Britain – ILANA MERCER

Where Magic Wins Out Over Reason

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 07:00:00 +0000

The images coming at us from Somalia are too horrible for words. And I don’t mean the sight of celebrity journo Anderson cooper and his CNN sidekicks standing in the neighboring Kenya, and blaming, against all evidence, the “worst drought in 60 years” for mass starvation in Somalia. As BBC tells it, the drought “has gripped only parts of Somalia,” and then only “since June.”

You have flint for a heart if the images of children starving slowly do not reduce you to tears. Aidan Hartley of the London Spectator describes these distended-bellied, dying innocents as “martian-headed skeletons,” whose emaciated little bodies have begun to eat up their fat reserves and muscle proteins. Many, if not most, will succumb to slow and agonizing organ failure.

In conjunction with “the drought”—isn’t Texas experiencing one of those—Cooper and company (joined by other cretins on Cable) have mentioned the menace of the Islamist group al-Shabab, which “rules over the population in a style reminiscent of Pol Pot’s Cambodia crossed with the Taleban.” However, Hartley imparts what Cooper is incapable of imparting—and what any vaguely knowledgeable journalist writing about Africa knows: “war caused this famine.”

In this case, internecine warfare was compounded by foreign, military intervention courtesy of the duopoly I dub the “Anglo-American Axis of Evil,” in my new book. Washington and Westminster (and their special forces) galvanized a neighboring Ethiopian gang to invade southern Somalia and occupy Mogadishu. “The objective,” explains Hartley, “was to expel Islamists alleged to have been linked to al-Qaeda.” And never mind that, “Under the Islamists, the city was enjoying its first period of relative peace since Somalia collapsed into civil war in 1991.”

Hunger in the Horn of Africa is not something Cooper is capable of understanding, let alone explaining to his fans on twitter. Contra Cooper, Hartley has not pruned the evidence. As jaundiced a journalist as he is, however, Hartley has failed to look deeper into the heart of darkness that is Africa. “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” fills this gap:

“Liberals labor under the romantic delusion that the effects of millennia of development-resistant, self-defeating, fatalistic, atavistic, superstition-infused, unfathomably cruel cultures can be cured by an infusion of foreign aid, and by the removal of tyrants,” I write in the book. However, “Africa is a culmination of the ‘failure of the people to develop the attitudes and institutions favorable to peace and progress.'”

What do I mean? The following are verbatim excerpts from the chapter subtitled “Culture Counts” (pp. 171-175):

“With racism, discrimination, and colonialism no longer credible causal factors in divining underdevelopment and delinquency, an ‘explanatory vacuum’ has opened up among academics, and is being filled with reference to culture. In other words, to the ‘values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in a society.'”The idea that culture is benign and harmonious if not disrupted is a delusion, argues anthropologist Robert B. Edgerton, who also believes that in Africa, ‘traditional cultural values are at the root of poverty, authoritarianism, and injustice.’ By taking account of culture, posits David Landes, a Harvard economic historian, and author of ‘The Wealth and Poverty of Nations,’ one could have foreseen the postwar economic success of Japan and Germany.”

“Easily the most controversial thinker on the causes of underdevelopment in Africa is Cameroonian Daniel Etounga-Manguelle. In 1999, he attended a symposium on ‘Cultural Values and Human Progress’ at Harvard. He had come to bury and not praise the cultures of the Continent. In a paper titled ‘Does Africa Need a Cultural Adjustment Program?,’ Etounga-Manguelle quipped controversially that ‘The African works to live but does not live to work.'”

“Another of his off-the-cuff remarks: ‘African societies are like a football team in which, as a result of personal rivalries and a lack of team spirit, one player will not pass the ball to another out of fear that the latter might score a goal.’ Etounga-Manguelle was referring to what he perceives to be the culture of envy—the kind of all-consuming envy that, in the Rwanda of 1994, caused certain Africans (Hutus) to attempt to kill off other, frequently more industrious, better-looking brethren (Tutsis).”

