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Entry: The Neocons and Charles Maurras Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/leo_strauss_the_neocons_and_charles_maurras#6518 Post contents: @ felipeb, Wow, where do I begin? First, the USA IS a "propositional state", (a "nation" is something else) and so was the USSR. But that doesn't mean that I think propositional states are a good thing - nor does it mean that I approve of nation-states. Second, as a prophylactic against ad hominem attacks or other jumps to conclusions about what I believe in and where my loyalties are, my identities in order of importance are: 1. Christian 1.a Ambivalently somewhere between Catholic and high church Protestant, but at least I'm not hypocritical about my heresies from Roman Catholic doctrine (and that's why I continue to refrain from taking Roman Catholic sacraments) 2. The civilisation of European Christendom 3. Anglophone (and my ancestors CREATED the English language, and it does make a difference between the way I use it versus, say, ethnically German Americans who buggered the American language with cumbersome habits like attaching prepositions to simple verbs, eg, "went out", "took up" (prep. "aufgenehmen"), the crude Germanised-American dialect of Hemingway et al...not to mention how the Russian Jews who created the Hollywood dialect ruined American phonemes with their ghastly palatalised sounds of the shtetls..."iyhhh, nyehhhh", those sounds came from the Jewish ghettos of the Russian empire, imported to Hollywood and New York and now spread like a virus throughout America...) 4. Son, or grandson, of England and Scotland and of the 5,000 year old heritage of civilisation in Britain (AND that other nasty little island nearby ;-) Ireland, from which my grandmother's people came) - I acknowledge being partly Irish with as much embarrassment as I would acknowledge being partly descended from Fijian cannibals - no shame in it, but no glory either. (Alright, I'm being a BIT tongue-in-cheek there, but my half-Irish father used to say, "an Irishman is just a n-gger turned inside out", and he had a good point!) 5. Heir of much that was good in Virginia and Pennsylvania and the USA when my various ancestors lived there from the 1600s until I left in 1994. By the way, I'm directly descended from Joseph Ball, the Virginian grandfather of George Washington. (His son, my ancestor Joseph Ball, the uncle of George Washington, moved back to England in the 1700s.) So, no latecomer to America am I. My roots in America run far deeper than those of, say, Father Coughlin or Joe McCarthy. 6. Citizen of the USA (and I will change that, as a matter of honour, as soon as the Commonwealth of Australia permits me to become an Australian citizen, soon.) 7. Lover of cats, dogs, Indian and Indonesian cuisine, good beer, beautiful women, and good cartoons. 8. Amateur, semi-professional cartoonist. 9. Lawyer. (I'm more proud of being a good cartoonist than of being a lawyer.) 10-99, 89 other personal qualities and identities, and then finally, 100. "White", whatever that means. So, felipeb, tell me, WHERE (if anywhere) do I fit in your conception of America as a "tribal nation"? If you define it according to the predominant ethnicity and religion of its founders, then I'm more truly "American" than, well than Taki, or our Irish-American colleague Mr Foy, or Paul Gottfried. I reiterate: I descend directly from George Washington's grandfather, and my paternal line have been purely English ever since our Viking ancestors conquered Northern England. Oh, but wait! That means I'm NOT PURELY ENGLISH! Follow my paternal line for a thousand years, and my fathers were pagan Danes invading the Christian Kingdom of Alfred the Great. Hmmm. So just WHO IS the "tribe" of the American "nation"? Do you mean the "tribe" of America's mostly English-Scottish-Welsh, and very anti-Catholic and anti-Irish, founders? (And they weren't too fond of Germans either - remember the Battle of Trenton, and all those Krauts who fought as mercenaries for George III. Many British officers refused to fight against Americans - because of an old rule of Honour which said a British soldier is not required to fight against his own countrymen - so old Farmer George (King George III, who was actually a pretty good King for the most part) had to hire German mercenaries to kill the American rebels. The majority of the "British" Army in the American War of Independence, were either Germans or native-born Americans. Most native-born Brits wanted nothing to do with killing their American cousins. But the German mercenaries just leapt at the opportunity - oh, and so did many Irish. (And then in the 1930s and 1940s, the IRA and their sympathisers in America did lots of "good" service in collaboration with the Nazis. German intelligence worked cheek-by-jowl with the IRA scum.) SO, felipeb, just what kind of American "tribe" are you talking about? If you mean people whose ancestry most closely resembles that of the high-church English Protestants, like my first-cousin (several generations removed) George Washington, then THAT tribe of Americans bears very little resemblance to Taki (who is one of my personal heroes), or to Paul Gottfried (not my hero, but I do admire him) or to 90 percent or more of Americans today. So, you wanna talk about "tribes"? You wanna define the American "nation" as a "tribe"? If so, then I am one of a handful of remnants of its exemplars. And the majority of America's self-defined "paleoconservatives" are not - mind you, ESPECIALLY the American paleocons who are Catholics! Or even "worse", those who are of Irish descent! (As I am, 25 percent.) If there was any original American "tribe" at its founding, then it was a tribe of Protestant and/or otherwise anti-Catholic descendants of Britain. And that "tribe" would exclude Joe McCarthy, and Charles Lindbergh, and Taki and the (to me, overwhelmingly intelligent AND decent and honourable) Professor Gottfried, and the majority of the writers and commenters on this blog. So I say, to hell with "tribes". My tribe is the tribe of decent, civilised men - and I'm confident in saying, so is Taki's. Taki, like me, is a student of Japanese and Chinese martial arts, and of the kind of chivalry and honour which transcends all "tribes." Now, all that said, "filipeb", I intend no personal insult to you. I'm just offering some food for thought. What say you in response, filipeb, among friends? :-) Sent at: 2008 05 16