General
Happy New Year everyone!!
Hoping for a better 2023 where we see some signs of a White awakening–the election was not encouraging. All polls indicate widespread dissatisfaction but so few really understand our media- and academic-dominant elites, their attitudes & motives.— Kevin MacDonald (@TOOEdit) January 1, 2023
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” – G.K. Chesterton pic.twitter.com/nDM8LiSetj
— Trad West (@trad_west_) December 24, 2022
Well, the Jan. 6 committee has produced its long-awaited report. In a surprise move, the committee referred former President Donald Trump for criminal prosecution, accusing him of inciting insurrection, among other crimes.
In fairness, Jan. 6, 2021, was the day that Trump announced he would open our southern border and allow nearly 5 million unvetted illegal immigrants into our country, whereupon they would be flown to various cities around the U.S. and given full access to all our welfare programs.
Obviously, this constitutes insurrectionary behavior. The committee had no choice but to demand criminal charges.
LATE BULLETIN: It was NOT the former president who did this, but the current president, Joe Biden. In another development, it turns out that engineering a foreign invasion of our country has been redefined as a “humanitarian mission.”
When will this “humanitarian mission” end? Apparently, never — not until all 7 billion humans living in places less luxe than America have moved here, at which point America won’t be so hot anymore, so no one will want to come.
Thus, The New York Times quoted Jennifer Quigley, of Human Rights First, saying of our intervention in Afghanistan: “We can’t claim mission accomplished. There are still too many vulnerable people abroad.”
After spending billions of dollars trying to build a semblance of civil society in that stone-age culture, evidently now we’re supposed to open our doors to everyone who lives there. Even granting that absurd notion, I can’t help but notice that Quigley seamlessly shifted from “Afghanistan” to “people abroad.”
So we have to take in every “vulnerable” person who doesn’t already live in the U.S.? Is there any other way to interpret her statement?
CNN demands that we fly Afghans here directly, not content to wait for these future Nobel Prize-winners to take the air-land route from Afghanistan through Central America into our country — which they are also doing.
For the last few weeks, CNN has aired a story almost every hour about how Afghans “risked their lives” to save Americans, so now we owe them permanent residency in our country. It’s unclear whom we were ever fighting, inasmuch as everyone in the country seems to have been a “translator.”
CNN hosts triumphantly produced a letter by “retired diplomats,” warning that if the U.S. doesn’t “support its allies” [by allowing them to move here], “in the future our allies will be less likely to support the U.S. missions.” (And then who will teach Third-Worlders about feminism, gays and George Floyd?)
Former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan must be relieved to hear liberals admit that how we treat those who put their lives on the line for our country will determine how we are willing to do so in the future. Whelan, you’ll recall, is rotting in a Russian prison, because a lesbian, Women’s National Basketball Association star (but I repeat myself) took precedence over him in a prisoner trade. We’re looking for a few good men. Anybody? Anybody?
We’ve already taken in 76,000 Afghans since Biden’s smooth withdrawal last year. (Please, God, tell me we rescued the Afghans who helped paint the George Floyd mural.)
And look at what a blessing they’ve been!
Mohammad Haroon Imaad was among the first batch of beloved Afghan “translators” brought to America last year. He was still living on the Fort McCoy military base in Wisconsin when he was charged with beating and choking his wife. She explained that he beat her all the time back in Afghanistan, once blinding her in both eyes.
Obviously, the Imaad household is going to be a real boon to our country. Yeah, we’re gonna have to raise the Social Security retirement age and start means-testing, but on the bright side, we’ve provided housing to Mrs. Imaad and paid for her astronomically expensive eye operations.
On the very same military base, another cherished Afghan ally, Bahrullah Noori, committed multiple forcible sexual assaults on children within weeks of arriving. Other Afghans flown to Fort McCoy showed up with child brides and multiple wives.
Just weeks after the Afghan-of-the-Month competition at Fort McCoy, another Afghan on our “must-have” list, Zabihullah Mohmand, was accused of raping a woman in Missoula, Montana. How long had he been here? A week? But the good news is, Mohmand was fully vetted by our government, according to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. If you can’t trust those guys …
In response, the media promptly stopped reporting those stories. Perhaps a better idea would be for CNN to have a word with the 76,000 “translators” already deposited on our shores. Hey, guys! Remember, for the next few months, NO RAPING!
Again, these were the most-favored Afghans, the ones who qualified for the first round of emergency admissions. And they just keep coming.
Now, that’s what most people call an “insurrection.”
COPYRIGHT 2022 ANN COULTER
The Crusader Armies 1099–1187
Steve Tibble
Yale University Press, 2018
Dr. Steve Tibble of the University of London offers a probing study in The Crusader Armies 1099-1187. He cites modern archaeological evidence and sleuths through the historical chronicles to rectify their neglect of the Crusaders’ infantry and their Turcopole light cavalry. Although the heavy cavalry knights were the Crusaders’ most powerful force, their efficacy and very survival depended on the auxiliary services.
