USA, Canada no longer in Human Development Index top 10

There was a time, way back in the 20th century, when the US of A and Canada ranked in the top 10 countries on the United Nations Human Deveopment Index. In fact, for something like five years in a row, Canada was No. 1 [Wut? Ed.] with the US around No. 5. Citizens (word chosen with care) of North America (excluding Mexico) were healthier, wealthier, and better-educated than those of any other region.

Sadly, those days are gone forever. Since the triumph of "liberal progressivism", North American standards of living have fallen below those of northern Europe. 

It's true that the HDI for the whole world have declined, particularly since 2020, due to Covid, climate hysteria, the greenscam and other factors. However, the Europeans are recovering, whereas under the terminally woke governments in Washington and Ottawa, things just get worse and worse.

The Human Development Index is one of the most widely used measures of countries' development. It gauges progress in terms of societal outcomes, including life expectancy at birth, expected and average years of schooling and gross national income per person. The latest figures, released yesterday, show that the global HDI is rising again, but progress has been slow and uneven. 

The countries shown in darkest squa are those which score highest on the HDI. The Economist has published a table showing how the 194 countries tracked by the UN compare. The left column shows the HDI score (1.00 would be perfect). The middle column shows life expectancy at birth. The right column shows expected years of schooling. We don't have room to show the whole table or even the top 20 countries, so have excerpted just Nos. 16 through 22.

Embarrassing, isn't? [Not to Brandon or Blackiie McBlackface, evidently. Ed.] The country with the highest Human Development Index, for the second year in a row, is... wait for it... Switzerland! Cue cries of "They're Number One! They're Number One!"

The Swiss score is boosted by high incomes and long life expectancies. Other countries in western Europe have some of the highest scores. Some parts of Asia also do well, with Hong Kong and Singapore making it to the top ten. 

Elsewhere on Turtle Island -- especially in South America, the Middle East and Africa -- things are worse. Countries such as Peru, Colombia, Libya and Lebanon have made little progress since the global HDI started to fall in 2019. Living standards in Ukraine (100th) and Russia have also dropped. War-torn Yemen, poor and indebted Belize, and Micronesia, an island country at risk of being swallowed by rising sea levels, all peaked in 2010 and have declined every year since. Here are the Bottom 10.

Walt notes that 9 of the bottom 10 are in sub-Saharan Africa. The 10th is Yemen, at the south end of the Arabian peninsula, where a Muslim civil war has been going on for years. That's where the Houthis come from. Have you heard that name recently?

We return now [Quickly, please. Ed.] to the Excited States of America, which is fighting its own cultural and political civil wars. The War on Poverty, however, is over. We lost! Here's how the American HDI looks, county by country.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 46.2 million American people were living in poverty in 2010, and the poverty rate reached 15.1%, the highest in 52 years. In 2020, the year in which Senile Joe was (allegedly) elected, the poverty rate climbed by 0.9 percentage points to 11.4% from 10.5% in 2019. Do you really think that, as Joe claims, things have gotten better since then? Really?! 

Ask yourself: What would it take to get the US of A back into the Top 10 on the Human Development Index? How can we Make America Great Again? Well, there's your answer... right there!

It's not over yet!

Ed. here. Speaking of the Deep South (see previous post), Walt has sent along this photo, which may explain his absence this weekend...or not.

Some people will not forget, no matter how much brainwashing the Deep State and its lickspittle media subject them to. "Save your Confederate money; the South will rise again!"

Worth reading! "American Nations" by Colin Woodard

Way back in 2011 -- note the date carefully -- Colin Woodard, a writer/historian/journalist from Maine, wrote American Nations -- A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (Viking). Part history, part sociology and part ethnography, the book traces the formation of Yankeedom, the Deep South, the Left Coast, etc from the 17th century to the early 21st century.

Since the cultural revolution of the hippy-dippy 60s, the fault lines between North America's regional interests have been growing ever wider, resulting in the division of America into left and right, blue and red, and urban and rural "nations". In the decade since the book was published, the split has been almost 50-50, as witness the elections that brought President Trump and Crooked Joe Biden to power. What happens next?

In the Epilogue, Mr Woodard reveals his liberal bias. He wants to see the US of A held together as a "liberal democracy". But he wonders if that's possible. Here are two key excerpts, with Walt's contrarian comments.

At this writing [2011... and things have gotten much worse since then!], the United States...has been exhibiting the classic symptoms of an empire in decline.... Like its superpower predecessors, the United States has built up a staggering external trade deficit and sovereign debt while overreaching itself militarily and greatly increasing both the share of financial services in national output and the role of religious extremists in national political life.

Once the great exporter of innovations, products, and financial capital, the United States is now deeply indebted to China, on which it relies for much of what its people consume and, increasingly, for the scientists and engineers needed by research and development firms and institutions.

Its citizenry is deeply divided along regional lines, with some in the "Tea Party" movement adopting the rhetoric of the eighteenth-century Yankee minutemen, only with the British Parliament replaced by the federal Congress, and George III by their duly elected president. Its military has been mired in expensive and frustrating counterinsurgency wars in Mesopotamia and Central Asia, while barbarians have stormed the gates of its political and financial capitals, killing thousands in the surprise attaches of September 2001.

