Critique, Ethics, Foreign Policy, History, John McCain, Morality, War
“THE VERDICT – John McCain was a deeply flawed, unstable man of limited intelligence and low character. In the field of world affairs and domestic politics alike, he had never had a reasonable or useful idea.”—Srdja Trifkovic.
SEE: “John McCain: The Score” By Srdja Trifkovic | September 07, 2018
Above all: What does it say about America and her values that McCain was considered one of her revered heroes and moral leaders?
Democracy, Donald Trump, Elections, Foreign Policy, THE ELITES, The State
Tucker Carlson 3:28 minutes in:
“The problem is not that some unnamed White House official is disloyal to the president. The problem with the anon and gutless op-ed in the New York Times is that so many in our political class are disloyalty to … voters.”
UPDATE (9/11):
“Crazy” to Never Trumpers means keeping campaign promises:
Trump’s preference to pull out of Afghanistan is depicted in the Woodward book as yet another crazy impulse that the “adults in the room” successfully rein in. Somehow waging war for 17 years with no demonstrable gains is automatically the sane, sober, serious position.
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) September 12, 2018
Africa, America, History, Nationhood, South-Africa, The State
NEW COLUMN is “Apartheid In Black And White: Survivalism, Not Racism” (Part 2). It’s now on Townhall.com. You can also read it on the Unz Review and WND.Com.
An excerpt:
Monomaniacal Westerners—they have one thing on their minds: it begins with an “R”—have come to think and speak of apartheid as a theory of white supremacy.
It was not.
The policy of “separate development,” as it was admittedly euphemized, was not a theory of racial supremacy, but a strategy for survival.
But first: To perceive the fundamental way in which the Afrikaner and American creeds differed early on we must first examine the former’s ideas of what a nation and a state were, respectively.
America, being a rib from the British ribcage, was built on liberal individualism; Afrikaner culture was first and foremost grounded in the survival of the Volk.
This is not to say that Afrikaners were not fiercely individualistic; they were, even more so than early Americans.
For the Boers, however, the nation encompassed “the land, the culture, the terrain, the people.” The state, on the other hand, had no such prestige for the Boers, who regarded it as just “the coercive apparatus of bureaucrats and politicians.” Against this apparatus, above all, the Boer rebelled.
The 19th century found him still resisting majority rule, by which time Americans had thoroughly submitted to it. Although the Boer’s outlook remained passionately political, his preference was for parochial self-rule.
It might be said, then, that if in the Americans the vagaries of the frontier bred an atomistic individualism, those same vagaries bred in the Afrikaner a very different attitude, namely, a keen sense of the collective and the need to preserve it. “The worth of the nation is even higher than the worth of the individual,” exclaimed one Volk philosopher.
To the existential threat which they faced on the Dark Continent, Afrikaners therefore responded by circling the wagons metaphorically (much as they had done, literally, during the 1830s) and devising the corpus of racial laws known as apartheid.
“We shall fight for our existence and the world must know it. We are not fighting for money or possessions. We are fighting for the life of our people,” thundered Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd (1958 – 1966).
Prime Minister D. F. Malan (1948 – 1954) had already used different words for the same sentiment, announcing his devotion to, “My God, my people, my country.”
Malan’s successor, Prime Minister Strijdom (1954 – 1958), believed unswervingly that if they were to survive as a group, the whites of South Africa would need to retain a position of guardianship, and that ultimately, white hegemony was indispensable for the good of all.
The Cape Town-Stellenbosch axis of the nationalist intelligentsia, which was the most influential lobby in Malan’s National Party (NP), almost without exception defended apartheid not as an expression of white superiority but on the grounds of its assumed capacity to reduce conflict by curtailing points of interracial contact. …
… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN is “Apartheid In Black And White: Survivalism, Not Racism” (Part 2). It is now on Townhall.com. You can also read it on the Unz Review and WND.Com
Donald Trump, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Journalism, Media, Morality
“Lie Down With The Enemy, Get Up Without The Presidency,” I wrote on 2017/03/16.
Trump ran on NOT taking in snakes that’ll bite the American people.
A ballad called “The Snake” became a theme along the Trump campaign. Donald Trump seemed to find “The Snake” a powerful metaphor for his campaign’s impetus.
Yet as soon as Trump took office, he gathered into his Administration many of the Never Trumper reptiles who had never supported the ideas he ran on.
Those idea are precisely the ones denounced in a New York Times’ yellow journalism op-ed:
Plainly put, the principles anon wishes to thwart are:
* Diplomacy with Russia and North Korea.
* Tough renegotiation of the multilateral trade agreements that had worked against the American worker.
* Very little sympathy for European and British leaders (“our allies” in the above op-ed), who’d exposed their own Deplorables—their innocent countrymen—to millions of hibernating snakes from the Middle East and North Africa.
Sixty million Americans liked these ideas enough to choose their progenitor, Trump, as their next president.
But not the failing New York Times’ anon.
Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.
Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.
On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.
Smoke him out, Mr. President. Clean house, for once.