Today’s anti-colonial mindset holds that the Crusaders were foreign intruders. They were, but so were all militarily active parties in the region at the time. For centuries, alien rulers had kept the locally established peoples, Armenians excepted, disarmed and subjugated. It was the policy of Byzantines, Arab conquerors, Egyptians, and the Turkic invaders who arrived shortly before the latest interlopers, the Crusaders.
Everything about the Turks made them the drivers of military and social change in the Crusader era. They were nomadic herders from the steppes of central Asia. Expert mounted archers on small, nimble ponies, they were confident warriors who would swarm their enemies while quickly discharging showers of arrows. Droughts on the steppes spurred them to greener pastures. They met and defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071. Their subsequent migrations proceeded rapidly. They substituted themselves for nearly all the Arab rulers of statelets in Syria and Palestine. They seized Jerusalem from the Egyptians (who returned to Egypt only to be evicted by the Crusaders). And they encountered the First Crusade soon after it had crossed the Bosporus.
Responding to Turkic weapons and tactics transformed the Crusaders’ Western style of warfare. While armor protected the knights from Turkic arrows, weight considerations precluded the armoring of their horses, which Turkic archers sought to wound or kill before or during battle. The Crusaders responded by reinvigorating an institution much slighted in Western medieval warfare, the infantry.
Crusader infantrymen had to be part-timers, in complicated contrast to their knightly comrades. The knights, even with their armed dependents, did not form a permanent army so much as a warrior caste whose status they maintained without intermission. They were born for combat, much as birds are born for flight, and saw it as their calling. Infantrymen were less attuned to war. They were recruited from the resident Christian population, both native and immigrant, urban and rural. Most adult men served in some capacity, if only for garrison duty.
Centuries of Muslim rule had left large, varied Christian populations in place. In the Latin Kingdom, roughly the area comprising modern Israel and Dr. Tibble’s focus, they were perhaps fifty percent of residents. They were more prevalent in Antioch and Edessa where Christian Armenians had, with perseverance, retained a martial culture congruent with the Crusaders’ own. Greek and Syrian Christians of various sects predominated in the Latin Kingdom where they commonly spoke Arabic.
The Crusader rulers bolstered their manpower pool by encouraging farming colonists from the West to settle vacant lands. This magnitude and success of this undertaking have only recently come to light. There are 235 known such colonization sites in the Latin Kingdom alone, with less intense colonization elsewhere.
Newcomers and native Christians generally got along well. They often intermarried, to the dismay of Church officials in Rome who regarded Eastern Christians as schismatics or heretics, but with the complicity of local Catholic churchmen who paid little heed to doctrinal niceties. Strong evidence of Western convergence with the East comes from the military where Armenian and Arabic displaced the Crusaders’ medieval French as the usual languages for training and tactical field commands. Some intrepid men of Eastern-Christian heritage achieved knighthood.
Some indigenous and mixed-heritage Christians became Turcopoles, the Crusaders’ light cavalrymen. Named pursuant to a Byzantine precedent, they specialized in reconnaissance and patrolling. They sometimes had knights and infantry accompany them as they sought to detect and engage hostile infiltrators. Most fighting in the Crusader East occurred in such small-unit actions, not the few great battles. Skirmishers par excellence, and the Turcopoles were in the thick of it.
Completing the Crusaders’ manpower resources were Italian seafarers and the warrior-monks of the military religious orders. Italian sailors and merchants provided crucial assistance to capture the Egyptian-held Palestinian ports. Carpenters and engineers from Italian ships built the Crusaders’ siege engines. The military religious orders, principally the Order of the Hospital of St. John (Hospitallers) and the Knights of the Temple (Templars), augmented the Crusader armies in several ways. As the twelfth century progressed, they promoted tactical “best practices” and placed large contingents of their members in the field armies. They funneled wealth and fresh manpower from Europe to the East. By the 1170s, the orders were responsible for most of the great Crusader castles, Kerak notably excepted.
Military resources available to the Crusaders lagged their enemies’ growing strength. Political changes exacerbated the disparity. Whereas early Crusaders faced feuding Turkic mini-states and an independent Egypt, their successors confronted a united Turkic/Egyptian superpower whose consolidation its Kurdish ruler, Saladin, had largely completed by 1186. Egyptian revenues enabled Saladin to fund several armies, each larger than any the Crusaders could muster. Finally in 1187, Saladin crushed the Crusaders at Hattin. A truncated Latin Kingdom, bereft of Jerusalem, survived on a narrow strip of the Palestinian coast. With Edessa having fallen generations before, Antioch and Tripoli also continued as diminished survivors. The Crusaders triumphal years were behind them.
