Eleanor Duckwall's Spotlight

Is the United States Doomed to be "Just Another Country?"

Those in the upper echelon will be protected from the depredations of globalization and will actually benefit by the hordes of cheap laborers who will be made available to to create from them greater profit margins and the willing to staff their homes as they did during "the Old Order" before World War I. The rest of us will be left to flounder, bewildered, among the hordes that are flowing across our borders and policies being foisted upon us against our consent.

Goodbye to the City Upon a Hill and to Its Fabled Economy by Paul Craig Roberts

"We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us." John Winthrop

Playing With Words is a Serious Business

From The Brussels Journal:

Fact-denying and reality-obscuring tags can do more than to hide snake medicine in opaque bottles. The brew becomes popular, as it soothingly appears to be something it is not. Old tricks, to exploit the uninformed that suffer from “memorial atrophy,” are used unabashedly. For one thing, the spoiled goods sell thanks to an amnesia that thrives on the ignorance of what would be known if only schools would transmit knowledge instead of disbursing “feel good about yourself”. Among the educated with access to information, popular distortions are covered up by those that wish to escape the obligation to resist even when it is hard to overlook (as in the case of Islamists) the challenge to reason and security. It is fitting to refer here to a scandal involving UN funds given to North Korea’s needy and used for years to support her “Dear Leader’s” lust for luxury. Mainly those of us are cheated that wish to be duped so as to avoid taking a stand for whatever we profess to stand for. A Foreign Minister whose country makes Holocaust denial a crime has suggested to Tehran a program about the different perceptions of the Holocaust. Facilitated self-swindle is a welcome cop-out that can make you feel better in a delusion that allows us to follow the path created by another herd. Stand-up comics are chased off the stage for using expired jokes. Political propagandists can prosper even if they colport old recipes guaranteed to function when it comes to failing those applying them.

The emasculation of the meaning of concepts is thriving in democracies as well as in dictatorships. In the former distorted terms, serve self-censorship and a welcome auto-paralysis. In the instance of dictatorships – pardon my slip – they tag themselves “democratic…” or “peoples…” – such labels serve as camouflage divorced from content. Naturally, if you question the name you are, according to another misuse of terms, “angering them” and “provoking hardliners”. Much of our problem is that the reversed concepts of newspeak enjoy a bull market. Those who nevertheless cry out that the emperor has no clothes are making them “lose face” which fuels intransigence thereby undermining “stability” and “peace”.

A current example is that of the Arab World:

But there is an overall problem with such narrow political arguments - they risk obscuring the heart of the matter, namely Arab culture and society themselves. The current situation in the Arab world, or at least in the middle east proper (the Mashreq [5]), is the result of a cultural crisis which we will underestimate if we examine it only from a political standpoint. It is no coincidence, for example, that Arab intellectuals [6] in their broadest terms still reject any normalisation of relations with "the Zionist enemy". Nor is it insignificant that the fundamentalist movements are getting stronger and stronger. Take Egypt, which despite having signed the Camp David accords [7] with Israel in 1978, has not budged one inch from its so-called "cold peace" with its neighbour. Or Lebanon, which clings to the rhetoric of "resistance" to Israel, despite the fact that Israeli troops withdrew to the international borders seven years ago. As for Syria [7], it remains highly doubtful whether it really wants to give up its quasi-imperialist role in the region and recover the Golan Heights, or maintain its current stance and thus ensure the opposite outcome.

This willingness of both the general populace and the intelligentsia to tolerate despotic regimes merely because they claim to stand up to "imperialism and Zionism" is extremely indicative [7]. People, all over the region, are more than ready to excuse blatantly backward and fanatical movements on the flimsy basis that they are the product of "the resistance". Or they refuse to criticise foreign interference in the Arab world - such as Iranian meddling [7]- when they know full well that there is nothing to be gained from such "anti-imperialist" meddling economically or in any other way, and that it can only lead to violent and costly repercussions.

