October 27, 2017

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

Resistance to the New World Order: Buchanan and Ilana Mercer Write

Friends,

A continuation today of themes highlighted in recent installments, with some excellent columns by able writers.

What has become so palpably apparent in recent days is the very real existence, in almost every sphere of our lives, of a not-so-civil “war” between what we label impressionistically “the establishment” or “the Deep State,” the managerial-political-entertainment-educational elites—and most of the rest of the country. To put it bluntly: we live in a kleptocracy, an America that has been transformed into a “nanny state” in which the leadership class uses its positions of power and authority to exploit the nation. In a very real and practical sense, our republic has been transformed from “the land of the free and the home of the brave” into the home of thieves and the land they abuse.

From the delicately-balanced and fragile republic left to us by the Framers of our Constitution, with its Bill of Rights especially intended to protect both the rights of the states and of the citizens, to the American super-state we live in today, there has been a veritable structural sea change not just in how we are governed and the rights we are supposed to inalienably possess but in the dominant social benchmark mindset and imposed standards we are all directed—cajoled—to embrace. George Orwell, in his famous novel, Animal Farm, did not realize back in 1945 just how accurate and spot on he would eventually be—that in one full lifetime, seventy years, his dystopian fantasy would not only come true, but come true with a vengeance. James Burnham and more recently the late Sam Francis foresaw and described the rise of the managerial state, the hardening in their positions of power of an immense, largely unseen and unelected permanent universalized bureaucracy. Paul Gottfried in his famous trilogy documenting the collapse of old fashioned liberalism and communism, understood that a new and far more dangerous and transformed form of Marxism and political correctness was incredibly more perilous to the existence of traditional Western culture. And, along with prescient writers like Jean Raspail (The Camp of the Saints), Peter Brimelow (Alien Nation), and others, Gottfried and Francis understood the exceptional significance of “race” and “gender” and “open borders” in the seemingly unstoppable advance of cultural Marxist globalism.

And unlike the emphases expressed in the older Soviet formulas, the cultural Marxists did not so much seek to destroy international and monopoly-oriented economic structures, but were often quite content to use them or shape them for their own revolutionary purposes of creating a New World Order. That new order required subservience from organized religion—specifically the virtual surrender, in many cases full collaboration, of much of a contemporary Christianity which thus sacrificed its essential teaching and its role, becoming the handmaiden—better said, the whore—of the Revolution.  That new order required a fifth column in entertainment, with Hollywood and most of our entertainment industry taking their cues from Progressivism’s cultural objectives. That new order required the active collaboration of our educational system and, in particular, of academia, understood to be critical in perpetuating the Revolution by preparing new generations in a fundamental Progressivist intellectual framework.

But that onrushing Progressivist revolution had one Achilles’ Heel, one major potential weakness—but a weakness that it believed, over time, it could address successfully: it depended in large measure on the depth and quality of the transformation—let us call it, subversion—of the citizenry. The success of decades of continual and relentless indoctrination, of the constant “softening up,” and the gradual implementation of a new, ideologically dogmatic intellectual template,  were aimed at doing just that. Yet the major uncertainty was how quickly and how profound the effects would be—would there be resistance, and just how much and in what form? After all, the Revolution aimed its multifaceted fire at a target, a civilization, that had grown up and developed over a period of several thousand years, and that had resisted barbarians, the violence of the Reformation, horrible plagues and civil wars, various earlier revolutions, and most recently, Soviet Communism.

By their very definition as “progressivist” the Revolutionaries understood that radical change and transformation, and the destruction of two millennia of civilization, would require time and patience. It seemed by the end of the twentieth century that most of the pieces in the revolutionary puzzle—its “long march” through our politics and our institutions—were successfully in place or at least verging on complete success.

Yet, both in Europe and in the United States there were rumblings of disaccord. Post-Communist Russia, once thought under Boris Yeltsin to be a pliant supplicant of the New World Order, rebelled against the evolving state of things, charting its own, increasingly defiant opposition. In Western Europe, newer nationalist and populist conservative political movements, each reaching back into its country’s respective traditions and historical legacies for succor, arose to oppose the tenets and demands of the new order, whether over immigration and ethnic displacement or national independence and the survival of national identity.

