Africa
Ungar, Sanford J.
Perhaps most damning of all is the ACLU's shameful record on the issue of civil liberties in the Soviet Union. Then-fellow traveler Roger Baldwin made two friendly visits to the USSR and published...
...That the ACLU has is largely its own fault...
...It was only after the shock of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact and in the face of an imminent congressional investigation into its loyalty that the ACLU came to its senses, expelled Communist party member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from the board of directors, and passed the well-known 1940 resolution which barred from its governing boards members of any political organization which supports "totalitarian dictator-ship in any country" or individuals who publicly do so...
...Proposals for reform include stringent constraints on the fiscal process, economic deregulation, tax reduction and simplification, and reductions in both transfer payments and military spending...
...Ungar labors under the impression that "few Europeans and Americans recognize the African origin of much music and dance that they en-joy...
...What is not generally known is that shortly after the Polovchak case emerged, the New Jersey CLU sought to defend a Chilean child in almost identical circumstances to Walter's...
...Ungar apply this "history, culture, and current needs" criterion, this "tolerance of differences," to the white tribe in South Africa, to justify its fears about oneman-one-vote...
...Then, in 1974, the strictures of the 1940 resolution were done away with altogether...
...My italics.] If the political and economic horrors do not necessarily make a black regime despicable, then what will do the trick...
...This is ancillary to the book's central theme, which is a long vehement assault on the present government of South Africa...
...As Nicholas von Hoffman has aptly put it, "The ACLU has so stretched and distorted the definition of our `rights' that they are beginning to look to many people like wrongs...
...Ideally," he writes, "an organization dedicated to the Bill of Rights should never be put on the defensive...
...This is generally understood to connote excessive dependence upon countries out-side of Africa, especially the United States...
...the deleterious impact of welfare programs, Social Security, and military spending on capital formation...
...The much-loved and respected Julius Nyerere managed to destroy the economy of Tanzania with his "socialist" policies...
...In the late sixties, the ACLU removed it from its constitution and substituted a watered-down version...
...and, in 1982, Lillian Hellman, perhaps America's leading apologist for Stalinism, was elected to the National Advisory Council of the ACLU...
...ten on December 26, 1913 in Chihuahua (then occupied by pro Villa forces), he announced that he was going to Ojinaga the next day...
...paper, $14.95 cloth, $34.95 FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH Available at bookstores 177 Post St., San Francisco, CA 94108 T*X& 1-' ' DE 1 AL FORMATION I THE UNITED STATES AFRICA: THE PEOPLE AND POLITICS OF AN EMERGING CONTINENT Sanford J. Ungar/Simon and Schuster/$19.95 Herb Greer and the like, usually without specific sources for the estimate, the feeling, or the vision...
...However, there is a genuine neo-colonialism in Africa, which works like this: Old colonial borders and structures, abandoned by Europeans after World War II, were taken over by local elites...
...Ungar profess to ad-mire and wish well...
...The Constitution guarantees individuals equal protection of the laws—the ACLU's drive for "equal results" is a "political exercise" with no constitutional foundation...
...Here as elsewhere, dependence on extra-African help has not diminished but increased...
...Information For information about the society or registration for the symposium, call or write: Mr...
...Donohue reminds today's autonomistic liberals that the Founding Fathers prized the virtues of moderation, sobriety, and self-discipline in public affairs...
...Where possible, visiting students will be housed in Stan-ford students' apartments...
...PETER GRACE TAXATION AND THE DEFICIT ECONOMY Fiscal Policy and Capital Formation in the United States Edited by DWIGHT R. LEE Foreword by MICHAEL J. BOSKIN Tenty-two distinguished economists examine the harmful effects of taxation on personal and corporate income...
...What he prop-agates is the standard shallow journalistic (one of his sources is Anthony Lewis) defense of Third World regimes—in this instance black African—that are hostile to the United States...
...I will read it `.i carefully before I investor send money...
...this is its real significance...
...Just as the ACLU has adopted key elements of "collectivistic liberalism" on matters concerning social equality, Donohue argues they have taken over currents of the nineteenth-century "autonomistic liberalism" which pre-ceded it on the questions of free speech liberalism...
