0 comment Thursday, November 6, 2014 | admin
Mark Steyn writes about 'Liberty and Loss' at NRO's The Corner.
He takes a gloomy view of the future for America on this Independence Day, and that angers most of the commenters at NRO, who somehow think 'conservatives' must be pollyannas or they are not real 'conservatives.' As Steyn is not waving the flag today, he is not getting the usual praise from the choir.
Steyn is an amusing writer, but it seems to me that he has always been fatalistic, writing flippantly about Europe becoming Eurabia, and yet he has never veered too far outside the PC limits. He barely acknowledges the demographic aspect of the destruction of America, and seems to be one of those who believes everything is ideological and economic in nature, not racial or ethnic.
Perhaps this is why Steyn has always been a favorite of the FReepers and the conventional right. (And he's not even black. Imagine that.)
The most interesting part of Steyn's piece is his quote from Thomas Jefferson:
''In my soon to be imminently forthcoming book, I quote one of the most poignant lines from the Declaration of Independence, one that never made it into the final text � Thomas Jefferson�s parting words to his fellow British subjects across the seas: "We might have been a free and great people together." There is a sense both of regret at the separation yet also of its inevitability.''
And Steyn asks at the end if a 21st century counterpart of Jefferson would say 'we might have stayed a free and great people together.'
Steyn seems not to recognize that when Jefferson wrote his words back in 1776, those words which were not included into the final draft of the Declaration, 'we' (American colonists and the English) were A People, together. We had common ancestry, language, traditions, and religion. The Declaration sundered us from our parent race in England. We have been taught to cheer that, and many Americans today are aggressively celebratory about ''breaking free of the Brits'', notwithstanding that the Founders were ''Brits'' or as they were more likely to say, Englishmen.
Have you all seen the video that's making the rounds, wherein Americans on a beach somewhere are asked on camera what the Fourth of July celebrates: independence from whom? Many of the respondents were clueless.
A shocking number of people have no inkling that America was originally under English rule, being a colony of England. Many Americans are so obtuse today that they cannot understand that the colonists were genetically and culturally English. America did not emerge from nowhere.
We can't know what course things might have taken if our colonist ancestors had not seceded from the home country. But we do know that the course we took somehow led us to this disaster that we now face. Instead of remaining tied to Great Britain, we chose to go independent. So today we are no longer 'a people' but a jumble of many peoples, and there is no commonality between most of us and the post-1965 immigrants, nor even between the founding stock people and the post-1865 immigrant wave. There is therefore no 'one people' anymore, and with no unity amongst ourselves, conflict looks less avoidable every day.
If we were to split this country along political or ideological lines, I would surely have to be in a separate country from the 'proposition nation' cult, whether they are Democrat, Republican, or something else. Let the 'America as an idea' people take their multicultural charges and form their own mix-n-match country somewhere, and leave the rest of us in peace in our own land, which will surely resemble the America of old more than the multicult Empire. My America is a kinship-based one, a blood-based one, not a 'notional nation.'
He takes a gloomy view of the future for America on this Independence Day, and that angers most of the commenters at NRO, who somehow think 'conservatives' must be pollyannas or they are not real 'conservatives.' As Steyn is not waving the flag today, he is not getting the usual praise from the choir.
Steyn is an amusing writer, but it seems to me that he has always been fatalistic, writing flippantly about Europe becoming Eurabia, and yet he has never veered too far outside the PC limits. He barely acknowledges the demographic aspect of the destruction of America, and seems to be one of those who believes everything is ideological and economic in nature, not racial or ethnic.
Perhaps this is why Steyn has always been a favorite of the FReepers and the conventional right. (And he's not even black. Imagine that.)
The most interesting part of Steyn's piece is his quote from Thomas Jefferson:
''In my soon to be imminently forthcoming book, I quote one of the most poignant lines from the Declaration of Independence, one that never made it into the final text � Thomas Jefferson�s parting words to his fellow British subjects across the seas: "We might have been a free and great people together." There is a sense both of regret at the separation yet also of its inevitability.''
And Steyn asks at the end if a 21st century counterpart of Jefferson would say 'we might have stayed a free and great people together.'
Steyn seems not to recognize that when Jefferson wrote his words back in 1776, those words which were not included into the final draft of the Declaration, 'we' (American colonists and the English) were A People, together. We had common ancestry, language, traditions, and religion. The Declaration sundered us from our parent race in England. We have been taught to cheer that, and many Americans today are aggressively celebratory about ''breaking free of the Brits'', notwithstanding that the Founders were ''Brits'' or as they were more likely to say, Englishmen.
Have you all seen the video that's making the rounds, wherein Americans on a beach somewhere are asked on camera what the Fourth of July celebrates: independence from whom? Many of the respondents were clueless.
A shocking number of people have no inkling that America was originally under English rule, being a colony of England. Many Americans are so obtuse today that they cannot understand that the colonists were genetically and culturally English. America did not emerge from nowhere.