Most dramatically and most unsuspectedly, in the United States a mounting popular unease and outright grass roots opposition to the Progressivist Revolution came to a head last November with one giant, raised middle finger aimed specifically at the surprised elites, the political establishment, and the cultural and educational over-class who, once recovering from their shock, set about furiously to bring down by whatever means available the interloper, that brash and uncouth New York billionaire who now seemed to stand athwart them putting the finishing touches on their grotesque New World Order handiwork.

That battle—that vicious “total war”—is what we find ourselves in right now. It is inescapable and cannot be avoided, unless we lock ourselves away in some remote monastery in Nome, Alaska. And there, too, its effects are inevitably felt.

The fear of the establishment and the Deep State—and the hope of those of us arrayed against it—is that once now unleashed, the Counter-revolution will continue, will grow, will organize successfully, that once let loose and tasting the blood of battle, will vigorously engage and undermine and, with God’s good grace and assistance, smite down the Revolution and send its minions straight to the Hell they so richly merit.

But, despite the crack in the door and the positive signs of last November, the Deep State, the managerial state, and its cultural Marxist shock troops, still command overwhelming resources, control most of the media, dominate education and entertainment, and continue to dictate the very language and expression we use to communicate. And many of those supposedly on “our side”—the pseudo-conservatives and Neoconservatives, much of the GOP establishment—actually enable and affirm the victories of our enemies: in many ways, they are worse than those who openly advance the Revolution, for often they “deceive the elect,” they dilute and weaken the genuine counter-revolution.   Thus, the constant requirement to distinguish between their ersatz opposition to the establishment and real and fundamental opposition.

Examining recent events, Pat Buchanan senses that the hopes engendered by the results of the 2016 elections continue to bear fruit, at the very least politically. The retirement of Jeff Flake and Bob Corker from the Senate and their very real anger and bitterness at this turn of events, are sure signs that the popular, “make America great again,” drain the swamps counter-revolution is still alive. Given the profound intellectual damage and harm inflicted on our citizenry and the significant cultural changes let loose in our society, I may not be quite as sanguine as Pat—but, still, like him, I sense and see more hope for real resistance than in the past four or five decades.

We must hope and pray—above all, pray—that this opportunity, this opening for counter-revolution, does disappear due to our fatigue, does not succumb to bribery or fakery. And that, indeed, that may be the crucial question: will our Faith be supported, as it must, by a Hope undeterred by the tawdry attractions and power of our enemies?

Pat’s latest column is followed by another fine item by Ilana Mercer, taking sharp aim at one of the archetypes of the globalist Deep State establishment, John McCain.

Dr. Boyd D. Cathey

It's Trump's Party Now

http://buchanan.org/blog/trumps-party-now-2-127791

By Patrick J. Buchanan      Friday - October 27, 2017

"More is now required of us than to put down our thoughts in writing," declaimed Jeff Flake in his oration against President Trump, just before he announced he will be quitting the Senate. Though he had lifted the title of his August anti-Trump polemic, "Conscience of a Conservative," from Barry Goldwater, Jeff Flake is no Barry Goldwater.

Goldwater took on the GOP establishment in the primaries, voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, defiantly declared, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," and then went down to defeat battling to the end after the assassination of JFK made LBJ invincible. The real "Mr. Conservative" was a true profile in courage.

Flake, with only 18 percent approval in Arizona, decided to pack it in rather than get waxed in his own primary. With Falstaff, Flake appears to believe that "discretion is the better part of valor."

Sen. Bob Corker is another summertime soldier calling on colleagues to stand and fight Trump while he retires to Tennessee. It's no wonder the establishment is viewed with such derision.

Flake calls Trump "dangerous to our democracy." But the real threat Trump represents is to the GOP establishment's control of the party's agenda and the party's destiny.

U.S. politics have indeed been coarsened, with Trump playing a lead role. Yet, beneath the savagery of the uncivil war in the party lies more than personal insults and personality clashes.

