Jonathan Bowden joins Richard to discuss the prospect of Iran attaining a nuclear weapon and the new geopolitical reality that would unfold as a result.

Into the Cannibal’s Pot – Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa
Ilana Mercer, Seattle: Stairway Press, 2011, hb, 319pp

Ilana Mercer is a well-known controversialist on the American right, who writes a deservedly popular WorldNetDaily column and somehow finds time to maintain both a website and blog.

Her views are probably best described as paleo-libertarian. The book’s provocative title, which probably cost her potential readers, is borrowed from Ayn Rand, but the author tempers capitalist principles with respect for national identities and cultural traditions. Unusually amongst conservatives, she combines Israelophilia and dislike of Islam with trenchant opposition to American military adventurism. Unusually amongst libertarians, she is an outspoken critic of current US immigration policy as subversive of social order as well as fiscal responsibility. She has now turned her sights on her former homeland of South Africa – both for its own sake and because she feels its tenebrous present contains urgent indicators for America.

The author was born in South Africa, the daughter of a rabbi, but the family had to leave in the 1960s because of her father’s anti-apartheid outspokenness. They decamped to Israel, before the author moved back to South Africa in the 1980s to start a family. She was (and is) against apartheid; she recalls having tea with Desmond Tutu and being on the Grand Parade in Cape Town in 1990 to witness Mandela’s release. From there she went to Canada and eventually the United States.

Notwithstanding her anti-apartheid views, she feels duty-bound to show that the RSA reality was immeasurably more complex than the simplistic narrative which came to misinform the West’s policy towards its final African redoubt. In the old days, there were gross indignities and injustices, and yet in the African context the old SA compared favourably with its neighbours:

“When we departed, South Africa was still a country with a space program...gleaming skyscrapers, and department stores that rivaled Macy’s. The Central Business District in Johannesburg bustled. Crime was controlled, or at least confined. When mobs stoned cars en route to D. F. Malan Airport in Cape Town…a tough and competent police sprang into action. An equally impressive Western system of Roman-Dutch law, and a relatively independent judiciary, dished out just desserts.” (1)

By contrast, the “Rainbow Nation” so revered by postmodern moralizers is largely dysfunctional and becoming more so, in accordance with what has become a sad post-colonial African tradition. The consequences for South Africans of all races range from the inconvenient to the lethal.

The country which carried on space programmes now suffers regular electricity shortages. Once-reliable government services have become a kind of lottery, with even the wealthiest suburbs experiencing interruptions in basic services like postal delivery, refuse collection and sanitation, while one third of budget-administering municipal councillors are functionally illiterate. There has been an explosion of AIDS, thanks to tribal prejudices against science—to the extent that an estimated 20% of adults have the virus. The overall unemployment rate rose from 19% in 1994, immediately before the end of apartheid and at the end of a long period of economic stagnation, to 31% in 2003. It has subsequently declined to 25%, but this is still very high for a country so well-endowed with natural resources, and with much lower levels of debt than many other countries. Black household income shrank by 19% between 1995 and 2000—although it had started to recover prior to the global financial crisis. This is despite – or because of—Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policies which compel firms employing 50 or more staff to have a certain proportion of black employees and/or black investors. BEE has devastated whole industries, such as the mining sector (ironically, as Anglo-American was one of the chief instruments of ending apartheid) and have helped to force 10% of whites out of work and below the poverty line. Comparing past government performance with present, it seems as if the dearest wish of African National Congress MP Mario Rantho has already been realized:

“It is imperative to get rid of merit as the overriding principle in the appointment of public servants.”

There is less scope for wry humour when it comes to violent crime, although the author tries by entitling a section “Crime, The Beloved Country” in an allusion to Alan Paton’s classic anti-apartheid novel of 1948. Over 300,000 have been killed since the arrival of black majority rule as the erstwhile unjust but orderly regime became one which is theoretically just but with scarcely any order. Mercer cites BBC statistics from 2006 showing that on average, 65 people are murdered each day, 195 raped and 300 robbed with violence. Shockingly, she cites 2008 figures suggesting that more than 50,000 children under three years old are raped each year—10% of total rapes. By comparison:

“Few realize that during the decades of the apartheid regime a few hundred Africans in total perished as a direct and indirect consequence of police brutality. A horrible injustice, indubitably, but nothing approximating the death toll in ‘free’ South Africa where hundreds of Africans, white and black, die weekly” (author’s emphases)

So ungovernable are some places that private security firms have actually been hired by the police to protect…police stations. The South African Police Service’s acronym of SAPS seems highly appropriate. Even high-profile liberals, like writer Nadine Gordimer, historian David Rattray and former First Lady Marike de Klerk, are not immune from murderous assaults. Arguably more deserving of sympathy are poorer, apolitical Afrikaners, singled out for attack because some among them once oppressed and dispossessed blacks. Now all Afrikaners are being oppressed and dispossessed – except more rapidly and much more finally.

