for protection, is preparing to reopen to the public. The railway from Damascus to Aleppo might resume operations this summer. …

… Syrians are experienced construction workers. When Lebanon’s civil war ended in 1990, they helped rebuild Beirut. But no such workforce is available today. In Damascus University’s civil-engineering department, two-thirds of the lecturers have fled. “The best were first to go,” says one who stayed behind. Students followed them. Those that remain have taken to speaking Araglish, a hotch-potch of Arabic and English, as many plan futures abroad.

Sunni states, such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, should also give up on the John McCain-Lindsey Graham style Sunni regime change.

Early on, minorities lowered their profile to avoid being targeted. Women donned headscarves. Non-Muslim businessmen bowed to demands from Sunni employees for prayer rooms. But as the war swung their way, minorities regained their confidence. Alawite soldiers now flex arms tattooed with Imam Ali, whom they consider the first imam after the Prophet Muhammad (Sunnis see things differently). Christian women in Aleppo show their cleavage. “We would never ask about someone’s religion,” says an official in Damascus. “Sorry to say, we now do.”

The country’s chief mufti is a Sunni, but there are fewer Sunnis serving in top posts since the revolution. Last summer Mr Assad replaced the Sunni speaker of parliament with a Christian. In January he broke with tradition by appointing an Alawite, instead of a Sunni, as defence minister. …

… A decade ago Mr Assad toyed with infitah (liberalisation), only for Sunni extremists to build huge mosques from which to spout their hate-speech, say his advisers. He is loth to repeat the mistake.

Now, “Mr Assad sees no reason to make concessions.” But “UN mediators and his Russian allies,” whom Graham maligns, have been pushing for inclusive solutions.

Is this ideal? Of course not. But it’s better than the alternative promoted by the diabolical duo, McCain and Graham and the rest of the Anglo-American foreign-policy establishment: rule by fundamentalist rebels.

Russia has called on all “foreign forces to leave Syria,” including Iran, which has stationed “80,000 foreign Shia militiamen” in Syria.

Skirmishes between the [Iranian] militias and Syrian troops have resulted in scores of deaths, according to researchers at King’s College in London. Having defeated Sunni Islamists, army officers say they have no wish to succumb to Shia ones. Alawites, in particular, flinch at Shia evangelising. “We don’t pray, don’t fast [during Ramadan] and drink alcohol,” says one.

All share a wish for the Iranians to depart, but Turkey, Israel and America would also do well to stay out of Syria, too.

THE ARTICLE IS: “How a Victorious Bashar al-Assad is Changing Syria: Sunnis have been pushed out by the war. The new Syria is smaller, in ruins and more sectarian.”

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American ‘Experts’ Call You Crazy If You Mention Our ‘Deep State.’ But Russia, Says US ‘Expert,’ Certainly Has One.

Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Neoconservatism, Political Economy, Propaganda, Russia, The State

To be accepted into polite company, we Americans are instructed to denounce the very concept of a Deep State (the unelected, extra-constitutional, entrenched, state apparatus).

Oddly, I first heard this eloquent, apt term  from Bill Moyers, considered an august force on the Left.

But now, leftists in the era of Trump, joined by neocons and cuckservatives insist that the concept is all the product of Deplorable minds gripped by conspiracy.

Except when it comes to Russia. The American state apparatus they consider virtuous, but Russia certainly has a Deep State.

The Russian Deep State one American “expert” calls: “the natural state.”

Yes, the same kind of American experts who denounce Deep State when applied to the US government, have a term for the Russian Deep State: “the natural state.”

Douglass North, an American political economist, alludes to what sounds like Deep State reality, only it pertains to Russia.

[Putin] presides over the sort of power structure that Douglass North, an American political economist, has called the “natural state”. In this, rents are created by limiting access to economic and political resources, and the limits are enforced by “specialists in violence”. In Russia these are the siloviki of the assorted security and police forces, serving the system as they did in Soviet times. …

Our government goons may not kill us in the name of compliance, but they certainly marginalize us.

MORE: “Gorbachev’s grandchildren: A new generation is rising in Russia: Vladimir Putin’s election victory does not mean that there is no hope.“

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