Outrage

I almost never link to an individual Steve Sailer piece, on the grounds that all intelligent people already read him, so what's the point?

I'm going to have to make an exception: this piece -- on why the humanitarian crises in Sudan and Zimbabwe are treated differently -- is so revelatory that it bears special mention.

[I]n an interview entitled "The McCain Doctrines" with Matt Bai in today's New York Times Magazine [May 18, 2008], John McCain volunteers that he's often thought about starting a war with Sudan, if only a way could be found to make it practical:

"I asked McCain if it was true … that he had been brought to a more idealist way of thinking partly by the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. ‘I think so, I think so,’ he said, nodding. 'And Darfur today. I feel strongly about Darfur, and yet, and this is where the realist side comes in, how do we effectively stop the genocide in Darfur?' He seemed to be genuinely wrestling with the question. 'You know the complications with a place that’s bigger, I guess, than the size of Texas, and it’s hard to know who the Janjaweed is, who are the killers, who are the victims. It’s all jumbled up. … And yet I look at Darfur, and I still look at Rwanda, to some degree, and think, How could we have gone in there and stopped that slaughter?'"

Note that, although McCain likes military adventures, the simpler task of intervening in Zimbabwe to avert famine does not appeal to him at all. While McCain volunteered Darfur, the NYT’s Bai has to bring Zimbabwe up:

"Why then, I asked McCain, shouldn’t we go into Zimbabwe, where, according to that morning’s paper, allies of the despotic president, Robert Mugabe, were rounding up his political opponents and preparing to subvert the results of the country’s recent national election?"

McCain tries to spell it out euphemistically for the journalist why a white President of the United States is not going to depose a black tyrant who wrecked his country by persecuting productive whites:

"'I think in the case of Zimbabwe, it’s because of our history in Africa,' McCain said thoughtfully."

Well, not that thoughtfully—the U.S. doesn't actually have much of a history in Africa. McCain notices his mistake and tries to make himself clear without actually mentioning the W-word:

"Not so much the United States but the Europeans, the colonialist history in Africa.'"

... What makes Zimbabwe so unsexy compared to Darfur is that in 1965 the British Colonial Office tried to give the colony of Rhodesia to its black majority. But its white population declared independence and for 15 years resisted an international trade embargo, building a substantial manufacturing base. Finally, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher organized the handover of the country to Robert Mugabe.

This is beyond pathetic: John McCain, eager for military adventurism on behalf of the Darfurians -- with whom we share neither race, nor religion, nor nationality -- won't countenance an effort to intervene in Zimbabwe on the grounds that it might help a white person!

Behold the Straight Talk Express.

To hell with the lot of them. If Half Sigma can torture out a worthwhile difference between John McCain and Barak Obama, well, more power to him, but I don't have the energy anymore.

I would add to that the Khartoum regime spent the 90's butchering or enslaving the Christian population of southern Sudan, and almost nobody cared. On the contrary, I remember how "controversial" that episode of the T.V. show Touched by an Angel that brought attention to what was happening there; controversial, you see, because the victims were Christian, and therefore beyond the proper concern of our bien pensants.

I took up Sailer's challenge to google "Sudan celebrities" vs "Zimbabwe celebrities". Sure enough: all first-page hits on Sudan were about celebrities decrying the violence there, while zero hits on Zimbabwe concerned its self-inflicted crisis.

While I'm still pissed off, I want to call attention to the backstory on the ICE raid at the Postville meat-processing plant: it details 16 years of media, government and business corruption aimed at subverting our immigration laws.