An economically and culturally significant subset, Afrikaner farmers (Boer of course means farmer), almost seems to be targeted for obliteration, with one tenth of them – over 3,000 – murdered since the end of apartheid, without anyone appearing to notice, let alone care. The author notes ruefully that “seals being clubbed to death on ice floes have garnered more attention” than what is widely accepted to be the actual genocide of these agriculturalists, often in circumstances of the most frightful cruelty. Statistically, farming in South Africa is more dangerous than mining. When Pretoria attorney Philip du Toit gallantly raised the unpleasant, unfashionable subject in his 2004 book The Great South African Land Scandal, he was brushed aside or condemned as the most verkrampte variety of bigot. The government, the semi-divine Mandela and the self-appointed “international community” all seem indifferent.

Many of the farmers who have survived thus far are quitting both the countryside and the country, defeated by physical assault, theft, sabotage and killing of livestock, incompetent police, corrupt officials and unjust land confiscations. By 2015, one third of farmers’ land will have been redistributed, and much of this acreage is already lying fallow or reverting to bush, because the new proprietors (often local tribal leaders or ANC party bosses) lack the interest or the skills to farm it. In 2009, South Africa became a net food importer for the first time. If or when famine strikes it will presumably be ascribed to the legacy of apartheid rather than the inadequacies of the nouvelle regime.

The white population decreased by 20% between 1995 and 2005, giving rise to the colloquialism of “packing for Perth” and causing even Mandela to snarl that they are “traitors”. Mandela’s Western worshippers may be surprised to learn that their demi-god would resort to such brusquerie, but after all he did lead the ANC’s terrorist wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) whose anthem contains the following un-neighbourly sentiment:

“We the members of the Umkhonto have pledged ourselves to kill them—kill the whites”

Even terrorists deserve a chance of redemption, but it is salutary to recall that Amnesty International—not generally considered a diehard conservative organisation—refused to recognize Mandela as a prisoner of conscience because of his continued commitment to violence, and that the country over which he hovers like some angelic presence early forged cordial links with the likes of Gaddafi, Castro and assorted Palestinian hardliners.

White flight has further skewed the imbalance between provider and provided for—today for every (disproportionately white) taxpayer there are no fewer than eleven (disproportionately black) voters. To add to this vast potential for class envy, many of these voters have been schooled to resent the whites on whom they depend. It is a volatile blend, fuelling radical redistribution policies and a sporadic ethnic intifada against whites—especially those who live on isolated farms far from police who might not come even if they knew what was happening, and would probably never catch the killers even if they did come.

I have used the word intifada because the Afrikaners always had an unusually intimate relationship with Israel. The author says of the Dutch Reformed Church to which most Afrikaners owe (or owed) allegiance—

“In their community they saw an extension of the covenant God formed with the Israelites.”

The material effects of this mysticism were decades of strategic co-operation between the two pariah-states, both hated for real or alleged racism, and both the objects of innumerable angry denunciations, UN resolutions and anguished editorials. Many in both condemned countries saw the situation as Mrs. Mercer describes it:

“It was SA and Israel against the world and against the forces of nihilistic liberalism intent on snuffing out civilized outposts at the tip of Africa and in the Middle East.”

Calvinist eschatological logic played a paradoxical part in South Africa’s trajectory—originally inspiring the Afrikaner expansion into the intoxicating-horrifying wilderness, then being used to justify and bolster apartheid before eventually turning in on itself, as the Afrikaners realized they

“…had become something they detested…the biblically blessed country became an Ishmael, an outcast.”

There was a consequent collapse of will in Afrikanerdom’s upper echelons. Big business always hated apartheid, there was little or no academic or artistic support, and when the church gave up in puzzled despair there was no more reason to resist—even though Afrikaners knew well that their quality of life would suffer. There is a revealing anecdote from the fraught final days of apartheid, when there were constant rumours of a military coup to forestall power-sharing. When General Constand Viljoen told General George Meiring that the army could take over the country in a single night, Meiring reportedly replied:

“Yes, that is so, but what do we do the morning after the coup?”

