Growing up, I remember being informed by various female school teachers and former Flower Children that “if women were in charge,” there’d be no more wars (among other things), because...you know...women are about caring and sharing and the only reason why there’s violence in the first place is because of testosterone and penal rivalries...und so weiter...
There is, of course, a kernel of truth to such claims. No doubt, Paris abducted Helen out of a blinding lust that all men, and only men, can understand. That said, anyone who has ever witnessed female relations in High School recognize that the fairer sex is more than capable of vindictive violence. (Mencken quipped that the definition of a misogynist is a man who hates women as much as women hate one another.)
Whatever the case, the Obama administration’s foreign-policy team offers all but definitive proof that women have the gene for bellicosity. Obama’s intellectual guiding light, Samantha Power, has written tomes scolding Washington for not intervening militarily enough over the past century. Hillary cackles over the brutal death of a foe. And then there’s Susan Rice, Obama’s UN ambassador, whose sepia skin tone might led one to believe that she has more than one reason to oppose the war-making ways of “The Man.”
No so! Today, China and Russia wisely vetoed a resolution that would, quite likely, have been a precursor to regime change in Syria (much like the Libya adventure began as a UN mandate for a no-fly zone last March). Rice reacted to this offense much like a bitchy HR manager who feels compelled to lecture her cubicle-dwelling underlings after “SOMEBODY took my Pad Thai leftovers from the fridge…I don’t know who it is, but I have suspicions!”
“The United States is disgusted that a couple of members of this Council continue to prevent us from fulfilling our sole purpose,” U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said. “For months this Council has been held hostage by a couple of members,” she said, referring to Russia and China, who she said had been “delaying and stripping bare any text to force Assad to stop his actions.”
Without referring to Russia by name, she said the vetoes were “even more shameful” given that Russia has continued to sell weapons to to Syria. She called the vetoes “unforgivable” and said “any further blood that flows will be on their hands.”
“We should expect tyranny to result from democracy, the most savage subjection from an excess of liberty”.
-Plato, Republic, Book VIII, 564 a
This December, as many Americans attended to their rituals of shopping, spectator sports and celebrity voyeurism, the 2012 fiscal year’s National Defense Authorization Act was passed by the U.S. Congress. It has now been signed into law by President Obama. This legislation has attracted some controversy, if characteristically muted, thanks to one of its provisions in particular. The U.S. military will be granted the power to detain citizens on the soil of the Land of the Free for indefinite periods of time. All that’s needed to do away with due process is the suspicion of involvement with “terrorism,” an activity elastically defined[1].
Well-meaning commentators have expressed some shock at the passage of an act that enables martial law and interminable vacations to Guantanamo. America was founded on the concept of inalienable rights! Critics and opponents of the liberal order, however, are in no way surprised at this development, for it was decades in the making. With the NDAA, our policy elites have appropriated a mask of legality to manage the chaos they themselves engineered. The rights once upheld as inalienable were ultimately a fanciful construct, a fiction employed in the service of enlightened government.
As Western democracy evolves and extends its power across the world, its ascendance must be secured and made absolute. Serious resistance abroad and at home will surely be crushed. With hearty approval of the new act, Senator Lindsey Graham remarked that America had now assumed its place as a segment of a much larger battlefield for freedom. Old fairy tales of civic virtue have outlived their usefulness in an age of globalism; the new narrative of universal terror assures us liberty and equality forever. A CIA officer-turned-security consultant explains the need for ubiquitous surveillance and government intrusion into all spheres of life:
If we watch – in the United States, in Germany, Sweden, the U.K. – things are constantly at a low boil and we always need to be on our guard…This can take place just about anywhere.
Terror and tyranny are inevitable byproducts of democracy, the one legitimate form of rule permitted by Washington to the tribes of humanity. Our struggle for the rights of man must by necessity incur some casualties, but such bloodshed waters the tree of liberty. Tabulated (or not) as collateral damage, Pashtun villagers are ripped apart by Hellfire missiles launched by drones so that one day girls from that very community may go to an NGO-run school and learn about voting and contraception. Yet when a Pakistani who has taken U.S. citizenship attempts to blow up Times Square in revenge, no one in America’s political and media establishment seems the least bit curious as to his motives. The entire affair is written off as business as usual in the Open Society--after all, it could have taken place anywhere. This regime is the culmination of liberalism’s logic; it is what U.S. forces patrolling the Hindu Kush and all other corners of the earth defend. We fight them over there to invite them over here, for peace and unity in our world must first be enforced through universal war.