...in most of the continent he is trapped by this as surely as by skin color in South Africa, with fewer hopes of reform and progress than are being offered by Botha's government...
...With the possible exception of Kenya, in no case has the condition of a neo-colonialized people improved over the long term...
...The disparity in disapproval is of the essence of racism, implying asit does the most nauseating condescension toward black Africans whom...
...PACIFIC INSTITUTE 530 pages...
...Ungar, they include a real danger to our oil-shipping life-line around the cape...
...If Bierce's literary career had not been entirely disappointing, he had clearly reached some kind of turning point in his life...
...Ungar with the plea—familiar from another context—that the people are learning to read and getting improved health care...
...ACLU's Millian positions on these matters from the republican philosophy of America's Founding Fathers...
...The following year, with seeming deliberateness, he took leave of his earlier life, touring the battle sites where he had fought in the Civil War and paying farewell visits to friends and relations...
...To be fair, though, they may not be able to help this, suffering as they do from a bizarre ailment, especially virulent among the liberal sub-species that inhabits the United States...
...Ungar's book, much as it glows in the faces of simple-minded celebrities who have made anti-Boer protest the latest chic cause in America...
...The economic difference between this state and the rest of Africa is huge, but Mr...
...With the radicalization of liberalism in the 1960s and 70s, the ACLU's views on free expression and morality took on an extremist cast...
...The most disgusting aspect of it is not the double standard as such...
...Mexico was in the throes of its own civil war, and Bierce intended to act as an "observer" of Pancho Villa's rebel army...
...tle Black Sambo being racist, and adds 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 a character that does not appear in the book, plus story elements it does not contain...
...Ungar, they are pleased to demand disinvestment and allude to "a number of South African black leaders" (as I say, Mr...
...20006 (202) 822-8138 THE OLD GRINGO Carlos Fuentes/Farrar Straus Giroux/$14.95 Anita Susan Grossman It should not be surprising that Mexico's leading novelist, Carlos Fuentes, has taken Bierce's strange disappearance as the subject of his latest book...
...r Rt A N I L _11_ N__ For a prospectus on this offering call: 889-4935 (local) Toll Free 1.800-392-8774 (Mo...
...telecommunications and broadcast deregulation...
...The affliction is a metaphysical pica, a morbid compulsion to gobble up blame...
...The Society is represented at more than 65 law schools...
...The implication is that a pro-Western bias proves subservience and fake in-dependence...
...He prefers his economics to have a moral flavor, and claims that the South African statistics are "skewed byinternal disparities...
...The longest chapter in the book is devoted to a summary of apartheid and its present problems, including Botha's attempts at reform...
...As elsewhere in the book, the reader is left with nothing but bum-rumble to in-form his judgment...
...Early commitments to speak have been received from U.S...
...What changed was the relation-ship of the elite to the local people...
...the religion clauses and government neutrality...
...This spiritual coprophagia is evident throughout Africa, Sanford J. Ungar's journalistic survey of sub-Saharan countries...
...Ungar with rueful compassion, backed by this mitigating excuse: . it is entirely reasonable to press African rulers to respect the right of their people to have control over their own daily lives in a manner consistent with the history, culture, and current needs of their people...
...Help and troops from the Eastern bloc, including Cuba, connotes a deep longing for real independence...
...Eugene Meyer Executive Director The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies 1625 Eye Street, NW Washington, D.C...
...He never admits that any such goals exist in South Africa...
...For us, pace Mr...
...63105 Please send me a prospectus containing more complete information about Franklin's AGEEHigh Income Fund, including charges and expenses...
...the wonder is rather that it took so long to inspire a work of serious fiction...
...stranded in rural Chihuahua when she 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986...
...In addition to a semi-formal banquet Saturday evening, there will be opportunities for outdoor recreation in sunny northern California...
...But in black Africa he cannot alter his tribal birth either...
...These and other such quirks blow the gaff on Mr...
