April 2, 2021

 

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

 

American Foreign Policy Advances the Globalist Revolution

And My Prayers and Good Wishes for Easter

 

Friends,

On this site, on occasion, I have shared essays and columns by other writers, items by friends that I believe should be more widely read and pondered. These essays address important issues that are not always that well focused or discussed by the so-called “conservative media,” essays that seem to pinpoint with specificity issues and questions that affect us. In the past I have passed on essays and columns by Pat Buchanan, Paul Gottfried, “The Dissident Mama,” Jack Kerwick, Clyde Wilson, Philip Leigh, Paul Craig Roberts, Brion McClanahan, and others.

Many of my own columns and essays are printed at The Abbeville Institute and Dr. Wilson’s Reckonin.com; many others show up at LewRockwell.com, and in the past at Chronicles magazine and The New English Review. But there are other, excellent pieces featured on those sites and by those journals as well that deserve wider distribution.

One writer who is also a dear friend is Ilana Mercer. Ilana writes a regular column that is printed in various venues. A former citizen of South Africa, she has seen quite personally how the ravages of Marxist and Communist revolution can destroy a civilized country and its social structures. And she has recounted that experience—and warning to the West—in detail in her necessary volume, Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa. It’s a book that more Americans should know and pay heed to, for there are certain parallels with the insane post- or neo-Marxist “woke” anti-racist and anti-white revolution now occurring almost unopposed here in the United States. Indeed, what is now happening here makes the revolution in and transformation of South Africa seem mild in comparison. 

In a recent column, Mercer offers a broad survey which examines the tragically obtuse and wrongheaded policies of the United States around the globe: for decades, whether under Democratic or Republican presidents—it seems to make little difference—American policy has been to impose on other countries by whatever method was convenient or available an egalitarian leftist-liberal “democratism,” a uniform global model as part of a universal zeal to remake the world. Older traditions, inherited religious belief, valued customs, and forms of government and statecraft which do not hew the “democratic” line and do not celebrate “equality” (as our government apparatchiks define it successively to suit their globalism) become pariah states. And soon, with the influence of US government-supported and financed NGOs (non-government organizations), “opposition” groups pop up in those non-juring countries. With American funding and the enthusiastic participation of almost the entirety of the US media, including most so-called “conservative media” (e.g. Fox News, National Review, The Wall Street Journal, etc.), new paper “heroes of democracy” are created and showcased.

Thus, currently, we have an Alexei Navalny in Russia, heralded and praised for his opposition to that evil dictator (no doubt the reincarnation of Joseph Stalin), President Vladimir Putin. Yet, Navalny and his pitiful opposition to Putin and the vast majority of Russian citizens would not even be a passing blip on the international scene were it not for American funding and support. Like what our State Department and CIA have done in Ukraine, in Georgia in the Caucasus, and elsewhere, such insignificant figures become larger than life when the American foreign policy permanent institutional class gets involved with its unlimited largesse and media voices. And that history of devious involvement goes far back into the earlier years of the Cold War—in Vietnam, for example (with the American coup against President Diem) and in other countries where the native leadership did not suit the globalists who have essentially controlled our foreign policy and its real effects internally on recalcitrant nations since the end of World War II.

Mercer argues rightly that the United States, considering the terrible and epochal culture war we are in, should be allied with such countries as Putin’s Russia and Viktor Orban’s Hungary—both nations which uphold the traditions and heritage of historic Christian civilization. Yet, our country has ranged itself directly and aggressively on the side of the globalist barbarians who seek to pervert and destroy that civilization. Indeed, arguably it is the USA which is the very locus and heart of that assault…it makes no difference if a Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump gets elected…it makes little difference that there are 75 million “deplorables” out in the nation who at least intuitively recognize that America is and has been on the wrong course for decades. The managerial state and its interlocking and impenetrable bureaucracy can withstand all that—as we have painfully seen through its resilience and unbowed resistance to even the very minor changes advocated by Trump during his tenure.

That mammoth “deep state” apparatus has emerged now, more powerful and authoritative than before, and more intent on finishing the job of inverting and, practically, destroying what remains of Western Christian civilization.

Just recently I discovered a rather recent Spanish film (with English subtitles), “Mientras Dure la Guerra” (Blu-Ray DVD, 2019) (“While the War Lasts”), which chronicles the opening months of the Spanish Civil War, from July until October 1936. Of course, hardly any major film these days is going to treat the Spanish Nationalist anti-Leftist side in that conflict with genuine fairness; but this movie, with limitations, comes about as close as anything these days. Viewing the issues and beginning salvos of the contest through the eyes of the aged philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (Rector of the Pontifical University of Salamanca), it manages to express, if obliquely, the reasons why millions of Spaniards at that time welcomed the rising against the Socialist republic and its Soviet enablers. Through the voice of Unamuno we hear of the terrorism of the Marxists and anarchists inflicted on the Church, and the persecution, the rioting, and the subservience of the Socialist government under Manuel Azana.

