Category Archives: Propaganda

“Kosher Butchers”

Europe, Foreign Policy, Islam, Israel, Jihad, Nationhood, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, South-Africa, Terrorism, The West

The International Criminal Tribunal sure honored Slobodan Miloševic’s right to a speedy trial, didn’t it? The President of Serbia and Yugoslavia languished in jail for years during which he conducted his own defense. Eventually, Miloševic expired in his cell from a heart attack. A similar—if not worse—fate awaits Ratko Mladic. Once a Serbian general, Mladic is now an aging, ailing fugitive, whom the impartial western media describes as a “war criminal.”

Writes Julia Gorin: The crimes “Karadzic and the abducted-by-night Milosevic, not to mention all the lesser-known Serbs currently serving multi-decade terms” are guilty of: “daring to fight back when Muslims attacked. They are guilty of being Serbian officials during war. Of daring to answer war with war.”

[T]he Mladic arrest is meant to overshadow all the bad news coming from our Great Islamic Hope in Kosovo. As if Mladic did anything approaching the crimes that the ‘legitimate’ rulers of Kosovo committed against non-Albanians and Albanians alike — and by their own hand. As if 1500 Muslim soldiers — not “8000? — dying from a combination of combat, landmines, infighting and — yes — criminal execution of POWs compares to kidnapping and torturing civilians and selling their organs, to name just one slice of what these apparently more ‘kosher’ butchers are guilty of.

MORE.

It goes a little deeper than that. What western powers have done to Serbia and South Africa, and are in the process of doing to Israel, is not terribly mystifying. To “get it,” you need to grasp the left-liberal urge to deracinate historic communities, and strip flesh-and blood human beings of the fellow feelings all human beings harbor, but some are better at hiding: the affinity for one’s own kind.

kin, clan, Koran: This is what Muslims are fighting for in Afghanistan and Iraq. Driven by left-liberal urges, the US wants to replace their community with our kind of centralized bureaucracy. Muslims will never give up. I secretly admire them for that. But Western communities can be made to roll over with ease.

In my my new book, and in the 2010 address, “Why Do WASP Societies Wither?”—it borrows heavily from Into the Cannibal’s Pot—I give a good sense of the extent of the West’s culpability in the demise of one such western outpost.

The dynamics of Serbia’s demise are similar—at least from the vantage point of the scheming West.

UPDATE II: Memorial Weekend Message (Dying for Nothing)

America, Israel, Liberty, Military, Morality, Propaganda, War

It is the habit on the Memorial Day weekend to thank uniformed men for their sacrifice. Sorry! None of this meaningless jabbering. I thank all the Ramos’s and Compeans of this nation, who stand on this country’s soil and defend their countrymen from the detritus of mankind.

My sympathies go out to Americans who fight phantoms in far-flung destinations. I’m sorry they’ve been snookered into living, dying and killing for a lie. But I will not honor that lie, or those who give their lives for it, and take the lives of others in America’s many recreational wars. I mourn for them, as I have from day one, but I can’t honor them.

I am sorry for those who’ve enlisted thinking they’d fight for their countrymen and were subjected to one backdoor draft after another in the cause of illegal, unjust wars. My heart hurts for you, but I won’t worship at Moloch’s feet to make you feel better.

I honor those sad, sad draftees to Vietnam and to WW II. The first valiant batch had no option; the same goes for the last, which fought a just war. I grew up in Israel, so I honor those men who stopped Arab armies from overrunning our homes. In 1973, we came especially close to annihilation.

“What I learned growing up in a war-torn region is that a brave nation fights because it must; a cowardly one fights because it can.”

UPDATED I: THE SIX-DAY WAR: Another just war. I was one of the many small kids you see in a bunker in the footage here. From that shelter, to the sounds of artillery on the Jordanian border (back then every Israeli resided on some hostile border) we listened to the infamous (lying) Cairo Broadcast, a snippet from which you can read below.