...and all other states) Or write: Drexel Burnham ATTN: B. Anthony Kirk 1st Vice-President, Investments 7701 Forsyth Suite 700 St...
...One is constantly reminded of Shakespeare's Duke in the Forest of Arden, praising the toad which is venomous and ugly, but "wears yet a precious jewel in his head...
...And wherever the ACLU considers moral behavior self-regarding (e.g., prostitution, drugs) the acts are outside the purview of the state...
...Ungar's strictures do not follow the color line in every case...
...Louis, Mo...
...As Donohue poin?s out, the ACLU today holds thebroadest, most radical position on free speech ever posited by serious students of the Constitution...
...The short introduction and early chapters do not inspire much confidence...
...Travel scholarships will be available to defray student expenses...
...Ungar's real purpose, which is propaganda...
...the freedom of association...
...GGThe most comprehensive analysis available anywhere...
...in a majority of cases it has worsened, often catastrophically...
...Ungar's principal criterion throughout is the usual racist double standard applied by American liberals and the European bourgeois Left, turning Big Bill Broonzy's famous chorus inside out like this: If they're white, give 'em spite;/and if they're brown, man, they're sound,/but if they're black, they're brothers—/get back, and don't you dare attack...
...Im dluable to our deficit-reduction efforts'', —J...
...The tribal corn-' plexity of South Africa is mentioned, and so are the conflicts between black leaders there...
...Topics And Guest Speakers Panelists will discuss a variety of important First Amendment issues including: pornography and freedom of speech...
...At any rate, no one—Mexican or American—has ever claimed to have seen him after that date, although his disappearance caused a sensation and prompted numerous investigations...
...But by the mid-sixties, the ACLU was already apologizing for the 1940 resolution...
...A great deal of space in Africa is given to describing the rewards in question: economic disaster, corrupt elites, intertribal slaughter, utter dependence on outside aid which is skimmed by the elites, a worsening of internal oppression, and starvation, all for the locals...
...Ironically, Bierce became better known for the mystery surrounding his death than for any of his published writings—an irony he himself would have been quick to appreciate...
...He even drags out the old wheeze about Helen Bannerman's Lit- ' playwright living in England...
...In a few cases the economic forces of the old inertial system provided a temporary period of prosperity, which faded as the distance from the old days lengthened...
...The value of your investment at redemption may be more or less than your cost...
...He seems unaware, or prefers not to mention, that these relationships were not forged in the depths of Western industrial civilization, but in the rather different ambiance of the Kalahari Desert...
...The book does contain a fair tourist's selection of facts, but the way they are presented is shifty, occasionally to the point of dishonesty, and question-begging...
...Rock singer Ozzy Osbourne, who had urinated on the Alamo shrine and bitten off the head of a bat while per-forming, was defended in the name of free expression...
...Thirty-one-yearAnita Susan Grossman is a writer /iv- old Harriet Winslow finds herself ing in Berkeley, California...
...The reader is never told exactly what this means, any more than the author explains his contention that Soviet goals and Cuban goals in black Africa are "not always congruent...
...To be a Gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia...
...If this trade rests now upon the success of a system we dislike, we can note that the system is changing in response to that dislike, if not as quickly as the protesters wish...
...He is comically priggish about the portrayal of "Africans" in the Marx Brothers film Animal Crackers...
...The skin-color criterion is a moral cheat, like the tut-tut media coverage of black African massacres, by reporters who then affect a sanctimonious fury over the death of every single black South African rioter or protester—like God lamenting the fall of every sparrow...
...he cites Madison's remark in The Federalist that "liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power...
...If this pressure builds and succeeds in cutting us off from Pretoria, and destroys the government there, then our vicarious revolutionaries may indeed get what they lust for...
...Ungar is fond of a vague reference), quoting their claim that "whatever temporary harm blacks may suffer, it is worth the ultimate rewards of freedom...
...In Fuentes's recounting of the story, Bierce's journey into Mexico is the occasion for a larger meditation on U.S.-Mexican history, as reflected in the shifting relationship between the "Old Gringo" and two fictional characters, an American schoolteacher and a Mexican peasant-soldier...