“A former member of the World Bank’s Council of African Advisors, Etounga-Manguelle observes that in Africa, ‘divination and witchcraft’ are integral parts of all aspects of state and civil society among all segments of society. Africans do not believe control over uncertainty is achievable through planning for the future and mastering nature; through reason, the rule of law, or technology. Rather, being by and large fatalistic and superstitious, they all too often resort to magical thinking to cope.”

“The plight of witch children across Africa comports with this paradigm. These children are blamed for every pestilence to plague the community. Zimbabwean tribal chiefs saddle angry ancestors in need of appeasement for everything from famine to inflation. The solution to the first ‘supernatural force’ is to brutalize the bewitchers. To resolve the second, beer is brewed, drums are beaten and beasts slaughtered.”In general, “Africans inhabit hierarchical societies in which ‘strength prevails over law,’ and where ‘the best way to change a social system is to overthrow those who hold power.’ The paucity of planning and future preparation in African life, Etounga-Manguelle puts down to a suspended sense of time. The reverence for the ‘strongman of the moment’ he roots in the sincerely held belief that these men harbor magical powers.”

In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” I concur to an extent with thinkers such as Etounga-Manguelle. Indubitably, in Africa “magic wins out over reason; community over individual; communal ownership over private property; force and coercion over rights and responsibilities; wealth distribution over its accumulation.”Indeed, human behavior is mediated by values. However, I criticize the cultural argument for “affording a circular, rather than a causal, elegance: people do the things they do because they are who they are and have a history of being that way.”

But “why have some people produced Confucian and Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwived Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control? Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place?” Such an investigation, I conclude, political correctness prohibits.

In any event, bad leaders or bad weather patterns are not what shackle backward peoples. Not exclusively. As cities across England burn because of the “unequal civilizing potential” of certain peoples—James Burnham’s coinage—it has become clear that the values and cultural influences which people (and peoples) bring to the polity cannot be tweaked out of existence like some unsightly nose-hair.

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Gangsta Gifts

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

“Hip” is how rapt reporters referred to the iPod the president and first lady gave the Queen of England. Thanks to his fawning friends in the British and American media, Barack Obama got away with giving another foreign dignitary a vulgar gift.

Shades of the reality show “Cribs”…

The MTV series features hip-hop rappers, and other American royalty, showing off their incredibly gaudy homes, CD, DVD, and iPod collections. (If there are any books in the house, these are well hidden.) They then send the loving camera crew packing.

The Obama iPod was no ordinary “small portable digital audio player capable of storing thousands of tracks in a variety of formats, including MP3,” to go by the dictionary. As any teenager would for his crush, the tacky pair had personalized the thing. How do you customize an iPod for an 82-year-old monarch?

Commensurate with the president’s signal solipsism, you ensure that there are plenty images and audio from his inaugural and DNC addresses. The queen will also have to strain to see visuals of her 2007 visit to Washington and Virginia on the minute screen.

I have no idea whether the rare songbook signed by songwriter Richard Rodgers was to her majesty’s liking. Neither do the Obamas, in all likelihood. The queen might have preferred a rare recording of the great cellist Pablo Casals performing at the Kennedy White House. Jacqueline Kennedy was a cultured lady with impeccable taste.

Just in case the queen doesn’t already have these tunes on the silver 6GB iPod mini she purchased in 2005, at the behest of her son, Prince Andrew, the Obamas “loaded” onto their iPod showtunes such as “My Fair Lady” and “Camelot.”

Quipped a characteristically acerbic blogger on the London Telegraph:

“The US president is a dreadful cur, with no appreciation for history or former relationships in the world. Even the dumb American people with grow to detest the very mention of his name. It will take a little while, however, because they have been so dumbed down by the educational system.”

In the spirit of such provincialism (and mindless projection), John Harwood, who’s in the employ of both the CNBC and the New York Times, described Gordon Brown as basking in Obama’s glow, and pronounced the queen “star struck.”

