Ilana Mercer – Page 2

Mindless response to massacre in South Africa

by Ilana Mercer

On August 16, 36 striking miners were shot dead by South African Police Service officers at the site of the Lonmin Platinum Mine, at Marikana—northwest of this writer’s birthplace, Johannesburg.Seventy eight of the 3000 rioting strikers were injured.

International response to the massacre at Marikana ran to variations on a theme: “They’re killing their own people”—although not quite so crudely put, as that would imply that the beleaguered white inhabitants of post-apartheid South Africa were not refracted through the Rainbow Nation’s national spectrum.

Nevertheless, as is to be expected of the pack animals that make up the press in the West, the incredulity over “black police firing at black mine workers” was unanimous.

Perhaps the journalistic herd intended to separate state-conducted violence from state-condoned violence. The latter is most certainly a black-on-black and black-on-white franchise. For in reality, most murders of Africans in Africa and, incidentally, of Africans in America, are courtesy of other blacks.

Needless to say, the luminaries of Western café society are not exercised when Nelson Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, inadvertently socks it to honky by denying the holocaust of the nation’s rural whites.

“A labor dispute between the oppressors (whites) and the oppressed (blacks)”: That is the mantra invariably mouthed by media whenever an innocent farmer is slaughtered—a weekly occurrence, on aggregate—in the country considered by cretins such as Anderson Vanderbilt Cooper, “a model of stability since racist white rule ended.”

But when the ANC, in control of the dominant-party state that is South Africa, engages in crowd control against what is deemed simplistically as “its own people,” that makes headlines. To wit, “The violent incidents on August 16were the single most lethal use of force by South African security forces against civilians since the end of the apartheid era.”

Allusions were made to the Sharpeville massacre.

Cut to March of 1960. A small band of panic-stricken policemen of the apartheid era—the media insists on appending the adjective “racist” in mentioning these men—shot dead 69 black demonstrators.

Prior to the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, nine white cops had been murdered in Durban.

Prior to the Marikana massacre, the strikers, all sweetness-and-light, had killed at least 10 individuals. There were police officers battered to death, mine security guards burned alive, and a union shop steward hacked to smithereens.

Let me hazard a guess: Contra their sympathizers in the West, who don’t scare fast enough—the marauding mob at Marikana put the fear of God in the misguided folks who fired upon them. The same law-enforcement officers had first tried to disperse and stop the rioters with tear gas, water cannons, stun grenades and barbed wire.

You’d have had to experience the onrush of a riled-up African crowd to comprehend the terror among these frightened, likely incompetent, cops entrusted with defending mine operators and other staff still at the site. The last would have endured hours, if not days, of menacing chanting, singing, stomping, all amplified through loudspeakers.

Likewise, the besieged police at Sharpeville would have been petrified, as the “unarmed” mob brandishing pangas, spears and sticks, advanced on their isolated outpost and breached the station’s fence, at the eponymous African township.

In both instances, the cops—white and black, then and now, right or wrong—fought to stay alive.

The media mob has already cut some slack to the black cops who were assailed at Marikana by 3000 miners. The frightened, outnumbered fellows at Sharpeville, who confronted 5,000 to 7,000 frenzied protesters: They’ve been condemned for eternity.

Sharpeville’s “villains” had also attempted to control the crowds with tear gas and batons before that fateful shooting.

Why not ask 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis what a tribe armed with indigenous weapons is capable of doing to a despised, helpless “Other”?

Ask the same of some 4000 white South Africans farmers, who once helped feed the continent.

Or, closer to home, let an all-American lass, Amy Elizabeth Biehl, tell you how furious her white skin and good intentions made an “unarmed” crowd, back in Cape Town of 1993.

Silly me. Question those Tutsis—whose blood turned the Kigara River red—all you like, but they will not reply. For they were torn asunder or macheteed by their longtime Hutu neighbors.

Ask the late Ms. Biehl about her ordeal, but she too has been silenced—stabbed and stoned, by an “unarmed” mob with murder on its mind.

As to the 4000 (and counting) Boers—they’re dead and buried too. Interred in the land they had farmed for centuries; culled like springbok on a hunting safari by the same, disarming, inadvertent enemies of peace and prosperity.

