THOUGHTS FROM FJORDMAN
Global Politician, NY
356&cid=12&sid=51
Aug 29 2007
Recently, I made a comparison between the reaction of Spartan King
Leonidas to the Persian invasion of Greece 2500 years ago and the
total lack of reaction against the Muslim invasion of Europe in the
21st century. This does not in any way indicate that I believe the
two invasions were identical.
The founder of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great, was remarkably
tolerant for his time. He announced that under his rule, "everyone
is free to choose a religion," and made no attempt to impose
Zoroastrianism, which became a popular religion in his empire,
on others.
After the Persians conquered Babylon in 539 B.C., Cyrus announced that
the Jews were free to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple,
which had been destroyed by the Babylonians a few years earlier, thus
ending the Babylonian Captivity. Judaism was influenced by Zoroastrian
ideas during this Exile. The founder of this religious tradition,
Zarathustra, was a fellow monotheist who believed in "one true
God." The depiction of the Devil, among other things, in Christianity
later is in some ways similar to ideas found in Zoroastrianism.
The Iranians had a proud history before the advent of Islam. Maybe some
day they can follow the example of former Muslims such as Ali Sina and
Parvin Darabi and lead the Islamic world away from sharia and Jihad.
The most interesting question isn’t what kind of enemy we are facing,
but why Europeans are so weak and feeble in their response. Europe
was deeply traumatized by two bloody world wars, fought largely
on its soil in the first half of the twentieth century, and has
never fully recovered from this. Moreover, Western Europe enjoyed
an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity in the second half
of the twentieth century thanks to American military protection. The
combination of these two periods has created entire generations of who
believe that war is always evil, for whatever reason, and are under
the illusion that the world has moved "beyond war," which can soon
be banned permanently by international law. Some observers tend to
focus exclusively on the destruction wrought during the first of these
periods, and tend to forget the challenges created by the artificially
safe and peaceful environment upheld by outsiders afterwards.
Maybe one of our flaws is a tendency to go from one extreme to the
next. Our culture is either superior to that of all others, or it
is evil and worthless and should be eradicated. We have created a
culture founded on ritualized atonement for past sins, some real and
some imaginary, on abasing ourselves in front of others. The only
thing we shouldn’t accept is oppression and inequality, which led to
all kinds of horrors of slavery, wars and colonialism in the past.
There are real evils in our past, and we should not pretend that
they didn’t happen. But the West has never been the sole source of
atrocities on the planet.
We have developed a strange nanny state culture where risk of any kind
is frowned upon. Children are hardly allowed to go to the playground
without wearing a full-body armor, yet at the same time we think
nothing of allowing the most violent cultures on earth to settle next
door. Our total aversion against small-scale risks and dangers in our
everyday life makes us incapable of dealing with large-scale threats to
our lives and our civilization when they occur. This insidious effect
is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the over-regulated welfare
state society. Moreover, the wealth that has been produced in the past
by capitalist dynamism has generated a buffer which ensures that it
takes time before bad ideas have their full effect. In combination,
all these factors have created a bubble of welfare and prosperity
where all kinds of unsustainable ideas can thrive.
The historian Bernard Lewis writes – correctly – in his book The Crisis
of Islam that the Crusade was a late development that constitutes
a radical departure from basic Christian values as expressed in the
Gospels. It was of limited duration, whereas Jihad is present from
the beginning of Islamic history – in scripture and in the life of the
Prophet. However, the same Lewis has some huge blind spots. His ideas
about exporting "freedom" to Muslims made significant damage with
his support for the pro-democracy drive in Iraq. According to him,
"The earliest specifically anti-Semitic statements in the Middle East
occurred among the Christian minorities, and can usually be traced
back to European originals."
This is nonsense, as Andrew G. Bostom has clearly demonstrated in his
book The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. According to Bostom, from the
advent of Islam, dehumanizing Jews as apes (Koran 2:65/7:166), or apes
and pigs (Koran 5:60) has been common. Muhammad himself referred to the
Medinan Jews of the Banu Qurayza as "apes" just before orchestrating
the slaughter of all their post-pubertal men. There are quotes in
support of anti-Semitism in the hadith, traditions about the Prophet:
"The Last Hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against
the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide
themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say:
‘Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and
kill him.’"
