Category Archives: Pseudo-history

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.”

UPDATED: The Founders Reduced

Africa, Colonialism, Ethics, Founding Fathers, History, Human Accomplishment, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Nationhood, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Race, Racism

After a conference (some photos are posted below) in Baltimore, I decamped to Old Town Alexandria (still occupied federal territory) to do some sightseeing. That meant staying away from the venue from which Glenn Beck and his 9/twelvers choose to rouse the nation: DC. Incidentally, a gentle bouquet of sewerage blanketed DC when I landed at Reagan National Airport. It lingered for days.

I, of course, needed no olfactory reminders to steer clear of DC. We headed into Virginia. Fredericksburg, Charlottesville, and Orange: The landscape took my breath away. So beautiful, so steeped in history and patriotism. One could so clearly see why magnificent men once defended these places to the death.

Sadly, after touring George Washington’s Mount Vernon, James Madison’s woefully neglected Montpelier, and Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, Sean and I turned into betting men. The bet? In what room, or stage of the guided tour, would our guide begin to deconstruct the founders for slavery, making sure that all present understood how compromised were these brilliant and brave individuals because of that peculiar institution.

Whites had been taught well. Many of the questions fielded touched on slavery; most of those present were eager to display their exquisite sensitivity. Achingly sensitive: Although the slave quarters were closed for renovations, one young man had draped himself over a windowsill. There he stood motionless, deep in thought, his frame racked by (very showy) pain.

An African-American family sauntered toward the estate plan, where I lingered. The father pointed his son toward one thing and one thing only: “Here, son, were the slave quarters. Here is their unmarked tomb,” said dad. They left. Thus was the boy instructed to keep those suppurating sores oozing with resentment. Not a word did dad disgorge about George Washington. Thus was Washington whittled down.

At Monticello we were joined by my good friend the economist and historian Tom DiLorenzo. Tom has blogged about another libel leveled against “The Great Man,” on Lewrockwell.com: the notion that “Jefferson fathered six children with slave Sally Hemmings,” disseminated by the “school-marmish tour guide.”

On average, by the time you arrive at the second room in any given house, you are hit with the requirement that Honky expiate over slavery. The Founders, it is intimated, are beyond repair given the contradiction they embodied. This was the gist of the message.

One pimply female gatekeeper—she was ominously standing sentinel at Washington’s tomb—wearing trendy shades and a shortish skirt, explained to a concerned middle-aged white man: “Washington freed his slaves towards the end, but kept some on because “he was addicted to the life style.” Imagine using contemporary pop-psyche vernacular in this context!

HISTORY FROM BELOW. The history of the US is what the Legislative Black Caucus, the NAACP, and so-called civil-rights activists say it is; it’s history from below; a litany of complaints and contrivances from self-styled victims’ groups on behalf of minor historical figures.

Outside “the plantation office building where Stonewall Jackson died in Guinea Station, Virginia.”

These little piggies, Ossabaw Island Hogs, belong to the very breed once bred by George Washington at Mount Vernon. This most innovative farmer, who used state-of-the-art technologies and thinking with respect to agriculture and conservation, was, naturally, nothing without the slaves (whom he and his ilk schooled).

With Barely A Blog Star, Myron Pauli, who was good enough to attend the Mencken Club Conference.

Peter Brimelow and myself.

UPDATE: I understand that David, in the Comment hereunder, is being cynical when he writes, “I got it, the founders were flawed, sinful men like me and you,” but the following bears saying:

No, the Founders were nothing like us. Not even close. I’m not talking as an idealist, but as a realist. Judging from their deeds and their words, the American Founding Fathers were immeasurably better than just about anyone on earth today (and that goes for that gnarled, somewhat stupid sadist, Mother Teresa. And yes, Christopher Hitchens nailed the woman).

Their actions tell us that they forsook their fortunes for a cause we no longer have the intellectual or moral capabilities to grasp: liberty.

Their writings evince an intelligence and a level of abstraction far beyond that evinced by most contemporary intellectuals. In fact, Charles Murray’s monumental work, Human Accomplishment, in which he comes up with 4,002 subjects who “dragged their fellow men out of wattle-and-daub hovels and pushed them into space rockets,” tends to support my harking to the past, not the present, for intellectual inspiration.

Slavery was debated vigorously and finally abolished by the English—not the Arab or African traders (who persist in the practice).