North Korea’s media is notorious, but few doubt the veracity of their reports of the death of Kim Jong Il (unless, of course, the Dear Leader is planning some kind of miraculous public resurrection in the future . . . )
There’s little left to say about Kim’s bleak and, from an outsider’s perspective, heart-breaking regime: it was a society that seemed to live up to the cartoonish image in the public’s imagination.
Upon learning of the news, I half expected to read the equivalent of hooting and hollering from America’s “conservative” press—Ding, Dong, the Dictator is Dead! But instead, the mood was subdued. The post-9/11—“Freedom Fries”—“Mission Accomplished!”-era seems to have officially ended. Not a moment too soon. And the thought must cross every American’s mind—even that of the most impassioned flag-waving Herman Cain-backer—that American policy in Korea is some kind of incomprehensible relic.
The division of North and South represents ongoing hostilities between Cold War spheres that no longer exist. Moreover, the reunification of the two Koreas was, for a half century, delayed indefinitely, not only by the megalomania of the Kim dynasty but by the stultifying inertia of American foreign policy. Since 1941, few of Washington’s war have actually ended, and Yankee has never gone home.
Much as the 38th Parallel was a testament to an unfinished Cold War, Kim’s regime amounted to a macabre wax museum of an older version of the Left—one of martial virtue, rigid, top-down planning, and a monolithic, state-generated national culture.
The Terror War years of 2003-2007 feel like ages ago now . . . though I fondly remember rooting on Jon Stewart as he launched into devestating send-ups of the Republicans and neocons. (That the Bushians and neocons were lunatics (or worse) was, of course, one of the few things that Stewart and I agreed on.)
I was reminded of this time watching Stewart's latest take on the Republican Jewish Coalition Forum. Whatever else he might be, Jon Stewart is brave. He makes criticizng Israel, Zionism, and American foreign policy funny and cool, and it's hard to imagine that won't have consequences.
At the Republican Jewish Coalition forum, Jews commemorate the miracle of incredibly religious Christian presidential candidates fighting over who loves Jews more.
Note that in the video (which is embedded in the Audio/Video tab), Rick Perry brags about increasing aid to Israel, despite the fact that a month ago he was claiming that in his administration, the foreign-aid budgets to all nations would start at zero.
Also, could you imagine sitting through seven three-hour debates between Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama!? Insomnia has been cured!
The Node
By Tito Perdue
Nine-Banded Books
258 Pages
(Cover art by Alex Kurtagic)
Literary renegade Tito Perdue’s new novel, The Node, is a dystopian comedy set later this century in an ultra-multi-cultural Third-World America where Caucasians (or “Cauks” as they’re called) are by law a disenfranchised minority.
In this wretched and wasted, yet still consumer-crazed land, pollution has ruined the atmosphere, overpopulation caused by third-world immigration has destroyed all the resources, and the most valued currency is the Chinese Yuan.
Looting, murder, robbery and pederasty are all considered normal, and an infamous prison called The Wedge is reserved for whites suspected of having “ethnocentric tendencies.”
Everything, it seems, in this bad new world is named (or re-named) after Martin Luther King Junior: streets, lakes, rivers, buildings, bridges, and New York City.
The book’s un-named 44-year-old protagonist, forced to abandon his rural Tennessee homestead, makes a dangerous 4-mile trek to “the city,” seeking propane for warmth, and visits a “node,” a covert compound peopled with white men and women endeavoring to illegally repopulate themselves. These “nodists” are part of an ever-expanding network of such groups, or franchises, they call them, that are springing up all over the country.
Here, the hero meets and talks with the movement’s founder, Larry Schneider, an eccentric idealist obsessed with a yen to “turn the world around” and who complains bitterly about their race’s bizarre predicament:
“Odd business, no? We spent a thousand years putting together some advantages for ourselves, and now we’re supposed to give them all away.”
“Yeah. Everybody’s good except us. We’re bad.”
“Precisely. Entirely appropriate that black people, yea and Asians too, should look to their interests. But don’t you try it!”