The author is particularly insightful on this subject, and en passant tells the little-known story of the slamse gevaar “(the Islamic threat”) in South Africa, as represented by the pro-Iranian revolution group known as People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, which almost unhindered carried out 80 bombings against civilians in 1999-2000 while the state security apparatus focused on a non-existent threat from white separatists.

The author’s father was against apartheid not out of Marxism or sentimentality but simply because he found the system to be inconsistent with the moral tenets he had imbibed from the Torah. Mrs. Mercer is at pains to explain his motivations, because it is her difficult duty to demonstrate that the country he and so many other well-meaning people helped create is in many ways inferior to the reviled Republic. Between the lines of the polemic there therefore crackles much unresolved tension, reflecting this balancing act between her loyalty to her father and her compulsion to attest to truths which will pain him. There is also a palpable sense of guilt—at fleeing from a once-beloved country, and leaving behind them fine people, black as well as white, who had not the Mercers’ good fortune of possessing a second passport and remittable funds.

“If only…” is her underlying refrain—if only the whites had insisted on minority safeguards—if only international opinion had supported the pro-Western Zulus rather than the pro-Third World “Xhosa Nostra”—if only the new reigning ideology had been capitalism rather than racial socialism—if only reform could have been achieved without this kind of miserable meltdown. She does not offer any SA solutions, although she quotes severally from the remarkable Afrikaner cultural activist Dan Roodt. She scarcely mentions contemporary Afrikaner parties like the Freedom Front Plus, or initiatives like the Afrikaner-only settlement of Orania in the Western Cape (which the new SA Constitution permits, and which Jacob Zuma visited last year).

Yet Cannibal is a klaxon of a kind—leaping frequently, if not always seamlessly, between the RSA and the USA. Mrs. Mercer seeks urgently to show how the perils of South Africa are being replicated in her new country of domicile. Both countries are roughly the same age, and both have frontier-taming, republican and Low Church traditions which are metastasizing into anxiety-utopian complexes. They also have large and mutually distrustful racial groups, a factor which militates against social cohesion and democracy because,

“A perquisite for a classical liberal democracy is that majority and minority status should be interchangeable and fluid.”

In America, as in South Africa, perplexed policymakers strive to address distrust through multiculturalism and affirmative action—perversely, because such policies all too evidently entrench rather than efface divisions. Both countries are wedded to what the author calls the “diversity doxology” and to globalisation; both are experiencing PC policy creep on social keystones like freedom of association (and dissociation), freedom of speech, strong families, self-reliance, fiscal rectitude, property rights and enforceable contracts. She feels that as some small recompense for America’s part in toppling the old balance of power, Washington should offer sanctuary to some of those whose livelihoods (and lives) they have ruined—one of her very few proposals, and one unlikely ever to make it into the US statute book.

The two countries’ situations are very different, and their destinies will therefore diverge—but there are strong similarities too, and she raises the powerful possibility what is happening now in South Africa is happening no less surely in her new beloved country.

NOTE

1. A rare and interesting cinematic idea of what the Cape Town of the 1960s looked and felt like may be found in the 1967 film The Cape Town Affair, starring Jacqueline Bisset and James Brolin

When I was finishing The Real National Interest (TRNI), it became clear that a follow-up article would be needed; because there is a complimentary aspect of state policy; common to all nations of the West, whose justification isn't entirely clear from the ethnocentric perspective referred to in the original article.

It might be useful to first restate the hypothesis posited in TRNI: That American Near- and Middle-East policy is logical and comprehensible when viewed from the perspective of its actual purpose: to destroy or marginalize potential threats to the state of Israel. These threats being other nation-states or coalitions thereof. And that “terrorists” are not only not a threat to Israel (or any other state)—they are to a large extent useful catalysts for the aggrandizement of state power. Thus the goal of American policy in this region is to destroy nation-states; and if the dissolution of a given state actually results in the propagation of terrorist activity—all the better.

When a modern, secular state such as Iraq is replaced by a largely anarchistic, proto-feudal and unstable pastiche of clashing religions and ethnicities, sharing nothing in common but a tendency towards religious fundamentalism and intolerance for “the other”, the region (one can no longer refer to it as a state in any meaningful sense) loses the capacity to act outwardly—to project a common will to power—and instead becomes consumed by internal conflicts that feed upon themselves, and that are relatively easy for external forces to influence, inflame, and maintain.