...Even the sexual exploitation of children for commercial purposes—child pornography—is alleged to be wholly protected by the First Amendment...
...and the special political and bureaucratic interests that dominate the fiscal process...
...s .•:.=•r.`;r''.?9:' securities...
...and John Hart Ely, Dean of Stanford Law School...
...And he makes a per-suasive case that the Founding Fathers in no way wished to erect the ACLU's iron curtain between Church and State but were seeking assurance through the "establishment clause" that a national religion would not be countenanced...
...Apartheid exploits blacks economically, denies them a vote, segregates them in a humiliating manner, and is en-forced by troops and police who torture political prisoners and will not hesitate to shoot black rioters and demonstrators...
...Like Mr...
...Liberals' rueful style in regretting black sins implies that the blacks are only doing what comes naturally—considering history, culture, current needs, and color...
...two years later the Union rescinded the decision that ousted Flynn and praised her as a great champion of labor rights...
...Brian J. Brille Symposium Director Stanford Federalist Society Or Stanford Law School Stanford, CA 94305 (415) 497-1551 1 MADISON The Federalist Society is a nationwide organization of conservative and libertarian lawyers and law students dedicated to the principles of limited government and a limited judiciary...
...Delegations of law students are especially welcome...
...liberals like Mr...
...By 1912 he had seen his twelve-volume Collected Works into print and ended his long association with the Hearst press, for which he had been a columnist and crusading reporter...
...This would be the inevitable result of a black takeover, and to put it bluntly, our anti-Boer crowd would love to see those Afrikanerbigots get it in the neck...
...In general it became less benevolent, not to say much bloodier...
...furthermore, a great part of the profit we take elsewhere in the world comes from equally bad or rather worse systems, none of which are decried by liberals in the emotive terms applied to our relations with South Africa...
...This backsliding has already had its consequences...
...By contrast Afrikaners, because they are white, are condemned with singular, tailor-made vindictiveness—not for behaving like the African tribe which they are, but for not comporting themselves like good liberal democratic Americans or Britons...
...In his last letter, writ-our own resources in danegeld (i.e., "aid") payments to hostile regimes in an area where we once traded profit-ably...
...In the event, Africa is routine hack work, riddled with formulae like "it is estimated," "it is felt," "many see," Herb Greer is an American writer and tion...
...Even the hideous accomplishments of Ethiopia's Mengistu are softened by Mr...
...The fact that the government which is despised looks to the West, and above all to America, for help, and gets it...
...jl Toll Free 1-800-325-8180 (III...
...Court of Appeals Judges Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork...
...There will be approximately twenty speakers, including prominent judges and academicians...
...The ACLU, of course, intervened on the side of Walter's parents...
...There is no exploration of what this "putatively" (the same qualification is applied to Angola and Mozambique) Marxist-Leninist regime uses for reading matter, or of the peculiar relationship of health care to population growth in a country where massive numbers are starving to death, while the government spends its money on arms instead of food...
...Then-fellow traveler Roger Baldwin made two friendly visits to the USSR and published two laudatory books, Liberty Under the Soviets (1928) and Soviet Russia Today (1934...
...These days the ritual condemnation of racism takes precedence over all principles including common sense, providing always that the racism is that of Western (and South African) whites against blacks...
...In some countries, like the Central African Republic 3....- :x i. "k •t...
...Their pleasure at contemplating this result obscures any incidental consequences...
...Ungar will have none of that...
...Donohue sharply distinguishes the...
...It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar steps...
...uncertainty of access to mineral supplies in southern Africa, and the necessity of expending In a letter to his nephew's wife shortly before he disappeared into Mexico in 1913, Ambrose Bierce wrote prophetically, "Good-bye—if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life...
...The single African exception to this dismal continental condition has been South Africa...
...The term is used as a form of moral blackmail, to reconcile hostile behavior with demands for more money...
...Admittedly Mr...
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...He is upset because, as he sees it, so few in the West have been doing the same thing, and he has written this guide to fill the gap in our consciousness...