“The existence of Israel has continued too long. We welcome the Israeli aggression. We welcome the battle we have long awaited. The peak hour has come. The battle has come in which we shall destroy Israel.”

UPDATE II: DYING FOR NOTHING. “Eight US soldiers killed in Afghan blasts,” via Jihad Watch. US General David Petraeus, more appropriately once dubbed General Betrayus,” has offered assurances that recent casualties are “because of the ‘progress’ made in ‘important areas’ since last year.”

Evidence to contradict his theory (mounting body count) is brought as evidence for his theory (we’re “winning”). How can the good general lose a debate?

Here’s what Betrayus will never say: Afghans (who’re mostly Muslim) have more of an affinity for the Taliban than for the Wilsonians who’re attempting to westernize them. This is why it is not uncommon to hear of an Afghan policeman opening fire on his American “colleagues” during a joint operation. Just the other day, on April 27 to be precise, as Times Of India tells it, “nine Americans—eight troops and a contractor—were killed by an Afghan officer who opened fire at a Kabul military training centre.”

UPDATED: An Inflationary Flight From Truth

Business, Conspiracy, Debt, English, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Inflation, Intelligence, Political Economy, Propaganda, The State

An observant manager at a social event commented recently about my husband and me: “You both use language very precisely.” The man was bright alright, but he was not necessarily flattering us, since my spouse (PhD, dubbed “guru” in his field) is constantly pelted with admonitions: Be vaguer when zeroing in on a problem—solve it to the group’s advantage, but don’t dare speak openly of incompetence. However obvious, credit the collective, submerge your achievements, ditch the “I” pronoun in favor of the “we.” (And how, pray tell, does one solve problems without removing the obstacles to their resolution? Easy: the able do double shifts to cover for the deadwood.)

The private sector is silhouetted by the state–and infected with the same collectivist philosophy, which aims to maintain the status quo, abolish the deference to ability (since we are all the same, given the right nurture, right? WRONG), and never admit that some are brighter than the rest. Or if this cannot be denied, rope the better man in the service of the mediocre majority that thrives in a culture of collectivism.

To be clear, this impetus is reflexive, rather than a matter of collusion and conspiracy. With few exceptions, most people believe they benefit from state- and corporate enforced collectivism—they believe this is the right way to be, the thing to strive for. (The Bell Curve—normal distribution—will give a hint as to why this is so.)

The co-optation of language plays a large role in subverting reality. The state and its lick-spittle toadies—educrats, mediacrats, and “intellectual”—have co-opted semantics over the years; stolen our words so that the new words better serve the parallel reality they’ve manufactured.

This is serious stuff since language mediates thoughts, actions, and hence public debate and policy.

The mutation in the accepted “meaning” of the word inflation serves as a good example of the process I’ve touched upon.

“Samuel Johnson’s famous A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, had just one definition for inflation,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Justin Lahart, in “Inflation Definitions: Through the Ages”:

The state of being swelled with wind; flatulence.

Naturally, the WSJ does not anchor its historical survey of “the evolution of the dictionary definition of inflation from ‘flatulence’ to ‘rising prices'” in any philosophical framework; it certainly omits any reference to the natural laws of economics. Nevertheless, do read “Using a Dictionary to Define Inflation Can Spell Trouble”

You ought to conclude that the culture en masse is fleeing from truth.

UPDATED: Compassionate Fascist, sadly, proves my point: The official line, which he repeats, has it that inflation is a rise in prices. False! Inflation is an increase in the money supply. The general rise in prices is but a consequence of an increase in the money supply.

UPDATED: Monarchy Vs. Mobocracy (“Albion’s Seed”)

Ancient History, Britain, Bush, Celebrity, Classical Liberalism, Democracy, Founding Fathers, History, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, The West

Trashing the British monarchy is an unfortunate, liberal (not in the classical tradition) impulse, prevalent in the US. Never mind that the British monarchy is purely titular. This American instinct mirrors the deracinated nature of American society, epitomized by the neoconservative creed. Strategically, Americans are taught, in state-run schools, that they form part of a propositional nation, united by abstract ideas, rather than by ties to history, heroes, language, literature, traditions.