And when readers of the original article suggest that “hand[ing] Egypt over to the Muslim Brotherhood” is a failure of US foreign policy, they are precisely missing the point. In fact, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism is one of the greatest boons of our adventures over there. People need to consider what Islamic fundamentalism actually is: It is not only a retrograde religion—it is cultural and civilizational retrogression! Islamic fundamentalism creates societies of unemployable men and ignorant and civically “invisible” women, who are collectively incapable of maintaining, much less producing, the level of technological development necessary to create a functioning, modern state. Indeed, Islamic fundamentalism is the indoctrination of teeming masses into a societal model taken en bloc from the first millennium AD.

In Western countries, boys and girls go to school and learn things like math, biology, physics, chemistry, history, and their language. One can argue convincingly about the pathetic state of education in many western countries—but the intent is as described. In Muslim countries dominated by fundamentalists, boys go to madrasas and learn how to recite the Koran forwards and backwards by heart. Girls . . . well, girls get to stay at home and be quiet and out of sight—OR ELSE. The extent to which reciting the Koran can help put a man on the moon (or more to the point—design and build a modern, main battle tank capable of taking on, say, the Merkava) is unknown to me, but I have a feeling it's rather limited.

So in conclusion, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism is an effective means of transforming what might otherwise be a temporary state of political disarray into a permanent state of 6^th century, ineffectual feudalism. That these teeming masses are at times inclined to strap dynamite to their chests and blow up stuff in a futile expression of their inability to accomplish anything on a meaningful, political level is icing on the cake.

This leads me to the larger point about the state policy exhibited throughout the West: wholesale immigration of various, culture enrichers—many of them Muslim. People are often incredulous when they note the current degree of anti-Semitism prevalent in these new arrivals—and they ask the logical question of whether or not this immigration isn't mortally dangerous for the Jewish populations of the countries being culturally enriched. The suggestion being that the Jewish community—by supporting (as they unquestionably have) wholesale Islamic immigration into western countries—is actually engaging in an insane and ultimately self-defeating policy. I do not believe this is the case, and indeed, I think that this policy meshes well with the Zionist project of Greater Israel (which is being facilitated by the foreign policy that was the subject of TRNI). There are three aspects that characterize the successful nature of this external political project—the transformation of the West into a multicultural soup comprised in no small part of Islamic ingredients:

Firstly, there is the “secular” political benefit of destroying ethnic homogeneity of Western states. This being the ability of a group exhibiting high intelligence, an ingroup/outgroup moral code, a strong sense of self, and the willingness to act in its own interests, to control a motley collection of other groups that are lacking one or more of the same characteristics. In order to affect this transformation, one makes use of the materials that are available. Since France is a long swim—even for a Mexican—one turns to France's southern “neighbors” . . . making use of a little, good ole collective guilt over colonialism in the process. Indeed, one can already see this playing off of various parties taking place in Europe – where Jewish, crypto-Jewish, or philo-Semitic politicians like Geert Wilders co-opt nativist movements in a fashion that remains beneficial to Jewish interests, while Leftish Jewish groups join hands with Muslim organizations to condemn European racism.

Secondly, Jews have historically gotten along fairly well with their Semitic cousins. They did well for themselves oppressing the Visigoths in Spain, while acting as agents for their Moorish masters. Sure, there's some bad blood between them right now over the whole Palestinian thing, but that won't last. My personal theory in this regard is that the Zionists figure that giving Europe to Islam is a small price to pay for securing their Biblical homeland in its entirety. If the Jews in Europe are frightened by near-term anti-Semitism, all the better. They're having trouble convincing them to make Aliyah in its absence. And after a century or so, they'll be able to move back to what's left of Paris and enjoy the pleasure of manipulating the various, competing ethnies in the former, romantic capital of the world via petty politics, corruption, and manufactured intrigue.