In addition, there is the Arabs' penchant for claiming "victory [7]" when in reality the reverse is invariably the case. This chronic need for triumph was seen most recently in the conflict [7]between Israel and Hizbollah in July-August 2006, which the latter claimed as a "divine victory" despite the devastation wreaked on Lebanon. It is an eloquent indication of the prevalent attitude in the Arab world which regards war as the only currency that could be squandered in the market of populist politics.

The argument that most Iraqis supported the invasion of their country, while more subtle than the rhetoric associated with the Arab-Israeli conflict, is similarly narrow in its political outlook. For while the majority of Iraqis may have supported the war (a war unworthy of support), the majority of Arabs did not (albeit for the wrong reasons). Moreover, as it subsequently became clear, Iraqis' backing for the war was intimately bound up with their thirst for revenge: what they wanted from the United States was to depose Saddam and eradicate the Ba'ath party, and nothing more. Washington's talk of moulding a new Iraq met with swift and radical opposition that left no room [8] to examine the real intentions of the Americans. In a wider regional context of disintegration and the resurgence of petty chauvinisms, Iraqi nationalism post-Saddam [9] soon splintered into the assertion of contradictory ethnic and sectarian allegiances, all hostile to modernisation and the west.

Self-delusion is not confined to other societies and cultures. Generally inhabitants of the United States see themselves of kind, just and reasonable. Many in the rest of the world do not, including the author of this article:

The evasion of blame

The monuments of US-Israeli brutality stretch from Abu Ghraib [9] prison to Guantánamo Bay [9], via the Palestinian refugee camp at Jenin in the West Bank (levelled by Israeli bombs and bulldozers) and Qana in southern Lebanon (where scores of Lebanese civilians seeking shelter were killed [9]by Israeli missiles). Once again, this cruelty only strengthens the argument of those who wish to prolong the conflict and legitimises those who seek to rule by dictatorship and protect the interests of their military establishments.

Indeed, playing with words is serious business. Sometimes it depends on whose ox is being gored.

The Death Penalty for Chiquita

Hattip: Kyle at Immigration Orange
Digg

Apparently multinational Chiquita Banana has paid $1.7 million dollars to identified terrorist groups in Colombia.

In Colombia, however, the Chiquita name has recently come to symbolize the confirmation of a long-suspected relationship between multinational firms and illegal armies fighting in the nation's four-decade-old war.

Chiquita Brands International admitted in US court last month that it paid $1.7 million to Colombia's brutal right-wing militias over the course of eight years. The company said it did so to protect its employees and agreed to pay a $25 million fine. The case is sparking outrage in the capital, Bogotá, where officials want to see company executives on trial.

Fjordman: Why Transnational Multiculturalism is a Totalitarian Ideology

The pain of transnationalism seems to be evident all over. At the Gates of Vienna:

Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre recently participated in a conference with editors and journalists from all over the world on how to "report diversity" in a non-offensive manner, with Arab News from Saudi Arabia as one of the moderators. The Cartoon Jihad the year before had prompted Indonesia and Norway to join forces and promote a Global Inter-Media Dialogue. In June 2007 this was held in Oslo.

Agnes Callamard from free speech NGO Article 19 voiced her concern that it could prove difficult to implement the ideal of equal representation and visibility of all groups in society if we do not control what is presented in the media. Diversity — ethnic, cultural and religious — has to permeate the media if we are to succeed in promoting the Multicultural society. Article 19 is supposedly a human rights organization with a specific focus on the defense of freedom of expression. Callamard, its Executive Director, has according to their website “evolved a distinguished career in human rights and humanitarian work,” formerly worked for fellow “human rights” NGO Amnesty International, has been published widely in the field of human rights and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science.

Suit to decide workplace 'hate speech'

The Washington Times

The words "natural family," "marriage" and "union of a man and a woman" can be punished as "hate speech" in government workplaces, according to a lawsuit that is being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Briefs for Good News Employee Association vs. Hicks, which were filed June 5 with the nation's highest court, lists D.C. school board President Robert C. Bobb as one of two plaintiffs. The case originated five years ago in Oakland, Calif., during his tenure there as city manager.