Add in the damage to public confidence in the electoral system caused by the 2000 election [the 2016 and 2020 elections were even worse!], the near-total meltdown of the financial sector in 2008 [and the near panic of last month!], and extreme political dysfunction in the Capitol [and that was in the Prez's first term!], and it's clear the United States has not started the century auspiciously....

One scenario that might preserve the status quo for the United States would be for its nations to follow the Canadian example [Eh? Trudeau's Canada?] and compromise on their respective cultural agendas for the sake of unity. Unfortunately, neither the Dixie bloc nor the Northern alliance is likely to agree to major concessions to the other.

The majority of Yankees, New Netherlanders and Left Coasters simple aren't going to accept living in an evangelical Christian theocracy with weak or non-existent social, labor, or environmental protections, public school systems, and checks on corporate power in politics.

Most Deep Southerners will resist paying higher taxes to underwrite the creation of a public health insurance system; a universal network of well-resourced, unionized, and avowedly secular schools; tuition-free public universities where science--not the King James Bible--guides inquiry; taxpayer-subsidized public transportation; high-speed railroad networks; and renewable energy projects; or vigorous regulatory bodies to ensure compliance with strict financial, food safety, environmental, and campaign finance laws. [This prescription for a better America might have been written by Bernie Sanders!] 

Instead, the "red" and "blue" nations will continue to wrestle with one another for control over federal policy, each doing what it can to woo the "purple" ones to their cause, just as they have since they gathered at the First Continental Congress.

Another outside possibility is that, faced with a major crisis, the federation's leaders will betray their oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, the primary adhesive holding the union together. In the midst of, say, a deadly pandemic outbreak [Written in 2001. How did he know?!] or the destruction of several cities by terrorists, a fearful public might condone the suspension of civil rights, the dissolution of Congress, or the incarceration of Supreme Court justices.

One can easily imagine circumstances in which some nations are happy with the new order and other deeply opposed to it. With the Constitution abandoned, the federation could well disintegrate, forming one or more confederations of like-minded regions.

Chances are these new sovereign entities would be based on state boundaries, because state governors and legislators would be the most politically legitimate actors in such a scenario. Sates dominated by the three Northern alliance nations--New York, New Jersey, and the New England, Great Lakes, and Pacific Northwest States might form one or more confederations. States controlled by the Deep South -- South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana -- might form another. The mountain and High Plains states of the Far West would constitute an obvious third.

The situation might be more complicated within often-divided Greater Appalachia or the "nationally mixed" states of Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Arizona. It's not impossible to imagine some of the resulting coalitions extending into Canada, or, in the case of El Norte, Mexico.

If this extreme scenario were to come to pass, North America would likely be a far more dangerous, volatile, and unstable place, inviting meddling from imperial powers overseas. If this scenario of crisis and breakup seems far-fetched, consider the fact that, forty years ago, the leaders of the Soviet Union would have thought the same thing about their continent-spanning federation. 

Mr Woodard's preferred scenario is clear enough, but is that how things will play out, or is the US of A headed for another civil war? Stay tuned.

Newly listed by our sponsor - "Lincoln's Gamble", by Todd Brewster - the truth behind the Emancipation Proclamation

On New Year's Day 1863, Abraham Lincoln (with William H. Seward, his Secretary of State) signed the Emancipation Proclamation, earning himself the soubriquet "The Great Emancipator", because he freed the slaves. 

So goes the hagiography. The truth is that the Proclamation didn't go nearly that far. It broadened the goals of the Union war effort. It made the eradication of slavery into an explicit Union goal, to be achieved not on that day but after the conclusion of hostilies. 

President Lincoln justified the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure intended to cripple the Confederacy and reunite the United States of America. Being mindful of possible challenges on the constitutionality of the Proclamation, the President applied it only to the Confederate states then in rebellion. 

Why President Lincoln issued the Proclamation, at the time he did, is the subject of Lincoln's Gamble, by Todd Brewster (Simon & Schuster, 2014), now available by mail from our dear sponsor's e-store, used, in very fine condition, at a great price.

Mr Brewster is a certified liberal journalist, having written for HuffPost and the NYT. But, as a professor of oral history at West Point, he has to admit that President Lincoln's motives were not altogether altruistic. Although he was no racist, he was a man of his times, recognizing the now politically unrecognizable, i.e. that there is a difference between the races. 

He thought it unlikely that the two races could live together in a harmonious society, and was an advocate, even as he signed the document, for the establishment of a black colony, in central America or Africa, to which freed blacks could be sent... if they wished, of course.

President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Declaration as a matter of military necessity. On New Year's Day of 1863, the Union was losing the war, and the tide of public opinion in the North was running against the President. He could think of no alternative but to roll the dice -- Mr Brewster's words -- and hope the freeing of the slaves (sort of) would bring would bring victory in its wake.

President Lincoln lived long enough to see the victory he hoped for, but not long enough to see the realization of his fears for the aftermath. This book will give you some food for thought, and fuel for debates with your friends, both liberal and conservative. If you buy it, tell `em Walt sent ya! 