I cover this topic in my yet-to-be-published book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For The West From Post-Apartheid South Africa. It is a complicated subject. The missionaries in Africa, for example, regarded slaves as children to be de-tribalized and missionized. They were taught skills and trades; mission stations acted as havens for refugees fleeing tribal depredations in South Africa.

As you tour the homes of the founders mentioned above, you’re wont to hear about this or the other wonderful cabinet maker or marvelously gifted horseman, or farmhand, etc. Who do you think taught the slaves these skills and trades? The monarchs of Buganda or Ethiopia?

As I say, the Founders were advanced for their time in EVERY respect. Not perfect, but a great deal more perfect than most of us.

UPDATED: A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition

America, History, IMMIGRATION, Liberty, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Pseudo-history

“The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate—has been mocked out of meaning.

To be fair to the liberal Establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. 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 McCain, an 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.”

On the occasion of Independence Day, re-read the original column in its entirety, “A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition.”

UPDATED (July 4): “Assimilation and the Founding Fathers”: Michelle Malkin picks up on the theme in her superb syndicated column. Here are a few excerpt:

“… as I’ve noted many times over the years when debating both Democrats and Republicans who fall back on empty phrases to justify putting the amnesty cart before the enforcement horse, we are not a “nation of immigrants.” This is both a factual error and a warm-and-fuzzy non sequitur. Eighty-five percent of the residents currently in the United States were born here. Yes, we are almost all descendants of immigrants. But we are not a “nation of immigrants.” (And the politically correct president certainly wouldn’t argue that Native American Indians, Native Alaskans, Native Hawaiians and descendants of black slaves “immigrated” here in any common sense of the word, would he?) …

George Washington, in a letter to John Adams, stated that immigrants should be absorbed into American life so that “by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, laws: in a word soon become one people.”

In a 1790 speech to Congress on the naturalization of immigrants, James Madison stated that America should welcome the immigrant who could assimilate, but exclude the immigrant who could not readily “incorporate himself into our society.”

Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1802: “The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family.”

Hamilton further warned that “The United States have already felt the evils of incorporating a large number of foreigners into their national mass; by promoting in different classes different predilections in favor of particular foreign nations, and antipathies against others, it has served very much to divide the community and to distract our councils. It has been often likely to compromise the interests of our own country in favor of another. The permanent effect of such a policy will be, that in times of great public danger there will be always a numerous body of men, of whom there may be just grounds of distrust; the suspicion alone will weaken the strength of the nation, but their force may be actually employed in assisting an invader.”

The survival of the American republic, Hamilton maintained, depends upon “the preservation of a national spirit and a national character.” “To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens the moment they put foot in our country would be nothing less than to admit the Grecian horse into the citadel of our liberty and sovereignty.” …

Read the rest at MichelleMalkin.com.

Updated: Allowed History From Below ONLY

Federalism, History, Just War, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, Race, Racism, States' Rights

Confederate History Month: Declared anew by Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, with the intent of honoring the Commonwealth of Virginia’s shared history. Read the April 2010 proclamation declaring it Confederate History Month. Reasonable stuff.

If you’re going to do something as controversial as honor the South’s sacrifice, be prepared to stick to your guns. Otherwise, don’t bother to put on the show. The specter of yellow-bellied pols capitulating to the pieties of political correctness is sickening.

The history of the US is what the Legislative Black Caucus, the NAACP, and so-called civil-rights activists say it is; it’s history from below; a litany of complaints and contrivances from self-styled victims’ groups on behalf of minor historical figures.

Update (April 8): I contacted my good friend the valiant Tom DiLorenzo, author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, for a comment about the fracas. Here it is:

“What would the race hustlers and the pompously politically correct do without Confederate History Month? How could the former frighten little old black ladies into sharing their social security checks with them if they couldn’t use it to scare them into thinking there are people out there who want to bring back slavery? As for the PC crowd, which includes the usual leftist suspects as well as such outfits as the ‘libertarian’ Cato Institute and the neocon Claremont Institute, Southerners must forever be demonized for the sin of slavery– but not New Yorkers and New Englanders, who also owned slaves and ran the transcontinental slave trade for centuries. No, only Southerners must be demonized because they were the only group in American history to seriously challenge the notion that the politicians in D.C. are ‘sovereign’ over everyone and everything.”