Saturday 9 October 2021

Is Uncle Sam committing suicide or being euthenised?

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Are we witnessing what a French conservative magazine recently called The Suicide of America?

Or a sort of euthanasia. Killing Uncle Sam softly with kindness?

America is a country that has gone from barbarism to decadence without a period of civilisation in between. I thought HL Mencken said that but apparently it was Georges Clemenceau.

I agree with most of this article by Taki, including what Taki says about Mrs Thatcher, whom I disliked at the time. The Neo-con pseudo-conservatives are to blame for the state America is in as much as the left.

I think his advice to America to befriend Vladimir Putin won't work, because it was tried by Bush junior, who looked into his eyes and found him very straightforward, Hillary and the Donald. But it is important to try to divide China and Russia, if possible.

I have always had very ambiguous feelings about America. I admire Americans' religiosity, their parochialism, their unabashed patriotism, their lack of understanding of irony, their love of freedom, their manliness.

These things seem to be dying out among people under 35.

I always associated them with modernity, which is something I dislike, but now with imperial measurements, Fahrenheit and the death penalty they seem rather old-fashioned.


I love very much their First Amendment which guarantees freedom of speech, something from which the whole world benefits via the internet. I like the way in fact that they are a genuine democracy, with limited government, states' rights.

A democracy where men go from log cabin to the White House. 

Harry Truman was a draper. Donald Trump could not have come to power in Europe or the British Isles. [A mistake that readers have corrected. I forgot Berlusconi. I also forgot Eric Zemmour.] 

The way they never get embarrassed is a very great strength and that never changes.

I could make a long list of things I do not like. They are a country without roots or hierarchy, without a landed class or state religion, formed from people who went there to make money or went there as slaves. Slavery and the disappearance of most of the indigenous peoples are the basis of their society. I fully agree with the left on that. But then the American Indians came from somewhere else too, as did the English.

I dislike their Calvinism and their liberal idealism which is a secular form of Calvinism. 

An American friend, his mother a French Algerian Jewish immigrant and his father a Romanian-Hungarian British immigrant, hates the place and says it is completely soulless. The small town America of Frank Capra and WC Fields films and Mark Twain is long gone, he says.

I came to like America more under Donald Trump than under George W. Bush and now much less under Joe Biden. 

But, regardless of who the president is, America has long been is the biggest threat to the world. 

The 1960s social revolution began in America, to a certain extent it began with American Communists, and it culminates in Woke.

England has been a cultural colony of America since 1940 and has the disease bad.

The last word to A. J. P. Taylor (I know I quoted it before): 
"If the Germans had succeeded in exterminating their Slav neighbours, as the Anglo-Saxons in North America succeeded in exterminating the Indians, the effect would have been what it has been on the Americans: the Germans would have become advocates of brotherly love and international reconciliation.”
Perhaps in that case the Germans would have invented Woke and gone in for insane internationalism, instead of insane nationalism. In fact the Germans anyway are now doing the former instead of the latter.

23 comments:

  1. I am suddenly reading each post.

    To this one, I might answer that only some foreign political faiths might be in search of new wordings.

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    1. I am suddenly reading anything on this blog while waiting to hear from you about taxes [lets say, I am half joking!]

      Turning to the blog post, to which the second sentence of my reply is referring, this is what I have in mind: the US that I know is a small part of a large country, pervaded by the instinctive certainty that it is small & inherently not like any other same-sized part of the USA. No one would dare define America. However, the job at hand was to detail causal inference behind acts of government, with a great deal of indirection. There was no doubt about the level of abstraction. I assume that it is already clear where this line of thought is going, else, I do hope to meet you next week.

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  2. Americans never used Imperial weights and measures. Americans used, and still use, ENGLISH weights and measures. "Imperial" measurements were a 19th century innovation. 20oz to the pint rather than the original 16oz, which we still have in the Home of the Brave.

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    1. You are absolutely right. Stone were invented in the early 19th century, I learnt a few days ago. What a wonderful thing the internet is.

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  3. I love very much their First Amendment which guarantees freedom of speech, something from which the whole world benefits via the internet.

    The First Amendment is as dead as a doornail. I've spoken to Americans who try to exercise freedom of speech and they live in constant fear of having their identities revealed because that would mean losing their jobs and any hope of future employment, which would almost certainly mean losing their homes and families as well. That's hardly freedom of speech.