Of course, there are the perfunctory condemnations of fascism and paeans to democracy, and Unamuno’s final disaccord (he had welcomed the coup initially). Yet, enough gets through. In one significant moment you see General Franco, when asked by his brother Nicolas what would be the overarching theme of the insurrection, he underlines a passage in a declaration by Unamuno—“the defense of Western Christian civilization.”

Today America is dying for lack of men of stature to raise once again that standard. The progressivist contagion controls most of our institutions domestically, and for decades has controlled our foreign policy.  As Pat Buchanan asked rhetorically several years ago when comparing Vladimir Putin’s defense of historic Christian civilization and its inheritance with what our nation does around the world: “On what side is God now on?”

It’s a question that Americans should ask, seriously and thoughtfully, as we observe the Easter Triduum, three days which for us all mean that we too can be Resurrected with the Risen Christ if we have faith, do our duty and have Hope.

My Easter good wishes and prayers for each of you.

*****

Now, here is Ilana Mercer’s column:

Americans Should Recall How Foreign-Policy Alinskyites Destroyed South Africa

https://cnsnews.com/index.php/commentary/ilana-mercer/americans-should-recall-how-foreign-policy-alinskyites-destroyed-south

By Ilana Mercer | March 26, 2021 | 12:53pm EDT

Certain national-conservative governments in East Europe should be natural allies to conservative policy makers stateside, if such unicorns existed.

Vladimir Putin’s, for example. Before his death, from the safety of exile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of Russia’s bravest and most brilliant sons, praised Putin’s efforts to revive Russia’s traditional Christian and moral heritage. For example:

In October 2010, it was announced that "The Gulag Archipelago" would become required reading for all Russian high-school students. In a meeting with Solzhenitsyn’s widow, Mr. Putin described "The Gulag Archipelago" as "essential reading": "Without the knowledge of that book, we would lack a full understanding of our country and it would be difficult for us to think about the future." … 

If [only] the same could be said of the high schools of the United States. (Via The Imaginative Conservative.)

The Russian president patiently tolerates America’s demented, anti-Russia monomania. And, as America sinks into the quicksand of Cultural Marxism, Putin’s inclinations are decidedly reactionary and traditionalist. He prohibited sexual evangelizing by LGBTQ activists. He comes down squarely on the side of the Russian Orthodox Church, such as when vandals, the Pussy Riot feral females, obscenely desecrated the cathedral of Christ the Savior. The Russian leader has also welcomed as refugees persecuted white South Africans, where America’s successive governments won’t even officially acknowledge that they’re under threat of extermination. Policies to stimulate Russian birthrates have been put in place by the conservative leader. 

Hungary is oh-so happy in its homogeneity and wants to keep it. But not if Washington can help it. Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s motto is, “Procreation, not immigration.” Orban plumps for closed borders, and pro-Western, Christian, Hungarian-families-first policies. Yet his ongoing campaign against George Soros, an agitator for global government, was met by Donald Trump’s State Department with a stern rebuke to Hungary that its anti-Soros law will cost the country dearly.

Americans on the Right could only dream that, like Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic—the U.S. would “shut its border to Islamic migrants to keep potential terrorists out.”

 America: A Notion, Not A Nation

Perplexing as it may seem, American foreign policy has been informed less by what Samuel P. Huntington termed civilizational consciousness, than by the idea of the propositional nation. America, to her governing neoconservative and left-liberal elites, is not a nation but a notion, a community of disparate peoples coalescing around an abstract, highly manipulable, state-sanctioned ideology. Democracy, for one.

Yet to Russell Kirk, the father of American conservatism, and an old-school conservative—as well as, arguably, to the founders of the nation themselves—society was a community of souls, joining the dead, the living, and those yet unborn. It cohered through what Aristotle called friendship and what Christians call love of neighbor, facilitated by a shared language, literature, history, habits, and heroes. 

These factors, taken together, constitute the glue that binds the nation. 

By contrast, the rather flimsy whimsy that America is a “creedal nation” and ostensibly united in “a common commitment to a set of ideas and ideals” is both a fantasy and ahistorical. If anything, when expressed by the historical majority, the natural affinity for one’s tribe—a connection to kith, kin, and culture—is deemed inauthentic, xenophobic, and racist, unless asserted by non-Occidentals.

 The Foreign Policy Of A ‘Creedal Nation’

The disregard a country’s policy makers evince for the feelings stirred among countrymen by a common faith and customs—secular and sacred—is invariably reflected in its foreign policy. 

America’s foreign policy looks at populations as interchangeable as long as they are “socialized in the same way” and, as paleoconservative philosopher Paul Gottfried puts it, “molded by a suitable public administration and a steady diet of human-rights talk.” The generic American government’s foreign policy reflects America’s denationalized elites, who are committed to “transnational and sub-national identities” both at home and abroad.

