Freedom Alone

Not long ago, syndicated neoconservative talk show host,  Rush Limbaugh ( don’t TELL ME you haven’t heard of him), said the following which is an excerpt from a much longer monologue:

“There have been populations of people organized as countries since the founding of the planet, since it was created, and since humanity first appeared.  People have organized themselves in various ways:  groups, families, nations.  Now, the earth and humanity, depending on who you talk to, is millions of years old, billions of years old, and throughout the history of human beings, no group of human beings has ever produced the wealth, the freedom, the opportunity, the prosperity, the security, as Americans.  The United States of America, throughout human history, is the greatest nation however you wish to define it, in history.  Now, how did this happen?  We, the United States of America, are just human beings.  There are countries that exist at the same time we have, there are countries that existed long before we came into being, of course in Europe and Asia, Africa, Australia, the subcontinents.”

I think we can ascertain here what Mr. Limbaugh is saying. Admittedly, he offers us a scenario that suggests something most Americans no longer think about, and that is their origin in the here and now. But I wonder what he means when he says “we?”

Hello ladies. We agree.

Who exactly is we; we who have produced a standard of living unheard of and undreamed of even by people who were alive 100 years ago. We who have produced a country where the occupants have the highest expectations of opportunity, security, wealth, and education, than any group of human beings has ever had. Who is “we?”

He goes on:

After all China, Japan, Russia, the satellite countries, Italy, France, Australia — all these countries have been around much, much longer than we have.  And admittedly, people that founded this country came from Europe.  Why were they not able to do where they lived what they did here?  You realize our Founding Fathers were Brits.  Why were they not able to turn Great Britain or England into the United States when they lived there?

Rush Limbaugh answers this question himself by saying it was the “freedom” from political and social oppression that unharnessed the power that created what we know to be the United States. True enough, I suppose. England and Great Britain were under the rule of monarchs and were not able to exercise the kind of political movement that would eventually build the kind of nation that was later to become America. This condition, we assume, also applied to other Western nations like France, Italy, Australia, Switzerland, Ireland, etc as well as to more cloistered regimes in China, Russia, Japan, countries in the Middle East and in the lower Western hemisphere. Africa of course, with all of its satellite populations that had migrated or were forced across the earth through bondage, comes into play as well.

So in other words, while we can agree not all European derived persons could have replaced the original founders, is Rush saying that Africans and Muslims could just as well have done so? Right.

Rush is insinuating here that it was freedom and freedom alone that created the United States, as if freedom is mutually exclusive to the white people who carried the philosophy and outlook of freedom with them. Of course, it can be argued that Russians and Australians could not have built the United the States he’s talking about. But neither could Muslims or Africans. Yet he is clearly insinuating that freedom and freedom alone, regardless of whatever race of people exercised it, would have successfully gave us a country where the occupants have the highest expectations of opportunity, security, wealth, and education, than any group of human beings has ever had — complete with our Constitution and Bill of Rights. This suggestion on its face is ridiculous and smacks of racial relativism and equality dogma. No, its a safe bet that Russians and Chinese founders could not have given us the United States we used to have in the 40’s, 50’s and parts of the sixties. And again, neither could Africans and Middle Easterners. But the irrefutable fact that it WAS British Europeans, who extrapolated the best from their own people’s global wisdom and learned bitter lessons from their foul/ups — who did not share total equality with not only their global racial kinsmen but non-white races as well — saw the time was right and set out to create a true homeland for a distinct race of people.

The wild success of Pat Buchanan’s excellent book “The Death of the West” should reinforce our position here: that although no two European derived nations or groups are on equal footing the fact remains that it is our folk alone who are capable of reproducing themselves and carrying on our culture family by family; that it is culture that can reinforce our genes; and it is our genes that create the culture. The same goes for all races of man. When Rush Limbaugh says that we, the United States of America, are just human beings he’s trying to buffalo his followers to believe that Haitians and Zimbabweans are just the same as Russians and Frenchmen — ALL OF WHOM would have been just as successful in creating America ( as we know it) through freedom alone. Nonsense. Racial variables are one thing. But this is just a nice way for people like Rush to peddle corporate racial equality which, as we know, affects the bottom line.

Now having said all that, we can almost hear the shrieks of horror and demands for my being burned at the stake for heresy; and I would bet that, on some level, Rush would agree with that sentence.