This is a struggle about policy, about the future. And Trump is president because he read the party and the country right, while the Bush-McCain Republican establishment had lost touch with both. How could the Beltway GOP not see that its defining policies — open borders, amnesty, free trade globalism, compulsive military intervention in foreign lands for ideological ends — were alienating its coalition?

What had a quarter century of Bushite free trade produced? About $12 trillion in trade deficits, $4 trillion with China alone, a loss of 55,000 plants and 6 million manufacturing jobs.  We imported goods "Made in China," while exporting our future.  U.S. elites made China great again, to where Beijing is now challenging our strategic position and presence in Asia.

Could Republicans not see the factories shutting down, or not understand why workers' wages had failed to rise for decades?

What did the democracy crusades "to end tyranny in our world" accomplish?  Thousands of U.S. dead, tens of thousands of wounded, trillions of dollars sunk, and a Mideast awash in blood from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, with millions uprooted and homeless. Yet, still, the GOP establishment has not repudiated the mindset that produced this.  With the Cold War over for a quarter of a century, what is the case now for America, $20 trillion in debt, going abroad in search of monsters to destroy?

Consider. Bush-Obama "open borders" brought in tens of millions of Third World peoples, legally and illegally, to rising resistance from Americans forced to bear the economic and social costs. What was the GOP establishment's reply to the opposition to amnesty for illegals and calls for a moratorium on legal immigration, to assimilate the tens of millions already here? To call them nativists and parade their moral superiority.

Flake and Corker are being beatified by the Beltway elites, and George W. Bush and John McCain celebrated for their denunciations of Trumpism.  Yet no two people are more responsible for the blunders of the post-Cold War era than McCain and Bush.  About which of half a dozen wars were they right?

Yesterday's New York Times recognized Trump's triumph:

"Despite the fervor of President Trump's Republican opponents, the president's brand of hard-edged nationalism — with its gut-level cultural appeals and hard lines on trade and immigration — is taking root within his adopted party."

Moreover, a new question arises:  Can the GOP establishment believe that if Trump falls, or they bring him down, they will inherit the estate and be welcomed home like the Prodigal Son? Do they believe their old agenda of open borders, amnesty, free trade globalism and democracy-crusading can become America's agenda again? Trumpism is not a detour, after which we can all get back on the interstate to the New World Order.  For though unpleasant, it is not unfair to say that if there was one desire common to Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump voters, it was be rid of the regime resting on top of all of us.

Should Trump fall, and a restored establishment attempt to re-impose the old policies, there will be a truly uncivil war in this country.  After the Trumpian revolt, there is no going back. As that most American of writers, Thomas Wolfe, put it, "You can't go home again."

Traditionalists have been told that for years. Now it's the turn of the GOP establishment to learn the truth as well. Goldwater lost badly, but the establishment that abandoned him never had its patrimony restored. It was the leaders they abhorred, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, to whom the future belonged.

Niger: Finally, A War John McCain Doesn't Love

https://mises.org/blog/niger-finally-war-john-mccain-doesnt-love

by  Ilana Mercer

News first broke about America's Niger misadventure on October 4. "The real news here is that the US has forces in Niger, where they're conducting covert operations," this writer tweeted out. "Hashtag America First."

Official media ignored the ambush of the American Special Forces, until the story gained anti-Trump traction. No word came from John McCain. Three weeks hence, the senator from Arizona is making history. McCain, who has never encountered a war he wasn't eager to prosecute, is questioning the folly in Niger.

The senator from Arizona can run but can’t hide from the pollution he has left along his political path. Republicans wisely rejected war in Kosovo; McCain jettisoned party loyalty to call for bombs from above and "more boots on the ground." At the prospects of war with Iran, McCain burst into song, "Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran." The possibility still makes this war ghoul smile. Before that, McCain promised a 100-year war in Iraq.

Senator McCain's jingoism has encompassed Syria, Georgia, Mali, Nigeria, and China. Where the US could not effect regime change, as it did fecklessly in Afghanistan and Libya—McCain would typically call to side with an imagined local "friend of America” against an imagined "foe of America." McCain has many imaginary friends.