Yes, there is an undeniable and unholy tradition of Christian
anti-Semitism, with Jews as "Christ killers." However, when the Nazis
wanted Jews to wear yellow stars and symbols publicly identifying
them as Jews, it could be argued that they were in fact copying
an Islamic idea. Non-Muslim dhimmis are supposed to wear specific
clothes and colors identifying them as belonging to a particular
religious groups, as both Jews and Christians did in Islamic Spain
and Portugal. That’s one of the Arab influences that is carefully
ignored when Multiculturalists talk about how much we owe Muslims.
I have, on occasion, been critical of my own country’s policies. Am
I thus behaving in the same way as Western Multiculturalists, by
undermining my own nation’s confidence? I don’t think so. I do not
hate my country. It was a good country to grow up in, and I’d like it
to remain a safe country to grow up in for my grandchildren. I would,
for the most part, describe my own country as naïve rather than evil,
although there is something sinister about some of the anti-Israeli
and anti-American rhetoric.
A man should always be prepared to defend his nation’s freedom and
survival, but he shouldn’t be obliged to always defend his nation’s
policies if these are unjust and involve sacrificing the freedom and
survival of others. A man should criticize his country when it does
something wrong, both because this is the right thing to do, but also
because, he, by making his country live up to its full potential,
will make it easier to defend.
It is true that smaller nations cannot win major ideological wars
on their own, but that is no excuse for doing nothing. We should
at least hold our ground at home. Israel is also a small nation,
yet has held the line against Jihad for decades, and Denmark, the
only Scandinavian country with some spine left, has also left its mark.
Norwegians did not rescue most of our Jews during WW2, as our
Danish cousins did. This is a dark spot on our history. Yet we did
have an active resistance movement. One of the greatest commando
operations during the war was against a heavy water plant in Rjukan in
German-occupied Norway, which was sabotaged and destroyed. Nazi Germany
had a nuclear program based on heavy water. This may not have been
advanced enough to produce nuclear weapons, and the loss of Jewish
scientists certainly crippled it, but it was fears of this nuclear
weapons that prompted Albert Einstein’s famous letter to President
Roosevelt, and thus triggered the initiation of the Manhattan Project
which created nuclear weapons in the United States.
Ironically, Norwegian heavy water was later used for the production
of nuclear weapons in the Jewish state of Israel, the refuge for the
survivors of Nazi Germany.
Norway was also the fourth-largest shipping nation in the world at
the outbreak of WW2, behind the United Kingdom, the USA, and Japan,
and was of major importance to the allied convoys during the war. A
British publication stated that the Norwegian Merchant Fleet was
"worth as much to the allied cause as a million soldiers." Norway is
currently the planet’s third largest exporter of oil, after Saudi
Arabia and Russia. If the Saudis spend some of their oil money on
promoting Jihad and sharia, should not Norwegians then spend a little
on combating the same? We could easily create a fund of a billion,
or even ten billion US dollars earmarked to defend those whose free
speech is threatened for criticizing Islam. And we should do so,
both to make an actual difference and to make a clear, moral stand.
I have pointed out that Western welfare states seem to produce
huge amounts of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is of course not a modern
invention, nor is it exclusively tied to democratic welfare states.
Authoritarian societies, too, can be deeply bureaucratic, both in
order to provide artificial employment to large numbers of people
and to assert state control in all sectors of society. Perhaps some
level of bureaucracy is unavoidable in complex societies with a wide
range of professions and a high degree of specialization. But this
process definitely has run amok in Western welfare states, and is
approaching a critical level.
Quotas and employment based on sex, religion, race or any criteria
other than meritocracy, the rule of merit, where individuals are
chosen through competition on the basis of demonstrated ability and
competence, interfere with private property rights. This violates basic
human rights of the employer. Historical experience indicates that
respect for private property rights, along with respect for freedom of
speech, are the hallmarks of true liberty. Abandoning these principles
undermines the free market economy and inhibits the creation of wealth.