The Crusader Armies offers fine style, rigor without academic jargon, and thorough, unobtrusive documentation. Anecdotes illuminating historical nuances grace Dr. Tibble’s presentation. For example, an account of insubordination attests to how seriously Crusaders, unlike contemporaneous Europeans, stressed military discipline. The culpable fighter won grudging acquittal only because his infraction had harmed the enemy. His excuse, that as a Turk he did not understand the spoken command he had disobeyed, seems not to have mattered.
Some readers will object to Dr. Tibble’s dismissal of religion’s role. He claims that the Crusades can be explained as a clash between nomadic and settled societies without reference to religion. To his credit, he often ignores this dictum. Taken to extremes, it accounts for the Turkic invaders well enough but not their Crusading adversaries.
Dr. Tibble’s treatment of Jews, i.e., his failure even to mention them, is mystifying. He discusses in detail the Crusaders’ relations with everyone else. Why not the Jews? He leaves readers clueless.
His foray into White Crusaders’ attitude toward blacks is welcome but not entirely satisfactory. The Egyptian infantry mostly comprised Black Nubians whom the Crusaders often fought and disdained as men and fighters. Even so, Dr. Tibble writes too loosely of medieval Whites’ “casual racism.” The medieval Song of Roland treats Blacks respectfully. Then again, the author(s) of Roland probably had no experience with Blacks.
The biggest disappointment in The Crusader Armies is the absence of reasoned speculation on the self-identification of the mixed-heritage Crusader families. Many knightly families, for example, including the Latin Kingdom’s royal family, were as much Armenian as European. How did they regard themselves? Perhaps this question presupposes a too modern mentality. Medieval men and women, not indoctrinated with self-identity qualms, could experience personal wholeness within their extended families and their people, where the latter understood is as one’s family’s social milieu, not the modern abstract monstrosity called “the nation.”
Whatever self-identification there had been meant little after Hattin when Saladin launched a sweeping ethnic cleansing of the Crusaders’ hinterlands. All apparently Western Christians, but not Christians identifiable as native, were purged by slaughter, enslavement, or forced exile. It was a draconian program. It also made possible some of the Crusaders’ finest moments.
The scope and speed of ethnic cleansing left Crusader castles isolated in enemy territory without hope of relief. Their defenders, as “men trying to make a point,” Dr. Tibble writes, nonetheless fought heroically. The Hospitallers held Belvoir for eighteen months. At Kerak and Montreal, castles of the secular lord Reynald of Chatillon, whom Saladin personally murdered after Hattin, defenders likewise held out, for nearly two years at Montreal.
It was of these defiant Crusaders that Sir Steven Runciman movingly spoke: “Their lives were precarious and they knew it. … [T]hey faced their doom with pride and resolution.” (Creighton Lecture, Athlone Press, London, 1960, not quoted by Tibble).
The pride of the doomed Crusaders haunts me. It was also the pride of the ancient aristocratic warriors whom Ricardo Duchesne posited as the wellspring of Western civilization and its abiding unique qualities. Modern Christian and Jewish moralists, or, arguably more accurately, the Christian ones goaded by their watchful Jewish mentors, tell us that this pride is a sin or, at best, an abnegation of one’s unceasing obligation to self-criticize and remake oneself and one’s society. Very well, I shall sin and abnegate. I shall not revere Abraham Foxman, Martin Luther King, Pope Francis, Nelson Mandela, Nancy Pelosi, and their ilk as my heroes. For solace, I shall take refuge, if only in my imagination, with the great Christian warlords of the Latin East.
To make up for slavery and Jim Crow, we abrogated constitutional provisions about freedom of association, freedom of contract and freedom of speech. We tossed out basic rules of fairness to allow (temporarily) affirmative action, set-asides and quotas. Behemoth departments were created in Washington to stamp out the last vestiges of discrimination on the basis of race. …
Unless you’re alleging race discrimination, take your lumps like a cis-gendered white man. You can be fired, not hired, turned away, rejected, called names, disciplined, looked askance at — and no one cares.
For at least a half-century now, every special pleader in America has made the following argument: Yeah, but what if we were Black?
This is supposed to be rhetorical kryptonite, capable of anathematizing “discrimination” against any group: atheists, women, gays, immigrants, illegal immigrants, the disabled, Muslims — basically anyone except a fully abled, cis-gendered, White male born in this country.
Oh my gosh! You’re right — we DO have to let girls try out for the Green Bay Packers!
OK, fine, we’ll hire more blind lifeguards.
Of course, Shadi Abdullah is welcome to be president of our campus Hillel group.
