America—community organizer for the world

Ilana Mercer has a powerful article at WND about Egypt’s arrest of American pro-democracy advocates in Egypt. It seems the Egyptian government suspects (with good reason) that the Americans, trained by and affiliated with the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, and Freedom House were stirring street demonstrates to challenge the regime. Mercer writes:

[O]n the foreign-policy front, not much distinguishes America’s duopoly. Republicans and Democrats work in tandem, Saul-Alinsky style, to bring about volcanic transformation in societies that desperately need stability….

It is a fact—and three of the Republican presidential candidates will applaud it—that Washington fields community agitators, whose brief it is to unleash marauders for mobocracy all over the world. D.C. does so through NGOs, surrogates and other unwitting participants, confirms former State Department official Col. Lawrence Wilkerson.

“Purple” in Iraq, “Blue” in Kuwait, “Cotton” in Uzbekistan, “Grape” in Moldova, “Orange” in Ukraine, “Rose” in Georgia, “Tulip” in Kyrgizstan, “Cedar” in Lebanon, “Jasmine” in Tunisia, “Green” in Iran, still un-christened in Russia and Syria: Dig around and you’ll find LaHood à la Alinsky activists behind these “color-coded,” plant-based revolutions, blessed and backed by baby Bush and his non-identical, evil ideological twin, Barack Obama.

Mercer then quotes Amy Chua in World On Fire: How exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability:

In the last 20 years democratization has been a central, massively funded pillar of American foreign policy.

In the 1990s the U.S. government spent approximately $1 billion on democracy initiatives for post-socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. At the same time, America aggressively promoted democracy throughout Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia.… There is almost no developing or transitional country in the world where the United States has not actively championed political liberalization, majoritarian elections and the empowerment of civil society.

I’ll have to take a look at Chua’s book.

But then Mercer, having made so many excellent points, blows it, as libertarians and paleocons always blow it:

The hypocrisy in all this is that we Americans do not live under the Athenian democracy seemingly promoted abroad. On the contrary, we the people labor under a highly evolved technocratic, militarized Managerial State, which is far more efficient in encroaching on its citizens than are the tin-pot dictators, who’ve been built-up into mega-monsters in infantile, Disneyfied minds.

Given the U.S.’s record-breaking incarceration rates, your average Egyptian under Mubarak or Libyan under Gadhafi was probably less likely than his American counterpart to be jailed, harassed or have a threatening encounter with the state’s emissaries.

So Mercer signs onto the anti-American left’s standard lie that America is more oppressive than Muslim dictatorships, and that, as stated by the despicable Ron Paul, whom she supports, the proof of America’s oppressiveness—of its lack of the sacred libertarian liberty—is that it keeps lots of criminals in prison where they cannot endanger society. Mercer has not quite gone to the ultimate Ron Paul / liberal lie that America is racist because it imprisons blacks “disproportionately.” However, given other recent dismissive statements she’s made about “racialists,”—a reference last October to my argument which I had e-mailed to her (though she didn’t name me) that Amanda Knox and Rafaelle Sollecito were innocent and that the real killer of Meredith Kercher was the black thief Rudy Guede—I would not be surprised if she goes along with that Paul position as well. She said that the unnamed “racialists” (namely me) believed that because the black Guede was guilty, the white Knox and Sollecito must be innocent. In reality, what I said, over and over, was that the evidence showed that Knox and Sollecito were innocent. The whole entry at her blog is worth reading to get an idea of Mercer’s emerging mindset.

See also the entry where she suggests that Amanda Knox was saying, like O.J. Simpson, that now that she had been acquitted she was going to look for the “real” killer. Of course Knox never said that she was going to look for the real killer, since, (a) the real killer, Rudy Guede, had already been arrested, tried, and convicted, and (b) the reason for Knox and Sollecito’s ultimate acquittal on appeal was that the evidence against them was non-existent. But Mercer is so reactively and ignorantly anti-Knox that she has persuaded herself that the belief in Knox’s innocence is nothing but white “racialism.” (Note, 2/13/12: In a reply to this entry, Mercer says that the comparison of O.J. Simpson to Amanda Knox was not hers, but Ann Coulter’s whom she is quoting. Ok, I missed that when I read the page—which was easy to do, as the reference to Coulter was a couple of paragraphs removed from the sentence I referenced. That’s why I thought it was by Mercer, not Coulter. The fact nevertheless remains that Mercer was approvingly quoting Coulter’s remark that Knox on being acquitted said that she was now going to look for the real killer. So Mercer endorsed Coulter’s view. Whether Mercer was quoting Coulter or (as I incorrectly believed) was making the remark herself, there was no substantive difference between them on this point. Furthermore, not only in this instance but throughout the history of the case Mercer has repeatedly equated Knox, an innocent, framed person, with the double murderer O.J. Simpson. For example, she has said that the evidence against Knox and Sollecito was “O.J.-like,” i.e., it was as overwhelming as the evidence against Simpson, and therefore the claim that Knox was innocent and the victim of over-zealous prosecutors was as absurd as the claim that O.J. Simpson was innocent and the victim of a frame-up by Los Angeles homicide detectives.)

Here is my larger point. The paleo-libertarians, though they are right in opposing the spread-democracy agenda, discredit themselves by their kneejerk anti-Americanism, which involves saying that America is worse than Third World dictatorships, and which now, in the person of their champion Ron Paul, also includes joining the liberals in the cause of “anti-racism”—an idea that, as discussed at VFR yesterday, is indistinguishable from anti-whiteness.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 10, 2012 11:33 AM | Send