Category Archives: Pseudo-history

UPDATE II: Zakaria Second-Hander Speaks On Syria (The Syria & Libya MO)

History, Intellectualism, Media, Middle East, Paleolibertarianism, Pseudo-history, Pseudo-intellectualism

Fareed Zakaria plagiarizer is big in America primarily because of his reliably banal, unoriginal brain. This “gift” is a prerequisite for maintaining the establishment’s status quo. Or, as Jeff Tucker calls it, the “statist quo.”

The equally uncontroversial WaPo—they passed on the Edward-Snowden scoop—has seen fit to feature Zakaria’s hardly scholarly “analysis” of Syria. (Try Efraim Karsh, Professor of Mediterranean Studies at the University of London. The late, anti-imperialist scholar Elie Kedourie was especially interesting.)

It’s hard to know where to begin to dissect Zakaria’s tired stuff. Zakaria Second-Hander reproduces the old colonialism canard, according to which the sorry state of the Middles-East (and Africa) are blamed (by leftists of the liberal and libertarian variety) on borders drawn by colonial forces “along ahistorical lines.”

Wait a sec, didn’t Shaka Zulu consolidate his empire and commit genocide against the region’s tribes before British penetration proper into South Africa?

Zakaria also assumes (like an ass) that dominant minorities have arisen in the Middle-Eat due to … colonialism’s inorganic border-drawing (that’s my descriptive, in case Fareed finds something worth …borrowing, sans citation).

You’d be better advised to read Amy Chua’s remarkable work on market-dominating minorities (or, as she calls them in chinglese “market-dominant minorities”).

Much more than Zakaria’s idiocy, Steve Sailer’s brief observation about the Alawites will tell you something about why they came to dominate (intelligence? Emphasis is mine):

“The Alawites are another complex ethnicity with deep roots. They are despised by the Sunni majority as not being true Muslims. (Alawites are said to celebrate Christmas and Easter.) When the French took control from the Ottomans after WWI, most of the Sunnis shunned joining the colonial security forces. But after centuries of Sunni oppression, the Alawites thought that getting paid by European experts to use guns and push Sunnis around was a great idea.”

And here’s tired Zakaria via the WaPo:

He compares Syria’s war to the 15-year civil war in Lebanon and the war that erupted in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein. In both cases, the wars were as much about vicious competition between sectarian groups as they were about the decisions of military and political leaders. In both cases, power ended up shifting from minority to majority sects. In both cases, civilians were massacred, and minorities suffered terribly. The difference, perhaps, is that the United States took heavy losses in Iraq but stayed out of Lebanon.

His case, then, is that Syria’s war is not something that the United Stated can stop or alter. Zakaria has no illusions about the pain and terror of Lebanon’s civil war but says that the United States was right not to involve itself. (He also points out that Reagan’s decision to bow out in 1984 did not exactly destroy American credibility in the region.) He points to the war in Iraq; even though the United States toppled Iraq’s minority dictator and quickly moved power over to a government that represented the broader population, that did not prevent hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, the formation of many civilian militias that did terrible things and the infiltration by al-Qaeda and affiliated groups. In this thinking, intervening in Syria will not stop the war’s violence, which is after all more about competing sects than it is about the decisions of one leader. …

Yawn on.

UPDATE I: An interesting take on Syria from Jack Kerwick, except that it is predicated on a notion I have a hard time accepting: Obama is NOT an ass with ears, but is quite smart. Moreover, the country doesn’t care about BHO’s strategy. For the first time in a long time, the people are against war. They don’t care about political posturing. Wow. Just wow. I’m so happy.

UPDATE II (9/7): Personally I think Jack here outthinks BHO. The Libya case, which all new antiwar-warriors are ignoring, is textbook as far as BHO’s Syria MO goes, is it not? In other words, Obama did exactly what he is doing now in the case of Libya, except that there he ignored Congress.