The dispute began in January 2003, when the two Oakland employees created a subgroup at their workplace called the "Good News Employee Association." It was partly in response to a group of homosexual employees having formed their own group 10 months before and being given access to the city e-mail system. One e-mail, dated Oct. 11, 2002, invited city employees to participate in "National Coming-Out Day."

Kill the Bill: Exposing the dirty deal Update - Senators to Bush: Enforce the laws first

From: http://michellemalkin.com/archives/007705.htm: (Click on images of lists to enlarge)

"The First Annual Open Borders Oscar Awards"

Video: Michelle Malkin at HotAir.

Spengler: The faith that dare not speak its name

Spengler asks: Is Tariq Ramadan a pagan?

Amid the apologetics and invective over Islam, Paul Berman's portrait of the Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan in the June 4 New Republic stands out as a thoughtful critique. Professor Ramadan personifies the West's bafflement before Islam; widely regarded as the thinking man's Islamist and a bridge-builder between cultures, he was barred by the Homeland Security Department in 2004 from entering the United States to take up a professorship at Notre Dame University in Indiana. In a rebuke to the US, St Anthony's College, Oxford, offered him a fellowship, which he now occupies.

Berman untangles the spaghetti-strands that tie Professor Ramadan to the terrorist ambience. He has trouble, though, making sense of what it is that Ramadan actually believes. Is he a 7th-century throwback (Salafi reformist), or an Islamic adaptation of Western totalitarian movements, or something quite different? We find an intriguing solution to Berman's puzzle in the work of the great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who argued that pagan society everywhere always is "totalitarian" in character, and that Islam is a form of paganism masquerading as revealed religion. I put "totalitarian" in quotation marks because Rosenzweig's sociology of paganism predates this neologism. I summarized Rosenzweig's still highly controversial view of Islam in a 2003 review of a German-language volume on the subject. [1]

The Stakes of the Immigration/ Amnesty Surge Bill: The Regime Against the Nation

President Bush has vowed that his "immigration reform" bill will be signed this week and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has told him that the only hope for the bill is if he delivers the votes of more than 20 Republican senators to break a fillibuster and pass the measure, a task that the President is determined to deliver as he meets today with Republicans in a closed-door meeting.

The immigration bill is the result of a " 'grand bargain' negotiated behind closed doors by a small bipartisan group of senators and the Bush administration...But the bargain collapsed last week...[and this week those involved] are aking a different approach."

One of the problems is that the bill doesn't have the support of the American people who are flooding switchboards and e-mail accounts in opposition to providing what they feel is amnesty to the 12-20 million illegal aliens that have surged in since the last attempt at immigration reform.

They want the border closed, and many want the illegal aliens deported.

Others see a sinister reason why the borders have remained opened and for the presence of millions, many of whom are 9% of of the total population of Mexico that have come north to work and live in the United States, to join those of Mexican heritage that have been here for decades, or even centuries. These people are pawns in a game being played by internationalists who believe in the free movement of goods, capital, labor, and population, and that national borders should not exist and that culture should determined by the status of class, education and wealth.

'Deep Integration' of U.S., Canada, and Mexico, Comes Out of the Shadows

Opposition to the Security and Prosperity Partnership continues to grow as more ordinary citizens have come to realize what it means. "The Plan to Disappear Canada. by Murray Dobbin in Vancouver (Hattip: Cubed) Written from a Canadian's viewpoint, one can also hear rumblings of the immigration dustup that is happening south of the Canadian border as

If the machinations going on in this country regarding so-called "deep integration" were instead a communist conspiracy to take over the country (you will, of course,have to try hard to imagine this) the news media would be blaring the story.

Pundits would pontificate, editorialists would erupt, security forces would be unleashed.

Instead, a virtual conspiracy to make the country disappear through assimiliation into the U.S. gets barely a mention.