"This Blessed Plot, This Earth, This Realm, This England" -- Peter Hitchens Reminds Us That Every Country Is Special To Its Inhabitants

The Freedom and Sovereignty Caucus is dedicated, of course, to preserving American Freedom and Sovereignty, but we all acknowledge our historic cultural debt to England. And furthermore, the FSC admires the patriots of England--and the authentic patriots of any country--who wish to defend their land's honorable traditions and history.

Indeed, one of the greatest ever evocations of patriotism was written--of course!--by William Shakespeare, in his 1595 play, Richard II. Here, in a renowned soliloquy, John of Gaunt lets fly with his poetic devotion to his homeland, England:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege

All countries should have great lyricism on their behalf. In fact, most do--but this passage is surely one of the best, in English or any other language.

Once again, the point is not necessarily that England is so great. Instead, the point is that every country is great to the people who were born there, who grew up there, and who live there now.

And so in that spirit, I extend my admiration to a British patriot Peter Hitchens, a columnist/blogger for The Mail on Sunday--not to be confused with his neocon brother, Christopher Hitchens--who devoted most of his recent blog to defending Britain and its history.

Should Oxford be dominated by Islamic religion--specifically, the call to prayer? Some say yes, Hitchens says no. (Those are the "dreaming spires" of Oxford in the picture above; no doubt some will think that those towers would make great minarets, but let's hope that never happens.

Should a woman who courageously stood up to hooligans desecrating patriot graves be prosecuted by the police? While the hooligans, who were not harmed, are free to desecrate again? Some say yes, Hitchens says no.

I love my country, and wish to defend it. Hitchens loves his, and wishes to defend it. And that's the way it should be.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori -- It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. Those are the words of Horace, two thousand years ago, and they are still true today.

Let's remember that, even if, in our lives we are never called to make such a sacrfice ourselves.

This We'll Defend

“In great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls.” – Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, USA

The picture above is of Bunker Hill in Boston, site of the American Patriots' famous victory over the British on June 17, 1775. Those and other shots heard round the world that year are the enduring wellsprings of our freedom and of our sovereignty.

A New Year's Resolution -- Keep What We Have Here

Time to count our blessings. And the biggest blessing is that we have maintained order and civility across our country for most of our history. Yes, we have our problems, but they pale beside the problems of other countries. Have a look:

From Zacatecas, Mexico comes the disturbing news from the BBC that seven police officers died in an ambush as gunmen attacked a convoy carrying three suspected criminals. In the mayhem, two of the three suspects escaped--which I guess stamps them as criminals for sure. So I got curious: How far away from the US border is Zacatecas? Answer: about 350 miles. Not too far for a would-be immigrant, or maybe terrorist, to travel.

And what sort of place is Zacatecas? Well, according to the website OurMexico.com, it's a place where Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary bandit, is much admired--see picture above, from the Cerro de la Buffa, overlooking Zacatecas.

So how much of that sort of violence do we wish to import into the US?

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world comes sobering evidence that other parts of the world aren't interested in--or aren't capable of--copying our political model.

About Pakistan, here's one revealing headline from ABC News: "Pakistan Rejects Outside Help in Bhutto Probe." 'Nuff said.

But here's some more news from Kenya, where they just had an "election." Of course, in Kenya, as with most African countries, is cursed with horrendously drawn boundaries inherited from European colonialists--boundaries typically drawn in Europe for thoroughly Machiavellian purposes. That is, divide and conquer: Split the various ethnic groups across different jurisdictions so that none could easily mobilize against the colonizers. Tragically, post-colonial Africa inherited those borders, and those borders have become recipes for perpetual civil war. And that's what's going on, in low-grade form, even in relatively developed countries such as Kenya. Here's the way The New York Times' Jeffrey Gettleman describes the situation, in which challenger Raila Odinga, an ethnic Luo, took an incumbent Mwai Kibaki, an ethnic Kikuyu:

Several foreign observers said they feared that the government was using its muscle to swing the election and stay in power, which could be a recipe for chaos, with the results rejected by millions of people and Kenya’s cherished stability in danger of collapsing.

Kenya is one of the most developed countries in Africa, but this election has exposed its ugly tribal underbelly.

Mr. Odinga is a Luo, a big tribe in Kenya that feels marginalized from the country’s Kikuyu elite that has dominated business and politics since independence in 1963. Mr. Kibaki is a Kikuyu, and the voting so far has split straight down tribal lines, with each candidate winning big in his tribal homeland.

On Saturday, the first signs of a tribal war flared up in Nairobi, with Luo gangs sweeping into a shantytown called Mathare and stoning several Kikuyu residents. In Kibera, another huge slum, supporters of Mr. Odinga burnt down kiosks that they said belonged to Kikuyu businessmen.

“No Raila, no Kenya!” they screamed, with the fires crackling behind them.

