You Know A Man By The Company He Keeps

John McCain, Military

Former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is whispering more sweet nothings in our ears: Gates “enjoyed and respected” few as he did Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), aka “McMussolini.”

Aside from settling the question as to what distinguishes “the 44th president of the United States differ from the 43rd” (“Bush sent troops to fight futile battles without flinching; Obama did the same with some reservation”), Robert Gates told us very little, it would seem, in “Duty,” “a book that hangs on one hook.”

The Costs Of The Drone & Family

America, Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Media

Praag.org (where my weekly column can be read too) is a good source for unreported or underreported US news.

Item: “The Council on Foreign Relations has released its estimates on the year’s covert targeted killings in Yemen and Pakistan, carried out primarily by drones. The Council estimates a total of 3,520 casualties since the drone strike program began in 2004, of whom 457 have been civilians. …” MORE.

Item: The Obama daughters were listed as “senior staff” for “the June 21-27, 2011, trip taken by First Lady Michelle Obama, her family and her staff to South Africa and Botswana. The passenger manifests confirm the presence of Obama’s daughters, Malia and Sasha on the trip. …” MORE.

Those are some of the costs to this- and other countries of The Drone and his family.

Mass Surveillance Based On Nothing But Prior-Restraint Argument

Government, Homeland Security, Law, Regulation, Terrorism

Mass surveillance is based on nothing but a prior-restraint argument: Violate everybody’s rights in the hope of nabbing a few terrorists. That’s if you buy the government’s good intentions; its real goal—reflexive inclination, really—is to use every method conceivable to increase its sphere of control.

Glenn Greenwald puts it a little mildly for my taste, but the heroic investigative journalist, also first “to use information given to him by Snowden to break stories of NSA surveillance,” explained a similar concept to CNN’s JAKE TAPPER:

GLENN GREENWALD: “… We could eliminate all sorts of crimes, Jake, like rape and murder and kidnapping and pedophilia if we just do away with the requirement that police officers first get a search warrant before entering our house, or if we let the government put video cameras in all of our homes and offices and watch what we are doing all the time. We make the choice that we’d rather not do that because we’d rather live with a greater risk of crime than let the government invade our privacy. The fact that there’s a half of 1 percent chance that it could have helped a terrorist plot 11 years ago in terms of detection is hardly a reason to do this massive, ubiquitous surveillance program.”

In a new piece for The Guardian, Greenwald looks at the history and dynamics of the NSA scam tactics:

The crux of this tactic is that US political leaders pretend to validate and even channel public anger by acknowledging that there are “serious questions that have been raised”. They vow changes to fix the system and ensure these problems never happen again. And they then set out, with their actions, to do exactly the opposite: to make the system prettier and more politically palatable with empty, cosmetic “reforms” so as to placate public anger while leaving the system fundamentally unchanged, even more immune than before to serious challenge.
This scam has been so frequently used that it is now easily recognizable. In the mid-1970s, the Senate uncovered surveillance abuses that had been ongoing for decades, generating widespread public fury. In response, the US Congress enacted a new law (Fisa) which featured two primary “safeguards”: a requirement of judicial review for any domestic surveillance, and newly created committees to ensure legal compliance by the intelligence community.
But the new court was designed to ensure that all of the government’s requests were approved: it met in secret, only the government’s lawyers could attend, it was staffed with the most pro-government judges, and it was even housed in the executive branch. As planned, the court over the next 30 years virtually never said no to the government.
Identically, the most devoted and slavish loyalists of the National Security State were repeatedly installed as the committee’s heads, currently in the form of NSA cheerleaders Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House. As the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza put it in a December 2013 article on the joke of Congressional oversight, the committees “more often treat … senior intelligence officials like matinee idols”.
As a result, the committees, ostensibly intended to serve an overseer function, have far more often acted as the NSA’s in-house PR firm. The heralded mid-1970s reforms did more to make Americans believe there was reform than actually providing any, thus shielding it from real reforms.
The same thing happened after the New York Times, in 2005, revealed that the NSA under Bush had been eavesdropping on Americans for years without the warrants required by criminal law. The US political class loudly claimed that they would resolve the problems that led to that scandal. Instead, they did the opposite: in 2008, a bipartisan Congress, with the support of then-Senator Barack Obama, enacted a new Fisa law that legalized the bulk of the once-illegal Bush program, including allowing warrantless eavesdropping on hundreds of millions of foreign nationals and large numbers of Americans as well.

The ACLU’s executive director Anthony Romero had a line almost as neat as Rand Paul’s “If you like your privacy you can keep it” (and here I add the soundtrack of villainous laughter: “NHAHAHAHAHAHA”). It is:

The president should end – not mend – the government’s collection and retention of all law-abiding Americans’ data. When the government collects and stores every American’s phone call data, it is engaging in a textbook example of an ‘unreasonable search’ that violates the constitution.

South Africa’s War Of Perspectives & The Whites’ Dwindling Fortunes

BAB's A List, Conflict, Race, South-Africa, The West

BY DAN ROODT

Ever since Britain started getting seriously interested in South Africa after the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in 1866, there have been at least two conflicting views of the country. Throughout the twentieth century too, South Africa has borne the brunt of the Western ideological revolutions, all the way from colonialism and so-called “white supremacy” to contemporary political correctness. In fact, in the aftermath of the Mandela funeral, one could almost speak of the West’s religious devotion to black Africans who are being endowed with all the capricious amoral innocence of Greek gods.

More precisely, South Africa has been the theatre of an “epistemic war” if I could be excused such a French-sounding term. Apart from the very palpable shifts in demographic, political, economic and military power towards South African blacks, locals are also acutely aware of how the Western world view is no longer the dominant one in South Africa.