VIDEO: Dr Jordan Peterson on the true nature of the war in Ukraine

About a month ago, Dr Jordan Peterson (for whom Walt has all the time in the world!) wrote an article for the Daily Wire entitled "Russia Vs. Ukraine Or Civil War In The West?" In this thought-provoking piece, Dr Peterson listed the reasons why we're seeing an extended conflict in Ukraine, and explains why a culture war in the West has fueled the Russian fire.

Since the Daily Wire is accessible only to members, the article was not widely read or circulated. So Dr Peterson read it aloud on his YouTube channel. Click here to watch the entire video. It's over 51 minutes long. If you're thinking that's too much -- some other time, perhaps -- Ed. has prepared the clip below in which Dr Peterson sums up his message of warning.

We hope you will now be motivated to click on the link to the full video to understand why there's much more to the war in Ukraine than just resisting Russian imperialism. Those who, like Walt, cherish the ideal of a free and independent Ukraine, need to take a broader and deeper view of the conflict. 

We cannot be assured that we are on The Right Side until we understand the moral, philosophical and ideological positions of the combatants. If it comes down to a civil war between those who stand for the values of Christian civilization and those who espouse today's politically orthodox secular humanism, whose side should we take? 

Thanks to Agent 9 for pointing us in the right direction.

Disgraceful! West Point to remove portrait of Robert E. Lee

Another wave in the tsunami of leftist iconoclasm sweeping America is about to hit West Point, the military academy of the United States Army (President Joe Brandon, Commander-in-Chief).

For 70 years, a portrait of General Robert E. Lee, the greatest American military leader of all time, has graced the Academy's library. But the twenty-foot portrait, showing General Lee in his Confederate uniform, could soon be coming down.

The National Defense Authorization Act of 2021 established a commission to rename military bases that honour Confederate generals, and otherwise erase from memory all references to the "enemy" in the War of the Secession, in the name of political (if not historical) correctness. 

The commission is expected to recommend that West Point -- now led by the first black Superintendent in its history, Lieutenant-General Darryl Williams -- remove anything that commemorates Robert E. Lee's association with the Confederacy.

The creation of the commission was one of the reasons President Trump, who had given the commencement address at West Point in 2020, vetoed the 2021 NDAA. After his veto was overridden by Congress, his administration named four individuals to the commission, all of whom were immediately removed by Brandon's Defense Secretary Lloyd James Austin, who is black. 

In Ken Burns' Civil War series, a freed slave is quoted as saying "Bottom rail on top now!" And so it is in this case. Retired Admiral Michelle Howard, the Navy’s first female four-star admiral and the first black woman to command a Navy ship, now serves as chair of the iconoclasm committee. 

Other members include retired General Thomas Bostick, the first black graduate of West Point to serve as chief of engineers of the US Army. The downgrading and degrading of General Lee, even though he was opposed to both slavery and secession is nothing less than the revenge of the Democrats and triumph of their diversity hires.

Robert E. Lee was a man of deep integrity, whose ancestors helped found the United States of America. He was born, it was said, in the same room as two signers of the Declaration of Independence -- his uncles Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee. He graduated first in his class at West Point, and went on to become Superintendent of the Academy. 

Later, Lieutenant-Colonel Lee fought with distinction in the Mexican-American War, and led the unit that went to Harper's Ferry to quash John Brown's little rebellion. Within days of the South's attack on Fort Sumter, President Lincoln offered Colonel Lee -- he had been promoted -- command of all the Union forces. 

General Lee declined, saying that he could not take up arms against his "country", by which he meant the Commonwealth of Virginia. (It was common, in those days, for people to refer to their state in that manner.) "If Virginia stands by the old Union," he wrote to his son Custis, "so will I. But if she secedes...then I will follow my native state with my sword, and if need be, with my life."

Robert E. Lee was a great American patriot. To dishonour him by removing statues, paintings and other monuments to his very existence is disgraceful.

"Summer of rage" = Civil War v 2.0? - NOT a new idea!

This morning's headlines... 

1 dead, 5 critically wounded after shooting at church in gun-controlled California 

2 killed, 3 injured after shooting at busy Houston flea market 

33 Shot During Weekend in Mayor Lori Lightfoot's Chicago

Biden: Buffalo shooting "racially motivated act of white supremacy and violent extremism"

And so it begins... No. That should be: And so it continues.

President Brandon, and all the other liberal loonies acting like this weekend's mass murder in  Buffalo is something new (and obviously the fault of President Trump!) seem to have forgotten about "race riots" (as they were called in more innocent times) in:

Detroit - June 1943 - President FDR (Democrat)

Watts - August 1965 - President LBJ (Democrat), the great champion of equal rights and "freedom now"

Newark - July 1967 - President LBJ (again)

Detroit - July 1967 - aka the 12th Street Riot, aka the Detroit Rebellion - President LBJ (yet again) 

I don't remember the 1943 event very well, but the Detroit Rebellion is clear in my mind. You could see the smoke from across the river in Canada, which is where sensible Americans went to wait it out. And of course there was the TV news. Images of mobs of black people (they weren't "Black", back then) in the streets, protesting discrimination and racism, demanding equality and justice...