...Bierce was seventy-one, suffering from asthma and perhaps loneliness as well, since his long-estranged wife had died in 1905, and his two sons had also died young...
...Even on the day when Walter turned eighteen and became' a free man, ACLU lawyer Harvey M. Grossman was whining that in the Soviet Union Walter's parents "are perceived as people who suffered harm at the hands of the United States Government...
...If a despot was benevolent it made no difference to this tendency...
...Our righteous pro-testers do not like to think much about the implications of this...
...On the other hand, tribal or Marxist governments in black Africa bleed their economies white (no pun intended), but they do give people a vote—sometimes, when the votes are coerced in a particular direction as in Zimbabwe...
...Here he refers to the enormous influence of John Stuart Mill on the ACLU...
...This is the other major thrust of Donohue's critique...
...In fact, like Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic, they rather like the idea of sudden change which would involve a bit of bloodshed...
...In Africa there also appears a cliche very popular in liberal discussions of the Third World: neo-colonialism...
...He offers undergraduate approval of the exemplary San or Bushmen, because their "unusually rich and significant human relationships" may have spared them our stress-related ailments...
...The Union's shabby performance in the case of Walter Polovchak, the young emigre who elected to remain in the United States rather than return to the Soviet Union with hisparents, is but one example...
...The black tyrants also humiliate and oppress their tribal opponents, starve their people by the hundreds of thousands, torture political prisoners, use police and troops to operate genocidal policies of mass slaughter, and give their elites privileges which are abused in a way never dreamed of by the most verkrampte Afrikaans politician...
...This Uriah Heep piety shines from the pages of Mr...
...In the argument that protesters make to condemn apartheid as worse than the black African political and economic horrors, the sins of both sides are first of all freely admitted...
...He is prepared to show contempt for black regimes, say in Zaire or Liberia...
...All these are enjoyed by other black African states, which are described by Mr...
...The area will thus pass violently out of the Western orbit...
...The goal is honorable, worthy of the most formidable historian or (given the factors of racism and political violence) the most profound moral philosopher...
...Professors Paul Bator, Richard Epstein, and Lino Graglia...
...not the desecration of morality...
...Given the Soviet backing for Oliver Tambo and the African National Congress, it seems obvious that one Soviet goal will be served by the destruction of the present Pretoria government...
...They do not qualify for disfavor just by virtue of their tribalism, their ghastly mismanagement of economic affairs, their bloodthirsty treatment of internal opposition, their personality cults, their corruption, or their one-party tyranny...
...Donohue concludes by strongly affirming the American republican tradiWestern liberals are supposed to be kind to the Third World, but they are not, really...
...Ungar is quite open about African elites and their skimming of aid, though he does not mention Mengistu's £20-a-ton tax on the landing of aid supplies, and his use of this money to pursue the current civil war...
...I am also interested in Franklin's ^ IRA ^ Keogh plan...
...And yet apartheid is worse, because, say the protesters, a man can-not change the color of his skin...
...commercial speech...
...All this is accompanied by a self-righteous air which makes hypocrisy look like a children's game...
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...not even the use of the issue to mount cheap-shot party political attacks on the present government...
...In Donohue's view, Mill's philosophy led to anarchism with regard to free expression and a concomitant laissez-faire posture on issues of morality...
...we will all have the harsh experience of watching one more bloody and tragic chapter unfold in the contemporary annals of smug, pious, well-meaning stupidity...
...It is the covert racism which informs the whole proceeding...
...The author says he has been paying a lot of attention to this part of Africa for about twenty years...
...But would Mr...
...ii' THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 47 and Uganda, the results were surrealistically lethal...
...Most likely he got there, to be killed in a battle which took place on January 11, and was buried in an unmarked grave...
...The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies presents A Symposium on the First Amendment MARCH 7-9, 1986 Stanford Law School Public Participation All persons interested in philosophy and policy applications of the First Amendment are invited to attend...
...They can be stingy almost beyond belief toward the "developing" countries, and if it comes to that, to the rest of the world outside the democratic West...
Vol. 19 • February 1986 • No. 2
