Strakon invites reader response to any of his Matches.

Strakon Lights Up table of contents.


Strakon Strikes a Match
A Hippocratic Oath for paleos:
"First, do no harm!"

September 9, 2001

 

I'm sure the anti-immigration crowd is up in arms now as never before, in the wake of President Bush's recent stand-up routine with visiting Mexican president Vicente Fox, where Bush pledged to encourage Mexican immigration for the benefit of American employers who can't induce Americans to take their various down-and-dirty jobs. (Old-republican types may be even more outraged at Bush's recognition of Fox as the chief representative of Mexicans residing in the United State.)

That Rose Garden sermon on the wonders of colored immigration isn't exactly a surprise, coming from Bush the Truckler, but it still ought to make our "paleo" friends wake up, finally, and smell the tequila. And it ought to evoke something more constructive than outrage. Tired of "idealistic" libertarian moralizing? Want some Realpolitik  instead? OK, here it is. The ruling class will allow an anti-immigration candidate into the White House only when they determine that such a thing is in their interests. As long as the higher circles are all New World Orderlies (I wish I could remember whom I stole that phrase from), it just ain't gonna happen.

It's past time for paleos to stop imitating their NWO socialist and neofascist adversaries, and stop pushing to expand their favorite form of state power. They're not going to succeed, but as they flail around in the political cesspit they're giving permission, in principle, for their notional adversaries to expand their  favorite forms of tyranny. (Ooops! I just backslid into idealistic moralizing, there, with that word "principle.")

Instead of continuing to suck up to leviathan, you'd think paleos would move on to other tactics, if they deemed it necessary to persist in collectivistic organized activism. For starters, how about trying to organize a mass movement of disobedience against the "civil rights" (i.e., forced-association) laws? That would get nearer to the fundamental problem, and it would be pro-freedom — it would have the immense advantage of not helping to strengthen the bloody Beast that is devouring us all.

I'll be told that, however hard paleos might try, there would be no "mass" about such a movement. You'd turn on the telescreen one day, and the Thought Police would be frog-marching three or four paleo activists in orange jump suits and shackles off to leviathan's Rape Gulag while three or four thousand antiwhite, anti-Western demonstrators — the new "masses" — stood behind the yellow tape screaming obscenities and ridicule. That's assuming the Security Organs wanted a TV spectacle and didn't simply murder the activists outside camera range, the way they murdered Vicki Weaver and her boy.

Fair enough. Marshaling a mass movement behind freedom of association would be extremely difficult. But how much more difficult, then, must it be to convince the ruling class to change their mind about something so strategic, so vital to their interests, as a demographic revolution!

If we're interested in fundamentals, let's push all the way to the fundamental problem. The culture is not on our side. It is on the side of the ruling class, which controls its commanding heights. Molding the culture, which includes exterminating any "unprogressive" cultural vestiges that may have survived its rise to power, is a part of what being a ruling class is all about. That's something I wish our paleo friends would ponder.

Nicholas Strakon


Strakon Strikes a Match
Below good and evil

September 3, 2001

 

There is a disturbance in the Zeitgeist, Luke.

More precisely, there is yet another of those contradictions of the kind that I like to sniff out. Down in Franklin, Indiana, not too far south of Indianapolis, a man is being tried for smothering his infant son to death as an act of "revenge" against his wife. He doesn't deny it, but otherwise he's doing all he can to get away with it. On August 31, the judge barred him from using insanity as a defense. However, Hizzoner said that he will permit the fellow to try the next best thing for purposes of winning a free-murder ticket: mental retardation.

We'll have to wait and see whether the killer dad succeeds in skating. But the judge's preliminary ruling has already got me puzzled, the same way I'm always puzzled by the special hoo-hah that we hear whenever Texas gets around to putting one of its many retarded murderers to sleep. Our man in Franklin is the head of a household, married with children (or one dead child, at least), and I'll just bet he's got a driver's license. He doesn't live at a group home for the retarded. The newspaper story I saw didn't say where or whether he was employed, but it didn't sound as though he is signed up at any sheltered workshop.

More importantly, he is not so deficient that he failed to understand that it was a baby he was putting to death or that babies are fragile. He knew what was what: he saw his terrible act as a way of injuring his wife as well as his baby. In short, what we have here is not an innocent, over-enthusiastic squeezing tragedy from Of Mice and Men. I'm pretty sure those remedial students of crime in Texas aren't just over-enthusiastic squeezers, either. I'm no doctor, but I do know a little about mental retardation, and from all I've seen, profound retardation is almost always accompanied by physical disability that renders the commission of anything resembling murder highly unlikely.

According to the Zeitgeist of the past forty or fifty years, retarded people are just as good as the rest of us. In fact, they're just the same as the rest of us, except that they tend not to excel in Latin or trig. They have other gifts. And just as rape has nothing to do with sex (someday I've got to write about that one), character has nothing to do with intelligence. (Or with governance, as we began finding out in 1998. And, for good measure, character has nothing to do with sex, either. For that matter, there are even some sex acts that have nothing to do with ... well, sex. I'm still trying to figure that one out. We keep being told that fewer and fewer things have anything to do with one another. Maybe that's a sufficient definition of cultural disintegration. But I digress.)