...and maybe doing a bit of "reparations shopping". Of course it wasn't called that, in those more innocent days. It was called "looting", `cause that's what it was! Martin Luther King would be horrified, I think, to see what's being done nowadays, in his name and in the name of "justice".

"No justice, no peace!" That's what they're yelling now. In the long hot summer of 1967, it was "Burn, baby, burn!" The point of yesterday's  post was to predict another long hot summer, a "summer of rage". Lifetime pct .991. 

I think now that I should have added "and riots" to that phrase. But the message was clear enough for our sponsor to call to let us know that a civil war between blacks and "others" was predicted in  the January 1980 "Fantasy Issue" of National Lampoon, "the Humor Magazine for Adults". Check this out!

This excellent piece of satire, written by John Hughes and superbly drawn by George Evans, could never be published today. The editors would probably report the creators to the Department of Homeland Security's new "Disinformation Governance Board", so they could be re-educated in a pleasant summer camp somewhere in Alaska.

Fortunately, the DHSDGB has not yet been able to destroy the archives of National Lampoon and other politically incorrect publication. Our sponsor has made a .pdf file of this prescient piece, which you can buy for only $2.00. Hard copy is also available. Tell `em Walt sent ya!

Remembering the veterans who fought for our flag

 Last Wednesday was Veterans Day. President Brandon a speech somewhere. I didn't hear all of it [Did you hear any of it? Ed.] but understand he paid homage to all the men and women who fought and died under the American flag, not just in the Great War, but in all the wars in which Americans fought and died. 

I wonder if that includes the Glorious War of the Secession, aka the Civil War aka the War Between The States. Assuming that to be the case, I wonder which flag he was referring to. Was it this one?

I hope Sleepy Joe hasn't forgotten [Go on... Ed.] that, while over 360,000 Americans went to war under the Stars and Stripes and never came back, some 258,000 other Americans died fighting for this flag.

Yes, those people were Americans, and just as patriotic as those who fought for the Union. They deserve to be remembered.

Yet statues of Confederate soldiers and leaders are being pulled down all across the South, and the display of the Confederate battle flag is prohibited, because it's "hateful", unlike the Stars and Stripes, which is only called "hateful" in this Babylon Bee spoof.   

Such is life in today's ultra-woke America. Pity.

Footnote: The statues of Confederate and Union soldiers erected in parks and village squares across America were largely produced by one manufacturer. They were identical, but for one detail: On the soldier’s belt buckle, the "U.S." is replaced by a "C.S." for "Confederate States." To the Monumental Bronze Co., of Bridgeport CT, it was all just business. Union or Confederate, a customer was a customer, another $450 for a zinc statue that could mean whatever you needed it to mean. Source: WaPo.

"Allahu akbar!" in... Afghanistan?! What'd I tell you...

The Associated Press mojo wire today spat out a story from Afghanistan which attracted only a little notice from the controlled media. In "Taliban-controlled Afghanistan" (the new politically correct way of referring to the shithole that 1000s of Westerners died trying to civilize), an ISIS suicide bomber struck at a mosque packed with Shiite Muslim worshippers in the northern city of Kunduz. 

Friday is a prime day of Muslim-on-Muslim attacks, because followers of the Prophet can be found kneeling in prayer, heads down and asses up. You can't miss! Today's bombing sent at least 46 people to Paradise, and wounded dozens more.

In its claim of responsibility, broadcast on the ISIS-linked Aamaq news agency, the region’s ISIS affiliate identified the bomber as a Uygher Muslim, saying the attack targeted both Shiites and the mainly Sunni Taliban for their purported willingness to expel Uyghers to meet demands from China. The blast was just the latest in a series of ISIS bombings and shootings that have targeted Afghanistan's new Taliban rulers, as well as religious institutions and minority Shiites since American and other NATO troops fled in disarray at the end of August.

May I now say for the last time [Really? Ed.] that Western nations had no business intervening in what was and still is an ongoing Muslim civil war. Likewise, we have no responsibility to send millions of dollars in food and other aid to avoid the imminent "humanitarian disaster" which the liberals are now saying is somehow all our fault. The Islamists' "Religion of Peace" is the cause of their misery. That's all ye know and all ye need to know.

President Trump decries removal of statue of Robert E. Lee

In his prescient novel 1984, George Orwell describes the "woke" society which the liberals and loony left have created for us in this century. A quote: "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute." 

The endless process of trying to make the past conform to the liberal vision of the present and future continued this week, as the great monument to General Robert E. Lee, hero of the Glorious War of the Secessrion and (some would say) the Greatest Virginian of All Time, was lifted off its plinth in Richmond VA.

You can erase the images of history. You can obliterate the images and statues that commemorate great events and great people. But, try as you might to pretend that these things -- people and events -- didn't exist, you can't change history. They did exist, and until you can lobotomize the entire population [Don't think they wouldn't do it, if they could! Ed.], some people will remember, and will pass on their memories to others.

President Donald Trump remembers who General Lee was, and what he stood for, and has issued a statement denouncing the removal of the biggest Confederate statue in the US of A. He called General Lee a "unifying force" who was "ardent in his resolve to bring the North and South together through many means of reconciliation and imploring his soldiers to do their duty in becoming good citizens of this Country." 