Where his target country was beyond US bullying (Russia), the idea of a resumption of a cold war was an option McCain liked. He is currently fulminating over a slight delay in sanctions against Russia. When all efforts to tame the world militarily fail, McCain is partial to the idea of UN troops acting as his surrogates, say in Sudan.

No war makes Johnny a sad boy. But now he's considering a subpoena over Niger.

Global Centralizer

Playing out in Niger are the permanently entrenched, unchanging, American foreign-policy interests. Keen observers will detect a familiar pattern. Once again, the American bias everywhere is toward a powerful, overweening central state. This conceit has put our forces on a collision course with the tribal interests America toils to tame.

Indeed, US foreign policy often flouts local authority. It certainly disavows separatists and generally discourages any meaningful devolution of power. Born of a loose confederation of independent states, America now stands for the strong centralized state. Our interchangeable leaders strive to see the same in the tribal lands of the Middle East and Africa.

Meddling in Yemen's Civil War

In Yemen, America is working to impose a central authority on "bickering sheikdoms." In the South alone, Yemen has 14 such principalities. Southern secessionists are at war with the north, have been for at least 139 years. There, "even the bottled water," notes the Economist, "is called 'South.'" There's no such thing as a united Yemen. Never was.

Into this fray, the US has waded. So stupid and dangerous is our foreign-policy colossus that it imagines America is fighting al-Qaida by backing the Saudi-led coalition to vanquish northern Houthi rebels. The northern Houthi rebels, however, clearly wear many hats. More so than the invading coalition, the rebels are ofthe community and often for the community.

As America's Emirati partners in Yemen are realizing, "Motivating recruits to push north is an uphill task even with the payment of bonuses. Those who were happy to fight for their own homes seem unenthused about fighting for somebody else’s."

Would that the Empire's military would confine itself to that constitutional mandate: fight for home and hearth and no more. Alas, our soldiers have been propagandized to conflate fighting for American freedom with fights in Niger, Burkina Faso (yeah, I know) and Mali.

Ultimately, all the spots America chooses to mess with are too complex for the prosaic American mind to grasp, for we are schooled to see societies unlike our own through a Disneyfied, angels-and-demons prism.

More so than the Middle East, Africa is riven by tribal interests and dynamics. These, McCain or CENTCOM (the United States Central Command) have no hope of understanding, because they’re wedded to the idea that their own home (America) is nothing more than an idea, and never a community of flesh-and-blood people with a shared, treasured patrimony.

And Now, Niger

To their credit, Africans’ fealty is not to deracinated political propositions—democracy, human rights, gay marriage, and communal bathrooms—but to each other. They will kill for clan and kin. (And they kill each other, too.)

Niger is no different. You’re told that the Americans and the French are empowering the local forces of Niger against the mythical ISIS. Poppycock. This is never the case. In Africa, as in Afghanistan or Iraq, the conflicts are regional, tribal, old, if not ancient.

Tongo-Tongo, the Niger village that ambushed our unsuspecting Green Berets, had not been "infiltrated" by hostile forces; that's the take of Niger's central government, itself a very recent development. If past is prologue, it's fair to assume that the Niger government is vested in developing as a French and American client state with all the attendant perks.

Villagers have likely learned not to wait for any trickle-down from the state. The Tongo-Tongo villagers enticed our forces to mill about, giving their homie militant benefactors just enough time to set up an ambush in a kill zone.

Imagine! Locals don't particularly relish a visit from the American and French patrolmen and their Nigerien puppets.

Again, Niger is heavily dependent on bribes from the West (foreign aid, we call it). We reward Niamey (the capital) to play war games with us. This is another case of an Islamic, if multi-ethnic, tribal land, whose people don't want Americans there. (And even if the people of the region wanted us there, America has no business being there. Deplorables vote against the concept of making Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali great again.)

So, if John McCain's hatred of President Trump has driven America's most ardent warmonger to question the American intervention in Niger — that's a good thing.

Ilana Mercer has been writing a widely published weekly column since 1999. She is the author ofThe Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed (June, 2016) &Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011)