Some folks from the Zeitgeist's R&D Department go further than the conventional "just-as-good" school, arguing that mentally challenged people usually turn out sweeter, more gracious, more loving, and more moral than the average chap. Under this advanced view, the challenged are actually better, spiritually, than the rest of us.

In Race Matters, thoughtcriminal Michael Levin has a few bracing things to say about a connection between intelligence and moral action. In short, he thinks there is one. (But he does not accept a lack of smarts as a ticket to skate.) I'm not going to delve any deeper into all that here; no matter what direction you approach it from, it is a thorny thicket. The only thing I'm wheedling after here is for whoever supervises the Zeitgeist to get their act together. Right now the party line seems pretty twisty, or maybe crooked would be a better word. The rule seems to be that retarded people inhabit the same moral universe as the rest of us, except when they happen to methodically and deliberately slaughter someone. Anyone besides me have a problem with that?

— NS


Strakon Strikes a Match
The non-blame game

August 30, 2001

 

When George W. was in the process of stumbling into office, the government-overheated American economy had already started to knock and rattle badly, and W. made sure everyone knew about it and knew he  knew about it. Some in the established media dinged him for "undermining confidence," but it soon became plain that W. was prepared to absorb that hit and persevere in what Wall Streeters might call a loss-limit operation.

Now, seven months later, the market is plummeting, profits are vanishing and not only in the cutting-edge tech sector, consumer spending has gone listless, and corporate layoffs are accelerating. Anent the last, it's interesting that during the last four or five years of the Clintonshchina  hardly a week went by without the media telling us of some vast new corporate layoff, and yet hardly any mainstream-media type ever questioned the universality of the Clintonista Economic Utopia. If anything, media commentators celebrated the notion that the great fascist transnationals were "leaning themselves down," which, they said, would allow them to more vigorously follow the Clinton-Gore Managed-Trade Expedition over that famous bridge to the 21st century and its Virtual Multicultural Wonderland of Hyper-Electronic Hyper-Globalism.

Free-marketeers know, to understate the case, that not every blip of prosperity owes its existence to Wise and Benevolent Government Intervention. But it's doubtless the case, too, that not every economic down-blip can be blamed on Stupid and Malevolent Government Mucking-About. (Although systemic instability and exploitation can and must be so attributed.) However, almost universally that is the popular perception. Both perceptions, of prosperity and decline, exist because, if I dare make this point for the thousandth time — and paraphrase old Tricky Dick while doing so — we're all totalitarians now. Almost all of us. And almost all of our assumptions are absolutely totalitarian.

The established media aren't just thoroughly totalitarian; they're also systematically slanted toward the senior of the two official totalitarian parties. You know which one I mean. Moreover, we live in what one sharp-needled writer (Gore Vidal, I think) has called the "United States of Amnesia." So what I'm wondering now is: How long can it be before we start hearing this boilerplate phrase nine times a day: "the Bush Recession"?

Democrats are already implying, if not declaring outright, that our current troubles have mostly to do with W.'s tax cut, draconian, wicked, and redolent of the era of Dark Satanic Mills as it was. (Folks who still own and operate a live brain may want to place quote marks around that purported cut.) I do realize that W.'s loss-limit tactic is bound to quit working, and appropriately so, once we get a couple years into his reign, and his own interventions, whether ham-handed or expertly corrupt, have a chance to kick in. So my anticipatory aggravation has nothing to do with any bizarre sympathy for Bush and the Bushies. No, what's going to irk me to distraction is that we'll never hear this phrase, either from the established media or from establishment historians: "the Clinton-Bush Recession."

— NS


Strakon Strikes a Match
The flag of Transparodia

June 16, 2001

 

Defenders of the Confederate Battle Flag sometimes like to throw in the face of their Red Guard and Negro adversaries the fact that while the Battle Flag was carried by armies of the Confederacy for a mere three or four years — and was never a national ensign — the Stars and Stripes flew officially over a "slave" republic called the United States of America for fourscore and nine years. And they invite their adversaries to follow their own purported logic and include that  flag, which still flies everywhere, even in the North, in their indignant condemnations.

Proving once more that life in our poor country is quite beyond parody, a black state legislator in Tennessee has taken Confederate defenders at their word — sort of. Miss Henri (sic) E. Brooks, of the state House of Representatives, refuses to stand along with her colleagues and chant the Pledge of Allegiance at the opening of each day's business. (Source: Fox News, June 16) Now, libertarians might be tempted to applaud her rejection of that socialist-inspired ritual of state idolatry, but her reasons for rejecting it aren't the same as our reasons.

Remember that Miss Brooks is not a private individual but a state functionary, however small-time. Clearly, she herself has bought into more than a few state-idolizing premises. In fact, I'd bet anything that our Miss Brooks would have few problems, in principle, with today's leviathan if only she and her allies could liquidate all those white men who run it and unfurl the glorious red, green, black, and blue banner of Azania.