Naturally, the “What if they were Black?” argument came up ad nauseum at the Supreme Court last week during oral arguments over Colorado’s “anti-discrimination” law. According to Colorado, making two gay guys who are married to one another feel “unwelcome, objectionable, unacceptable or undesirable” is the equivalent of separate water fountains for black people.
A web designer had petitioned the court, objecting to the law’s requirement that she design a website celebrating a gay marriage, in contravention of her religious beliefs. But if you’d heard only the questions from Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, you’d think the petitioner was refusing to design websites for Black people.
E.g.:
JUSTICE JACKSON: “[C]an I ask you a hypothetical … [What if] they want to have a sign next to the [shopping mall] Santa that says, ‘only white children.’ Why isn’t your argument that they should be able to do that?” [The hypothetical went on for hours, but that was the gist of it.]
These were a few of Justice Sotomayor’s questions:
— “What’s the difference between that and ‘I don’t believe black people and white people should get married’?”
— “Tell me how that’s different, by the way. What you’re basically saying is, in our Ollie’s Barbecue case, the company there said, ‘I’ll serve blacks but only on a takeout window, not inside my restaurant because that sends a message that I endorse integration ….’”
— “Well, when I sit down to eat a meal by a full chef who creates this beautiful picture on a plate, why can’t he say, ‘I make specialized meals for my clients. I will not serve a black person.’”
Here’s a cheat sheet that should help answer the justices’ questions:
Can I refuse to let black kids sit on Santa’s lap? — NO.
Can I refuse to serve black people at my restaurant? — NO.
Can I refuse to bake one of my wedding cakes for black people? — NO.
Can I refuse to write speeches for black people? — NO.
Can I refuse to perform marriage ceremonies for black people — NO.
Can I discriminate against black people for any reason, ever? — NO.
Displaying his own unique approach, Eric Olson, Colorado’s solicitor general, who was defending the law (popular name: “We Won the Right to Gay Marriage and Now We’re Shooting the Wounded”), made this pioneering argument: “What [a business] can’t do is say, ‘I reserve the right to refuse service, which means in practice I will not serve black people.’”
A good rule of thumb is that any claim of discrimination that requires a comparison to black people is sophistry.
No offense — I’m sure the rest of you have really moving tales of woe, full of pathos and suffering. But gays, atheists, disabled people, women (whatever the hell that is), immigrants, illegals, please try to remember: YOU’RE NOT BLACK.
It’s discrimination on the basis of race — and only discrimination on the basis of race — that is forbidden by our Constitution. Other forms of “discrimination” may be stupid (if so, the market will punish you) or blindingly logical (football teams allowing only healthy young men to try out, or religious groups limiting officeholders to practitioners of the religion).
Only one type of discrimination ever stirred up such mass revulsion in this country that we decided to amend our Constitution to prohibit it: race discrimination.
You’d think that at a moment when our entire national dialogue is fixated on the legacy of slavery, it wouldn’t be so difficult for people to grasp that black Americans’ unique history is not amenable to cut-and-paste victimhood.
To make up for slavery and Jim Crow, we abrogated constitutional provisions about freedom of association, freedom of contract and freedom of speech. We tossed out basic rules of fairness to allow (temporarily) affirmative action, set-asides and quotas. Behemoth departments were created in Washington to stamp out the last vestiges of discrimination on the basis of race.
By now, of course, the only discrimination involving black Americans is in their favor. But that doesn’t change the rule: NO DISCRIMINATION ON THE BASIS OF RACE.
As G.K. Chesterton said, “When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom, you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.”
That’s what “discrimination” law is today. Instead of one big law: “No Race Discrimination!” we have a million little laws about strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, rational basis test, public accommodations, bona fide occupational qualifications, and on and on and on. At the same time, we have open race discrimination against whites and Asians.
Unless you’re alleging race discrimination, take your lumps like a cis-gendered white man. You can be fired, not hired, turned away, rejected, called names, disciplined, looked askance at — and no one cares.
This simple rule allows us to live in what we call “freedom.” As the libertarians would say (if they were real libertarians), start your own website business, bakery, Hillel organization, professional football team, holiday, all-women’s eating club, etc. etc. etc.
Gays, you’re not black. (And you’re not Allan Bakke.) Gays’ median household income is about $115,000 — the highest of any group in America. It’s $45,000 for black people. To my gay readers, answer this honestly: When you move into a neighborhood, do home prices go up or down?
Blacks must be looking at gay rights activists in bewilderment, thinking: Why couldn’t we be oppressed like that?
For the rest of you, memorize this, recite it in the shower, write it on your hand: “Unless I’m being discriminated against on the basis of my race, I will stop being a pain in everyone’s ass.”
COPYRIGHT 2022 ANN COULTER