The formidable Elizabeth II “star struck”! The same woman who gave her first impeccably delivered address to the nation at age 13, when World War II broke out—and sans teleprompter! Still in her teens, this great lady—the very epitome of the British character—joined the army, where she served as a truck driver.

Obama swanked to the press that his wife was handling the details of the visit—the same woman who gave a box of 25 DVDs including “ET,” “The Wizard of Oz,” and “Star Wars,” to Prime Minister Brown, a cheap gift which spoke to the giver’s impoverishment. The DVDs were also region-encoded for North America and could not be played in Britain. Brown gave Obama “a pen holder carved from the timber of an anti-slave ship.”

Sarah Brown lavished books and ball gowns on the Obama girls. Mrs. Obama reciprocated by giving the Brown boys two lousy, plastic, “matching models of the helicopter which ferries her husband around.” Sneered the Telegraph’s Iain Martin: “While Sarah Brown had spent time choosing gifts for the Obama girls, Michelle had clearly sent an aide to the White House gift shop at the last moment.”

“It didn’t go down well in Britain,” remarked Daniel Hannan, Conservative MEP for South East England. “I know [Brown’s] a ninny, … but he’s our ninny, and we don’t like to see you slapping him about. That’s our job.”

Before the DVD and gift-shop gaffes, there was the weightier matter of the bust of Winston Churchill. “The valuable bronze by Sir Jacob Epstein had been loaned by the British government to George W. Bush,” wrote syndicated columnist Diana West. “One of President Obama’s first acts as president was to consign that symbol to a box and send it packing”:

“It seems that what we are seeing in the return of the Churchill bust is less a personal vendetta against Churchill the man and more an open breach in the Western continuum out of which a new orientation toward the Third World will become increasingly apparent. Having achieved a Washington-like apotheosis in the American imagination, Churchill serves not only as the preeminent symbol of resolve, courage and faith against the enemies of Western civilization. He serves as a symbol of Western civilization, period.”

The return of the Churchill bronze confirmed the suspicion that Obama was anti-Occident. The habit of giving inappropriate, thoughtless presents─ as he and his family are deluged with wild effusions of love and lavish gifts─ this shows Obama to be, well, a bit of a pig.

George Will once wrote that “manners are the practice of a virtue. The virtue is called civility, a word related—as a foundation is related to a house—to the word civilization.”

The ability to mind one’s manners in dealing with others is a reflection of the mettle of a man. Or a woman.

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NO RIGHT OF SELF-DEFENSE IN BLAIR’S BARBARIC BRITAIN

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 06 Aug 2003 00:00:00 +0000

A British Times Literary Supplement reviewer recently took a shot at tracing the “providential themes” in George Bush’s political rhetoric. Indeed, the interminable war on “tyrants and terrorists” is laced with evangelical zeal. The American president, however, is not alone “in the redemption business.”

British Prime Minister Tony Blair fancies himself every bit the redeemer of mankind. Etched all over Blair’s address to Congress was the devotion to the “mystic [and, might I add, malevolent] idea of national destiny.”

One particularly chilling dictate was this: “I know out there there’s a guy getting on with his life, perfectly happily, minding his own business, saying to you, the political leaders of this country, ‘Why me? And why us? And why America?’ And the only answer is, ‘Because destiny put you in this place in history, in this moment in time, and the task is yours to do.'”

The tyranny implied in Blair’s maudlin grandiosity should be obvious.

First, the little guy back home ought to be the one calling the shots, not Messrs. Messiah and Company. Second, before Blair joins Bush in rousing the “visionless” middle-class American from his uninspired slumber—The Great Redeemer thinks it’s below contempt to harbor a civilized desire to mind one’s own business and live in peace—he ought to take a look at the little guy back in England.