Perhaps the new frontier of liberty in the 21st century consists of
battling for national sovereignty in legislation, for a nation’s
right to decide how much immigration it wants to accept, if any,
and the fight against the imposition of quotas, hate speech laws,
hate crime legislation and other threats to the individual’s right to
free speech and to defense of his own property, the yardstick against
which liberty should always be measured.
The UK Commission for Racial Equality in 1996 claimed that "everyone
who lives in Britain today is either an immigrant or the descendant of
an immigrant." So, basically, since many population groups in Europe
have moved one way or the other since the end of the last Ice Age, none
of us have any more claim to our country than, say, Ethiopians? But
if that is the case, how come people of European stock in the
Americas and Australia are still viewed as alien elements by some,
even though many of them have lived there for centuries? As Professor
David Conway demonstrates in his book A Nation Of Immigrants?, after
the invasion led by William the Conqueror in 1066, the total number
of Norman settlers in Britain was never more than five per cent of
the population. The inflow now is some 25 times any previous level,
and frequently from the opposite side of the planet, not from a
neighboring country.
Strangely enough, a British court has decided that use of the word
"immigrant" can amount to proof of racial hostility under the 1998
Crime and Disorder Act. A charge of racially aggravated assault had
been raised against a woman who referred to a man as "an immigrant
doctor." But if we are all immigrants, calling somebody an "immigrant"
cannot possibly be racist, can it? Once again, Political Correctness
demonstrates how little is has to do with tolerance, and how much it
has to do with making the majority population subject to the whims
of minorities at any given moment.
Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende established a new cabinet in
2007, which included Nebahat Albayrak and Ahmed Aboutaleb, both with
dual citizenships. Mrs. Albayrak is Turkish-Dutch and was appointed
as the state secretary for justice, thus responsible for immigration
policy. Moroccan-Dutch Mr. Aboutaleb is responsible for social affairs
and employment. In 2006, Albayrak refused to speak out unequivocally
on the Turkish Jihad genocide against the Armenians in 1915, which
is forbidden by law to discuss in Turkey.
Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders has proposed that dual nationals
should not become members of government and parliament, because their
loyalty to one nation could be in doubt. According to Mr. Wilders,
not only Turkey and Morocco, but Islam has now penetrated the very
core of the Dutch state. Meanwhile, apparently referring to Wilders,
Dutch Crown Prince Willem-Alexander worries that debates on dual
nationality have a polarizing effect, and states that it is "not
for nothing do we have the saying: ‘Speech is silver, silence is
golden.’" Prominent liberal VVD member Geert Dales states that "Having
two or more passports is entirely unimportant." Labor Party MP Khadija
Arib, who has dual nationality, claims that "I am not loyal to the
Netherlands, I am not loyal to Morocco. I am loyal to my principles."
The intellectual Thomas Kuhn has formulated the theory of paradigm
shifts, periodic revolutions in our ways of thinking about the world.
I have mixed feelings about Kuhn and don’t like his ideas when
applied to science, because I believe there is an anti-rational
streak in this concept that has contributed to the rise of
Multiculturalism. However, his ideas can sometimes be applicable when
describing cultural-ideological changes in society. The Second World
War, for instance, contributed to a major paradigm shift in Western
ways of thinking about a wide range of issues.
Some readers have claimed that my ideas about totally stopping all
forms of Muslim immigration simply aren’t politically possible in
the West. Well, it’s impossible according to the current, ruling
Multicultural paradigm, yes, but this paradigm isn’t sustainable and
is going to break down soon, anyway. Then a new paradigm will emerge,
one dedicated to Western survival in the face of Jihad.
Will China lead the world in the 21st century? Confucius’ collected
teachings, The Analects, currently enjoy a major revival in editions
tailored to suit a modern audience. Although Confucianism promotes
many virtues such as a strong work ethic, it is not prejudice to
say that it does contain some authoritarian and anti-individualistic
traits. Chinese intellectuals have blamed it for contributing to the
some of China’s problems, and for its sometimes overly patriarchal
views on women. Will the growth of Christianity in China continue?
