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~How was your Thanksgiving? On a day to give thanks for all the blessings of America, it fell to Gary Beckstrom to announce to the world the death of his twenty-year-old daughter, Sarah. That will taint Thanksgiving every year for the rest of Mr Beckstrom's life - in part because his child's blood is on the hands not just of her killer but of the public policy that enabled the murderer to be on the streets of what passes for the national capital. Thanks, America!
The Democrats are in favour of admitting the killer of the next Sarah Beckstrom, and non-Trump Republicans are happy to string along. Here is the famously rock-ribbed "conservative" Bill Kristol, a few weeks after the fall of Kabul:
Almost every Afghan refugee will turn out to be so much better an American than Charlie Kirk. https://t.co/CdKZCCm2BO
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) August 16, 2021
Mr Kristol was the most prominent cheerleader for the two-decade unwon wars that made the supposed hyperpower a global laughingstock. After spending so long urging Americans to die for Jalalabad, he should surely have picked up along the way an actual fact or two about the joint. Otherwise, he risks appearing a shallow, parochial bleepwit whose "Project for the New American Century" looks more like a Project for a No American Century.
Facts? For starters, as I wrote in The National Post of Canada twenty-four sodding years ago, in Afghanistan it is forbidden by law for women to feel sunlight on their faces. Perhaps Bill Kristol could impose similar strictures on his own womenfolk and let us know how it goes.
To take him more seriously than he deserves, presumably Kristol believes that Charlie Kirk's claims to Americanness rest on outmoded concepts such as being born in America to American parents and being raised in American institutions such as the Presbyterian Church and the Boy Scouts. Whereas to the Wanker Right America is nothing so vulgar and restrictive but is instead an "idea", whereby simply by getting off the boat at Ellis Island and setting foot on American soil one imbibes the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of nine-year-old child brides from the next village. Whoops, sorry, I mean the pursuit of happiness.
The New York Post headlined its coverage of Miss Beckstrom's murder as follows:
National Guardswoman Sarah Beckstrom shot by crazed Afghan refugee
But is the Afghan refugee really that "crazed"? I mean by comparison with Bill Kristol and other proponents of the "magic soil" theory of mass migration, such as his friends at Mr Murdoch's equally "conservative" Wall Street Journal:
The alleged shooting by an Afghan 'partner' shouldn't condemn all who assisted the U.S. and now live here.
Of course not! The Wanker Right is now saying it's outrageous that Biden did not "vet" any of the incoming Afghans. The killer of Sarah Beckstrom worked for a CIA-backed "Zero Unit" in Kandahar; he served alongside US troops for a decade. There is no "vetting" procedure he would not have aced. So, if you're one of those on the Wanker Right calling for more vetting, you're going to lose your country, and you entirely deserve to. There's more wisdom in a throwaway line by George Macdonald Fraser in his comic romp Flashman and the Great Game - that an Afghan's friendship lasts "only as long as it is convenient".
But not if you're war-crazed Bill Kristol. If you think that Americanness is just something whose transformative properties can be inhaled from the Taco Bell at Dulles Arrivals, well, it's true that first contact with the land of the free can bring about miraculous modifications: think of all those doughty Afghan "translators" for the US military who, upon arrival in the Lower Forty-Eight mysteriously found all their English fluency had vapourised over the Atlantic and suddenly required translators themselves.
Don't you ever get tired of the bollocks?
There are exceptions, such as the BBC's former Afghan hottie Yalda Hakim, whose casual asides during the fall of Kabul were worth more than all the bouffant tosspots of the Yank networks put together. But that's the point: Miss Hakim is an exception, and the exceptions do not negate the general rule. "Afghan" is a somewhat problematic concept in a highly tribalised society, but, granted that it exists for the purposes of international law, let us play along: no country that isn't Afghanistan needs Afghans. The United Kingdom, under its rock-ribbed "conservative" government, admitted some 200,000 Afghans - 15,000 plucky loyal "translators" plus dependents - and then took out a legal injunction to prevent the media reporting on the fact. Robert Jenrick, a leading member of the Conservative opposition, says that Afghans commit sex crimes at a rate twenty times higher than UK citizens. Before he reinvented himself as Mister Butch, Mr Jenrick was the Tory immigration minister who let in all those sex-fiends of the Hindu Kush, so presumably he knows whereof he speaks.
President Trump has now responded to the slaughter of Sarah Beckstrom by announcing that he "will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries". Does that include the United Kingdom? It ought to. Either way, that's great news - at least for the forty-eight hours until the district court judge of Dead Moose Junction strikes down the President and orders the executive branch to create a cabinet-level Department of Afghans.
Yet even the President's executive order will not, ultimately, suffice. To prevent its own conscription into the Third World, America will need to deport tens of millions of its present population. It will also to have to abandon the arseholian self-mythologising that has brought it to the point of national extinction and global eclipse at the intersection of world-record debt and unprecedented mass migration. Do you like, as some niche Canadian once said, the way the French gave the Americans a pretty great "Statue of Liberty" and the Americans wrecked it by stapling a crap poem to the bottom and turning it into a Statue of Immigration? "Diversity" is where nations go to die.
"Nation of immigrants"? As late as the 1990s, over half the people in America were descendants of those who were here before July 4th 1776. Gee, it's almost as if the country was founded by British settlers who wanted to take Anglo-Scottish ideas of liberty a little further than the imperial metropolis wanted to take them...
Today? Well, Gary Beckstrom has one surviving daughter - which is one fifth of the children of Sarah's killer: five. Which is fairly typical of the fecund Afghans. So, in a few years, the murderer's progeny will be out-voting Mr Beckstrom's. Biden, Kristol, The Wall Street Journal et al add insult to fatal injury.
It is a matter of regret to me that America has succeeded in exporting the "nation of immigrants" bollocks to the other British settler nations and to all of Europe west of the Iron Curtain - to the extent that even countries no American thinks of as diverse, such as Sweden and Austria, will have extinguished their ancestral homelands by mid-century. The Yanks like to mock the gunlessness of Europeans. Okay then, what's your excuse for stringing along with demographic dispossession and the slaughter of your maidenhood?
Next year, upon America's quarter-centennial (a mere blip in the sweep of history), Trump should stand at the Statue of Liberty, crowbar off the crappy poem and toss it into the ocean. As things stand, there's unlikely to be a three-hundredth anniversary.
Rest in peace, Sarah Beckstrom.
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