In truth, America was founded on both. There was the Lockean philosophy of individual rights. But this philosophy, as the American Founders understood, didn’t magically materialize, or come into existence by osmosis. “Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Thomas 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.”

The fathers of this nation, moreover, loved the American people; they did not delegitimize their ancestry and history by calling them eternal immigrants. John Jay conceived of Americans as “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and custom.” The very opposite of what their descendants are taught.

To denounce the monarchy, as some libertarians have done, with reference to that 18th Century Che Guevara, Thomas Paine, is radical alright, but it is also nihilistic. Paine sympathized with the Jacobins—the philosophical progenitors of today’s neoconservatives—and he lauded the blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious “Revolution in France.”

Pat Buchanan, in one historically rich column, provides an interesting juxtaposition between king and a despot far worse:

“Louis XVI let the mob lead him away from Versailles, which he never saw again. When artillery captain Bonaparte asked one of the late king’s ministers why Louis had not used his cannons, the minister is said to have replied, ‘The king of France does not use artillery on his own people.'”

In his seminal book, Democracy: the God that Failed, master of praxeology Hans-Hermann Hoppe provides ample support—historical and analytical—for his thesis which is this: If forced to choose between the mob (democracy) or the monarchy, the latter is far preferable and benevolent.

“[I]n light of elementary economic theory, the conduct of government and the effects of government policy on civil society can be expected to be systematically different, depending on whether the government apparatus is owned privately or publicly,” writes Hoppe.

“From the viewpoint of those who prefer less exploitation over more and who value farsightedness and individual responsibility above shortsightedness and irresponsibility, the historic transition from monarchy to democracy represents not progress but civilizational decline.”

… democracy has succeeded where monarchy only made a modest beginning: in the ultimate destruction of the natural elites. The fortunes of great families have dissipated, and their tradition of a culture of economic independence, intellectual farsightedness, and moral and spiritual leadership has been lost and forgotten. Rich men still exist today, but more frequently than not they owe their fortune now directly or indirectly to the state.

MORE.

[SNIP]

The democratically elected ruler has no real stake in the territory he trashes for the duration of his office. (Besides, Court Historians and assorted hagiographers will re-write history for him.) It was no mere act of symbolism for the Clintons to have trashed the White House on the eve of their departure.

The Queen of England might be a member of the much-maligned landed aristocracy, but she has acquitted herself as a natural aristocrat would—Elizabeth II has lived a life of dedication and duty, and done so with impeccable class. (It was a sad day when she capitulated to the mob and to the cult of the Dodo Diana.) The queen has been working quietly (and apparently thanklessly) for the English people for over half a century. According to Wikipedia, Elizabeth Windsor was 13 when World War II broke out, which is when she gave her first radio broadcast to console the children who had been evacuated. Still in her teens, Elizabeth II joined the military, “where she … trained as a driver, and drove a military truck while she served.”

It looks as though William, her grandson, has more of a sense of duty (not my kind, but nevertheless a patriotism his countrymen may appreciate) than most members of the pampered American political dynasties. Did any one of the atrocious Bush girls do anything worthwhile over and above preach for daddy’s wars and promote Obama’s healthCare?

But to reiterate, the monarch in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. has far more powers, and uses them far more destructively, than does the monarch across the pond.

UPDATE (May 1): To the ahistoric contention below that American freedoms originate exclusively in … The Netherlands: I guess that the historian David Hackett Fischer, author of Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, got it completely wrong. Ridiculous too is the contention, moreover, made by the letter writer (I never publish untruths about my written opinions) that I was an Anglophile for stating that historic fact. There is a chapter in my forthcoming book titled “The Anglo-America Australian Axis of Evil.” Yes, that’s the writing of an incorrigible Anglophile!