In a world awash in floating fiat currency, demand for platinum will remain consistent and predictably high, even as production plummets in one of platinum’s prime producers, South Africa.

That’s guaranteed.

The miners of Marikana told Time magazine that they would not return to work until their wages were doubled (poor productivity be damned). Any scab who stepped in to do “their” jobs would be eliminated. Or so they promised.

Read Ilana’s blog.

Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand and Rachel the wretch

by Ilana Mercer

Even-tempered, tall, dark, handsome and heterosexual: If these qualities were still in demand in Tinseltown’s leading men, the Romney-Ryan Republican presidential ticket would be described as the stuff of Hollywood.

As goes Hollywood, so go D.C. and the country. None of the constituents the Republicans are told to appease – if they are to reclaim the White House on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November 2012 – is partial to upstanding, good-looking, staunchly Christian, white males.

The ladies, the Latinos, the halt and the lame: These identity groups – political constructs of the left’s making – will be galvanized to lambaste the two leading Republicans for being too attractive, too macho, too white, too Christian and too rich.

And for speaking favorably of Ayn Rand. Ostensibly, at least.

Paul Ryan has come under coruscating attack in the progressive press for admitting that Rand’s peerless defense of the morality of laissez-faire capitalism influenced him.

Despised by the left, reviled by many on the right, Ayn Rand would have appreciated the picture-perfect aesthetic of the Republican duo, if not its policies and political philosophy.

According to CNN, Ryan once addressed the Atlas Society, “a group dedicated to promoting Rand’s beliefs.” In that 2005 speech, he said this:

“I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. … the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.”

Ayn Rand, of course, was no fan of “public service,” unless it was in the service of reversing the damage done to the voluntary economy by legislators. The Republicans’ repeal-and-replace statism doesn’t cut it.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

At MSNBC, Commissar Rachel Maddow ran the Ryan-Rand clip as though she had stumbled upon a crime scene.

Ryan is “not a fiscal conservative,” asserted Maddow, after the screening. Rather, the presumptive Republican vice-presidential nominee was an acolyte of “this person, Ayn Rand,” spat the TV talker.

“This person.” What disdain the left has for Ayn Rand, who was a trailblazing female – a Russian émigré who instantiated in novel form a comprehensive, thoroughly American philosophy of freedom.

For someone who is considered smart, Maddow sure says a lot of deeply stupid things. Her mindless claim is predicated on the assumption that “fiscal conservatism” and the beliefs of Ayn Rand are mutually exclusive.

While Ayn Rand was no social conservative, she was fiscally conservative. In fact, “fiscal conservative” is just how a libertarian anarchist – more radical than Rand – might describe Rand, who advocated not the absence of government but a night-watchmen government.

“Give me Thomas Aquinas, Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” proclaimed Ryan in a subsequent interview with National Review.

Why renounce Rand in this manner?

Mitt Romney’s pick for VP could have calmed down to a blind panic and simply reaffirmed the influence Ayn Rand had on (the better parts of) his political thought.

The quest for mutually exclusive categories, be it by Maddow or by Ryan, falls flat here. Ayn Rand would have renounced Saint Thomas Aquinas for his faith. But she would be wrong to deny that natural-rights philosophers like herself owed a debt of gratitude to Aquinas, the foremost philosopher of natural law. Aquinas deferred to revelation to justify the natural rights of man; Rand to reason. But does a difference in justification change the fact that the natural rights of man remain unalienable in both belief systems?

Unrelenting in maligning Ayn Rand, Maddow ended on a loud moo:

“In Ayn Rand’s novel, she leads her readers to see the wealthiest people as heroes, heroes that must be protected. The rich are heroes and everybody else is a taker. The more the rich have, the better. The better for everyone. That is not fiscal conservatism, either. It is something else.”

Rubbish. Rand scorned those rich whose ill-gotten gains were derived by using the coercive power of the state – Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, George W. Bush, to mention a few. In Rand’s book, these men have not earned an honest crust.

