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Chronicles Roundup

Late in January, Dr. Trifkovic weighed in on D’Souza’s book, touching on themes that I have been talking about recently: It is noteworthy that D’Souza is condemning our writings as “Islamophobic” without further elaboration. Like the term “Islamophobia” itself—a classic product of the Hate Crime Industry—his technique is characteristic of the totalitarian Left. I remember […]

Late in January, Dr. Trifkovic weighed in on D’Souza’s book, touching on themes that I have been talking about recently:

It is noteworthy that D’Souza is condemning our writings as “Islamophobic” without further elaboration. Like the term “Islamophobia” itself—a classic product of the Hate Crime Industry—his technique is characteristic of the totalitarian Left. I remember reading, as a teenager in Tito’s Yugoslavia, similarly worded condemnations of dissident writers and their “tracts” in the communist-controlled press. Once they were defined as “anti-socialist,” “reactionary,” or “nationalist,” no further elaboration was needed and no debate allowed.

That D’Souza’s invocation of Islamophobia is of a piece with other invocations of anti-Semitism, homophobia or racism to silence political opponents and force through the conclusions of the person wielding these terms should be quite clear, but Dr. Trifkovic goes on to explain just how all-inclusive D’Souza’s use of this term is intended to be.

Early last month Dr. Trifkovic had this to say about Abe Foxman and the ADL:

What it does in practice has very little to do with its stated objective. It has a radical political program and social engineering agenda that goes way beyond “fighting discrimination.” It insists on America’s total demographic and cultural transformation into something that it is not, even when that transformation is manifestly detrimental to the interests of the Jewish community itself.

ADL’s immigration policy illustrates the point. For decades ADL has been advocating more or less unrestricted Third World immigration into the United States, on the grounds that a restrictive policy was inherently discriminatory and that a more diverse population would make the Jews more secure. In November 1965 it hailed the abolition of national origins quota system and stressed the “educational role” it played in helping to bring this change about. For the ensuing four decades it became strident in equating any advocacy of immigration control with “discrimination.”

But as many American Jews now realize, ADL’s agenda was driven by its leftist ideological blinkers, not by its concern for the community.

Dr. Clyde Wilson had a fine series of posts on “The Lincoln Fable.”  He concluded the first with these words:

So one aspect of the proliferating Lincoln fable was the cynical use far into the future of the fable of a martyred leader of supreme virtue for emotional ammunition to keep the Republican party in power. Another aspect of the fable is far more troublesome—the creation of Lincoln the Christ figure. It can be and has been thoroughly documented that this icon was created in post-assassination sermons. As a historian two generations back put it: “That the Lord had sent Lincoln to earth as his mysterious representative, to die for his people, was a belief that rose from many Easter sermons and grew with time to blend into the faith that the humble backwoodsman had been by some miracle the savior of the Union.” The literature that created the Lincoln/Christ is vast and stomach-turningly blasphemous. And, of course, it is never asked just what made saving the Union such a divine cause.

The Lincoln thus imagined and propagated was a fictitious narrative which has long been proclaimed to contain the true account of American history and the essential meaning of America. The fable gained its purchase in the midst of war, revolution, assassination, violent and vengeful self-righteousness, and most important and worst of all—religious disintegration. Lincoln the Christ figure was thrust into the vacuum created by the erosion of belief that had been steadily undermining Northern Protestantism in the previous decades. Out of public anxiety and near hysteria was created the religion of Americanism: America The Father, Lincoln The Son, and Democracy The Holy Spirit.

 

To this day and to the immense peril of our souls and bodies, many of our fellow citizens are incapable of distinguishing between God and “America” or comprehending that one who occupies the throne of Lincoln and uses the hallowed terms that Lincoln used can be capable of wrong.

In the second, he wrote of the fable’s distortions of Lincoln’s pseudo-religiosity:

The fable presents us with a pious, praying, saintly Ole Abe, a rail-splitter of humble birth, rather resembling a well-known Carpenter of similar background, and who also was martyred on Good Friday and wafted to Heaven by flights of angels. So far as we know the real Lincoln was an agnostic who was a prolific retailer of dirty stories and who cynically made his political speeches sound like the King James Bible. One of the few evidences of belief he showed was in the Second Inaugural when he blamed the war on God, for whom Humble Abe Lincoln was but an innocent instrument.