According to her ruling sophisticates, America’s mission is to “democratize mankind.” To fulfill this mission, and to do justice to American “exceptionalism,” Americans are, as Pat Buchanan puts it, “indoctrinated in a fabricated creed that teaches they are being untrue to themselves and faithless to their fathers unless they go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Or, welcome The World into their midst. We aren’t Americans, we are the world, we are lectured. 

One such “monster” targeted for rapid reform was South Africa.

 South Africa Betrayed

Cold War confrontation prompted the United States to acknowledge South Africa as a surrogate for American interests on the Dark Continent. In defense of these interests in the region and against the Communization of their neighborhood, South African soldiers fought Russia’s Cuban and Angolan proxies with the same fortitude that the country’s founders displayed when battling the Zulus in the Battle of Blood River. 

Yes, South Africa had faithfully fulfilled its role as a Cold Warrior. It fought alongside other advanced Western nations, led by the United States, and, as Huntington puts it, “engaged in a pervasive ideological, political, economic, and, at times, military conflict with [other groups] of somewhat poorer, communist societies led by the Soviet Union.” A surplus of courage, however, was no panacea for a deficit in democracy.

Thus, although South Africa was regarded as “an important Western geostrategic bulwark” against Soviet encroachment in the region, the American reservoir of good will toward South Africa was quick to run dry. It’s not that the U.S. did not have democratically flawed allies; it did and does. But such imperfections are usually the prerogative of non-Western nations. China, for instance. For South Africa, this meant fighting communism’s agents while being handicapped by sanctions.

The United States had imposed an arms embargo on Pretoria [South African capital] in 1964 and had joined the international consensus in refusing to recognize the "independence" of four of South Africa’s black homelands between 1976 and 1984.

While during the 1970s and the 1980s, all American administrations condemned apartheid, they had generally opposed broad economic sanctions, arguing reasonably that these would hurt the very population they were intended to help. With the Carter administration (1977-81) came an even “tougher line toward Pretoria.” Jimmy Carter viewed black African nationalism as perfectly “compatible with U.S. interests.”

In fairness, the left turn in American foreign policy came well before Carter. America’s support for Soviet satellites such as the African National Congress was likely a hangover from Yalta: a long-standing official policy of support for the Soviet alliance, and the subsequent ceding of most of Central and Eastern Europe to Stalin?

The shift in American foreign policy ironically saw the U.S. adopt and deploy slogans popularized by the Soviet Union in support of African liberation and against the “imperial, colonial” West. 

There was a “pullback of military forces around the communist periphery” and the “frequent support of the Third World in disputes with Western nations” around the world. Thus, left-wing revolutionaries were propped up, instead of a Western ally like Salazar in Portugal; Mugabe was favored over Ian Smith, as was Nasser above Britain and France; Batista was ousted to make way for Castro.

Republicans Too Radical For Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan at least favored “constructive engagement” with South Africa, together with a tough resistance to communist advances in the Third World. But political pressure, not least from the Republican majority, mounted for an increasingly punitive stance toward Pretoria. This entailed an “elaborate sanctions structure,” disinvestment, and a prohibition on sharing intelligence with the South Africans. 

In 1986, the Soviet Union, which had until the 1980s supported a revolutionary takeover of white-ruled South Africa by its ANC protégés, suddenly changed its tune and denounced the idea. Once again, the U.S. and the USSR were on the same side—that of “a negotiated settlement between Pretoria and its opponents.”

For advocating “constructive engagement,” members of his Republican Party issued a coruscating attack on Reagan. Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., in particular, stated: “For this moment, at least, the President has become an irrelevancy to the ideals, heartfelt and spoken, of America.” Republicans had slipped between the sheets with the fashionable left. What’s new? 

For sustainable change to take place, change must be gradual and “rooted in the institutions of society.” In tracing the contours of such Burkean thinking, Kirk referred to “that aspect…which is prepared to tolerate an old evil lest the cure prove worse than the disease.” To Kirk’s contention that “true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order,” I’d wager that in my former homeland, South Africa, this bulwark against barbarism has collapsed. In my new homeland, America, the framework that sustains the country’s ordered liberty is so rapidly being eroded, so as to be near collapse. 

Decades back, no less a classical liberal thinker than Ludwig von Mises warned that liberty in the United States could not—and would not—endure unless the founding nation retained its historic national identity and cultural hegemony. 

An ahistoric, rootless America, shot through with dangerous and systemic anti-white animus, is an America in which liberty has been lost.

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of "Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa" (2011) & "The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (2016). She’s currently on Parler, Gab, YouTube & LinkedIn, but has been banned by Facebook.

(Citations are in “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa” by ilana mercer)