Rand’s celebrated “rich” were the men and women who bring to market the products and services without which life would be miserable, and for which Maddow is a walking ad.

The clothes she is kitted-out in, her coif, the devices she uses to communicate and transmit her sub-intelligent message, the food she buys cheaply to sustain her efforts – these are all produced, facilitated or brought to market by the invisible hand she labors to lop off.

The “rich” were voted into riches by the only democratic vote – the dollar power of the ungrateful masses, who, like Maddow, cannot do without the computers, software, hardware, hand-held devices, air conditioning, airplanes, apparel – on and on – the rich provide.

The left treats “the rich” as a reified, rigid state-of-being. Ayn Rand – and all men and women of reason – understand that “rich” is a work in progress.

Achieved through voluntary cooperation, riches are a reward for work well done. (Which is why this book is well-worth buying.)

Hillary’s next blood-inspired hoedown

If you care about rebels the world over, as Sens. John McCain, Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham think you ought to, consider the fate of one brave rebel. Stacked as they are with The Dictator’s judges, the courts in this rebel’s country want to place him behind bars for shooting a predator on his property. Ursus arctos horribilis is a wild and extremely dangerous carnivore that thrives in the northwestern parts of this dictator’s dominion.

The tribesman is guilty of no more than aggressively repelling from human habitat a creature that had become brazen, making itself at home near the man’s six young children, as they frolicked.

It used to be that the country’s tribesmen instilled fear in encroaching beasts, animal and human. But due to decades of cultural and legal emasculation, under a succession of like-minded dictators, the queered men folk are no longer licensed to protect home and hearth. If they do, they risk losing their liberty.

One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. Our rebel’s plight would never be popularized by CNN’s Anderson Cooper or the rest of America’s journalistic priesthood. For he is an American, one among many.

“Jeremy M. Hill, 33, pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court to killing a grizzly bear with a rifle on his 20-acre property near Porthill, Idaho, at the Canadian border.

At least five of Mr. Hill’s six young kids, ranging in age from 14 years to 10 months, were home when their dad killed a brown bear that had gone after penned pigs the kids had been raising.

I wonder how many Syrian rebels or regulars President Bashar al-Assad has arrested for shooting wild animals that had threatened their families.

If given the choice, this scribe would choose the absolute right to defend life and property over the democratic vote, any day.

Fighters for the family and the farm are never “rebels.” Or so McCain, Lieberman and Graham would impatiently insist. Wresting dominion from the distributive state: now that’s the defining battle of an “authentic” freedom fighter.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

Speaking of our Syrian soul mates, the Free Syria Army, aka “The Rebels”: By now you’ve viewed their handiwork. Purity of arms is not exactly their military or moral motto. In footage uploaded to the Internet Aug. 2, members of the Free Syria Army were captured committing war crimes. They lined up pro-government militia against a wall in the city of Aleppo and mowed them down.

Where have we seen a similar scene before? Yes, yes, on YouTube. But YouTube is not a place, America; Libya is.

Backed by American drones and French fighter jets above, another bunch of rebels to whom the U.S. took a shine intercepted Col. Moammar Gadhafi as he fled his hometown of Sirte, dragged him from his vehicle and lynched him then and there.

To these rebels’ blood-curdling harangues of “Allahu Akbar,” Hillary Rodham Clinton added her own ululation. “We came, we saw, he died!” cackled the secretary of state in solidarity, when tidings arrived of the actions of her thugs of choice.

America’s three neoconservative amigos, aforementioned, consider the Syrian rebels and the Syrian people one and the same. McCain, Lieberman and Graham advocate providing their side in the Syrian civil war with “weapons, tactical intelligence, communications equipment, financing, medical supplies” and much more.

Political illiteracy being a precondition for political office, these “three blind mice,” naturally, don’t know Shia from Shinola. Grasping Syria’s ethnic and religious mix is clearly beyond the ken of one John McCain.

A new book, “Revolt in Syria: Eye-witness to the Uprising,” might guide the perplexed in peeling back the onion of the Syrian enigma.