The streets were a collage of destruction, strewn with burning tires, broken bottles, fist-size rocks and fresh shell casings from soldiers who fired in the air to scare the demonstrators off. Some men sharpened machetes on the asphalt, vowing to shed blood should Mr. Odinga lose.

Of course, America has had plenty of bloody ethnic feuds in its history. But for the most part, we have sorted these controversies out, and built a wonderful country. Nobody is saying, here in the US, for example, "No Romney, no America!" Or "No Hillary, no America!"

And we should keep it that way; we must solve our problems as Americans, in our own good time, without floods of foreigners who don't know our ways, and without floods of legislation from those who don't like our ways.

The Freedom & Sovereignty Caucus resolves to preserve our Freedom and Sovereignty. We will protect our Constitution, we will protect our liberty, we will protect our country.

If any of us wish to do more than that, politically we will find some other venue to do it. Because the FSC is focused, hedgehog-like on just a few key concerns. And yet if enough of us wish to do less than that--if we abandon our duty to our past, present, and future--then America might well be doomed to share the fate of Mexico, Pakistan, and Kenya.

Time to Get Real About Pakistan, and About the Defense of America--What the Assassination of Benazir Bhutto Means For Americans

Heckuva job, Condi! One doesn't wish to make light, in any way, of a terrible situation in Pakistan, but we must also remember that our leaders have an obligation to wise and farseeing. And if they are not wise and farseeing, we should get new leaders. And part of being farseeing, of course, is knowing what you don't know--what can't be known. In trying to manipulate Pakistani politics from 10,000 miles away, the Bush administration tried to play the political equivalent of drawing to an inside straight; actually what they wanted to do was much harder than that--more like hitting a hole-in-one on a difficult golf course in a high wind. In statecraft, humility is a great asset, although it's OK to feign that--this is politics after all. But what's really needed is a sense of what's realistic. As Bismarck, perhaps the most effective European diplomat of the 19th century, reminded us, "politics is the art of the possible." And given the Bush administration's pitiful track record when it comes to Pakistan--no apprehension of Osama Bin Laden, no suspension of cross-border aid to Taliban forces in Afghanistan, no effective oversight of US foreign aid, there was much reason for Rice and her boss, President George W. Bush, to be humble about their capabilities. And within just a few months, their high-hopes/low-realism strategy is in ashes.

If The Washington Post is to be believed, it was our Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who urged Benazir Bhutto to go back to Pakistan--where, of course, she was killed on Thursday.

As this disturbingly detailed front page article in the Post makes clear,the US was heavily involved in all aspects of the deal, from ill-starred beginning to tragic ending:

For Benazir Bhutto, the decision to return to Pakistan was sealed during a telephone call from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just a week before Bhutto flew home in October. The call culminated more than a year of secret diplomacy -- and came only when it became clear that the heir to Pakistan's most powerful political dynasty was the only one who could bail out Washington's key ally in the battle against terrorism.

So what to do? It would be too much to hope that those arrogantly overconfident neocons would completely fall silent, even when they have proven wrong yet again.

But fortunately, a few bold voices of resurgent realism are shining through. One such is Andrew C. McCarthy, writing for National Review Online. McCarthy gets right to the point, using blunt language that should be a cold slap in the face to those who see Pakistan as some place where American armchair "strategists" can play out their fantasies of Machiavellian mastery. Here's McCarthy, in his own blunt words:

There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.

Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.

The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.

The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters — warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.

The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.

In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.

It is the new way of warfare to proclaim that our quarrel is never with the heroic, struggling people of fill-in-the-blank country. No, we, of course, fight only the regime that oppresses them and frustrates their unquestionable desire for freedom and equality.

Pakistan just won’t cooperate with this noble narrative.

Whether we get round to admitting it or not, in Pakistan, our quarrel is with the people. Their struggle, literally, is jihad. For them, freedom would mean institutionalizing the tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism. They are the same people who, only a few weeks ago, tried to kill Benazir Bhutto on what was to be her triumphant return to prominence — the symbol, however dubious, of democracy’s promise. They are the same people who managed to kill her today. Today, no surfeit of Western media depicting angry lawyers railing about Musharraf — as if he were the problem — can camouflage that fact.

Once we've had our fill of neocon fantasy, we can return to what works in foreign policy--realism, the art of the possible. Last year Michael Lind , a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington DC, published a useful history book, The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life, which sought to remind Americans of their own successful history in diplomacy. Lind does not argue for isolationism, he argues for a constructive internationalism, based on time-tested balance-of-power politics. Good! We need a foreign policy that works, for a change.

The stakes are high--mushroom cloud high.

Idealism and altruism are great. But as history reminds us, the continued freedom and sovereignty of America depends on flinty-eyed don't-tread-on-me toughness and realism. Maybe we can make other countries better. But most definitely, we must preserve and protect the United States of America.

That's the mission of the Freedom and Sovereignty Caucus.