He went on to say the US would have benefitted from having Lee leading the war in Afghanistan. Could be. General Lee's orderly withdrawal from Richmond saved the city from further destruction, and saved the lives of 1000s of his men. More important, it brought the war to a close without one final bloodbath. 

"If only we had Robert E. Lee to command our troops in Afghanistan, that disaster would have ended in a complete and total victory many years ago," wrote President Trump. "What an embarrassment we are suffering because we don't have the genius of a Robert. E. Lee."

Well, the ultra-woke iconoclasts encourage by the Democraps and their Antifa and BLM allies have succeeded in hauling General Lee from his pedestal. In other cities, statues of Washington and Lincoln have had the same shameful treatment. But it's a long road that has no turnings. What has been torn down can be erected again, once Americans recover from their temporary insanity. Selah!

VIDEO: French finally starting to take the threat of Islamism seriously

For some weeks now, the country from which WWW draws the largest part of its readereship has been... wait for it... not the USA... not even Canada, but... here it comes... France! This is passing strange considering that we rarely post more than a sentence or two in the language of Molière. Could it be that the French are more attuned to (or care more about) Walt's warnings about the collapse of Christian civilization under the onslaught of Islamization being tolerated, or even perpetrated by our political and spiritual leaders?

Evidence that more and more Frenchmen and women are starting to say "Il a raison!" comes in the form of a Harris Interactive poll taken this week following publication of an open letter signed by a group of retired generals of the French Army, calling on Président Emmanuel Macron to defend patriotism.

The signatories condemned the "délitement" (disintegration) striking the country, and said they were "disposés à soutenir les politiques qui prendront en considération la sauvegarde de la nation" (willing to support policies that will take into consideration the safeguard of the nation). Now there's something you're not going to hear from generals of the AABC countries. Maybe the French generals are braver than ours, after all.

The letter provoked much soiling of shorts and related tut-tutting from the M Macron's government. Prime Minister Jean Castex condemned the letter and those who signed it "with the greatest firmness." But according to the poll, large numbers of French people agreed with the generals.

   

64% of those polled had heard about the letter, and 38% said they understood exactly what the generals were saying. 58% of the 1613 respondents said they supported the publication of the letter, and nearly half felt the army should intervene to guarantee law and order, even without being asked by the government so to do!

93% of those who identified as Républicains and 94% of supporters of Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN) thought that the laws of France no longer apply in certain places. 84% of polledthose asked agreed with the statement that violence was increasing day by day, (especially in the suburbs of Paris). 73% consider that France is disintegrating. 

According to the generals, France is sliding toward a civil war due to creeping Islamism and the government's failure to control mass migration and creeping Islamism in the country. Two days after publication of the letter, Mme Le Pen invited the signatories to "joindre à notre action pour prendre part à la bataille qui s'ouvre" (join our movement to take part in the battle which is opening).

Not everyone agrees with her. About a third of those polled agreed with her, with disapproval of her position running as high as 86% of the self-declared eco-wienies. But by supporting the military, Mme Le Pen has caused her star to rise even higher. With the next presidential election less than a year off, she has the declared support of 89% of RN sympathisers, and 40% of Républicains.

Meanwhile, the BBC reports that a court in Nanterre (in the western suburbs of Paris, where white Christians are almost an endangered species) has acquitted Mme Le Pen and Gilbert Collard, an RN colleague, of breaking hate speech laws by posting on Twitter three images of ISIS atrocities. The court found that while the pictures were violent they fell into the category of political protest, thus protected by the right to freedom of speech.

Mme Le Pen had called the trial "poltically motivated", and defended her "freedom to inform" with the images, "shocking as they are." The court found that the images had been posted by elected officials who had not tried to trivialise violence or "present violence in a favourable light."

Her lawyer Rodolphe Bosselut called the victory important because "freedom of expression has been recognised as complete for a top-ranking politician." That's in France, of course. Might be worth a try on this side of the Atlantic!

AUDIO: Victor Davis Hanson talks about the causes of Civil War v. 2.0

Some people say a second Civil War is coming... soon. Some say it's already here -- if not a shooting war, at least the culture war which is already being fought throughout the Excited States of America. What will it take to turn today's war of words into an honest-to-goodness armed conflict?

Victor Davis Hanson is an American classicist, military historian, columnist, and farmer. He has been a commentator on modern and ancient warfare and contemporary politics for National Review, the Washington Times, and other media outlets. In this podcast (audio only) he talks about the changes in American society that have occurred in the last decade which make Civil War v. 2.0 almost inevitable. Listen carefully.

 

Please note that I said "almost inevitable". Towards the end of this podcast, Mr Hanson says a shooting war can still be averted if we can avoid doing the things -- he lists them -- that caused the shooting to start in in 1861. 

Although the time is late, each of us, he says, can do a lot to stop things from getting to that point. The one thing Mr Hanson forgot to mention is the power of prayer. Don't forget to pray: God save America!

VIDEO: "The Birth of a Nation" (full) - a lesson for our times?