“To put it simply,” writes its Times Literary Supplement reviewer, “the Alawite sect, to which Bashar al-Assad belongs, is favored by the regime. The Christians are in a similar position. Therefore, both of these groups support the government. The Sunnis are a marginalized majority, so many turn to political Islam to find a voice. The Kurds are non-Arabs in an ‘Arab Republic.’ Many do not feel Syrian and even support Israel. Damascenes are isolated and care little for anything outside Damascus.”

The analysis in “Revolt in Syria” makes it clear that the divisions between the factions are in flux. “There are Sunnis who ‘would die for the president,’” as are there anti-government Christians.

The recent slaughter perpetrated by her preferred sect has yet to elicit Secretary Clinton’s familiar hee-haws.

Given her history in Libya, Hillary is likely postponing the hoedown for when her proxies eliminate Bashar al-Assad.

Porno mom and her freaky family

By Ilana Mercer

“Unseemliness” is how Charles Murray might call the May 21 Time magazine cover, genuflecting to modern motherhood in America. In “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” the libertarian political scientist mentions the “collapse of a sturdy code” [of conduct] in American society, rendering the nouveau riche upper class indistinguishable in that sense from the ever-accreting lower class.

“Obscene” better captures the mien of the Madonna and child that brazenly stare into the camera – and at America. Time’s cover-models are Jamie Lynne Grumet, 26, self-styled, “attachment” parent, and Aram, her chunky, garden gnome of a child.

(And “hollow-elite,” also a Murray moniker, fits Time Managing Editor Rick Stengel. Stengel, whose hagiographical tributes to Nelson Mandela have practically been serialized – he has completed two, perhaps a third is planned? – has helped cloak Mandela in the raiment of sainthood. Mandela, that paragon of virtue, has never raised his authoritative voice against the pogroms that have seen thousands of white South Africans murdered and mutilated by blacks.)

In any event, Aram is a real feeder, if you know what I mean.

Grumet junior is large for his tender age of 4. His gaze is cunning, never cute. The miniature man already reaches up to his non-gnomic mom’s waist. To help Aram get at the prized pair – mom’s perky breasts – Time’s artistic director has used a stool.

All the better to satisfy mom’s “maternal” urges, “Nudge nudge, wink wink. Say no-more, say no-more.”

One other tender touch: Porno-mom’s pelvis is tilted slightly in the direction of her gnome’s grubby hands.

At this stage, bullying would be the best corrective intervention this kid could hope for. In a better world – one in which propriety had not been pulverized – odious Aram would be taunted mercilessly at play school. Were he to make it that far, boob-boy is sure to be smacked about the head by a few manly college boys, later in life.

For now, Aram remains the play thing of bigger bullies, caught as he is in a maelstrom of mommy dearest’s making. Horrified, television spectators watched the advocacy for the onanism known as “attachment parenting,” with the fascination with which you’d watch maggots crawl in-and-out of a CSI corpse.

“A lot of people say, you know, you can’t really be intimate with your husband if you’re co-sleeping and … those are kind of myths, too,” vaporized Mrs. Grumet on NBC’s “Today” show, to the leering approval of the mad-hatter behind Jamie Lynne Grumet’s Method Parenting. Dr. William Sears was on set to dispense Delphic advice to moms who don’t measure-up. “These are tools, not rules,” this tool of a doctor effused.

Viewers of this uniquely American vaudeville were assured by Mrs. Grumet that her relationship with her husband was “very, very important” to her. If to believe her, daddy too enjoys watching mommy perform. Or as Monty Python’s Flying Circus put it in 1969, “the wife is a ‘goer,’ she’s a sport, she’s interested in photographs.”

Charles Murray’s “sturdy code” is moribund but not yet dead. I don’t know if “JoshuaW” from Charlotte, N.C., is a dad too, but this is not his idea of family fun. “How do I erase this from my computer?” he quipped on a chat-board. “If the feds raid my place, I’m looking at five to 10.”