Thirdly, the infusion of Islamic populations—and Islamic fundamentalism as described above—is part of the dysgenic process by which the populace of the Western world will be transformed into a permanently manageable herd. The Germany of 1933 was an unpleasant lesson (as was the Spanish Reconquista and subsequent Inquisition) of precisely what happens when one visits too much abuse on a homogenous and intelligent host population. Point #1 above deals with the whole “homogenous” part. The second part of this, final solution is to reduce the level of intelligence and knowledge of the host population to the point that it is no longer capable of engendering effective resistance. A friend of mine used to refer to this as the “São Paulo Model”. I used to scoff at it. I'm not so sure anymore. Certainly, the dumbing-down of education and culture is unquestionably useful in making the citizens of Western countries manageable and manipulable. This is a goal that is beneficial not only to alien powers. Limiting access to education is a tool used often and historically to control certain populations; women in Islamic countries being a useful example. But overwhelming intelligent populations with sub-intelligent ones seems like a logical extension of this—and a permanent one at that. No need to worry about controlling “evil” books and ideas when there's no one willing or capable of reading or thinking them.

Some might suggest that this is all too conspiratorial. But it doesn't have to be a “conspiracy” in the sense of an entire ethnic group getting together in auntie Ruth's basement to make plans that they put secretly into motion. More likely, it's an organic movement in a common and commonly beneficial direction, of a people united in their perception of self as “the oppressed outsider”. Some might also suggest that the Jewish community might feel unhappy or disappointed by the end product of these machinations. Aren't they happier within a French France or an English England than they will be in these countries, once the demographic time-bombs they've helped build explode? Maybe. But one of the greatest failures of Western man has been his ridiculous tendency to project his sentiments and sensibilities on others. The idea that the Negro (or the Japanese, or the Indian, and so forth) is just like him—but in a different, physical wrapper—is pathetic and fundamentally wrong. Is it not logical, in fact, that a people who are themselves products of thousands of years of history in crowded, chaotic, multi-ethnic cities would be more at home in such an environment than in the quiet, orderly, homogenous, “boring” communities that we Europeans find most comforting?

In last week’s address on U.S. Middle East policy, President Obama finally unveiled his radical plans to betray Israel. Thankfully, Republican leaders and their AIPAC handlers are onto the administration’s game. They’ve sounded the alarm that Obama is throwing “our only democratic ally in the region” under a runaway bus packed with freedom-hating Islamo-Nazis. So what are the details of this malefic design? The president’s speech outlines the main elements:

• Reaffirmation of “unshakeable” U.S. security guarantees to Israel.
• Warning the Palestinians against a bid for statehood at the UN General Assembly in September.
• The two-state solution: “Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people”.
• A challenge to Fatah on bringing Hamas to the negotiating table and White House insistence that the new Palestinian state be non-militarized.

Under these conditions, it’s only a matter of time before Iranian panzers make their final drive to the shores of the Mediterranean! Of course, the greatest point of contention in the matter was Obama’s call for Israel and the Palestinians to establish borders circa 1967. There is nothing terribly new about this demand, as both the Clinton and Bush II administrations conducted talks under the same basic framework. Washington’s support for Israeli-Palestinian frontiers roughly matching those before the Six Day War has merely become more explicit.

What’s Super Autocue-reading Boy up to this time? A couple of weeks after unleashing his “Seals of Death” against the Bearded-but-almost-forgotten One, which was one week after “unleashing” his recently re-remembered Hawaiian birth chit, he now comes out 1960s-Batman-style with a new, shiny, Middle-Eastern peace plan that looks set to upset the Jewish lobby—Biff! Zap! Bam! Kapow!

Is this more evidence of the “chaos theory” that Igor Shishkin says lies at the heart of American foreign policy? The simple, low maintenance theory for all this is that Obama is simply making pointless “feel good” sound bites, with those pulling his strings knowing full well that a reversion to Israel’s pre-1967 borders has as much chance as a snowball in the Negev (85 percent of which is used by the Israeli military for training purpose). May as well send a train down a track without any sleepers.

A slightly more abstruse theory is that the Whitehouse’s “Big Idea” at the moment is to place itself at the forefront of the Arab Spring, even though this might deprive the Democrats of some of the more naïve shekels.

Such a policy obviously requires a well-timed backtrackable gesture towards “fair play” for the Palestinians. Exactly the kind of thing Obama has just done. With the Arab Spring threatening to push on into Summer, Syria, and possibly un-Arabian Iran, the possible thinking here is that encouraging “democratic” uprisings in a region that has never had a democratic culture offers the Whitehouse and its Zionist backers the political panacea of keeping the Middle East forever divided, destabilized, off-balance, and harmless.

