Another member of the Bush-Gerson-Chavez Hate America Club

Gerard Baker, the pro-Bush, neocon Brit who writes about the U.S. for the Times of London, has an article in the Sunday New York Post on the theme that contemptible populist passions are dragging America from the true course in two areas: Iraq and immigration. (The piece is called, “Populism Pushing U.S. Politicians into Pathetic Policies.” But the title of the original article in the London Times is more telling: “How paranoid little Napoleons took over America.”) Warning: this is not pleasant reading.

The populist revolt over Iraq follows a smaller but equally depressing moment last month in Washington over immigration. President Bush had tried, honorably and rightly, to get a reform bill through Congress that would have regularized the status of 12 million illegal immigrants, mostly Latinos, as well as enforcing border security more effectively.

The bill was defeated by a roar of nativist and, at times, thinly disguised racist hysteria from the great American heartland. Little Napoleons on TV and talk radio strutted and howled, denouncing the president and his supporters for surrendering to a cultural takeover by Mexicans.

It was as ugly as it was absurd. America has absorbed waves and waves of immigrants through its history; alone among industrialized nations its openness and ability to assimilate others give it a relatively rosy demographic future. Its remarkable gift for re-creating itself has long been its most crucial economic talent.

Bush, to give him rare credit, was willing to resist the tide of right-wing paranoia and hatred. But of course he is free, politically, to do so, no longer having to submit himself to the people’s verdict in elections. The real test was for his would-be successors—and almost all the Republicans fell quickly into line behind the howling mob.

Just like Linda Chavez, Michael Gerson, George W. Bush, John McCain, Robert Novak, and all the rest of the Hate America Club, Baker smears America as a country of racist haters, and doesn’t feel constrained to offer a single piece of evidence for the charge. Why? Because we resisted, with mighty hearts, the most damaging and dishonest bill in the history of our country. Because America has one destiny and one destiny only, to merge itself with the world and go out of existence. And anyone who resists that, is by definition a vile hater.

* * *

But beyond these fairly obvious if unpleasant points, the article is sinister in a deeper sense. The first two thirds of the piece concern not immigration but Iraq. Baker thinks it is horrible that more and more U.S. politicians are considering a pull-out from that country. He says this would result in horrific slaughter. But if the Iraqi government—created as part of the U.S. policy to spread democracy—is so weak that a U.S. withdrawal would leave it helpless to stop mass slaughter, then it is hard to visualize any series of steps or any improvements in any foreseeable future by which the Iraqi government would become strong enough to prevent mass slaughter. Which means that the U.S. must keep its forces in Iraq forever.

Thus what Bush’s commitment to spread democracy to the Muslims means in practice is that we must keep our men forever in a Muslim hellhole to stop its people from slaughtering each other.

Yet when it comes to the legitimate democratic governance of our own affairs, the sight of ordinary American citizens phoning their senators to oppose a bill they see as ruinous to our country is so offensive to Baker that he calls us every low name in the book.

Meaning that, in Baker’s eyes, our American democracy—actual self government—is immoral and repulsive.

Since Baker despises democracy in America, what then is the “democracy” in which he believes? It is two things. First, Baker’s democracy is global democracy, the use of American soldiers to implant democracy among Muslim peoples whose religion is totally incompatible with liberal and constitutional democracy, but who, to the extent that they do adopt democracy, i.e., popular elections, will use it to release murderous violence against their fellow Muslims, violence which our soldiers must then police and manage FOREVER in order to keep the Muslims from committing mass slaughter on each other. Second, Baker’s democracy is the unrestricted right of all peoples in the world to enter America, and the concomitant destruction of America’s laws, borders, and national identity—notwithstanding the transparent lies coming from the bill’s supporters, including Baker, that it would improve border security. Thus to Baker and President Bush and many “conservatives” and liberals, democracy means that we Americans must waste our substance by spreading democracy to foreign peoples incapable of it, and that we must simultaneously let ourselves be inundated by foreign peoples incapable of being assimilated into our society. Meanwhile, real democracy, in which a free people direct their own affairs according to their own Constitution and laws, is, according to Baker, “a roar of nativist and racist hysteria from the great American heartland.”

He hates us, he really hates us.

- end of initial entry -

LA writes:

Here is Baker’s e-mail address:

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

Howard Sutherland writes:

I read your comment about Gerard Baker’s discomfiture about the fact that at least some Americans take an active interest in what our ruling caste is doing to our country. Based on living in England for quite a while, I have a theory about who (or at least what) Mr. Baker is.