Just about 100% of the reviews you'll read for D.W. Griffiths' masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation focus on the racism, pro-South bias, "glorification" of the Ku Klux Klan, yada yada yada. There is no dbout about the bias, but there is also no doubt that the events depicted are real, a cautionary tale about what happens when you turn society on its head.

In another masterpiece, The Civil War, film-maker Ken Burns quotes a freed slave as telling his master "Bottom rail on top now!" As the film shows, the aim of many radical abolitionists before, during and after the Civil War was nothing less than to make downtrodden black Americans rulers over the privileged whites. To do so, they used rigged elections (in which whites were disenfranchised), mob violence, and occupation of southern cities and states by the federal army.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? The KKK was undeniably racist, but would not have come into being were it not for the necessity of defending southern society and, dare we say it, civilization, in a country which had descended into chaos. Watching The Birth of a Nation may make some people uncomfortable, but it would be foolish to let the political incorrectness blind us to the realities of the culture war which America experienced then... and now.

 

President Woodrow Wilson is famously rumored to have responded to the film with the remark: "It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." His published works as a historian are closely aligned with the film's negative portrayal of Reconstruction. Some of his writings are even quoted onscreen in certain prints of the film.

Also worth watching (and free of bias!) Mississippi's War: Slavery and Secession, a production of Mississippi Public Broadcasting, 2014.

Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. (George Santayana)

Hey lefties! Are you really ready for a civil war?

Further reading: What tool are the lefties using to poke the bear? Answer: "The Devil’s Pitchfork: Seeking the Origin of Our Present Troubles", by David Solway, American Thinker, 5/7/20. Mr Solway explains the three-pronged progressivist campaign to destroy America.

Black Lives Matter doesn't matter any more!

Looks like last night was comparatively peaceful across the Excited States of America. Not so much rfioting and looting as on the weekend and Monday. I expect today we'll see images of good citizens pitching in to clean up the debris left behind by even peaceful "protesters". I predict that 90% of those shown in such photos will be white. Lifetime pct .976.

You realize, gentle reader, that all the commotion in America's cities is not about George Floyd, police brutality, or even racial inequality, about which the SJWs have been moaning for two centuries.

Black lives do not matter! At least, not to antifa types, the mostly white leftists who are the real "protesters". What we are seeing is a well-organized, well-funded, violent campaign to overthrow the government of the USA. Well... not the whole government... just the man at its head, Still-President Trump.

The bad news for them -- good news for the USA -- is that the protests-cum-riots are having the opposite effect from that intended. They have all but insured the November re-election of the Donald! (Lifetime pct still .976.) I have to admit that Mr Trump hasn't come through the Covid-19 Dempanic covered with glory. But the rioters have effectivelyl ended the lockdown by defying it, and the rest of us figure that if they can take to the streets without worrying about getting the virus, we can take to the beaches!

As well, the media hysteria about "anti-black racism" has all but totally displaced the media hysteria about the Dempanic. And in this chapter of the soap opera that is American politics, President Trump is the one who looks like a hero -- the only one standing up for law and order, while dozen of weak-willed and weak-kneed Democratic politicians fall all over themselves to signal virtue and pander to the anti-American agitators.

I am now the only one who thinks that the "protesters" will succeed in keeping President Trump in the White House. Let me share a few well-chosen words from "Seven Thoughts on the Civil War the Other Side Wants So Badly", by Scott McKay, in The Spectator, 2/6/20.

The police can handle these rioters if they're allowed to. If the police can't, in some circumstances, the National Guard certainly can. This isn't some invading army; it's the dregs of society who have been induced into the streets for free air fryers from Target. The slightest application of law enforcement muscle will put this rioting down.

[On why the areas trashed by the riots won't ever be rebuilt] At the end of the day, everybody figures this is an area where the locals were so stupid and so disrespectful that they looted and burned down the very shops that kept the neighborhood going. And who wants to do business with such people?

You don't have to go any further back than 1968 to know that when America gets its fill of domestic violence and insurrection, it votes for the most conservative candidate it can find. How do you think Richard Nixon, who was the political version of a broken-down claiming horse who had lost an election for the governorship of California just a few years earlier, rolled into the White House like a tsunami? Nixon was the law-and-order candidate. It didn't really matter what else he was; the Silent Majority gave him the job and a mandate to put an end to The Sixties.

Democrats have been trying to recreate The Sixties ever since, and the public has been trying to tell them The Sixties weren't all that awesome.
Trump is going to law-and-order this all the way home. It’s an easy play for him. Trump’s response hasn’t been perfect, but he’s going to dominate the discussion the longer this goes. Do Democrats really think they’re going to beat him without even denouncing the riots? Are they that stupid?

Of course they are. Of course they are.

Well said, Mr McKay. Couldn't have said it better myself. [You got that right! Ed.]

Remembering Abraham Lincoln

February 12th used to be celebrated as Lincoln's Birthday. Which it was. February 12, 1809 was the date. Because it's Black History Month, the only holiday Americans get now is Martin Luther King Day. Washington, Lincoln and other nobodies have to make do with "Presidents Day". That's one of the fruits of the triumph of freedom and equality begun by President Lincoln and completed by... wait for it... President LBJ.