Not that cable’s chronically incurious cretins have inquired, but I would be surprised if the appendages shared by the freaky family yield much by way of fluids. Jamie Lynne Grumet is very thin. Nutrients (and nurture, for that matter) are not what the gnome is getting from the breast on which he gnaws. For an intake of fewer than 1,500 to 1,800 calories a day by the mother would put her breast-milk supply at risk. Or so contend the experts. Being as skinny as Mrs. Grumet is would probably degrade the nutritious quality of the liquid as well. Claims Kelly Bonyata, IBCLC: “Fat-soluble environmental contaminants and toxins stored in body fat are released into the milk when caloric intake is severely restricted.”

Still, the toddler’s toxicity came in handy. Aram made it hard for viewers to make head or tail of porno mom’s NBC disquisition on “attachment parenting.” “Buddy,” as mom referred to Aram, kvetched a lot (as any half-decent parent could have predicted).

Yes, America’s Model Mom is a boob of very little brain, to quote Winnie the Pooh. Aram is “self-weaning right now,” the vacuous Mrs. Grumet intoned affectatiously, as the gnome’s self-whining reached a crescendo.

To the infant, the breast is a non-sexual organ, on which he depends for sustenance and solace. As a mother who breast-fed her baby, I understand how close a bond breast-feeding fosters. My daughter would play with a lock of my hair, or stop feeding to crack a smile. She would always turn a meal into an occasion. But when she emphatically rejected this unarguably suffocating closeness, I let go.

Having read Sigmund Freud’s primary works (as opposed to secondary source commentary about them), I consider him one of the most creative and imaginative writers. While I would not put much store on the pioneering psychoanalyst’s reductive theories of child psychosexual development, about one thing Freud was right: Children are sexual beings.

But as King Solomon (allegedly) preached in the Book of Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.”

Appropriate, non-perverse parenting should never awaken and amplify a sexuality that is destined to lie dormant until much later in life.

Stage theories (in the social sciences, at least) are problematic because they are so formulaic. However, Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development have much to impart. Central to the existential conflicts Aram Grumet should be experiencing right about now are issues of “Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt,” and “Initiative vs. Guilt” – the unsuccessful resolution of which could give rise to anything from obsessive and impulsive traits, to antisocial and narcissistic ones.

From the little we’ve seen of him, Aram is awfully unpleasant, a walking, whinging DSM-5 textbook – that’s the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – in the making.

National Review eunuchs

by Ilana Mercer

In an interview with Brian Sack on GBTV, columnist and author John Derbyshire inadvertently anticipated his future in commenting about the dismissal from mainstream of another iconoclast, Patrick J. Buchanan:

“MSNBC is a private company. They can hire and fire who they like. But Buchanan is a serious guy who talks in a serious way about serious issues. Yet he is out of the national conversation. That’s bad.”

Not long after, Derbyshire was dismissed from National Review, where he freelanced. The “girlie boys” of NR had taken offense to “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” a column Derbyshire published at Taki’s Magazine.

My book “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” for which John provided praise, deals with the broad generalizations for which Derb was sent packing:

“Provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, generalizations are not incorrect. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decisions in their daily lives based on probabilities and generalities. That one chooses not to live in a particular crime-riddled county or country in no way implies that one considers all individual residents there to be criminals, only that a sensible determination has been made, based on statistically significant data, as to where scarce and precious resources – one’s life and property – are best invested.” (pp. 41-42)

John was also found culpable of cautioning kids about life’s dangers.

Similarly, in a WND 2011 column, “Sacrificing kids to PC pietism,” I rebuked the errant adults in the lives of “mild, meek and vulnerable boys like Carter Strange.” For these formative figures “enfeeble their children with PC pieties,” instead of forewarning them of perils they may well face.

The wilding attack that came close to extinguishing the life of this gangly, ungainly, 18-year-old Caucasian boy (Carter) was carried out by eight blacks, in Columbia, S.C.

National Review used to be conservatism’s flagship publication. These days its ideology reflects “Modern Republicanism’s” “dime store New Deal”‘ proclivities (Barry Goldwater’s characterization). Launching oxymoronic attacks on Obamacare for “endangering Medicare”: that’s the extent of NR’s fight to free minds and markets.

Tons of pixels have since been spilt in response to Derbyshire’s article and subsequent dismissal. The dimwitted discourse reflects a polemical landscape from which the Derbs of this world have been uprooted. None of John’s critics can write or reason as he does. None has his “range of historical and literary allusion,” as Mark Steyn observed. John Derbyshire’s is pellucid prose at its best.