Taking the pre-‘67 borders proposal at face value, it is clearly unworkable. Israel with the West Bank is a tiny overpopulated country that would be vulnerable to attack by a resolute and well-organized enemy. Israel without the West Bank creates a misshapen piece of land that would be constantly open to infiltration from the local DIY Arab militias as well as prone to murderous friendly fire from its own big boy munitions.

Ellison Lodge’s attempt to bring order to the debate about Jewish nationalism and influence in America was very laudable and plausible. His categories have the appearance of fairness and balance, which is an achievement in an area that generates so much “heat” and miasma. His four categories also have a pleasing symmetry and simplicity that almost reminded me of Newton’s laws of planetary motion. However, after a few days rolling them around in various portions of my rather convoluted and un-geometrical mind, I couldn’t help thinking that they made the classic Western (or White) intellectual error of equivalence, which is treating things as if they all exist on the same plane.

This sort of thinking, rather like Newtonian physics, has the appearance of rationality, extension, and universal applicability, and, more than this, just like Newtonian physics, it almost always works. For example, there is certainly equivalence between German and French national rights and interests. Although these might have been addressed at various times by different methods—politics, economics, and war—the idea that both countries had roughly equal national rights and weight has always informed their history and their relationship.

When France was dominant at the time of Napoleon’s ascendancy, the idea of a German national interest mobilized things beneath the surface and prepared the way for his downfall. Likewise, when France was crushed by the superior military genius of the Germans in 1870 and 1940, the idea that France was somehow still equal to Germany kept the national flame burning strongly. This idea of a just equivalence of national interests between all the European nations has led at various times to wars and more recently to the unfortunate situation where the nations have agreed—based on the idea of a kind of negative equivalence—to temporarily subsume their legitimate national interests in the bureaucratic swamp of the European Superstate.

The crux of Byron Roth’s disagreement with Kevin MacDonald is essentially that Prof. MacDonald makes criticisms of Israeli nationalism that he would never make about European peoples. This critique is frequently leveled against Patrick Buchanan by writers like Larry Auster.

This is, in many ways, the inverse of one of the easiest criticisms some White Nationalists make about Jewish Leftists: namely, that they hypocritically support Israeli nationalism, while screaming that enforcing our immigration laws is “racist.”

If one were to try to sort out views on nationalism in Israel and the West, it could be neatly split into four categories:

1. Those who support ethno-politics for Israel but not for Europeans and the West.  (neoliberals and neoconservatives like Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz, Bill Kristol et al.)
2. Those who oppose ethno-politics for Israel and the West (Noam Chomsky, Max Blumenthal et al.)
3. Those who support ethno-politics in the West and in Israel  (Lawrence Auster, Diana West, Michael Savage)
4. Those who oppose ethno-politics for Israel but support it for the West (Pat Buchanan, Kevin MacDonald)

Presumably, the intellectually consistent views would be 2 and 3. Group 1 could be seen as Jewish hypocrites, and group 4 must be anti-Semitic.

It is not that simple, however.

I have long considered Kevin MacDonald’s work on anti-Semitism to be an important contribution to the social science literature, and I have so stated in my latest book, The Perils of Diversity.  His work on the subject bore the marks of serious scholarship when dealing with social issues, among which are a reliance on evidence, full coverage of differing views on that evidence, and a keen eye for the context in which social events play out.

I was therefore dismayed by his intemperate and gratuitous slur in his recent piece at The Occidental Observer (which was re-posted at Alternate Right), “Attack of the "Jew-Hating Stormtroopers"” claiming that “Israel is an apartheid state bent on ethnic cleansing and oppression of the Palestinians.” The vicious attack by David Horowitz on Ron Paul was completely out of line and should be answered; however, MacDonald’s skewed depiction of the Israel-Palestinian conflict didn’t help his cause.

In trying to determine the basis of MacDonald’s view, I examined a 2003 article (PDF) in The Occidental Quarterly in which he makes similar charges against Israel. As regard to evidence for these serious charges, he relies exclusively on anti-Zionist authors, with no reference at all to those who have challenged their views. For instance, he quotes at length Ran Hacohen, an Israeli leftist whose website is unabashedly and vehemently pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. For example, Hacohen wrote, during the height of the suicide bombings in Israel, that those bombings were justified by the occupation of the West Bank and that they could easily be stopped by building a fence, but such a move was resisted by Israeli leaders as it might be seen as a permanent border.  After the fence was built and proved successful, Hacohen then charged that it represented an effort to establish an “apartheid” state.  Even a cursory perusal of Hacohen’s website will reveal that it is wildly lopsided in its analysis. Had he wished, MacDonald could easily have found sources challenging Hacohen’s interpretations. But this Macdonald failed to do and thereby failed a fundamental test of honest scholarship.

