Category Archives: Pseudo-history

UPDATE II: A July 4th Toast To TJ, Author of The Declaration

America, Founding Fathers, History, Pseudo-history

THOMAS JEFFERSON, that is. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. “The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate—doesn’t feature. To be fair to the liberal establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.”

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked ‘through the night’ to set the full text on ‘a handsome folio sheet,’ recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in Liberty And Freedom. And President (of the Continental Congress) John Hancock urged that the “people be universally informed.”

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it ‘an expression of the American Mind.’ An examination of Jefferson’s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the mind of a Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, or the collective mentality of the liberal establishment, ‘American’ in any meaningful way. For the Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig—an American Whig whose roots were in the English Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. …

… Jefferson’s muse for the ‘American Mind’ is even older.

The Whig tradition is undeniably Anglo-Saxon. Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, 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. …

Naturally, Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.”

The original Independence-Day column in its entirety is “A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition.”

UPDATED AND CONFIRMED I (July 5): Certain Americans will never own the founding history of this country, and one of perhaps three just wars Americans have fought.

The foul-mouthed Chris Rock: “Happy white peoples independence day.”

UPDATE II: In response to a Facebook comment: The issue here is not slavery, Myron. No need to crumble in white guilt at the mere mention of the American Revolution.

Tailored Truths About South Africa

Crime, Pseudo-history, Race, Racism, South-Africa

Craig Seligman’s Bloomberg column—it’s not worth reading—is about South African “Nobelist Nadine Gordimer,” known for her impenetrable prose, having “channeled her rage” over the reality of the “Rambo Nation” in yet more obscurantist prose.

(“Rambo Nation” is the title of the Introduction to “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.”)

Permissible rage over the new South African mobocracy has to be a mixed-race affair. After all, you can’t tell the story of the dispossessed white minority (Afrikaner farmers), currently “being culled like springbok in a hunting safari.”

That’s a quote from “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” a tract that tells it like it is.

This is the level of truth that tired and tiresome mainstream writers can tolerate—and are willing to transmit—about the New South Africa.

UPDATE II: ANC Centenary Celebrations Kick Off in … America (Theron The Twit)

Africa, Celebrity, Hollywood, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Race, South-Africa, Terrorism

PBS is celebrating: “This week, the African National Congress, South Africa’s ruling political party, marked its 100th anniversary.” Drop the Newspeak. The ANC heads a dominant-party state. Not quite a one-party state, but almost.

To kick off the fun, I watched a rather well-produced, utterly one-sided, propagandist “documentary” yesterday. “Have You Heard From Johannesburg” is about the so-called Struggle. The behind-the-scenes reality popped into my head when watching the famously “exiled South Africans,” (like Oliver Tambo) suited up, and giving ponderous interviews:

“… There was certainly precious little that would have dampened Joseph Lelyveld’s enthusiasm for ‘The Struggle.’ But when the former (aforementioned) New York Times editor went looking for his exiled ANC heroes all over Africa, he found nothing but monosyllabic, apathetic, oft-inebriated men whom he desperately tried to rouse with revolutionary rhetoric.” (Page 143, Into the Cannibal’s Pot.)

Myth-making aside, the ANC’s manufactured heroes have nothing on the ascetic, self-sacrificing Salafis who man al-Qaeda (and who do not rely on European groupies for sustenance).

UPDATED I: “AFRICAN NATIONAL CORRUPTION.” A LOT TO CELEBRATE. DURBAN. I WOULD NOT recognize it today. Durban Bay is dying, environmentally.

UPDATE II: “Be a man who is not afraid to know his HIV status” broadcasts a billboard in the CBD of the once-magnificent city of Johannesburg. The image attached to the ad? A white man. HIV is almost non-existent, statistically, among whites. Such equal opportunity idiocy reminds me of that useless idiot, actress Charlize Theron, who, during a recent interview with another member of the idiocracy, Piers Morgan, hinted that South Africans should be disarmed. Her campaign against rape in SA was as vague, if not as dangerous. In addition to being a pretentious, rather poor actress, Theron is a major hypocrite: I believe her mother shot her father, all in a “good” cause, of course.

The image of your prototypical HIV carriers is at the 3:27 minute mark:

In my book I flesh out the facts about the Central Business District; what it looks like today—the JHB Stock Exchange has been forced to migrate to the suburbs, and businesses are shuttered—as compared to the time when I used to walk to work (it was in the Southern Life Building) from the bus station. I lived up the road in the once vibrant, humming, safe Hillbrow, where I used to stroll at night. A clip of Hillbrow today is below.

Have you ever heard of the hijacking of a … building? It’s a new concept. Of course, the woman in the clip is mouthing the allowable left-liberal platitudes, with her reference to the divinity “Madiba” (Mandela’s African honorific, and an adopted affectation among liberals). “Madiba” would not wish fear to replace his magnificent legacy. The old idiot interviewed seems to think that fear anchored in a fearful reality is a really bad thing. I’ve heard this pearl of wisdom repeated among many American liberals. Living life stupidly and fearlessly seems to be a great virtue.

Pipes on Private Property (Courtesy of JIMS)

Individual Rights, Israel, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Private Property, Pseudo-history, Russia

Sponsored by the Jerusalem Institute for market Studies, the “Property and Freedom” lecture below was given by Prof. Richard Pipes, author of the book Property and Freedom. Here’s a shocker: historians of the West have paid scant attention to the role of private property in the annals of America and Europe. “If you look for the word ‘property’ in the index of American books dealing with evolution of American [and European] attitudes you tend to find nothing there,” says Pipes.

(Property and Freedom is cited in Into the Cannibal’s Pot.)

You already know what this writer thinks. It should be, life, property, liberty. In that order. Property trumps liberty, for liberty can be variously defined. Our government insists we are free so long as we can vote. We know this to be untrue. Property, moreover, is harder to redefine by the state. If our rights to property were fully upheld—the same state that tells us to consider ourselves free (and be grateful) would be unable to control huge areas of our lives—bedroom, boardroom, deathbed, you name them.

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