RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13022/europeanize-america

Europe did not invent racism and religious bigotry, but it surely perfected them.
Europeans lived for centuries under kings and emperors. They came to believe that power flowed from the top down. The “elite” decide what is best for the “common people” — the “masses” — and then cram it down their throats.
The “elite” send their children to the best schools and universities, and relegate the children of the “common people” to lousy schools, where they get lousy educations, which prepare them for lousy jobs, which pay lousy salaries, which leave them dependent on the government for a lifetime of “assistance.” But they expect the “common people” to be grateful for the “universal education” — and for the “assistance.”
The American idea of individuals being responsible and taking responsibility is utterly foreign to the “elite,” who seem much more comfortable with the European idea of infantilizing subjects to make them dependent on a parentified government to protect them, care for them, dole out money to them, and in general control their lives. If people cannot even choose their own light bulbs, toilets, or dishwasher detergent, in what sense are they free?

If Europeanize were not a word, we would have to invent it, because that is what many are doing to America. Remember when candidate Obama was asked if he believed America is exceptional? He answered yes, but only in the sense that Britain, Greece, and other nations are exceptional.

As Gilbert and Sullivan said, “When everyone is somebody, then no one is anybody.”

If every nation is exceptional, none is.

It is not that Obama and his friends really think America is unexceptional. They may well believe it is exceptional, but that it should not be. So they do everything they can to end its exceptional nature, and to make it resemble other nations. They are Europeanizing America.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/laugh-at-the-u-n-not-with-it-1538002997

Oh, how they laughed.

When President Trump told the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday that “in less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country,” the delegates of the world couldn’t contain themselves. “I didn’t expect that reaction,” Mr. Trump responded to the laughter ringing through the hall, “but that’s OK.”

Mr. Trump’s boast merited an eye roll, but I’d laugh right back at the U.N. It deserves it.

Who but the U.N. would elect some of the world’s leading human-rights abusers—Saudi Arabia, China, Venezuela, Pakistan and others—to run a Human Rights Council and lecture the rest of us? In 2016 many of these members even tried to silence Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, in midsentence as he exposed their hypocrisy.

Who but the U.N. would elect the Islamic Republic of Iran to the executive board of its agency “dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women”? The World Economic Forum ranks Iran 140th out of 144 nations in parity between the sexes for a reason. Its regime arrests and beats women who peacefully protest for their rights. It imprisons and tortures women for removing their headscarves. Discrimination is written into every area of Iran’s civil code, from marriage and divorce to employment.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/bennelong-papers/2018/09/three-false-waves-australian-history/

The divisive myth that modern Australia is the result of three sequential ‘nations’ — Aboriginal, European and post-war immigrant — has seduced many, most recently Paul Kelly, who believes it ‘true and inclusive’. There has been only one nation, brought into being at Federation.

Morrison should reference the best recent formulation of Australian identity and history, courtesy of Noel Pearson, who argues the nation embodies three traditions: the first Australians, who roamed this continent for 65,000 years, long before the ages of Babylon, Athens and Rome; the British inheritance dating from the voyages of James Cook, the initial colony at Sydney Cove, the rise of British-derived laws, values and institutions; and the immigrant tradition, the arrival of people from many nations that so enriched the culture and led to a multicultural nation. Pearson’s concept is true and it is inclusive. It should appeal to the entire nation, from conservative to progressive.
—Paul Kelly in The Australian, September 26, 2018, on Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s call to retain Australia Day on January 26 but also observe a new public holiday to commemorate indigenous people.

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There are a number of problems with this proposal from journalist Paul Kelly. For a start, it is wrong to say the concept originated with Noel Pearson; second, it provides a seriously mistaken view of the formation of the Australian nation; and third, it is not hard to show the notion fosters division not inclusion.

Nonetheless, Kelly is right to say the idea should appeal to both conservatives and progressives, since it has already done so for almost twenty years now. John Howard used the same terminology in 1999 when he sought to include in the preamble of the Constitution the words ‘honouring Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, the nation’s first people’. I have heard both John Howard and Tony Abbott repeat this terminology several times since then, providing the same ‘Three Waves’ version of what they call the ‘national story’, though without knowing its real origins.

The idea that Aborigines are the nation’s first people is a version of Australian history devised not by Noel Pearson but the left-wing economist Herbert Cole ‘Nugget’ Coombs in 1982. As president of the Aboriginal Treaty Committee, he addressed the National Press Club on Australia Day that year, giving a speech titled ‘The Three Waves and Australian Identity’. Coombs said Australian history was defined by three distinct human migrations: the Aborigines who arrived some 40,000 years ago; the Anglo-Celtic migrants from the British Isles who came in 1788 and thereafter; and the third wave, the more ethnically mixed migrants of the period after the 1939-45 world war.

Coombs did not go to the National Press Club to lecture his audience about Australian demography. His aim was to score moral and political points, and he laid down a narrative that many people have found compelling ever since.

On the one hand, he described the continent when Aborigines dominated it as a paradise where people were in harmony both with nature and one another.