RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/04/suicide-of-the-west-postponed/

“Latter-day progressives recommend accommodation with all things non-Western and, more ominously, all things anti-Western. To take the contrary view, as Donald Trump has done, makes him the enemy of very powerful interests. Russiagate, the Ukraine impeachment farce and every other faux scandal laid at the White House door are the consequence of that.”

Donald Trump may have been too wilful and too much of a know-it-all to be indoctrinated by what James Burnham called, as early as 1964, “the ideology of Western suicide”. Trump-haters will loathe me saying so, but there is at least one connection between Trump and Churchill. The latter, despite the lengthening shadow of Nazi Germany, was himself too wilful and too much of a know-it-all to accept what others regarded as “inevitable”. His opposition to appeasement throughout the 1930s and his determination, as prime minister in 1940, to spurn Hitler’s overtures in the aftermath of the Battle of France might seem straightforward enough now, but that is with the benefit of hindsight. Equally, with Trump. Recall his decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, impose tariffs on goods imported from China, insist on a hard border with Mexico, call North Korea’s bluff, quit the Paris Agreement, ad infinitum. Like it or not, Trump’s aversion to mollification, which is just another word for appeasement, makes him in a sense Churchillian.

The ideology of civilisational suicide, argued Burnham in Suicide of the West (1964), had its origins in the Great War. The war was a calamity with consequences still playing out half-a-century later, and we could now say more than a century later. There was an observable decline in confidence about the merits of Western civilisation, from both internal and external points of view, during the inter-war period. This process only accelerated after the Second World War. James Burnham based his claim, partly at least, on the withdrawal of Western-sponsored governance in Africa, the greater Middle East and South Asia. As the West literally shrank during the decolonisation era, foreign policy experts had to come up with a new worldview, a new kind of liberalism, to account for this changing reality. Some of the military adventurism involved in the Cold War—for instance, the Korean War and America’s Vietnam War—disguised (and acerbated) a surge of unabashed anti-West creeds throughout the world. The Muslim Brotherhood, Maoism, Guevaraism, Khomeinism, Juche, Fanonism and so on are but a few examples. Edward Said’s Orientalism, as a radical form of liberal “broadmindedness”, has encouraged one generation after another to cast off their Westocentric and patriotic “biases” in order to accommodate themselves to a post-America global community.

https://dianebederman.com/what-is-the-meaning-of-america-first/

“From this day forward,” Trump said at one point, “it’s going to be only America first. America first.”

We hear a lot today about the term America First; always attached by politicians, pundits and professors to Donald Trump, and in a derogatory manner.  America First is a racist term they say. It was. There is a show on TV now called; The Plot Against America,  based on a novel by Philip Roth,  that takes place around the time of the Second World War.  At that time there was a group of people calling themselves America First which had its roots in the America First Committee (AFC), founded in 1940. These people opposed any U.S. involvement in World War II, and were harshly critical of the Roosevelt administration, which it accused of pressing the U.S. toward war. At its peak, it had 800,000 members across the country, included socialists, conservatives, and some of the most prominent Americans from some of the most prominent families. There was future President Ford; Sargent Shriver, who’d go on to lead the Peace Corps; and Potter Stewart, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice. It was funded by the families who owned Sears-Roebuck and the Chicago Tribune and of course had its share of antisemites.

These people walking around calling for America First tended to be white Christians who wanted America to remain white and Christian. Echoes of their German compatriots who called for Germany to be an Aryan nation, nice, white, blond people. No one else. I don’t know if it is hypocritical or ironic that the man behind the plan was dark haired and looked nothing like his idealized Aryan German.

America First.  That was white nationalism, white racism and antisemitism.

That was then.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/swans_of_a_different_color_.html

The next catastrophe might not be a virus

The advent of COVID-19 and the subsequent nation-wide lockdown amounts to a wake-up call of historical proportions. It has alerted us to the possibility of “black swans” swimming into our lives, or in the words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his bestselling The Black Swan, our susceptibility to “the role of the exceptional event leading to the degradation of predictability.”

A “black swan” is characterized by three attributes: “it is a rarity,” “it causes an extreme impact,” and we come to understand it only “after the fact.” The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 was such a “black swan” — a malign event we did not expect and plan for. At the same time, most beneficial discoveries and technologies did not come from design, planning or predictable outcomes but were rare events with positive implications; for example, Sir Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin. But what most concerns us is the negative “black swan,” with its destructive radius owing much of its malignity to the “built-in defect of conventional wisdom.”

Of course, the trope of the “black swan” is not Taleb’s invention but enjoys a long pedigree, going back to the Latin poet Juvenal’s sixth Satire against marriage, where the perfect wife is considered a disaster since she would be impossible to live with. In other words, something “good” = something “bad.”

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/18/a-deadly-if-dutiful-deference/

On March 14, when the current coronavirus hysteria was beginning to get going in earnest, I said “one of the silver linings” of this panic would be that “the people who will be blamed when it is over—which it will be, and soon—are the people who stoked the insanity.”

That was a little over a month ago and guess what? “Soon” is “now.”

I am not thinking primarily about the burgeoning protests against the draconian and largely pointless “lockdowns” and interdictions ordered by power-hungry governors and other high-handed politicians. Those have been gratifying, and I suspect that the protests against really egregious actors, like Gretchen “Cruella de Vil” Whitmer, the wretched governor of Michigan, at least for now, will only gather momentum in the coming weeks.

But I am hoping that the deeper and longer-lasting response will be a quiet revolution in sentiment against the people who abetted this wealth-destroying panic: against the media, first of all, but also the obscure bureaucratic elite that stoked the fear and helped spread the hysteria.

Every day, it seems, brings new reasons to distrust the models and projections that turned the American public into a fearful, quivering jelly. A month ago we were told that unless we turned our world into a giant condom and took care not to touch anyone or anything, millions would die. In recent weeks, those numbers have been revised downwards again and again, even as the strategies for counting cases and fatalities due to the insidious new virus have spiraled upwards. There is a great eagerness in municipalities thirsty for government funding to overstate the number of people affected by the virus.

In New York, the smoldering omphalos of the disease in America, with just over 40 percent of the cases nationwide, a third of fatalities were not even tested. Rather, they are said to have succumbed to “COVID-19 or an equivalent.” An equivalent, Kemo Sabe, like those generic drugs made in China that are supposedly the equivalent of the brand name varieties.

Things are moving quickly now. After losing some 10,000 points in a few weeks, the market has regained more than 5,000 points just as abruptly. Who knows whether that rally will continue. It’s pretty clear, though, that many of the 20 million jobs that evaporated and tens of thousands of businesses large and small that have been crushed will not be coming back. How do we deal with that?