We can't know what course things might have taken if our colonist ancestors had not seceded from the home country. But we do know that the course we took somehow led us to this disaster that we now face. Instead of remaining tied to Great Britain, we chose to go independent. So today we are no longer 'a people' but a jumble of many peoples, and there is no commonality between most of us and the post-1965 immigrants, nor even between the founding stock people and the post-1865 immigrant wave. There is therefore no 'one people' anymore, and with no unity amongst ourselves, conflict looks less avoidable every day.
If we were to split this country along political or ideological lines, I would surely have to be in a separate country from the 'proposition nation' cult, whether they are Democrat, Republican, or something else. Let the 'America as an idea' people take their multicultural charges and form their own mix-n-match country somewhere, and leave the rest of us in peace in our own land, which will surely resemble the America of old more than the multicult Empire. My America is a kinship-based one, a blood-based one, not a 'notional nation.'
Labels: American History, Ethnonationalism, Ethnopatriotism, Proposition Nation, Thomas Jefferson
0 comment Friday, October 17, 2014 | admin
A ''British'' ''historian'', writing in Newsweek, tells us our Founding Fathers were flawed. As if we don't hear this kind of leftist jeering every day of the week in our media. And as if we don't have homegrown leftist professors galore belittling our ancestors, we have to import the likes of Schama to do this?
He makes sure to mention the old Jefferson canard:
''He may have written the Declaration of Independence, but were he around today Thomas Jefferson wouldn�t have a prayer of winning the Republican nomination, much less the presidency. It wouldn�t be his liaison with the teenage daughter of one of his slaves nor the love children she bore him that would be the stumbling block.''
This 'historian' can't even be bothered to check out various sources, and instead smugly repeats these charges as if they are true. It's true, so they like to think, because other leftists and assorted malicious idiots with axes to grind repeat it endlessly.
Even many purported pro-Whites, WNs, and others, repeat this story as if it were proven fact. It is not.
And yes, I am not unbiased, being a Jefferson descendant. It just infuriates me that this one slander is given the status of near-gospel truth. I feel duty-bound to speak up against this thing.
But it isn't just his snide gossipy stories about Thomas Jefferson; it's the whole snarky article, from a man who is not an American, nor even our kin, sitting in judgment on us, and not even making an attempt at objectivity.
I am ready to say our Founding Fathers (including Jefferson) were flawed. Of course they were; they were human. But that does not mean that we drag their names through the mud and defame them as the inferiors of today's self-designated 'enlightened' ones.
It's more than obvious that today's politicians -- and history 'scholars' -- are pygmies compared to the generation of 1776. Look at the state of our world and our country, and compare with the Founding Fathers' era. The critics and character assassins, if they have any honesty, have to know that, even with the Founders' flaws, they were head and shoulders above these post-modern nonentities.
Schama would be equally annoying if he were sitting in London writing this stuff about us and our forefathers, but the fact that he is here as a guest in our country writing to us or about us in this fashion is especially egregious.
He makes sure to mention the old Jefferson canard:
''He may have written the Declaration of Independence, but were he around today Thomas Jefferson wouldn�t have a prayer of winning the Republican nomination, much less the presidency. It wouldn�t be his liaison with the teenage daughter of one of his slaves nor the love children she bore him that would be the stumbling block.''
This 'historian' can't even be bothered to check out various sources, and instead smugly repeats these charges as if they are true. It's true, so they like to think, because other leftists and assorted malicious idiots with axes to grind repeat it endlessly.
Even many purported pro-Whites, WNs, and others, repeat this story as if it were proven fact. It is not.
And yes, I am not unbiased, being a Jefferson descendant. It just infuriates me that this one slander is given the status of near-gospel truth. I feel duty-bound to speak up against this thing.
But it isn't just his snide gossipy stories about Thomas Jefferson; it's the whole snarky article, from a man who is not an American, nor even our kin, sitting in judgment on us, and not even making an attempt at objectivity.
I am ready to say our Founding Fathers (including Jefferson) were flawed. Of course they were; they were human. But that does not mean that we drag their names through the mud and defame them as the inferiors of today's self-designated 'enlightened' ones.
It's more than obvious that today's politicians -- and history 'scholars' -- are pygmies compared to the generation of 1776. Look at the state of our world and our country, and compare with the Founding Fathers' era. The critics and character assassins, if they have any honesty, have to know that, even with the Founders' flaws, they were head and shoulders above these post-modern nonentities.
Schama would be equally annoying if he were sitting in London writing this stuff about us and our forefathers, but the fact that he is here as a guest in our country writing to us or about us in this fashion is especially egregious.