Since President Lincoln and others are gradually being consigned to the Memory Hole, I thought it might be appropriate to share a few opinions of Honest Abe, as penned by his contemporaries, drawn from Civil War Curiosities, by Webb Garrison (Rutledge Hill Press, Nashville, 1994).

No other war maker was so widely vilified as was Abraham Lincoln. Contemptuous of the president's announced policies, the abolitionist Benjamin F. Wade announced that Lincoln's views on slaver "could only come of one who was born of 'poor white trash' and educated in a slave State." Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, who had his own eyes on the White House, characterized his leader as "greatly wanting in will and decision, in comprehensiveness, in self-reliance, and clear, well-definted purpose."

Henry Ward Beecher, the nation's most famous clergyman in 1861, denounced the president from the pulpit. According to Beecher, the chief executive lacked any spark of genius and possessed "not an element of leadership, not one particle of heroic enthusiasm." Fellow abolitionist Wendell Phillips described Lincoln as "a second-rate man" and charged his "slackness" with "doing more than the malice of Confederates to break up the Union."

Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts, who was among the first to commit himself fully to the war effort, castigated the man for whom he raised regiments of volunteers. "Besides doing my proper work," wrote Andrews, "I amsadly but firmly tr5ying to help organize some movement, if possible to save the President from the infamy of ruining his country."

Soon the Massachusetts leader sent one of his top aides to confer with Lincoln. Reporting about this visit, Henry Lee said just what Andrew wanted to hear. As he sat waiting, Lee recalled, "I grew more and more cross to think that this Western mummy of a rail splitter should sit in Washington's chair."

Congressman Frank Blair of Missouri urged that the primary obligation of every Unionist was "to stop fighting Jeff Davis and turn in on our own Government and make something of it," According to the lawmaker, soon to become a Federal brigadier, all Confederate leaders taken together had not harmed the4 nation has as much as "the cowardice, ignorance, and stupidity of Lincoln's administration."

I'll leave for another day the quotation of President Lincoln's thoughts about "African-Americans" (as they are now called) and their place in American society. Suffice it to say that General Robert E. Lee's views, quoted in Walt's profile, were much the same as those of the Great Emancipator. And we know that they were both wrong, as evidenced by the contribution of people of colour to making America what it is today. Right?

2020 re-enactment of battle of Gettysburg CANCELLED... why???

Agent 78 has just sent us a disturbing report from WGAL-TV, Channel 8, "covering Gettysburg like the dew". They reported on September 4th that the committee that organizes the annual Battle of Gettysburg reenactment says the re-enactment of the key battle of the Civil War won't be done again next year. Here's a clip from last year's event.



Too bad if you missed last year's re-enactment, because it may turn out to be the last of its kind. A leader of the Gettysburg Anniversary Committee, which staged the events for the past quarter-century, said the cancellation was due to a combination of factors, including:
- Aging re-enactors, causing a decrease in participation.
- Changing interests from Gettysburg visitors.
- The weather-dependent event creates risky economic dynamics.
And, he told the TV station, the hobby is moving toward smaller, living history types of events.

You have to wonder if the reasons given for the cancellation are the real reasons. Surely the decision has nothing to do with political correctness! Surely no-one would have objected to see a reenactor playing General Lee astride "Traveller", or Confederate battle flags waving bravely in the breeze. How could I think such a thing? Well, which flag did you see displayed in the clip?!

But who knows... Maybe it's just as well that the re-enactment has been cancelled. Anything "divisive" in an election year would be unthinkable, wouldn't it?

Book review: "How De Body?", by Teun Voeten

The poke in the ribs to write "War is Africa's natural condition. Can we change that?" (WWW 16/10/18) came from How De Body? (St. Martin's Press, New York, 2002), Dutch journalist Teun Voeten's account of his terrifying journey through the very uncivil "civil" war in Sierra Leone (west Africa) in the late 1990s.

"How de body?" is a customary greeting -- like "How's it going?" -- in Krio, the pidjin widely spoken in Sierra Leone. Mr Voeten apparently chose it as the title of his book because the bodies he saw and photographed -- and they were many -- were in pretty bad shape. His powerful photographs speak volumes about the sad state of Sierra Leone  at the turn of the century, and of the nature of Africa itself. As I said yesterday, war is Africa's natural condition.

The purpose of the author's first trip to west Africa, in 1998, was to photograph and write about the child soldiers who were fighting on both sides of the conflict that had raged in Sierra Leone for nearly a decade. Mere boys (and girls too) like this one.

A scrawny kid like this, when carrying a Kalashnikov, can make a pretty big hole in you, and as the clash between the military junta and ECOMOG -- the West African peacekeepers -- raged around him, Mr Voeten was forced to hide in the bush, fearful of being robbed, tortured and/or killed by drug-crazed, gun-toting "soldiers" of either side.

ECOMOG -- the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group -- was a west African multilateral armed force established by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The idea was that separate armies of Africans would work together to make and keep the peace in an African state. ("Nation" is the wrong word to use here. The concept of the nation state doesn't really exist in Africa, divided as it is by tribalism, language and religion.) To no-one's surprise, it didn't work very well, which is why the United Nations eventually felt compelled to involve itself in the conflict.

