Category Archives: The West

The title for this blog post comes from a 2014 column, “Don’t Know Shiite From Shinola,” in which I write that America is “a mulish military power which doesn’t know Shiite from Shinola.” The original expression is 100% American: “Doesn’t know shit from Shinola“:

Shinola was a brand of shoe polish previously manufactured in the USA. The alliteration of the expression ‘doesn’t know shit from Shinola’ partly explains the derivation. Also, without putting too fine a point on it, the two things named in the expression could possibly be confused. However, only one of them would be good to apply to your shoes and only particularly dim people could be expected to muddle them up.

To continue the theme of the previous blog post, “Afghanistan And Its Neighbors; China And Those Uyghurs,” you’re not considered properly American unless you’re carping about “Iran, Iran, Iran.” The John McCain version is, “Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.”

For merely asking, “When last did Iran commit terrorism against the US?,” Tucker Carlson was attacked viciously by Mark Levin. Carlson, however, was on the money. As I chronicled in this 2017 blog post: “Iranians Killed ZERO Americans In Terrorist Attacks In U.S. Between 1975 -2015.”

Iran is neighbor to Afghanistan, sharing a long border with it. And, “Iran … has a more tortured relationship with the Taliban. Its leaders are certainly delighted to see the Great Satan, America, abandon its bases next door.”

As always, The Economist offers informed analysis in, “Afghanistan’s neighbours are preparing for life with the Taliban”:

“Shia Muslims … view their own Islamic revolution as a modernising movement.” After all, “Women can study, work and hold office in Iran, so long as they veil.” Yes, Iranians “look askance at the Taliban’s hidebound Sunni fanaticism.”

Swamped for decades with destitute refugees and cheap heroin from Afghanistan, Iran is also worried about a new influx, particularly of Hazaras, a Shia ethnic minority that the Taliban have viciously persecuted in the past.

“With little leverage over the Taliban and no liking for the tottering government in Kabul, Iran is likely instead to lend support to local Afghan militias in the border region, which recently beat off a Taliban assault on the city of Herat.”

What do you know? When compared with the Sunni Islam (Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism), a faction of Islam with whose practitioners the West feels much more simpatico—Shia Islam (Iran’s poison of choice) is more enlightened. Yet America and Israel side with Saudi Arabia, the epitome of Sunni insanity. Go figure. And the title says it all:

America Doesn’t Know Shiite From Shinola.

Thoughts from Twitter:

We invade and then centralize:

#Afghanistan occupation: "The #Pashtun population we patronize happens to disdain the central government we hope to strengthen. We help local groups we believe to be patriotic, at the same time, end up establishing an authoritarian protectorate."©2008 https://t.co/iIayE9farF

— ILANA Mercer (@IlanaMercer) August 16, 2021

Totally tribal: This would sound like a brand name to our idiots, but it’s how Afghans think and feel.

#Afghanistan: Given the tribal, familial focus of their societies; Arabs are unlikely to abandon their particularism in favor of American statism. Federalism or
greater regional autonomy is what tribal societies want. The US is always looking to empower a puppet central power.

— ILANA Mercer (@IlanaMercer) August 16, 2021

#Afghanistan: Another dynamic at play is between the forces of centralization and the forces of decentralization. As a rule, the U.S. sides with centralization; the Arab people with whom we meddle generally side with decentralization. #Kabul https://t.co/41s0Qih6Wy

— ILANA Mercer (@IlanaMercer) August 16, 2021

Our fight for democracy is not necessarily theirs.

#Afghanistan: Why they won't fight: Many in the Arab world see the battle with the #Taliban (or ISIS) not as an Arab but as a U.S.-European war. We force our worldview/values on the nations we invade. Then we expect them to fight for values not their own. https://t.co/41s0Qih6Wy

— ILANA Mercer (@IlanaMercer) August 16, 2021

Memories from ‘Liberated’ Afghanistan: Religious Freedom: Say What? https://t.co/1cOw1bW2Hl

— ILANA Mercer (@IlanaMercer) August 17, 2021

*Image courtesy LinkedIn

Douglas Murray CAN’T Say ‘Happy, Homogeneous Hungary,’ So I Did

America, Argument, Christianity, Conservatism, Democracy, English, Europe, IMMIGRATION, Nationalism, Neoconservatism, Russia, The West

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British commentator Douglas Murray proves over and over again that the American right is gulled by utterly banal ideas, so long as they are expressed in posh English.

I give Douglas Murray top marks for English oratory. From there on, it’s downhill: His writing is not nearly as good as his speaking. Once a committed neoconservative, Murray’s ideas are now wishy-washy, safe, middle-of-the-road conservatism.

Tucker Carlson took a daring trip to Hungary. The pointy heads stateside frothed and foamed at the mouth—in the same way they fulminate over Putin and Russia.

Remix News, a central European news and commentary organization, reports that “Carlson, who’s widely regarded as the most influential figure on the American Right today, has endeavored to familiarize his American audience with the widely successful policies enacted by the [Viktor] Orbán government, policies the majority of conservative Americans would like to see introduced in the US.”

Via REMIXNews:

Establishment leftist outlets are using Carlson’s trip to propagate their usual disinformation against right-thinking people. Newspapers and outlets like The Washington Post, CNN, Vox, and Business Insider continue to make outrageous and unfounded claims such as: Hungary’s democracy is in terminal decline; freedom of the press in the country has not only been eroded but no longer exists; and that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has leveraged his position to enrich his political allies and do away with the independence of the country’s judicial branch.

But despite outwardly championing the rights of historically oppressed minorities and appearing, deceptively, to be on the side of righteousness and justice, Western liberal elites – i.e., Western governments, media, activists and intellectuals – are supporting Hungary’s opposition electoral alliance, the two largest parties of which are known for their open anti-Semitism and sympathy for, or membership in, the country’s communist party.

On an August 6 segment of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Murray claimed the West had turned on Hungary around the time the latter had rejected mass Muslim immigration, the kind of invasion Angela Merkel embraced, with tragic consequences for her countrymen.

That’s a typical Murray cop-out: State a comfortable, uncontroversial half-truth. The whole truth Murray would never come out with—for he probably doesn’t grasp it; and he mostly still wants to be welcomed into polite society.

The whole truth about why the progressive West hates Hungary is the one articulated in “Happy, Homogeneous Hungary“:

And it’s not just that “enlightened” western media object to “Hungary exercising its right to self-determination.” No. The media treat the sight of fruitful, happy whites as they would an aberration, a plague. Freud would have called this western attitude Thanatos: “the personification of death.” This mindset is pathological, for Hungarians look beautiful, happy and whole.

A related truth never to be spoken by the likes of Douglas Murray is in “America’s Radical, Foreign-Policy Alinskyites Destroyed South Africa!“

Hungary is oh-so happy in its homogeneity and wants to keep it. But not if Washington can help it. Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s motto is, “Procreation, not immigration.” Orban plumps for closed borders, and pro-Western, Christian, Hungarian-families-first policies. Yet his ongoing campaign against George Soros, an agitator for global government, was met by Donald Trump’s State Department with a stern rebuke to … Hungary claiming that its anti-Soros law will cost the country dearly.