printIn time for the release of my new book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa,” this week’s WND column explains what the book is about and why it is an important read at this juncture in our history. Here’s an excerpt from “Don’t Believe Michelle Obama”:
“Michelle Obama will travel to South Africa later this month. The First Lady’s trip coincides with the release of my new book, ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.’ And not a moment too soon. (Read the Preface on VDARE.COM.) ‘Into The Cannibal’s Pot’s’ will dispel any myths Michelle Obama is likely to help perpetuate about this writer’s former homeland.
So why is this book so very crucial at this juncture in our history? Simply this: It is essential that we curb the naïve enthusiasm among American elites, and those they’ve gulled, for radical, imposed, top-down transformations of relatively stable, if imperfect, societies, including their own. As the example of South Africa demonstrates, a highly developed Western society can be dismantled with relative ease. In South Africa, this deconstruction has come about in the wake of an almost overnight shift in the majority/minority power structure. In the U.S., a slower, more incremental, but equally detrimental, transformation is underway. …
America’s intellectual ‘Idiocracy’—the president and the “Untamed Ids” of the media, liberal, libertarian, and conservative—are egging on revolution in the Middle East. Post-apartheid South Africa should serve to remind this retinue of romantics that stable societies, however imperfect, are fragile. They can, and will, crumble in culturally inhospitable climes. For better or for worse, societies are built slowly from the soil up, not from the sky down. And by people, not by political decree. …”
The complete column is “Don’t Believe Michelle Obama.”
Purchase “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” from Amazon or from the Publisher (who ships free) by clicking on the “Buy” Button of your choice.
UPDATE I (June 10): Ruth, I am against forced integration. I am for free association, as intended by the founded of this great country, and as is egregiously violated by the Civil Rights Act. If you don’t want to hire or serve a Jew (that’s me) because you have misgivings about Jews qua Jews; I support your natural right as a property owner to associate or dissociate at will.
UPDATE II: It’s interesting how the FB thread on WND was hijacked by one jackass’s complaint, instead of being a forum to discuss the substance of the book. Then two people fell into each others’ pixelated arms had a love fest, giving into sheer vanity and sanctimony. America’s reality-show mentality! For a jackass who hates writers who use words he doesn’t know (my favorite kind of writers), the guy sure spent a lot of time dismissing and dissing me. I think I used a term in the column I learned from the editor of my book (Robert Stove): “Untamed Id.” That’s what’s on display here.
I wrote the book b/c people are dying. But it’s become the topic of reality-show like kibitzing on WND’s facebook thread. There’s the Yiddish my Afrikaner reader Mr. Juann Strauss likes. Sorry: It came to me. My late grandpa’s influence. In the USA you have to apologize for your personal idiosyncrasies; for not fitting a mold.
My complete comment posted @WND (visible if you are on Facebook), in response to the complaint, is this: Imagine having to apologize for using the English to the best of one’s ability! Our founding fathers forewarned against an “Idiocracy” rising. “If a nation expects to be …ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” That genius, Thomas Jefferson, also insisted that liberty would be “a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed and enlightened to a certain degree.” That means not being angered by what you don’t know. (A function of a fragile ego.) For the benefit of the reader who heaps scorn on me for failing to mirror his vocabulary and mindset, I recommend avoiding “The Federalist”- and “Anti-Federalist Papers.” Anything our founders wrote is sure to drive him and his ilk to distraction. May I also suggest reaching for a dictionary, or for Google, instead of the ad hominem? I do the first whenever I read words I don’t know, which is often.
UPDATE III: Rob Stove, who posted below, always reserves his funniest comments to email. I’m sorry, Maestro, I’m outing you:
It’s weird. When I was an undergraduate I was perpetually being rebuked by my lecturers because they found my prose “superficial”. Now I’m being rebuked by these lecturers’ sons and daughters, who find my prose “elitist”. Yet it has been the same sort of prose which I’ve written all along!
Back when lecturers were denouncing my stuff as “superficial”, I was getting quite a few articles published in The Canberra Times, The Weekend Australian, and suchlike recognizably serious newspapers, earning fairly substantial sums as a consequence. The 1980s was a veritable paradise for a literate freelancer in this country. Now that I’m officially “elitist”, I can’t even land an article in The Pig-Breeder’s Gazette.
“Elitist” now gets routinely applied in Australia to any remark above the intellectual level of Britney Spears’s navel-lint.
UPDATE IV (June 11): Hey Roger, dodo, if you can figure it out, please post your impressions of the book to Amazon. Unlike jackass, you will read it and offer a comment on the substance of da book, good or bad, or both. I began reading it to refresh my memory in anticipation of interviews. It’s pretty easy sailing. Even my stats have been, as I like to say, de-Sailerized. I.e., made simple, unlike Steve Sailer’s statistics (which are fit for the smarter cohort), so that jackasses can grasp. Oh, stay tuned: sometime soon I will post a column about crappy writing. A few lessons I learned in journalism school in the country of da Hebes where I be getting some of my learning. The column I wrote yesterday on WND is wicked good, according to those criteria. I will compare it with a crap piece of writing, which the likes of Jackass will find heavenly.
Respec to my peeps.
Get ready for what is coming. They won’t know whether to ignore you, thus damning any potential influence you might gain, or go for the throat and shut you up. Just remember the old latin saying: “Non Carborundum Illegitimati”. (Don’t let the bastards grind you down.)
My wife was born and raised in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe – her mom is South African. I lived in South Africa for 13 years. My first trip to South Africa was in 1986 and I witnessed events that perplexed my Western/American mind.