The British press has long had a strain of usually witty and almost always very self-righteous Irish writers. While I was unable to confirm it through Google, I suspect Baker is yet another of these hectoring, lecturing Irishmen. At any rate, I have never met anyone named Gerard who wasn’t either Irish or French. Seems pretty clear Baker isn’t French. Due to their history of oppression at English hands and their own mass emigration diaspora, a lot of Irish people these days are very liberal in their politics, rather self-righteous in their outlook and see free immigration—especially to the United States—as something of a sacramental entitlement. As we see every St. Patrick’s Day, plenty of pandering American politicians at least pretend to agree with them about that.

So my guess is that Baker is another foreign journalist in the United States whose beat is Manhattan and Washington who—based on his exposure to those two utterly atypical places—thinks he knows America a lot better than he really does. If I’m right about his being Irish, his view of America is probably totally Ellis Island, Nation-Of-Immigrants, seen through gauzy lace curtains of Irish ancestral memory, to boot.

It’s strange, though, that he favors Bush’s disastrous Iraq war. Most journalists of the kind I’m thinking of are vehemently opposed to it.

Let’s deport Baker anyway.

LA replies:

I definitely agree with Mr. Sutherland that Baker should be deported after what he said about the American people. He has no business being here. I wonder if, in the 19th century, any foreign journalist who had slurred the American people as Baker had done, would have been allowed to remain here.

James W. writes:

My own Napoleonic in scope nativist and racist instincts, not to mention a couple hundred million of my closest friends, were fully prepared to “regularize” the fellow who re-roofed my garage, and the drunk who rammed and killed my co-workers friend and her two kids, but those were not the stakes. The stakes were sixty million, not twelve, and the Senate not only knew it, they refused to take out language that would have seen to that.

If somebody wants to overplay his hand by blaming me, I’m good with that. As our hero Bonaparte once said, never interrupt our enemy when he is making a mistake.

LA replies:

Great comment by James W.!

RG writes:

These elites, whether domestic or foreign, may in fact not be true democrats (small “d”), for they often object when the American people get involved in the legislative process. The perfect example was the horrid immigration “reform” bill.

Any reasonable estimate would show roughly three out of four Americans opposing it yet the elites in the Beltway, in the media, in London or Mexico City, would have preferred for Bush, Kennedy, McCain, etc. to decree it into law without the consent of the governed.

LA:

Because democracy no longer means the self-government of a people. It means global equal rights and global integration, enforced by unaccountable elites on the people. The America that stopped the Comprehensive Black Death Act is VERY out of step with the New World Order that Gerard Baker believes in.

Emerson writes:

I’m confused about the term “neocon.” Some say writers use the term to avoid using the word “Jew.” But many of the conservatives often referred to as neocons are not Jewish. So when you describe Baker as a neocon, do you mean that he’s Jewish? I tried to google some bio on Baker but got nothing definitive on his race. He does write favorably of Israel.

I only ask this because Jews seem to be overrepresented in the assault on Western Civilization, along with gentile liberals. In fact, you are the only Jewish person I’m aware of who defends Western Civilization (even more strongly than most gentile whites). Am I wrong? I mean, do you know of any others?

LA replies:

Some people use “neocon” to mean Jew, and some people, like Thomas Lifson of The American Thinker, falsely claim that neocon is a code word for Jew. But the word neoconservative has been around for 35 years, it is a well established term describing a political ideology. Though many of the leading neocons are Jews and neoconservatism reflects Jewish concerns, it is not a Jewish ideology per se. Jewish neoconservatives constantly refer to themselves as neoconservatives and write endless articles talking about neoconservatism and using the word “neoconservative” in the title: “The Neoconservative Convergence” (Charles Krauthammer), “The Neoconservative Persuasion” (Irving Kristol), “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy” (Norman Podhoretz). Since the neocons embrace the term neoconservative, it is obviously not a code word or a slur for Jew.

Also, one can use neoconservative in a narrow sense, to mean just the fairly small group of people who call themselves neoconservatives, and you can use it in a wider sense, to mean mainstream U.S. conservatives who have increasingly adopted the neoconservative ideology.