That didn't work very well either. Mr Voeten tells us that by 2000, "the situation in Sierra Leone...again deteriorated. The 25,000 UN peacekeepers that were stationed in the country...proved to be largely ineffective. Civil war flared up; cease-fires and treaties were broken, and...the fighting has spilled over the border to Guinea and Liberia."

But UN intervention, the globalists and progressives think to this day is better than leaving the Africans to exterminate one another. Hence the UN mission in Mali, which was the subject of yesterday's post.

What's wrong with Africa that bloody conflicts of the kind Teun Voeten saw up close and personal keep recurring? They seem to be unavoidable natural phenomena -- the work of evil "big men", full of ambition and greed, with no moral compass or concept of civilization to guide them. Mr Voeten quotes English cultural anthropologist Paul Richards: "What we are seeing in Sierra Leone is the total collapse of the nation-state. Criminal netyworks rush in to fill the power vacuum, which is an oasis of lawlessness and institutionalized corruption. Those networks have every reason to make sure the state of chaos continues. And vice versa."

Teun Voeten concludes How De Body? by saying that he won't give up on Sierra Leone. "Despite the difficulties," he writes, "I believe there is hope.... Eventually peace will come. ...'We just have to be patient.'"

I understand his feelings. Having lived there for years in the 1990s, I can attest to the saying that Africa gets in your blood ...sometimes literally, but forget about that. It's easy to love the land and the ordinary people, when they are left alone by foreign interventionists and by their own corrupt and cruel leaders.

Where I disagree with Mr Voeten is in thinking that the "big men" will give way to leaders like Nelson Mandela -- he was an exception -- or that the UN and the legions of western do-gooders will ever leave Africans to develop (or not) at their own pace and in their own way. I believe there is no hope for Africa, and that we westerners do Africa and ourselves a disservice by trying to change human nature.

Footnote: The Deutsche Welle website has a report from the World Bank, which sez (headline news!) "Poverty rates remain high in Africa". "Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world where the overall number of extremely poor people is increasing rather than decreasing, according to the World Bank's latest Poverty and Shared Prosperity report." No kidding! But don't worry. The white folks at the World Bank believe things can be turned around, with their help of course. Just like Teun Voeten.

Cultural jihadists get "Gone With The Wind" banned in Memphis

Todd Starnes wrote (on Fox News, yesterday) that "Common sense has 'Gone With the Wind' in Memphis". Ain't it the truth! The site of the latest victory for the alt-left is Memphis TN, where SJWs have succeeded in forcing the Orpheum Theatre to end its 34-year tradition of screening Gone With the Wind at least once a year.

Why would they do that? Because a handful of snowflakes took seriously the criticism penned by the New York Post's Lou Lumenick back in June of 2015. The alleged film critic wrote that the 1939 Oscar-winning film "buys heavily into the idea that the Civil War was a noble lost cause and casts Yankees and Yankee sympathizers as the villains, both during the war and during Reconstruction." He suggested it should "go the way of the Confederate flag" and be phased out of American culture.

The Orpheum caved right sharpish after several patrons complained about an August 11th screening, saying the film was "racially insensitive". In what way? Well, black people are referred to a couple of times as "darkies". That would have been a mild usage for the Civil War period, and the director, Victor Fleming (who won an Oscar for Best Director for GWTW) struggled to get the N-word excised from the original script.

Walt has seen GWTW countless times and feels that all of the black characters were shown sympathetically, with the possible exception of "Prissy" (played by Butterfly McQueen) who is portrayed as rather dim-witted, just as in the Margaret Mitchell novel. No race, black, white or striped, is comprised solely of geniuses!

The president of the Orpheum Theatre Group was quick to take the side of the snowflakes. "While title selections for the series are typically made in the spring of each year," he told Entertainment Weekly, "the Orpheum has made this determination early in response to specific inquiries from patrons. As an organization whose stated mission is to 'entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves', the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population.... This is about the Orpheum wanting to be inclusive and welcoming to all of Memphis."

Walt says, pass the sick bag... quick!

Further reading about "darkies": "Politically correct toothpaste makes your smile brighter", WWW 21/1/12.

VIDEO: U of Maryland band told not to play pro-Confederate state song

I must confess that until today I had never really listened to the lyrics of Maryland, My Maryland, the official state song of the eponymous state. If called upon to sing along, I just mumbled the words to O Tannenbaum, and no-one seemed to mind.

Turns out the real words, taken from a nine-stanza poem written in 1861 by James Ryder Randall are the latest target of the cultural jihadists,
because they are (rather obviously) pro-Confederate and anti-Union, therefore offensive to snowflakes, SJWs and all right-thinking [left-thinking, shurely! Ed.] people. So it comes to pass that the University of Maryland marching band has been ordered to stop playing the state's official song, while officials "evaluate if it is consistent with the values" of the school.

Ed. has found a short (under two minutes) video so that you can see the problem. The word "despot" refers, of course, to Abraham Lincoln. But the phrase "Northern scum" is only included in the full-length version. Anyway, the band just played it. They didn't sing it. So what's wrong with that? How about if we all agree to just hum along? Another problem solved by Walt!