    Americans allowed free speech to be taken away from them and it happened because of the absurd belief of the American Right that private corporations should be above the law and above the Constitution. Those private corporations are now taking free speech away from all of us, not just Americans.

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    1. I'd say any two can take away that freedom from a third, no need for a greater corporation.

      I keep hearing of Citizens United, but the effect of such corporatism of speech is not obvious beyond political mechanics, and I have not done due dilligence, forshame.

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    2. I agree with your statement that freedom of speech is dead. Professors lost their tenure, forced out of academia. Recently, the DOJ unleashed the FBI against the parents who oppose Critical Race Theory being taught to their children. These parents will be investigated and treated as "domestic terrorists".

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    3. If there must be a superpower bullying most countries around, I'd much rather that it be the United States of America than most other countries on the planet. The most serious counter candidates in recent history were the Soviet Union, and now Communist China. The US of A is the least destructive option by far.

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  4. I admire Americans' religiosity, their parochialism, their unabashed patriotism, their lack of understanding of irony, their love of freedom, their manliness.

    It's their religiosity, their parochialism, their unabashed patriotism and their lack of understanding of irony that has made them such a deadly threat to civilisation. Those are the qualities that produced Wokeism and that cause them to try to impose Wokeism on the entire globe.

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  5. A church in Bournemouth called St Michael’s has changed its name to St Mike’s. The vicar, Sarah Yetman, said this is to make the church “attractive and engaging for younger generations”.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dont-blame-newcastle-the-entire-game-is-built-on-dirty-cash-and-blood-money-dx2wh9qg8

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    1. St Mike's can be informal - that's fine - but women vicars seem like a black comedy to me.

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  6. 'euthenised?'

    'euthenasia'?

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    1. I wrote euthenased but apparently that's only correct in Australian English and as I am a subject of the home country I used what is apparently the British or English version. It's used in relation to putting dogs to sleep.

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    2. A strong word, either way.

      I can think of something dying - of dissapointment, but it is not America [too much novelty there, mercifully faddish, washing off the weightier sense of 'guarantee' of its generation in power who are hardly new], perhaps more so Europe [I read too many Catalan news toying with Europe's fundamentals, & all of the polls].

      Digressing, quite likely the news I read are not a very common stream - it is all from Twitter, following news correspondents & a few other kinds of sources. Habits from odd jobs.

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  7. So France is about to have a war and America is committing suicide.

    What other nations face certain death or at least heavy maiming?

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    1. Every Western country but not Japan, India or Russia.

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    2. Brexit gives England a chance and will be of economic benefit, I hope, but we shall continue to make most of the same mistakes the EU does. Trying to be a world power. Wasting money especially on defence. Unnecessary and unjust wars are possible. Legal and illegal immigration and massive numbers of refugees. Political correctness. Over-regulation. Huge restrictions on freedom. They have even banned selling furs because of the Prime Minister's inamorata.

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    3. It's possible, indeed likely, that post-Brexit Britain will move much further and much faster in the direction of Woke totalitarianism.

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    4. The AUKUS Pact is a catastrophically bad idea. Australia and the US will drag Britain into a disastrous war. War fever is out of control in Australia. The Australian Government clearly wants war. One assumes that they are acting under instructions from Washington.

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    5. This article is idle speculation but it would be nice if China were in decline. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/which-war-beijing-preparing

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    6. 'idle speculation'

      Falun Gong wishful thinking.

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    7. Falun Gong wishful thinking.

      The hope that China is in decline is very largely driven by sour grapes. There are still many who genuinely believe that Britain and the US have a God-given right to dominate the world and tell the lesser nations what to. That's what the AUKUS Pact is all about.

      The fact that China will leave the Anglo nations in the dust is a very very bitter pill to swallow for those who cling to notions of Anglo supremacy.

      An even bitterer pill to swallow is the fact that in today's world we are dealing with the problem of totalitarian states, with Britain being currently the world leader in totalitarianism. And we are dealing with the problem of an insane out-of-control rogue state, that rogue state being the United States.

      Some people have immense difficulty in accepting the truth that today Britain and the US really are the bad guys.

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