Miss Brooks, you see, reviles the Stars and Stripes only because it once flew over "the colonies" that enforced slavery. The problem there, of course, is one of profound historical illiteracy. The Stars and Stripes didn't  fly over British America. It started to fly precisely when the New World settlements ceased being colonies. Does the name "Betsy Ross" not ring a bell? I can't say what other flag Miss Brooks believes flew over the American "slave" republic from 1776 to 1861. Perhaps she thinks that Abe Lincoln abolished slavery in 1776 after hanging George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert E. Lee. But in any case you can see why I had to stipulate "sort of," above.

Tennesseans can take all of this as a reminder that not all the people imposing laws on them quite reflect the breadth of knowledge and mental acuity that Plato intended rulers should possess in his ideal totalitarian system. But there's a more general lesson for all of us who think in terms of race and civilization: namely, that Our reasons are never likely to be the same as Their reasons.

— NS


Strakon Strikes a Match
If they can't even get this right ...

June 20, 2000

 

The totalitarian Left is making a terrible fuss these days about capital punishment, claiming that the state's criminal-justice system is so flawed that it is executing innocent men. I oppose capital punishment myself, principally because I don't want the state to possess that (or any other) power. In an ideal world, an armed and righteous populace would gun down predators before they could complete their crimes or would lynch them moments after. My position is consistent with libertarianism. However, the Red Guards' position undermines their own totalitarianism.

Think about what they're telling us. Owing to racism, corruption, incompetence, or Neanderthal bloodthirstiness, innocent men are executed even after every shade of meaning in testimony, every move by the police, every particle of evidence, every tiny procedural event, every comment by the trial judge, and every failure on the part of the defense to perform like Perry Mason are subjected to virtually Talmudic analysis during ten or twenty years of hearings and appeals, with the ACLU and other predator-lovers poking and prodding on the margins and massaging public opinion in favor of the accused. Attitudes, opinions, and supposed motives of cops, prosecutors, and jurors are investigated endlessly.

All to no avail! The state still can't get it right! And it isn't just that the Left has raised the hurdles so high and constructed such a minefield of technicalities that no one, even the guilty, can possibly be convicted in the absence of chicanery, incompetence, or prejudice. In many of the recent cases, death sentences have been overturned in the face of new, highly credible witnesses or, even better, of new DNA evidence. Innocent men really are sentenced to death.

Do the Red Guards learn anything from that? Let me ask the totalitarians — no, scratch that. There's no point asking totalitarians anything. Instead let me ask ordinary liberal-minded folks who are skeptical about the death penalty. Seeing the difficulty government employees have identifying and executing the right people — even when under the most intense scrutiny — why in the world would you ever believe anything a state official said? Why would you have confidence in any state program or proposal? Why would you accept the stated motives or intentions of any bureaucrat or politician?

The controversy over the death penalty amounts to a free course in the open university of life. Let's call it Developing the Critical Faculties 101. The only prerequisite is the ability — as George Orwell might put it — to see what is in front of one's nose.

— NS


Strakon Strikes a Match
He may be stupid, but that doesn't mean he ain't evil, too

May 23, 2000

 

Sam Francis likes to distinguish between the two duopoly parties by calling the Democrats the Evil Party and the Republicans the Stupid Party, and that rule of thumb possesses quite a bit of explanatory power. But how interesting it is, then, to see the Republican candidate who is popularly believed to be one of the stupidest men in public life today — and one who seems to go out of his way to reinforce that belief — work strenuously to make sure the Republican Party is the Democrats' evil twin.

Last week as senators were preparing to vote on a deadline (July 1, 2001) to cut off funds for the U.S. invasion of Kosovo, and it appeared, shockingly enough, that the Republicans might actually have the cojones to push it through, George W. Bush criticized the bill as a "'legislative overreach' that would tie his hands if he becomes president." (New York Times, May 16)

"Until today," the Times wrote, "momentum seemed to be building among most Senate Republicans for the measure."

On May 18, in what the Times called a "victory for the Clinton administration," the Senate rejected the deadline by a vote of 53 to 47. Only 40 of the Republican senators voted for it.

On reflection, the remarkable thing isn't really how evil a stupid Republican can be, but rather how much gall it must require for the Republicans to continue to call themselves Republicans. "Legislative overreach"! As an anarchist, I don't have a starry-eyed view of republicanism, but everyone used to learn in school that one of its storied achievements was taking the power of the purse from the ruler in the Palace and limiting his ability to wage arbitrary war. "Republicanism" certainly has come a long way since then.

There was never any question that Bush (like his predecessor Bob Dole) would prove to be as much of a New World Orderly as Clinton, but it is nice to have something screamingly obvious to point to. No one who votes for this man now can claim to be surprised at what he gets.

— NS

Page 1             Page 2
 

© 2000, 2001 Thornwalker. All rights reserved.


Notice  to visitors who came straight to this document from off site: You are deep in The Last Ditch. You should check out our home page and table of contents.