‘Mad Men’ Go Mad Over MLK

History, Hollywood, Media, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Race, Racism

I was under the impression that “Mad Men” was intended as a period drama. Last night, however, the Madison Avenue advertising team, generally true-to-the-times, enacted today’s racial scripts. “Mad Men” is set in the 1960s.

(A period drama is where “elaborate costumes, sets and properties are featured in order to capture the ambiance of a particular era.”)

The backdrop to this politically correct revisionism was the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Struck by political correctness, one “Mad Man” even berates a colleague for not grieving appropriately. The annoying Megan Draper, who has begun to sound very 2013, drags the Draper kids to a nighttime vigil, as rioters rage around them. Don Draper suddenly finds love in his heart for one of his neglected waifs, when the child directs a syrupy word to a black man.

Really? A little too forced and didactic, if you ask me.

Jacqueline Kennedy, as revealed from audio recordings of her historic 1964 conversations with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., held a low opinion of Martin Luther King. America’s most engaging first lady called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “terrible,” “tricky” and “a phony.”

“His associations with communists” is why Jacky’s husband ordered the wiretaps on King. Mrs. Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Robert Kennedy—recounts Patrick J. Buchanan in “Suicide of a Superpower”—”saw to it that the FBI carried out the order.”

I guess our Madison Avenue advertising wizards could have been to the left of Jacqueline Kennedy, but it strains credulity.

History Teachers Who’re As Good As Goebbels

Education, History, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Race, Ron Paul

“Not much different to what came out of the warped mind of Josef Goebbels” is how Barely a Blog contributor Myron Robert Pauli assesses the “PC pseudo-history” instruction your kids are receiving in the nation’s schools. And with good reason.

Myron Pauli, incidentally, is related to Wolfgang Pauli, who was a pioneer in quantum mechanics. A new book about J. Robert Oppenheimer notes that The Other Pauli was an “outspoken critic of shoddy thought who faulted Oppenheimer for his lack of perseverance and thoroughness” (The Times Literary Supplement, April 19, 2013). Sounds a little like Our Pauli. If you enjoy the musings of BAB’s resident physicist, do consider a one-time contribution or a regular monthly contribution to BAB. Read more about our pal and patron below. (To your right you’ll find the PayPal buttons.)

History Teachers Who’re As Good As Goebbels
By Myron Pauli

I recently went over my daughter’s “history” book with her about World War II, to discover what political correctness has done to education. Apparently, the war was fought primarily by women, Navahos, Mexicans, blacks, and Japanese-Americans. A small number of white guys and perhaps even a few Russians (Soviets) may have also fought against the Nazis as well. Not that the “facts” are wrong but, in my humble opinion, history also needs PERSPECTIVE. The textbook spends time on the Zoot Suit Riots but ignores trivial piffle like the Battle of Kursk! It is bad enough that America’s “D students” know nothing about history while the “A students” are trained to be morons with facts.

Undoubtedly, for the next textbook edition, they will have discovered a transgendered Muslim who grew some carrots in a Victory Garden to have single-handedly won World War II. “Fatima the Riveter’s” carrots mean far more than the million people who starved in Leningrad or the millions starved in Asia.

However, this PC pseudo-history is, in fact, as racist as any garbage that came out of the warped mind of Josef Goebbels.

The PC world is built on a hierarchy of victimization where the top of the “good” chain is a poor, black lesbian atheist and the bottom – e.g. the most “evil” is a rich, white, male, heterosexual Christian. In this world, Jews, for example, are ambidextrous – being virtuous in the presence of Christians and evil in the presence of Muslims.

Not that this narcissistic PC actually cares about most minorities per se. I was on one of my “Pauli rants” about 5 million people slaughtered by genocide in the Congo while watching my uber-PC friend nearly dozing off. So, I decided to wake him up by saying “but the world doesn’t give a damn when n**gers kill n**gers”. Of course, he snapped to attention immediately to state his disgust – not at the genocide, of course, but at me using the BAD WORD. I pointed out that he cared more about my “bad language” than of mass murder – but that only illustrates one of the fundamental laws of PC victimization: namely that “black people do not exist except in the presence of white People”.