A staff writer at The Atlantic epitomizes this fluffy, unfocused, Meghan McCain-like waffle (punctuated with a lot of, “I feel”) that lands you a job at a top publication. “As someone who places a high value on both robust public discourse and the fact that racism is now taboo,” he whimpered, “I won’t even try to mediate between these two except to say that … Derbyshire’s piece was wrongheaded.”

That’s it? A feeble, frightened assertion is a substitute for an argument?

Such cyber-ejaculate gushed from similar androgynous androids, possessors of the Y chromosome. The volume of bad writers safely ensconced in high places, and their voluminous, vapid output strengthened this conviction:

More so than enforcing conformity – ousting John was about safeguarding the future of mediocrity.

As professor Clyde Wilson of Chronicles Magazine has written,“Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans.” Indeed, Americans cannot abide enormous talent, unless it presents itself in a mindless or uncontroversial field: sports or the hard sciences.

Cognitive consonance is what writing in the Age of the Idiot is all about.

The key to success in the scribbling profession is to strike the right balance of mediocrity in writing and thinking, which invariably entails echoing one of two party lines, poorly.

Conservatism once had the genius of James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Frank Chodorov and Felix Morley; now the brand boasts S. E. Cupp, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Rich Lowry, and their editorial enablers. (Perhaps NR will recruit Jedediah [sic] Bila in place of Derb?)

Mark Steyn made sure to append a disclaimer to his defense of Derb: “Didn’t like the piece.”

For my part, I cop to Western man’s individualist disdain – could it be his weakness? – for race as an organizing principle. For me, the road to freedom lies in beating back the state, so that individuals may regain freedom of association, dominion over property, the absolute right of self-defense; the right to hire, fire and, generally, associate at will.

I want to see a lot of well-written, wickedly witty, controversial writing in print – in pixels or paper and always at the pleasure of the print’s owner. Why must the consensus-craving mob conflate this last wish with absolute endorsement?

Those who hoist their pitchforks to purge ideological disagreement, in Soviet-style, they are the enemies of civilization, not John Derbyshire.

Ilana Mercer is the author of “Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Culture and Into The Cannibal’s Pot – : Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.” She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, an independent, nonprofit, economic policy think tank. She also contributes to VDARE.COM, founded by Peter Brimelow and devoted to the analysis of immigration policy. To learn more about her work, visit IlanaMercer.com. If you would like to comment on this column, go to Ilana’s blog.

Pat Buchanan and MSNBC’s pygmy

“The ideas he put forth aren’t really appropriate for national dialogue, much less the dialogue on MSNBC.” So decreed MSNBC president Phil Griffin about Patrick J. Buchanan’s grand historical synthesis, “Suicide of a Superpower: Will American Survive to 2025?” Mr. Griffin was justifying the booting from the network of one of the last authentic conservatives in mainstream media.

If I were not already persona non grata within the mainstream, I would be worried.

In an exchange with this writer, Mr. Buchanan had mentioned that his “18,000-word chapter on ethnonationalism and tribalism and the surge of both throughout the Third World—as well as our own declining world—tracks pretty much with what” I had written in my book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” published in May of 2011.

Buchanan’s towering text concludes as follows: “We were one nation. We spoke the same language, learned the same history, celebrated the same heroes, observed the same holy days and holidays … were taught the same truths about right and wrong, good and evil, God and country. We were a people then. That America is gone. Many grieve her passing. Many rejoice. But we are not a people anymore.” (Page 424.)

America, as Mr. Buchanan observes, was eaten away by the acid of the 1960s revolution, “with its repudiation of Christian morality and embrace of secularism and egalitarian ideology.” South Africa was relatively unaffected by that revolution. It was a staunchly traditional Christian country. Stores closed on Sundays. Television came late to the place but so did pornography and the gay-rights movement. In South Africa, the influence of Christianity receded after the 1994 democratic transition.

