Category Archives: Pseudo-history

Freedom Fighters Vs. Freedom Deniers; Truth Vs. Untruth

Conservatism, Journalism, libertarianism, Liberty, Media, Political Philosophy, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Pseudo-intellectualism

If economic historian Tom Woods and XM radio host Mike Church made it onto Freedom Watch’s often-misnamed Freedom-Fighters panel, I would be inclined to tune in more often. These men have fidelity to truth and reality. It was on display during an appearance on Judge Napoliaton’s Fox Business show.

More often than not, I switch off. Sure, the occasional freedom fighter finds his way onto the segment, but the Freedom Fighters Panel is set-up, in general, in the mold followed by every other cable and network show. It’s positively postmodernist. Present the public with two competing “perspectives” or worldviews. By doing so, you mislead Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber into thinking that indeed there are two realities, and that he may decide which one is more compelling.

The truth is that truth is immutable; it is not relative. There is, moreover, too little truth in media. Truth cannot afford to be diluted or presented by its adherents as dueling with untruth.

Gasbag Gasparino/Nancy Skinner/Caroline Heldman/Tara Dowdell/—these Fox News fixtures no more represent truth or promote it than does your average Holocaust denier.

Except, that—although I know nothing about the Dewey Decimal Classification—I believe that in a library, Holocaust denying literature would not be classified under history. If I am correct in this last assumption, why classify the reality defying bunk spewed by the likes of Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne, “Charlie” Rangel, and other assorted TV mouths, as versions of the truth? For that is what the panel format suggests.

Naturally, the dueling “perspectives,” political-panel format is quite compatible with the aims of CNN, MSNBC, and other progressive media outlets.

Where Magic Wins Out Over Reason

Africa, Colonialism, Economy, Ethics, Foreign Aid, Free Markets, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Racism, Socialism, The West

The following is from “Where Magic Wins Out Over Reason,” now on WND.COM:

“The images coming at us from Somalia are too horrible for words. And I don’t mean the sight of celebrity journo Anderson cooper and his CNN sidekicks standing in the neighboring Kenya, and blaming, against all evidence, the ‘worst drought in 60 years’ for mass starvation in Somalia. As BBC tells it, the drought ‘has gripped only parts of Somalia,’ and then only ‘since June.’

You have flint for a heart if the images of children starving slowly do not reduce you to tears. Aidan Hartley of the London Spectator describes these distended-bellied, dying innocents as ‘martian-headed skeletons,’ whose emaciated little bodies have begun to eat up their fat reserves and muscle proteins. Many, if not most, will succumb to slow and agonizing organ failure.

In conjunction with ‘the drought’—isn’t Texas experiencing one of those—Cooper and company (joined by other cretins on Cable) have mentioned the menace of the Islamist group al-Shabab, which ‘rules over the population in a style reminiscent of Pol Pot’s Cambodia crossed with the Taleban.’

However, Hartley imparts what Cooper is incapable of imparting—and what any vaguely knowledgeable journalist writing about Africa knows: ‘war caused this famine.’ In this case, internecine warfare was compounded by foreign, military intervention courtesy of the duopoly I dub the ‘Anglo-American Axis of Evil,’ in my new book.

Washington and Westminster (and their special forces) galvanized a neighboring Ethiopian gang to invade southern Somalia and occupy Mogadishu. ‘The objective,’ explains Hartley, ‘was to expel Islamists alleged to have been linked to al-Qaeda.’ And never mind that, ‘Under the Islamists, the city was enjoying its first period of relative peace since Somalia collapsed into civil war in 1991.’

Hunger in the Horn of Africa is not something Cooper is capable of understanding, let alone explaining to his fans on twitter. Contra Cooper, Hartley has not pruned the evidence. As jaundiced a journalist as he is, however, Hartley has failed to look deeper into the heart of darkness that is Africa.

“Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” fills this gap…”

“Into the Cannibal’s Pot” is available from Amazon.

The complete column is “Where Magic Wins Out Over Reason,” now on WND.COM.

If you’re interested in syndicating my weekly, WND column, kindly email me for details at ilana@ilanamercer.com. “Return to Reason“ is WorldNetDaily’s longest standing, exclusive libertarian column.

“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: “Inside [John Esposito’s] Islam”

Islam, Israel, Jihad, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Pseudoscience

Very little was said about sample size, data-collection methods and other crucial methodological matters during the screening, on PBS, of the documentary “Inside Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think.”

“We have the missing answers and statistics, gathered, parsed, and analyzed not by pundits but by professional researchers”: So goes a declamation on the website touting the program. This sounds a lot like advertising. You do learn that these stellar social scientists relied on the interview to collect this definitive information (which concludes that Muslims the world over are moderates). The interview is one of the least reliable tools in the social sciences. The questions asked and showcased, moreover, were most definitely leading questions. The answers people tend to give to loaded questions are usually bogus.

Other than Georgetown University Professor John Esposito, an A-list Islam apologist, “Inside Islam” introduced the viewer to emphatic, invested presenters of a one-sided view of the West as oblivious to Muslim opinion and aspirations.

I guess they had a valid point with respect to American foreign policy. You have to possess Olympian vanity to invade Muslim countries as America has done, with so little knowledge of the history of the people, the region and the outcome of prior such faith-based democratic missionizing.

However, the efforts of Dalia Mogahed, Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies (also an Obama appointee), to sanitize Islam became quite ridiculous when she contended that her faith specifies a series of inalienable rights designed to protect the individual against the state.

Come again? More than a religion, Islam is a fully developed political system.

Mogahed was commandeering the language of the American Bill of Rights to ingratiate Islam on her audience. What has happened to the social sciences? In my days you ruled out activists.

In the same spirit of “scientific” detachment, another self-styled social scientist, who spoke at length on “Inside Islam,” ventured that Israel was a piece of the West left behind in Muslim lands; a sore reminder of this occupation. Our impartial researcher was voicing the radical opinions of the Helen-Thomas School of Thought.

My old Afrikaner lecturers—the ones who drilled me in statistics—would have barred both Mogahed and her colleague from designing or partaking in a study for fear of biasing the results.

There is a good chapter on the death of the social sciences in “WE ARE DOOMED.”

The social sciences are most certainly doomed.

UPDATE I (Jan. 1): Stephen raises an interesting point about pathological sexual repression. Sexual deprivation accounts for the accepted practice of rampant homosexuality among heterosexual Muslims prior to marriage.

UPDATE II: Actually, Mercer (Who Eats Nails For Breakfast) had softened momentarily to the excuse-making, psychologizing, school of thought on Islam. Larry Auster keeps us focused: “It’s because they’re sexually repressed–no, it’s because they lack democracy–no, it’s because they marry their cousins–no, it’s because they were ‘left behind’–no, it’s because of Israeli cruelty–no, it’s because of … Anything But Islam.”