And if so, will it strengthen a vital component of individualism in
Chinese culture?
President Hu Jintao is preaching a "Harmonious Society" based on
Confucian values of unity and respect for authority. When the Communist
Party is now promoting a Confucian basis for their rule, which has
been the traditional hallmark of rulers in China for centuries, it
indicates that the Party has simply become another Chinese dynasty,
just like many Russians view Stalin as the Red Czar.
China certainly has the potential to lead the world, but there are
stumbling blocks along the way. It does have its challenges, from
political corruption to vast environmental problems caused by rapid
economic growth. However, if there is one problem China definitely
does not have, it is the suicidal streak of self-loathing which is
now so prominent in the West. The Chinese do not feel guilty about
promoting their own culture or upholding their own borders. In
contrast, the United States currently enjoys the greatest military
superiority of any power in the history of mankind, and has enough
nuclear weapons to blow up much of the planet, yet it is seemingly
incapable of protecting its own borders. Although China’s flaws may
potentially prevent her from becoming the leading power, the West’s
flaws represent a threat to its very survival.
Richard D. Lamm, former governor of Colorado, has drafted a mock plan
for a policy of how to destroy the United States, which incidentally
looks remarkably like the policies pursued by US authorities today.
The plan would include making the US a bilingual country by encouraging
the use of Spanish: "History shows, in my opinion, that no nation
can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing
languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be
bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual."
Lamm would then proceed to encourage immigrants to maintain their
own culture, and further establish a grievance industry and a cult of
victimology, where all minorities could blame their lack of success on
the majority. Finally, he would place all immigration-related subjects
off-limits by making it taboo to talk about them. He would find a
word similar to "heretic" in the 16th century to brand opponents and
paralyze debate. "Racist" will do just fine.
How significant is the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as French
president? He is certainly better than the outgoing president,
Mr. Chirac, and without doubt better than his Socialist opponent
Segolene Royal, who just before the election day threatened French
voters that they would unleash "violence and brutality" if Sarkozy
won. His opponents immediately staged local riots, and an Islamic
terrorist group threatened to launch bloody attacks in response to
the election of a "crusader and Zionist" as president.
I believe Mr. Sarkozy is a decent man, and I wish him good luck. I’m
just not sure he’s good enough. The French Constitutional Council
has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting
of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists,
thus targeting, among others, bloggers. The law was proposed by then
Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy. Besides, even if Mr. Sarkozy
is not a bad man, the tasks he is facing are enormous.
Famed Sociologist Max Weber has defined a state as an entity with a
"monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given
territory." Since hundreds of ghettos in France are already outside
of police control, and effectively under the rule of local Muslim
militias, hasn’t France already ceased being a functioning state?
Will France face a civil war, or will the situation just continue as
it is today, with gradually increasing gang violence, rapes, street
fights and car burnings?
According to the French writer Bernard-Henri Levy, "America is the
fire of the European Enlightenment set alight on new shores. Without
this idea, it would be nothing more than an amalgam of communities,
a juxtaposition of bubbles, the sort of post-modern society some
people dream of, but perhaps no longer the American dream." He may
have exaggerated to what extent the United States is a continuation
of Europe, but there certainly a connection between the two.
Although some of its seeds may have come from the Middle East,
Western civilization is a tree firmly rooted in European soil. The
New West, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, are
all branches of this tree. If the worst-case scenario takes place,
and the Old West in Europe gets destroyed by Islam, can the New
West survive without its roots? Western civilization is, after all,
transplanted to North America and Australia, whereas it is native
to Europe. Westerners are generally perceived to be the natives of
Europe, both by themselves and by outsiders. This is not the case
with Westerners in the New West. This distinction has not been very
significant so far, but it could theoretically turn out to be so later.
Some observers have suggested that the European Unions is
using Bismarck’s unification of Germany as a model for European
integration. The numerous German states rallied to Prussia’s side
against the French in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, thus paving the
way for a new, powerful German federation. The EU is trying to cast
the United States in the role as the external rival. However, this
comparison contains some large flaws. Elements of German nationalism
existed at least as far back as the Protestant Reformation in the
early 16th century.
