I PAY MY RESPECTS TO A GREAT POPE




There is a fitting tribute to him here

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WINSTON CHURCHILL WAS A NEOCON

I am sometimes amazed by how little history even my fellow conservatives seem to know. Lawrence Auster is of course well-known for the way he joins Leftists in his paranoia about the "neocons" so I guess that helps us understand his latest lapse. He has put up a post consisting mainly of a letter from an historian claiming that Winston Churchill was NOT a neocon. In the narrow sense that Churchill was not Jewish and that the term "neocon" is only a recent invention, that does, of course, have to be true.

In the broader sense -- a neocon being a former Leftist who favours foreign military intervention in favour of democracy -- however, to say that Churchill was not a neocon betrays no knowledge of history whatever. He joined the British LIBERAL party in 1904 and served as Colonial Under-Secretary under Campbell-Bannerman and as president of the Board of Trade and Home Secretary under Asquith. So he was in his early years a promininent Leftist in terms of British politics at the time. But, like the neocons, he later (1925) changed his tune and became a prominent Conservative.

And as for foreign interventions in favour of democracy, who was Secretary of War under Lloyd George when Britain sent troops to join the "white" Russians in fighting the Bolsheviks in 1919? It was Winston Churchill! And there is no doubt that Churchill did not repent doing so. One thing he never changed was his fierce opposition to Communism -- an opposition that is also characteristic of the neocons.

And though Churchill was not Jewish, he was at least philosemitic. As Auster notes, Churchill once said: "Where the Jew goes there is oasis. Where the Arab goes there is desert."

So on the four primary neocon identifiers -- Jewishness, anticommunism, Leftist early life and support for military intervention in the cause of promoting democracy -- Churchill scores 3 out of 4 -- and on the Jewishness angle he might be said to have done his best! I gather that not all neocons are Jewish anyway -- particularly if you include the Straussians in what is after all a pretty loose classification to begin with. Some people also say Churchill was a neocon because he was an unabashed defender of the British Empire but for that to be relevant we have to accept that the neocons want an American empire -- which is in my view a brain-dead claim. The idea of America as an empire is antithetical to all American values and traditions and the neocons are far too smart to be unaware of something as basic as that.

Auster does not link to it but the article which started the recent discussion about Churchill as a neocon is here

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ELSEWHERE

British kids can't be conned: "Children as young as 13 are displaying signs of Islamophobia and are voicing their support for the British National Party, researchers have found. Young teenagers are increasingly saying they have negative views towards Muslims and do not want Islamic culture expressed in the classroom. The study of 1,500 students aged 13 to 24 was presented at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society in Manchester yesterday. Researchers asked students from 14 secondary schools and one further education college in York for their views on Islam since 11 September 2001. Three of the schools were from the independent sector and the others came from a wide geographical and socio-economic area".

Al Qa'eda members learnt their hatred of the West in the West: "Strikingly, 70 per cent joined the jihad while away from home. Sageman describes them as the `elite of their country' sent abroad to study because the schools in Germany, France, England and the US are better. Egyptian-born Mohammed Atta, who crashed the jet into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11, became a violent-minded extremist while studying architecture in Hamburg. Ahmed Omar Sheikh, the Briton convicted of murdering American journalist Daniel Pearl, attended the London School of Economics. Al-Qa'eda's `breeding ground', it seems, is as much in fragmented cities in the West as in hotbeds of Islamism in the East". [How unsurprising that they learnt hatred of the West in Western universities!]

Strom Thurmond, famous Southern segregationist, had a black ex-nuptial daughter. Some things she recently said about him: "However, in his personal life, he was doing many things to help black people - things many people didn't know about. Since I came out, so many black people have called and told me about the many good things that he did for them.... I didn't want people to know he was my father. But he later did other things that I am proud of. He helped pass the bill recognizing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, and he was the first senator to hire a black administrative aide.... I didn't warm up to him at first; it took time for me to grow to like him. All we did was shake hands when we saw each other. After a while, he would hug me and kiss me on the cheek. And we became close after that... he visited me when I lived in New York. And he suggested that I attend South Carolina State, a black college. And he visited me when I was there and helped me financially. He also helped me with my children. He helped my son get into medical school and the Navy, and he helped my daughter with her business endeavors".

There is around a century of test data to show that men on average are much better than women at mathematics, despite what the feminist opponents of Larry Summers at Harvard say. The latest is this set of statistics from recent SAT results: "But the score distributions show that among the test takers in the higest score range (750-800), males made up 50.5% of that group on the verbal reasoning portion of the test and 68.7% of that group on the math reasoning portion of the test. In fact, males are disproportionately represented in the score ranges on the math section for all score ranges above 600. Looking at the most extreme tail of the distribution, the coveted 800, males were 49.3% of the population achieving that score on the verbal portion, and 72% of the population achieving that score on the math portion". (From Discriminations via Peg Kaplan)

Stupid Belgians: "Belgium's interior minister was left red-faced yesterday after it emerged that photos comparing US President George W Bush to a chimpanzee had been used in a police training manual..... The pictures in question - reprinted by the newspaper - showed a series of the US leader's facial expressions next to shots of a chimpanzee making apparently similar faces. They were intended to help trainee police officers in the western city of Bruges to recognise the importance of body language in dealing with the public. Bush is shown in poses ranging from pensive to finger-waving debating mode". [Lots of Leftists have been calling GWB "chimpy" but now that many are admitting that they were wrong and GWB was right to say that the Muslim "street" wants democracy, what does that mean? That they were dumber than a chimpanzee? I think it does!]

My latest post on MARXWORDS shows that Marx & Engels believed that human races emerged naturally but that eugenics could and should alter that.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and LEFTISTS AS ELITISTS. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftist movers and shakers is perfectly shown by the 2004 Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftist ideologues are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions and can con "the masses" into giving them power.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist"

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