Examples abound. Out of every nine black pregnancies in America, five get aborted, three are born out of wedlock, and one “abnormal” one gets born to a married black couple. Does Obama care? NO. What is, instead, of national concern is a two minute verbal altercation between a black Harvard Professor and a white Cambridge Cop! Three drunk guys leaving a bachelor party in Queens were riddled with 50 bullets by cops which would have been a major incident; however, the trigger-happy cops were black – so fuggedaboutit.

When George Zimmerman killed Travon Martin, some defenders of Zimmerman tried to use a “self-defense justified manslaughter” argument which, naturally, had no credibility with the media. They then switched to the fact that Zimmerman was a “dark-skinned Hispanic.” Albedo equals justification!

Even Ron Paul tried to get credibility in his attacks on the War on Drugs by pointing out their “racist” effects. Does that mean that warrantless SWAT teams locking up 1,000,000 blue-eyed blondes for smoking pot would be OK?

To sum, the Gospel of Victimization is merely a mirror image of Goebbels Nazi ideology. History is viewed entirely through the lens of race, sexual preference, religion, or whatever the Fad-of-the-Month club dictates from the Ivy- League-Media axis. If a gay man kills his gay lover or infects him with AIDS – yawn. But a fist fight in a bar with a hetero is reason to pass five new hate crime laws. Separate drinking fountains trump genocide any day of the week.

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

On the Atrocity Scale, Bush’s Badness Dwarfed Benghazi-gate

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Just War, Pseudo-history, Republicans, War

As bad as it is, Benghazi-gate is nothing as compared to the cost in blood and treasure, courtesy of George W. Bush, of the immoral, fraudulent invasion of Iraq.

Nothing.

Follow the hyperlinks above if you have doubts. (You shouldn’t, if you have a moral compass and a cerebral cortex.)

It would be an entirely different matter if Republicans had the intellectual moxie to examine the human toll, for decades to come, of Obama’s “murder by multilateralism” in Libya. For that was what the invasion of Libya amounted to.

But they don’t. To the Republicans, Benghazi-gate amounts to no more that a “procedural mishap.” Namely, finding out “what happened? How did it happen? Who covered it up? And, above all, how do we return to doing what we did before IT happened. ‘IT’ being the Sept. 11 attack on the embassy in Libya that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and ‘three other,’ mostly faceless Americans dead.”

And if, in the process of discovery, Republicans can implicate the president—all the better.

By the way, here’s a big surprise. As was to be expected, the horrible David Petraeus “lied to Congress” last week. Oops. Reports RT:

Retired US Army General David Petraeus testified before Congress this week about the storming of a US consulate building in Benghazi, contradicting previous statements made by the since-resigned CIA chief.
Friday morning’s closed-door session was void of the normal media presence as lawmakers on Capitol Hill grilled Gen. Petraeus for further information about the assault in Libya two months ago that left four Americans dead, including the country’s ambassador.
Since the attack on Sept. 12, little has been explained to either the public or politicians in Washington about what really happened before, during and after the consulate was raided in Benghazi. In the immediate aftermath, the White House, State Department and reportedly even Petraeus himself suggested that the assault was likely a spontaneous response to an anti-Islamic film produced in America that had been circulating on the Web. Hours earlier a similar demonstration erupted outside a US embassy in Cairo, Egypt, and the events shortly after in Benghazi were considered to be a copycat protest. In the weeks and months since the attack, however, government agencies have slowly but surely retired that explanation to instead blame the assault on anti-American insurgents, perhaps with al-Qaeda affiliation, waging what is now considered a terrorist attack.
Gen. Petraeus testified to that claim on Friday, sources in attendance say, despite previously suggesting the Benghazi incident was spurred by the “Innocence of Muslims” movie.