In the third he wrote a telling assessment of the evils Lincoln unleashed on America:

One hardly knows where to begin in dealing with this rampant balderdash. Who appointed those generals? General Sherman himself observed that many of Lincoln’s appointments looked like they had been made to purposely lose the war. In fact, Lincoln’s conduct is understandable only if you perceive the real pattern of consistency—that his primary objective was to keep himself and his party in power and that the war was the instrument for that objective. This was the tender-hearted leader who auhroized ruthless terrorism against women and children, refused generous offers of prisoner exchange while declaring medicine a contraband of war, accepted Grant’s costly policy of losing three men for every one Confederate killed, was not above keeping his own son out of harm’s way, and invited his own fate by clandestinely organizing the attempted assassination of Jefferson Davis.

I do not know whether Lincoln was personally corrupt in that he made money from his office. I do know that he was politically corrupt—that he took to previously unimagined levels the use of government jobs and contracts to buy political support and by design made the government a machine for doing favors for the wealthy and well-placed that has remained the hallmark of the U.,S. Government to the present day. Historians again give Abe a free pass. He was somehow the innocent victim of the corruption of the day. Mysteriously, the Great Barbecue blossomed without his awareness or complicity. But in fact, corruption was implicit and endemic in his political platform and his political conduct. This is not noticed because we are so used to what he created, but it would have shocked earlier generations and did shock honest people at the time. Just one example: until Stanton made him stop, Lincoln freely signed and gave out to his financial supporters what were called “cotton certificates.” This gave them leave to conduct an illegal and immoral trade with the enemy. A brisk business developed on the coast of Confederate Texas where Republican industrialists traded gold, medicine and other goods for Southern cotton.

There is a simple and obvious thing which we must always remember but is almost always left out of discussion of the War to Prevent Southern Independence. What happened in American in the years 1861–1865 was, rhetoric aside, a brutal war of conquest. The South was invaded, laid waste, a fourth of its men killed off, and its people deprived by force of their American right to self-government and subjected to military rule. At the same time peaceful critics of Lincoln’s government were suppressed in fashion previously unthinkable to Americans. The Union of the Founding Fathers was not saved. It was destroyed and replaced. The Gettysburg Address covered up the revolution by a rhetorical feat of having it both ways. By religious-sounding language and evasion and misrepresentation of fact, Lincoln made his destruction of the Union seem to be simultaneously a preservation of the old and sacred and “a new birth of freedom.”

Mel Bradford was wise and correct, I think, that Lincoln is best discerned through his rhetoric. Lincoln provided the rhetoric by which the rational republican discourse of earlier generations of Americans was replaced by sermonistic verbiage of the pseudo-religion of Americanism, like “saving the world for democracy.” Perhaps the ultimate limit of this poisonous style has been reached by George W. Bush, who uses words like “freedom” as magic incantations devoid of content.

Dr. Trifkovic has two recent pieces on Kosovo and another on a State Department ventures in the “integration” of European Muslims modeled on the non-existent integration of many American Muslims.

Dr. Wilson wrote a few weeks ago:

The Australian writer John Pilger nails it: Iran has no nuclear weapons—unlike the United States and Israel. Iran has generally complied with international inspection rules—unlike the United States and Israel. Iran has not engaged in aggressive attacks on other countries in recent years. Unlike the United States and Israel.

He wrote again late last month:

Solzhenitsyn has reminded us often that despotic regimes rest upon two pillars—violence and lies. George Bush has shown a proclivity for both.

Dr. Fleming has this typically clear-eyed assessment of the recent “reporting” about HPV vaccines and related matters:

If everyone had to pay for his own treatment—or die—some of us might think twice before engaging in risky behavior. But in a country where the President describes a Lesbian as a wonderful mother, personal responsibility is unfashionable. Frankly, I don’t care much what people do. Let them kill themselves, trying to perform every act described in the Philosophie dans le boudoir. All I ask is two things: Don’t tell me about it and don’t ask me to prolong your suicide by subsidizing it.

But Charlie Gibson, Katie Couric, and Brian Williams (and their writers and handlers) are probably not intelligent enough to be active promoters of the Playboy Philosophy. Even if they wanted to promote virtue and truth, they would not know how to go about it. They are too stupid to ask any of the right questions, and their stupidity is a fatal disease that has long infected the American mind and is now, from is bad reporting on medical science, infecting our bodies.

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