As many are aware, I’ve successfully predicted five of the last zero total breakdowns of the system. With that record in mind, here are some prognostications for 2011.

By This Time Next Year…

Israel will have bombed someone – An Israeli-led bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities has seemed imminent since “Mission Accomplished” was declared in Iraq in 2003. Unable to convince Obama to lend it unconditional support, and unwilling to wait for a Christian-Zionist to take the Whitehouse in 2013, Israel will attack alone, like a thief in the night.

The Euro will be down; the dollar, up; the Dow Jones and housing, way down; gold, steady or up – It’s hard to look at the United States’ account deficits, and its unfathomable—certainly unpayable—liabilities and not conclude that the dollar will soon become Zimbabwe-ized. And this is inevitable. But it won’t happen in 2011.

The reality is that the world economy has been operating on a dollar-based currency system since 1944 (with semi-gold convertibility until 1971 and fiat “credibility” thereafter.) At some point, the center (i.e. the dollar) will not hold, but until that spectacular day, I expect the valence currencies surrounding the greenback to crack up first.

So, here’s my prediction: along with a loss of faith in the Euro, by next autumn, it will be clear that “QE” has utterly failed; housing will get closer to a full retracement of the gains of the past decade, and the 2008 lows in the Dow and S&P will be broken through. Everyone will be convinced of “deflation” and falling prices.

It will be the ultimate set-up for hyperinflation.

A major vestige of the Buckley-ite movement will have fallen by the wayside—If American “conservatism” is a movement at all, then it exists on the streets with the Tea Party and online with the various group blogs that have cropped up spontaneously since the Tea Party’s rise in 2009. The neoconservatives, on the other hand, are tacking leftward and increasingly viewing the Tea Partiers, and the Religious Right, as idiots who’ve lost their usefulness.

The tweed-clad redoubts of “respectability” that were established by Buckley and his allies over the past 60 years—ISI, National Review, The New Criterion etc.—are caught in the middle and have increasingly lost their purposes. Places like NR are well funded, but many of the others aren’t. One of them will fall apart before the year’s out.

The mainstream Right will be increasingly polarized between Red State nutjobs and urban neocons. Only a Middle East war could bring them back together again.

Sarah Palin will have won the Iowa Straw Poll and will hold a commanding lead in the 2012 Iowa Caucuses—I’m not really going out on a limb here. Does anyone out there think she’s not running?

A major party or politician in Germany will actively pursue the revival of the Deutschmark—The various sovereign debt crises may lead to the breakup of the EU, but not because Greece, or any of marginal Euro countries will splinter off. As long as Brussels dispenses bailouts, the “PIIGs” have every incentive to stay in the Euro zone—to draw closer to Brussels even. If the EU is to break up, it will be because one of the big countries that pays the bills decides it has had enough.

For the past 60 years, competitors have been able to restrict German independence through vague evocations of Hitler. With the Euro disintegrating, the idea of reviving older, harder currencies will be thrust into the mainstream.

All the best in 2011!

In the last few months of 2010, the United States has intensified its air campaign over the Pashtun tribal lands that lie astride a mountainous and poorly defined Afghan-Pakistan border. In the course of 102 days, 58 strikes against Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives (as well as a high but unknown number of innocents) were carried out by the Air Force and CIA’s fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Jihadists and civilians alike are incinerated by Hellfire missiles without much notice from the media, and American soldiers and marines who fall in combat can expect little better. Yet one death connected to the war in the Hindu Kush certainly did garner attention in Washington: that of Richard Holbrooke, the Department of State’s Special Representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Holbrooke, responsible for diplomatic coordination of the ongoing conflict, died from a ruptured aorta on December 13^th. Since then the press and the Obama administration have unleashed torrents of praise for this “giant of American diplomacy”. But perhaps the most fitting tribute to the man has been the ever-expanding role of killer drones in the execution of policy, as reported from Pakistan’s northwest. Despite his earlier experiences in Vietnam, Richard Holbrooke came to believe firmly in redemption through coercive air power. In bombing there is progress; in bombing shall we find peace.