Sympathetic with their cause, the novice decides to stay among them. Returning home, he later learns, would do no good anyway, since in his absence, the government has given his house and acreage to Cambodians for the sake of “diversity.”
Larry Schneider eventually recruits “our man,” (as Perdue often calls his protagonist) to go on a mission to rendezvous with an out-of-state contingent of like-minded whites and create a new node.
Once he finally finds his comrades, our man and his nuevo nodists, after many mishaps and misadventures, appropriate a piece of abandoned farmland and horde a supply of ammunition, guns, explosives, pharmaceuticals, food, and synthetic water. They then build a twenty-foot wall around the compound and set to work making babies and raising cattle.
Eventually, they win over a large part of the local population (nine counties worth) with their philosophy and create a micro-nation called Peluria, which is to be measured, as the movement’s founder puts it “not by prosperity, but by the quality of men.”
But one is left wondering, will the Cauks prevail? Will the white race survive? Will they be “the winners” who get to write their own history, outnumbered, maligned, and despised as they are in that nightmare state that used to be America?
One can guess that Perdue had considerable fun writing The Node. Though the magical realism, so abundant in his other works, is not as prevalent here, the novel does contain a number of inter-textual references and inside jokes (another characteristic of Perdue’s fiction).
When, for instance, the protagonist overhears a mother “teaching her child the rudiments of what sounded like the old-fashioned English of a hundred years before,” he wonders:
Was this indeed the tongue that held sway in North America once, the dialect of Wolfe, Faulkner, and Perdue?
And later, he happens upon a faded and forgotten manuscript in a drawer titled Morning Crafts (a book of Perdue’s due to be published before the end of this year).
From Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture, to The Sweet-Scented Manuscript, to The New Austerities, to Lee, to Fields of Asphodel (and a number of other yet to be published novels) Perdue’s entire oeuvre involves a fictionalized version of his ancestors, his family, and himself (as his brazen alter-ego, Leland Pefley).
But The Node is the first work in which the American South’s most luminous radical reactionary ruminates upon and prognosticates about the future of the white race and the fate of his (and also our) descendents.
“This is sin”, said a bloodied Muammar Gaddafi to his tormenters in a last moment of humiliation. “Do you know right from wrong?” After NATO airstrikes destroyed his convoy and forced him to flee on foot through Sirte, Libya’s deposed leader was seized from a drainage ditch. Footage off of a captor’s cell phone shows a howling rebel mob parading him along the dusty city blocks of his birthplace. Beaten, pistol-whipped and sodomized with a knife, Gaddafi was then summarily executed with a gunshot to the temple. His body was displayed as a trophy of war, and his secrets were effectively buried, never to be revealed at another farcical international tribunal in The Hague.
U.S. policymakers weren’t likely planning on the mass release of a Gaddafi snuff film. In their jubilation and braggadocio, the Libyan “freedom-fighters” ruined the enjoyment of a private viewing session available only to a chosen few within the Beltway. And so an eccentric dictator with a terrorist past and delusions of pan-African grandeur evoked unforced human sympathy as he suffered and died before a world audience. Colonel Gaddafi knew grave sin well; this was the man who ordered the passengers of Pan Am 103 blown out of the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. He had since come to terms with the West, paying restitution to the victims’ families and scrapping his nuclear weapons program in favor of restored diplomatic and commercial ties eighteen years later. Yet when Benghazi and the rest of Cyrenaica rose up against the regime in early 2011, Washington, London and Paris smelled blood in the water.
From Stephen McNallen, speaking in 2008, for those who follow this festival:
America's ruling class is filled with some of the most wonderful people around.
Not in vain is
Barring any extraordinary surprises or disasters, Putin will again be president of the Russian Federation by spring of next year. His liberal protégé, Dmitry Medvedev, is slated for a return to the premier’s seat (now occupied by VVP, as he is referred to in Moscow), thereby flipping the leadership “tandem” back to its natural state. Titles in contemporary politics carry limited meaning. It’s clear that Putin was and is the Gosudar’, Russia’s ruler; he’s a Byzantine emperor, Petersburg technocrat and KGB veteran all at once. And his operating methods today still reflect the formative years he spent in Soviet intelligence.
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