Tony Martin, for one, is not having a terribly tranquil time. Blair’s blather to Congress about “the spread of freedom” being “the best security for the free” must ring hollow to the law-abiding, English farmer, who would no more advocate the spread of British-style freedom than he would the bubonic plague.

Tony Martin was recently released from jail after being arrested for the crime of defending his home—he killed a career criminal by the name of Fred Barras and injured his accomplice, Brendon Fearon, when the two broke into the elderly man’s homestead. Martin was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison, the court finding that he had no freedom to use force to defend his property or his life.

The traditional “Rights of Englishmen”—the inspiration for the American founders—are no longer cool in Cool Britannia. The great system of law that the English people have long held dear, including the 1689 English Bill of Rights, which entails the right to possess arms, is in tatters. The British elites, many of whom enjoy taxpayer-funded security details, have disarmed law-abiding Britons, who now defend themselves against the protected criminal class only at their own peril.

A right that can’t be defended, however, is a right that exists only in name. In Britain today there is, in effect, no real right to life or property.

In Blair’s Britain, the law has been turned around to break and subdue proud and self-sufficient people like Tony Martin. The Crown rejected his self-defense plea, although his conviction for murder was commuted to manslaughter once Martin capitulated and agreed to accept a diagnosis of mental illness. In other words, to defend your home in Britain is to evince a paranoid personality disorder.

Martin’s case, unfortunately, is far from unique, and the consequences of this policy have been appalling. According to a recent UN study, writes Historian Joyce L. Malcolm, author of Guns and Violence: The English Experience, “England and Wales have the highest crime rate and worst record for ‘very serious’ offences of the 18 industrial countries surveyed.” Whereas violent crime in America has been plummeting for 10 consecutive years, criminal violence in Britain has been rising.

Since Blair’s 1997 total ban on armed self-defense, things have gone from very bad to even worse. “You are now six times more likely to be mugged in London than New York,” notes Malcolm. “Why? Because as common law appreciated, not only does an armed individual have the ability to protect himself or herself but criminals are less likely to attack them….A study found American burglars fear armed homeowners more than the police.” The most dangerous burglaries—the kind that occur when people are at home—are much rarer in the Unites States, only 13 percent, than in Britain, where they constitute 53 percent of all such home invasions.

How far has British barbarism gone? Malcolm’s evidently garden-variety accounts include the story of an elderly lady who fought off a gang of thugs “by firing a blank from a toy gun, only to be arrested for the crime of putting someone in fear with an imitation firearm.”

Similarly, when Eric Butler was brutally assaulted in a subway, “he unsheathed a sword blade in his walking stick and slashed” at one of his assailants. Butler was added to the lineup—he “was tried and convicted of carrying an offensive weapon.”

Tony Martin was almost denied parole because he failed to show sufficient contrition for killing one of the creatures that invaded what was supposed to be his castle. In the words of a probation officer, Martin continues to be “a danger to burglars.” In a truly civilized country, of course, that would be a compliment.

To add insult to injury, after having been robbed of three years and five months of his life for the crime of self-defense, Martin’s ordeal is still not over. The surviving ruffian, who has more than 30 convictions to his name, has been granted permission to sue his victim, even given legal aid to so do, for the injury he suffered on the “job.”

In addition, the criminal protection and reinforcement program that is contemporary British justice also entails honoring career criminal Brendon Fearon’s “right” to know where his victim, the old farmer, will reside now that he’s been released.

Tony Blair has gone to great (and dubious) lengths to make a case for Britain‘s right to defend itself from perceived threats in the international arena. He ought to be reminded that self-defense, like charity, begins at home.

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HARRY’S HOUNDERS AND OTHER VILLAGE IDIOTS

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 23 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000

Horror of horrors, Prince Harry, the second son of Prince Charles, has been getting plastered and enjoying the odd spliff. It’s not quite clear how the unremarkable news reached the press. It would appear, though, that when Prince Charles got word of the wild parties, the drinking and, yes, the inhaling—all hell broke loose in the media. Daddy, it would seem, may have been less than discreet. On the other hand, it could be that Prince Charles’ pot plants were wired.