Labels: American History, Founding Fathers, Leftist Bigotry, Thomas Jefferson
0 comment Thursday, August 7, 2014 | admin
''According to the admitted standards of greatness, Jefferson was a great man. After all deductions on which his enemies might choose to insist, his character could not be denied elevation, versatility, breadth, insight, and delicacy; but neither as a politician nor as a political philosopher did he seem at ease in the atmosphere which surrounded him. As a leader of democracy he appeared singularly out of place. As reserved as President Washington in the face of popular familiarities, he never showed himself in crowds. During the last thirty years of his life he was not seen in a Northern city, even during his Presi�dency; nor indeed was he seen at all except on horse�back, or by his friends and visitors in his own house. With manners apparently popular and informal, he led a life of his own, and allowed few persons to share it. His tastes were for that day excessively refined. His instincts were those of a liberal European nobleman, like the Duc de Liancourt, and he built for himself at Monticello a chateau above contact with man. The rawness of political life was an incessant torture to him, and personal attacks made him keenly unhappy. His true delight was in an intellectual life of science and art. To read, write, speculate in new lines of thought, to keep abreast of the intellect of Europe, and to feed upon Homer and Horace, were pleasures more to his mind than any to be found in a public assembly. He had some knowledge of mathematics, and a little acquaintance with classical art; but he fairly revelled in what he believed to be beau�tiful, and his writings often betrayed subtile feeling for artistic form, -- a sure mark of intellectual sensuousness. He shrank from whatever was rough or coarse, and his yearning for sympathy was almost feminine. That such a man should have ventured upon the stormy ocean of politics was surprising, the more because he was no orator, and owed nothing to any magnetic influence of voice or person. Never effective in debate, for seventeen years before his Presidency he had not appeared in a legislative body except in the chair of the Senate. He felt a nervous horror for the contentiousness of such assemblies, and even among his own friends he sometimes abandoned for the moment his strongest convictions rather than support them by an effort of authority.
If Jefferson appeared ill at case in the position of a popular leader, he seemed equally awkward in the intellectual restraints of his own political principles. His mind shared little in common with the provincialism on which the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were founded. His instincts led him to widen rather than to narrow the bounds of every intellectual exercise; and if vested with political authority, he could no more resist the temptation to stretch his powers than he could abstain from using his mind on any subject merely because he might be drawn upon ground supposed to be dangerous. He was a deist, believing that men could manage their own salvation without the help of a state church. Prone to innova�tion, he sometimes generalized without careful analysis. He was a theorist, prepared to risk the fate of mankind on the chance of reasoning far from certain in its details. His temperament was sunny and sanguine, and the atrabilious philosophy of New England was intolerable to him. He was curiously vulnerable, for he seldom wrote a page without exposing himself to attack. He was superficial in his knowledge, and a martyr to the disease of omniscience. [...]
"Generally speaking," said he, in his only elaborate work, the Notes on Virginia, "the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any State to that of its husbandmen is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption. . . . Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."
This doctrine was not original with Jefferson, but its application to national affairs on a great scale was something new in the world, and the theory itself clashed with his intellectual instincts of liberality and innovation.
A school of political thought, starting with postulates like these, was an interesting study, and would have been more interesting had Jefferson's friends undertaken to develop his ideas in the extent he held them. Perhaps this was impossible. At all events, Madison, although author of the Virginia Resolutions, showed little earnestness in carrying out their principles either as a political or as a literary task ; and John Taylor of Caroline, the only consistent representative of the school, began his writings only when political power had established precedents in�consistent with their object.''
- Henry Adams, History of the United States: The United States in 1800
If Jefferson appeared ill at case in the position of a popular leader, he seemed equally awkward in the intellectual restraints of his own political principles. His mind shared little in common with the provincialism on which the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were founded. His instincts led him to widen rather than to narrow the bounds of every intellectual exercise; and if vested with political authority, he could no more resist the temptation to stretch his powers than he could abstain from using his mind on any subject merely because he might be drawn upon ground supposed to be dangerous. He was a deist, believing that men could manage their own salvation without the help of a state church. Prone to innova�tion, he sometimes generalized without careful analysis. He was a theorist, prepared to risk the fate of mankind on the chance of reasoning far from certain in its details. His temperament was sunny and sanguine, and the atrabilious philosophy of New England was intolerable to him. He was curiously vulnerable, for he seldom wrote a page without exposing himself to attack. He was superficial in his knowledge, and a martyr to the disease of omniscience. [...]
"Generally speaking," said he, in his only elaborate work, the Notes on Virginia, "the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any State to that of its husbandmen is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption. . . . Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue."
This doctrine was not original with Jefferson, but its application to national affairs on a great scale was something new in the world, and the theory itself clashed with his intellectual instincts of liberality and innovation.
A school of political thought, starting with postulates like these, was an interesting study, and would have been more interesting had Jefferson's friends undertaken to develop his ideas in the extent he held them. Perhaps this was impossible. At all events, Madison, although author of the Virginia Resolutions, showed little earnestness in carrying out their principles either as a political or as a literary task ; and John Taylor of Caroline, the only consistent representative of the school, began his writings only when political power had established precedents in�consistent with their object.''
- Henry Adams, History of the United States: The United States in 1800
Labels: American History, Thomas Jefferson