My wife explained the truth to me as to what really was taking place and what she encountered growing up in Rhodesia through a 16 year terrorist war where Black terrorists terrorized Black families through the most horrific mutilations the depravity of man could inflict upon another human being producing Jimmy Carter’s fine example of democracy at work in the new Rhodesia, Zimbabwe. Pure democracy always produces mob rule.
My wife pulled the blanket of deception off my brain that had been flung on me by the media. She unraveled all the twisted truth, (which is no truth at all), the American news media were feeding the American public. Politically correct politicians followed the lead of the media and played their game all for votes … and many Black South Africans perished when America started tightening the political and financial screws to force the South African White government to turn the reigns over to Black Marxist despots trained in the Soviet Union. American Civil Rights forced on the South Africans resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. The mayhem continues to this day in the name of Black freedom. The roles are reversed. Racism has reached new heights of arrogance in South Africa. White farmers are being slaughtered like cattle. Women are being raped … White virgins and infants are being raped as witch doctors tell Black men the only way to heal AIDS is to rape virgin Whites. Many Black men in South Africa have many mistresses and wives, thus the rapid spread of AIDS.
I am waitng for Ilana’s book to come in the mail, you should order it too, and if you can shake off all your political correctnesses, maybe you will be set free in your thinking.
David G
Sarasota FL
I take it, then, that you are not FOR segregation, but simply against the gigantic, governmentally enforced racial favoritism going on right now?
Thank you for confirming, Ilana.
In other words, you can be morally against rejecting someone based on their Jewish roots, but that doesn’t give you or the government the right to create a law forcing them to accept Jewish workers. Sounds about right.
As other avid Chess players know, we use the word “kibitzing” in reference to our discussions on past games, openings, endgames, etc. But that’s neither here nor there. For a reader to criticize a piece of writing because he or she doesn’t understand certain words is asinine, but not that shocking. Back in college I tutored English and the lack of reading comprehension among my peers was astronomical. If the words are “too big” some shy away. Grab a dictionary and a thesaurus, there comes a point when it’s time to graduate from the Sunday comics section.
I’d love to be able to say that I invented the phrase “untamed Id”, for which Ilana Mercer kindly praises me, but in fact I didn’t. I found it in an article in (Britain’s long-defunct) PUNCH magazine, published 1979 or 1980. While I can’t remember who wrote the article, it might well have been Alan Brien, a hard-drinking, mildly left-wing London columnist of the era, who despite his booze propensities and Henry-VIII-like marital history managed to reach his 83rd year (and who once wittily described Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington as “so boring you fall asleep halfway through her name”). A Google search hasn’t led me to the relevant PUNCH issue, alas.
Will Bono ever sing a song, about his and the Humanitarians greatest mistake
I have Names to bring attention to the future of America, Detroit,Cleavland , El Paso,Phoenixox etc
you can not allow bleeding hearts and muscians to rule or Govern man!
The situation in South Africa can be accurately summed up in the following anecdote delivered to me by a farmer in Zambia:
An aspirant philosopher can delve a mountain of insight into the African psyche from that simple exchange.
I Got de book yesterdy, I tink I might figer id out sumhew.- What I found interesting was how he had been reading your articles for ten years of accumulated frustration. Amazing; I normally throw the trash against the wall and allow it to mildew on the floor forever after the first page. Some newspaper articles don’t make it past the first paragraph. He deserves an award, I mean what did Einstein say about repeating the same action but expecting a different result? Take James advice and have a good weekend Ilana.
[See update.]
Regarding obscure lexicography, I am somewhat in the middle whereby using a few obscure but precise words to illuminate a point are valid (the ignorant user can look up the words if he cannot infer it contextually) … BUT it is possible to enter the realm of literary flatulence. The best example of the latter is my man Mencken’s essay on socialist “intellectual” Professor Thorstein Veblen:
http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/hlm_veblen.html
whereupon Mencken mops the floor with the bombastic socialist.
Regarding South Africa – I’ll purchase the book soon and hopefully can manage time to read it as well. [No book; no palling with Da Paulis] Obviously, there was a cultural conflict between the Boer, Anglo, Zulu, Xhosa, and other ethnicities and, in such a situation, it is hard to “win” without a violation of rights. The concept of unlimited government without guarantees of the minorities virtually guarantees a disaster. The “raison d’etre” for LIMITED government and rule of law is to preserve as many rights as possible for ALL people.
The Jim Crow South had a confrontation between compulsory segregationists who ran state governments with compulsory integrationists who ran the federal government. The latter won but at the cost of establishing a “Civil Rights Bureaucracy” which continues to violate liberty.
I like your writing, Ilana, and while there are some words I either need to look up or read more slowly, it’s never been overwhelming; the wordage is pleasant and educational to me. I look forward to your article from what you learned in journalism class; I gained many valuable lessons in college English, particularly on how to write a debate paper without ever directly referring to myself (no “I’s” or “me’s” allowed). I liked this, as it helped me sound less arrogant when I really starting heating up.
[How did you know that I was going to start with exactly that point???]
Poor jackass, he’ll be forever remembered. In this case, not a good ting, dat. [He’s a prototype really, not a particular person.]
Funny how we were thinking about the same lesson in writing class!
“He’s a prototype really, not a particular person”
That makes sense; I’ve seen that peculiar type of criticism before on intellectual work.
I received your book in the mail yesterday.
I believe your book is important. The facts and the truth must be told. The truth will set you free but, that doesn’t mean it won’t make you angry or uncomfortable in the process. I believe I will learn some important things from reading your book. Hell Ilana I’m an engineer I already know my vocabulary is limited so the dictionary and thesaurus are my friends!