I called Gerard Baker a neocon because he seems to be generally in favor of the same things the neoconservatives support, the Iraq war, the spread of democracy aiming at a single world democratic system under American leadership, and (as we now see) open borders. Some of the open borders neocons were so shocked by the extremism and irresponsibility of the immigration bill that they came out against it. But it wasn’t too extreme for Baker. Ironically, among the vast wave of American “racist haters” he was denouncing were quite a few respectable establishment neocons.

Here’s my own simple explanation of neoconservatism: Neoconservatives are conservative, in that they support the nation; but they are liberal, in that they define the nation solely in terms of abstract liberal principles like democracy, not as a concrete country, culture, and people.

As for your last question, it’s true that most Jews are liberals (or neoconservatives, which is a type of liberal). But there are plenty of Jews who defend Western civilization and oppose our wide-open immigration policies. I think their number is going to increase, as the threat that faces us becomes more obvious.

Mark Jaws writes:

How many more times must we hear from liberals that “America has absorbed waves and waves of immigrants in its past” as a prelude to their pooh-poohing this “Latino” invasion? The waves of previous immigrants, mentioned by Mr. Baker, were overwhelmingly white, and therefore easier to assimilate. The Meso-Americans who initially inhabited this continent were rapidly pushed aside by the English settlers at Jamestown only after two catastrophic massacres by the Powhatan Indians. Today’s Spanish-speaking Meso-American from Mexico and Central America is hardly more assimilable and in the long run will prove equally menacing.

There are even Jews who are white racialists, and who have been readers and supporters of American Renaissance, though many of them were alienated by the events at the February 2006 AR conference, which I covered extensively.

Anthony Damato sent this e-mail to Gerard Baker:

Dear Mr. Baker.

I suppose that you think you are able to see the forest through the trees as it relates to the defeat of the immigration bill that you lament in your NY Post article “Panicky Politics.”

You claim to support democracy, yet when the political elites attempted to bamboozle us under the guise of rectifying one problem (uncontrolled immigration) they in effect would have been immensely compounding it with another bigger problem, legalizing millions of illegal immigrant criminals and welcoming more third-Worlders in even greater numbers.

As a result, millions of Americans spoke up and forced this bill twice to be trashed. Not only that, a MAJORITY of Americans demanded control of who comes into this country, it used to be called democracy. In fact the EU has almost destroyed the right of its member states to exercise the right we still hold dear here, the RIGHT of self determination.

You need not look at America to see where people like you, globalists with “good intentions,” have brought the West. London is becoming a Third World cesspool with more cameras per person then any other country on the face of the Earth. Why? Well maybe Enoch Powell was right.

Why is it that whites are under siege in their own lands? All the while, the besieged population has to listen to drivel from insane self haters like yourself that they are guilty of racism, or discrimination or failure to bend over far enough for the immigrant, causing him or her to feel “alienated,” hence the failure of the newcomers to assimilate.

Don’t you know that your capital city is called Londonistan? I meet Londoners who tell me I am right to call it that, but they can’t speak freely about this at home. People from England tell me they MOVED here to the States because their town or city is unrecognizable and violent. The violence comes from the third worlders invited in—this is no secret to anyone but useful idiots like yourself.

Whose choice was it to turn the UK into a violent haven for Muslim terrorists and non-white violent immigrants who clearly have changed the demographics and culture and SAFETY of your country forever? If your people weren’t blinded by greed then guilt then “multiculturalism,” do you think they would have, beginning in the post war 1950’s, allowed themselves to embark on a mission to define themselves, BRITAIN, out of existence, as we Americans are trying mightily to avoid?

When British elites favor foreigners over their own people and culture, reject their greatest heroes like Winston Churchill, are ashamed of their flag, and remains prostrate before the enemy within while smashing all opposition to that enemy, then its leaders are guilty of cowardice and treason, and that nation will die.

I don’t expect to get through to you, but I do hope that you live long enough to see the horror that is to come in your country and the rest of the Western world. A destruction that people like you created, nurtured and promoted under the guise of feel-good liberalism and insane non-judgmentalism.

James W. writes:

As Jefferson pointed out, it is useless to argue with those who have renounced the use of reason. I would not bother to write a person like Baker. In one sense, it gives him a credibility he does not deserve to offer him argument. What has not been reasoned up cannot be reasoned down.

As often as not, what I see you generally undertake is to follow a precept of William Blake. When you tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who do. There is no time better spent.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 16, 2007 01:44 AM | Send