Category Archives: Propaganda

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: Fee-Fi-Fo-Fems (Who Smell The Blood Of A Racist)

Free Speech, Gender, libertarianism, Propaganda, Race, Racism, Reason

“You’re a racist.” “No, you’re a bigger racist.” “No way; you hang out with Lew Rockwell, Hans Hoppe and Ron Paul; they’re racists, so you’re racist.” What on earth is going on here? Why are serious libertarians engaging in tit-for-tat spats with a twat? She is Cathy something or another, a sally-come-lately libertarian. Justin Raimondo, a life-long libertarian, has been credited with “smoking out” this woman—who has libeled Paul, Murray Rothbard, Rockwell and Hoppe as racists.

Are libertarians as dazed and confused as Republicans? The latter have certainly dignified the rival gang’s Stalinist show-trial tactics, partaking in the same silly tit-for-tat: “You’re a racist, I’m not. Democrats are racists; we’re the party of Lincoln.” Blah-blah.

And what will Mr. Raimondo do if the bimbo in question produces some “iffy” quotes from the men she has maligned, quotes that fail the politically correct test?

Libertarians should not partake in this dance done by the political establishment. By going on the defense—allowing themselves to be drawn into such a deeply silly exchange—libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone, and deserve to be purged from “polite” company.

(Incidentally, allow me some latitude here when it comes to the liberal use of ad hominem, having already proven, I hope, that Cathy Whatshername is the dim bulb she is. It was hoped that “Libertarian Feminists Make A Move On Von Mises” would have provided “brutalists” with a temporary reprieve from her ilk. Alas, this is the “Age of the Idiot.” You can’t keep ’em down for long.)

JUNGE FREIHEIT, a German weekly, recently interviewed this writer. One of the questions was this: “Have you been blamed for racism because of your book “Into the Cannibal’s Pot”? What would you answer?”

The reply, taken almost verbatim from “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” (pp. 41-42), ought to help in warding off the fee-fi-fo-fems who sniff out the blood of speech offenders and thought criminals:

No, not really. The book is concerned with reality, not race. Res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself). Most intelligent readers can tell the difference. One individual from Media Matters failed, but he could hardly be called intelligent. In order to accuse me of racism, he needed to lie about what I had written. My answer to those who’d fault me for daring to make broad statements about aggregate group characteristics, vis-à-vis crime, for instance, would be as follows: Generalizations, provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, are not incorrect. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decisions in their daily lives based on probabilities and generalities. That one chooses not to live in a particular crime-riddled county or country in no way implies that one considers all individual residents there to be criminals, only that a sensible determination has been made, based on statistically significant data, as to where scarce and precious resources—one’s life and property—are best invested.

UPDATE (5/11): Comments harvested from the Facebook thread:

Jack Kerwick (Catholic, conservative philosopher): “‘Tit-for-tat spats with a twat.’ Vintage Ilana.”

Ilana Mercer: “From the fact that some dude is dumber than Cathy Whatshername, it doesn’t follow that CWHN is smart, Christoph Dollis. The Jeffrey Tucker I once knew was way too bright to have written the crap I critiqued in “Libertarian Feminists Make A Move On Von Mises”. Cathy Whatshername is the ‘brains’ behind it. The woman is the SE Cupp of lite libertarianism.”

The adorable Kathy Shaidle: “Libertarians should not partake in this dance done by the political establishment. By going on the defense—allowing themselves to be drawn into such a deeply silly exchange—libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone, and deserve to be purged from ‘polite’ company.” (From the post above)

Exactly. Many so called libertarians just seem like low tax liberals whose big priority is getting to smoke dope without a helmet, and who have bought into the fashioable leftwing “multiculural/race/gender/transphobia” narrative. No thanks.

Ilana Mercer: “The inimitable Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe once told me: ‘If you are not called a racist, then, it seems to me, you are in intellectual trouble and it is high time to reconsider your own thinking.’ Professor Hoppe was attempting to console me, after someone marked us both with that Mark of Cain”.

The Elephant In The Pistorius Courtroom

Crime, Free Speech, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Race, Racism, South-Africa, Sport

Now on WND is “The Elephant In The Pistorius Courtroom,” in which I speak to philosopher Dan Roodt, Ph.D., about two recent show trials: that of blade-runner Oscar Pistorius and that of the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, Donald Sterling. Dr. Roodt is a noted Afrikaner activist, author, literary critic and director of PRAAG. He is the author of the polemical essay, “The Scourge of the ANC.”

An excerpt:

ILANA MERCER: “There’s an elephant in the courtroom in which Oscar Pistorius is being tried for the murder of girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. It is the unidirectional, black-on-black and black-on-white violent crime in South Africa. The fear of being butchered was likely behind the blade runner’s irrational, irresponsible actions. I had hoped that Pistorius would speak up. For all his privilege, Pistorius knows the rapacity and invincibility of the criminal class in his country. Like every other Afrikaner, he knew in his gut what infiltrating gangs would do to a legless Boer. The world is praising the proceedings in that court. However, “making sport of a caged animal that has confessed” is how a South African reader described this Colosseum. What do you think?

DAN ROODT: I largely agree with that. One of the columnists on our Praag.org site described the trial as a “canned hunt and a legal travesty.” Most people watching it probably do not know that only 8 percent of murder cases in South Africa result in a conviction, so killers have a 92 percent chance of literally getting away with murder! South Africa is both the murder and especially the rape capital of the world. Usually the statistics are massaged in such a way that only murder proper, called “first-degree murder” in the United States, is included in the absolute number of murders. But if one also counts other homicides with a lesser culpability, we are the world champions, even above India’s 43,000 homicides. But, of course, India has over 1 billion people, whereas we have just over 50 million. Even for first-degree murder, we have more of those per year (16,000) than the U.S. (14,000) which has six times our population.

Regarding the court procedures, Pistorius is spending a lot of money on his legal team and the state is using an experienced Afrikaner prosecutor, Gerrie Nel. However, there has been large-scale affirmative action applied to the appointment of judges, so that many of them lack the knowledge of the law and the experience to do their job properly. In many cases, black offenders, especially, get off very lightly and in practice do not serve more than ten years for first-degree murder.

The government is also applying pressure on lawyers to apply affirmative action in their own ranks as most of the top-level senior lawyers or advocates, as we call them, are still white. …”

… Read the rest. “The Elephant In The Pistorius Courtroom” is now on WND.