More plausibly, the media picked up the yarn when the boy was spotted visiting a drug rehabilitation clinic in south London. A tad young to be adopting the many politically correct causes his late mother embraced, Harry was not officiating as the new Patron Saint of the Tokers. He had apparently been sent by Prince Charles to study up close “what drugs can do to the lives of young people.”

Considering that drug rehab centers are often full of self-styled addicts (the kind of manipulative young people with a knack for playing the system), this may not have been the best real-life lesson for Prince Charles to foist on his youngest son. The rehab is often the end-of-the road and the last resort for families tethered by troubled kids. Having reached a breaking point, the family typically is only too eager to outsource a disruptive youngster to a state-sponsored facility. What family would risk trying to get tough with a truant teen, if it means being accused of child abuse by some Sapphic Sister from Social Services?

If not in bad form, Charles’ sending our poor “potter” to a rehab center qualifies, at the very least, as melodramatic. Young Harry was soon swept up in the hysteria, with everybody—from the pub owner in Wiltshire where the prince partied, to the headmaster of the exclusive Eton College, to a Home Office spokeswoman, and to the many addiction industry gargoyles—offering up a version of the slippery slope Harry could be careening down. Even the Wiltshire police joined the rash of recrimination, indicating it would be willing to consider action against Harry if information were to materialize.

Amidst all the overreaction, it emerged (run for cover) that Prince Charles had not always occupied himself by chatting to pot plants. While on a school sailing trip, a 14-year-old Charles led a less than teetotaler expedition of boys to a local bar to sample the cherry brandy. As heartless as his mother is alleged to have been, the queen did not pack him off on a cirrhosis-of-the-liver crash course. As a member of a more sober generation, the queen may have known what the addiction industry doesn’t reveal, and that is that despite casual or occasional use of drugs, most teenagers don’t descend into the addiction abyss.

On the issue of drugs, adherents of the left and right simply can’t shake a shared high. On any day, Cool Britannia rivals the U.S. for prohibition piety. Blair’s 1998 Crime and Disorder Act went so far as to enshrine in law coercive drug testing and compulsory treatment protocols. Tony Blair thinks of “drug policy”—the euphemism for the state’s interference with what people ingest or inhale—as a road to “social rejuvenation.” “The fight against drugs, wrote Blair,” should be part of a wider range of policies to renew our communities.”

The “Hildebeest” is another believer, here at home, in the power of legislation to renew communities. In fact, the philosophy popularized by Hillary Clinton is one that advocates undermining and forcibly stripping families and communities of their powers to keep their members in check, and replacing them with legislation that often transfers responsibility for children to the State.

When last did the actions of a legislator serve to renew a genuine community? Public housing slums? How about rent control? In many great cities, rent control has meant that there are more boarded up buildings than there are homeless, because landlords are not permitted to recover the costs of upkeep. Designed to preserve a way of life, enforced inter-provincial wealth equalization programs in Canada have resulted in chronically dependent and depressed regions. And we know how, with welfare policies, the state has helped destroy black families: young black women choose to marry the state rather than wed the fathers of their children. Last year, the prohibition on drug possession “recharged” the lives of roughly 1.5 million Americans, arrested for marijuana possession.

Clearly, It Takes A Village Idiot to think of government policy as a means to a Renaissance.

Harry’s teen pranks, of course, are no more the business of sticky-pawed politicians than they are the business of drug policy advocates. Harry’s indiscretion is to have publicly behaved in a manner unbefitting his station. (Then again, his late mother modeled a self-indulgent disregard for royal etiquette and decorum.) His father’s indiscretion is to have followed through with a public pop-therapy protocol instead of removing the keys to Highgrove country estate, and enforcing a curfew and some serious pecuniary pain on the boy.

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