A few years ago I spoke to a liberal, anglophone, Jewish woman who lived in Johannesburg but who had some connection to the huge Baragwanath hospital in Soweto, one of the proud achievements of the former Afrikaner-led government. Within the Afrikaner mind, blacks had wanted not real political power but hospitals, schools, universities and jobs which is why they put so much effort into constructing such public institutions. Those institutions are currently being derided as having been entirely useless and a sop, or an insult to blacks, especically to the divine black leaders such as Mandela.

The point is, however, that since the black takeover in the country “they have changed the frame of reference” as my liberal Jewish friend put it. But she wasn’t really speaking in general terms, referring to the broad sweep of history and politics. First and foremost, she was speaking in medical terms. What she was saying, was that with the new order had come a new way of looking at healthcare, at patients and the function of a hospital. In short, the age-old belief systems of Africans have been reasserting themselves and “success” is no longer measured in white or European terms. That is why, when whites decry the deterioration of the state hospital system, as well as standards of professionalism and hygiene there, blacks are quick to retort with the ubiquitous cry of “racism”. After all, blacks are now in charge and they make the rules and set the standards against which a hospital, a school, a university or even a government will be measured.

It is really hard to understand the hullabaloo over President Zuma’s expenditure on what amounts to a private Zulu homestead or kraal at Nkandla. Compared to the billions being frittered away in corruption and unauthorised expenditure, the R240 million (about $20 million) involved seems almost paltry.

It is a truism of historians and philosophers alike, that one’s assessment of a situation – any situation – depends on one’s perspective. Not so long ago I read a paragraph by French political philosopher Alain de Benoist wherein he said:

I am not fighting for the white race. I am not fighting for France. I am fighting for a world view. I am a philosopher, a theoretician, and I fight to explain my world view. And in this world view, Europe, race, culture, and identity all have roles. They are not excluded. But mainly I am working in defense of a world view. Of course, I am very interested in the future and destiny of my own nation, race, and culture, but I am also interested in the future of every other group.

That all sounds very interesting, but somewhat abstract. To the Afrikaner farmer who is being attacked in his or her home by a group of blacks who had imbibed some form of “medicine” or muti to make them invincible, the question is one, not of philosophy but of survival.

At a more mundane or political level, the clash is one of perspectives, even a traditional fight between the left and the right. In South Africa, any statement expressing concern over the future of whites or their well-being is almost always characterized as “right-wing”. Blacks are simply too good-natured and inherently moral ever to commit evil on a significant scale against whites.

This is also the foreign perspective. A Marxist theologian in Germany or a pro-white militant in America would concur that whites “have no place in South Africa, at the southern tip of a black continent”. On the other hand, the Afrikaner perspective is quite the opposite. They feel deeply rooted in South Africa and reject the “black supremacism” of both the foreign whites and the anglicized, superficially Westernized blacks who see them as being “not indigenous” to the country or the continent.

For most of the twentieth century, there has been a perspectival war around the notion of whether Afrikaners or whites really “belong” in South Africa or not. Once, I was shocked to see the former leader of the opposition, Tony Leon, being bluntly told by a BBC announcer on the programme Hard Talk that he was a “white politician” and that South Africa had always been “their country” – meaning that of the blacks – even in former centuries when their numbers were limited to about a million, nomadically drifting through parts of a mostly unpopulated territory twice the size of France.

History, as the ruling ANC politicians usually put it in their quasi-communist way, is “a terrain of ideological struggle”. Needless to say, whites have lost that ideological struggle – or the perspectival war over the past – hands down. It is now better to kiss the feet of Mandela’s bronze colossus than to voice your own opinions or interpretation of history.

Faulkner, that strange author from the American South who uses the “N word” in his novels but depicts his own Southern whites with relentless cynicism, once wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” So there will always be a feud over history, everyone’s history.

But looking at the future of South Africa, or even our present safety in a physical sense, it also depends on one’s perspective. To foreigners and overseas correspondents in South Africa, this is Mandelatopia, a liberal democracy with same-sex marriages and universal suffrage – although cannabis is not yet quite legal. According to this view, which is based on a very superficial “multicultural” reading, “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity”, as it is stated in our incongruous constitution, replete with rancor and affirmative-action clauses.

Many whites, especially women, have a sense of impending doom. The crime, corruption and general sense of lawlessness portend worse to come. Usually, they are not arguing against the dominant ideology with its illusions of democratic bliss. Rather, they intuit some kind of typically African implosion or civil war during which whites will be punished for all the evil they have wrought in their zeal to “uplift” and “civilize” blacks, admittedly ridiculous notions within the present context.

To the pessimist or the more intuitive analyst, South Africa’s future represents the “chronicle of a death foretold”, or many deaths, if you will pardon my paraphrasing the fetching title of Gabriel Márquez’s little novel. It will be Zimbabwe on a much vaster scale, and much bloodier. It is already much bloodier, and ultimately the country will be ethnically cleansed of its Caucasian undesirables, probably to universal acclaim.

Depending on one’s point of view, South Africa is either a “problem that has been happily solved” or a disaster in the making. Looking at the past, especially the nineteenth century when indigenous whites were as weak as they are now and were regularly massacred by blacks, as well as the history of postcolonial Africa, I am not macho enough to cast all caution to the winds and believe in the foreign male fantasy of a South Africa that is some kind of Switzerland or Singapore, clean, tolerant and law-abiding.

There being no common ground in this war of perspectives, no rational debate will take place either. I am inclined to trust those “womanly” truths that are as unspeakable as they are likely to come to pass.

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DAN ROODT, Ph.D., is a noted Afrikaner activist, author, literary critic and director of PRAAG (which features my weekly column). He is the author of the polemical essay “The Scourge of the ANC,” available from Amazon.