Whereas “Americans are no longer a people,” by contrast, the Afrikaners, as illustrated in “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” still linger as a people, clinging to what Barack Obama would indubitably deride as their Bibles, their guns and their bigotries.

Dubbed the white tribe of Africa, this organic nation has, however, ceased to exist as a nation-state, dissolved by democratic decree. The sundering of state sovereignty has, in turn, exposed Afrikaners to ethnic cleansing, a familiar feature of democracy a la Africa.

Despite the Afrikaner’s superior military prowess, they simply “surrendered without defeat.” Ferocious though it was, the South African Defence Force (SADF) ceded to the African National Congress and its representatives. “You, me and our men can take this country in an afternoon,” said former Chief of the SADF General Contand Viljoen, famously, to the reigning Chief, General George Meiring. He uttered this comment as President de Klerk prepared to cave into ANC demands, forgoing all checks and balances for South Africa’s Boer, British and Zulu minorities. Yet, the very same Afrikaner people, in the same spirit, went on to peacefully dismantle the six nuclear devices they had built at Pelindaba, west of the capital, Pretoria.

Why did the mighty SADF capitulate to Mandela’s ragtag ANC? Why did the tough descendants of the trek Boers, who have 350 years of history on the continent of Africa—as long as their American cousins have been in North America—give up their birthright for a mess of pottage?

Since it all makes so little sense, my conclusions are more philosophical than factual.

RECONCILING PIETISM WITH POWER

Some clues as to why WASP (white Protestant Anglo-Saxon) societies tend to wither from within are offered by W. de Klerk (no relation to the traitor president). In “The Puritans In Africa,” de Klerk devotes his authorial energies to fleshing out the archetypal Afrikaner with an almost forensic objectivity. The tragedy of the Afrikaner and the American—a function of a shared Calvinist-Puritan ancestry—is the struggle to reconcile Pietism with power:”

The basic dilemma of Western man is how to reconcile power with justice. … Those within the Calvinist-Puritan ethic, who secretly yearn for power, find it impossible to do so openly and unashamedly. … Naked power… is not possible for Western Christian man, especially of Calvinist-Puritan leanings. … For Puritan man, the quest for power—a quest very much alive—cannot be an open bid for supremacy,” but, rather, has to be “power acceptable in Christian terms”; it must be power driven by a devotion to a “great ideal.”

The Afrikaner’s “great ideal” was ineluctably tied to enduring as a biblically sanctified nation. However, if national endurance was to be accomplished, the exercise of power would be absolutely essential. Apartheid was the political superstructure within which the Volk sought safety for what they saw as their divinely ordained sovereignty. But the “exceedingly tough” Puritan mind was crippled by a correspondingly “tender conscience.” This “great ideal” had turned the Boers into something they detested.

The people who had fought imperial Britain in Africa’s first anti-colonial war were now lords and masters of their own satrapies: the African Bantustans. Soon, the biblically blessed country became an Ishmael, an outcast. Charges of racism were especially difficult to withstand and rationalize. Petty perhaps, but no less intolerable for these South-African Spartans was their banishment from sparring in international sports. Patriots that they are, Afrikaners resented being expected to feel ashamed of their country. Puritans that they were, the resentment soon turned inward.

As an abstraction, the ostensive grand ideal of separate but equal development failed to reconcile power with justice. True to type, the Puritans of Africa relinquished the former to achieve the latter.Upon the American mind, Puritanism has left a very different mark. While the Afrikaner’s “great ideal” turned him into an outcast, America’s messianic calling made it a crusader for democracy.

The U.S.’s asserted exceptionalism gave imprimatur to its expansionism. The American Puritanical toughness has manifested itself primarily in never-ending expeditions overseas. Its corresponding—and paradoxical—Puritanical “tenderness” has culminated in a national death-wish: mandating multiculturalism and mass immigration at home, while pursuing a monoculturalist Manifest Destiny abroad. These are two sides of the same coin.

Thus has the United States become “an empire of liberty,” and a contradiction-in-terms. Thus has the US been hoisted on its own petard, its “great ideal” harboring the seeds of its own destruction. That the pygmy from MSNBC prefers not to speak about this reality does nothing to change it.