According to The Story of Christianity: Volume Two, by Justo
L. Gonzalez: "…much of Luther’s impact was due to circumstances that
he neither created nor controlled, and of whose role in the process
of reformation he himself was only dimly aware. The invention of the
movable type printing press gave his writings a widespread audience
they otherwise would not have had – in fact, Luther was the first to
make full use of the value of printing as a medium for propaganda, and
to write with the printed page in mind. The growing German nationalist
sentiment of which he himself partook offered unexpected but very
valuable support."
Martin Luther helped strengthen this German national sentiment further
by printing Bibles in the vernacular, thus shaping the modern German
language. Notice that there was some German proto-nationalism present
centuries before the formal unification of Germany.
Bismarck’s German states were already united by a common language.
This is not at all the case with the EU today.
It says in the proposed EU Constitution that the European Union
is based on "democracy." Yet the European Commission, the EU’s
government, is both the executive and the legislative branch of the
EU, and happens to be unelected and totally unaccountable to anybody.
Clearly, the EU has never heard about Montesquieu or the concept
of separation of powers. The elected European Parliament, the EU’s
democratic fig leaf, is largely a joke, and the national parliaments
are gradually reduced to rubber-stamping federal EU legislation. This
is called "democracy," which means that the word had become so vague
that we should perhaps use it with some caution.
At the EU Observer, Anthony Coughlan, a senior lecturer at Trinity
College in Dublin, Ireland, notes that in every EU member state at
present the majority of laws come from Brussels. Why do national
politicians and representatives accept this situation? He suggests
a plausible explanation:
"At national level when a minister wants to get something done, he
or she must have the backing of the prime minister, must have the
agreement of the minister for finance if it means spending money,
and above all must have majority support in the national parliament,
and implicitly amongst voters in the country. Shift the policy area in
question to the supranational level of Brussels however, where laws are
made primarily by the 27-member Council of Ministers, and the minister
in question becomes a member of an oligarchy, a committee of lawmakers,
the most powerful in history, making laws for 500 million Europeans,
and irremovable as a group regardless of what it does.
National parliaments and citizens lose power with every EU treaty,
for they no longer have the final say in the policy areas concerned.
Individual ministers on the other hand obtain an intoxicating
increase in personal power, as they are transformed from members of
the executive arm of government at national level, subordinate to a
national legislature, into EU-wide legislators at the supranational."
EU ministers see themselves as political architects of a superpower in
the making. By participating in the EU, they can also free themselves
from scrutiny of their actions by elected national parliaments.
According to Coughlan, "the great bulk of European laws are never
debated at council of minister level, but are formally rubber-stamped
if agreement has been reached further down amongst the civil servants
on the 300 council sub-committees or the 3,000 or so committees that
are attached to the commission."
EU integration represents "a gradual coup by government executives
against legislatures, and by politicians against the citizens who
elect them." This process is now sucking the reality of power from
"traditional government institutions, while leaving these still
formally intact. They still keep their old names – parliament,
government, supreme court – so that their citizens do not get too
alarmed, but their classical functions have been transformed."
This is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the EU: It is increasingly
dictatorial, but it is a stealth dictatorship, whose most dangerous
elements are largely invisible in everyday life, and that’s why it
works. What the average persons sees is that the EU makes it easier
for him to travel to other European countries without a passport,
and use the same Euro currency from Lapland in Finland to Spain’s
Canary Islands outside the African coast.
This appears convenient, and it is. But it comes with the price of
hollowing out the power of elected institutions and placing it into
the hands of a powerful, unelected oligarchy who are conspiring to
usurp ever-more power and rearranging the entire continent without
popular consent. That’s a steep price to pay for a common currency.
But people do not clearly see this is their daily lives, and seeing is
believing. The enemy that clearly identifies himself as such is less
dangerous than the enemy who is diffused and vague and difficult see,
since you cannot easily mobilize against him.
European elites created the European Union in a last-ditch effort
to remain relevant on the world stage. Instead, they may have signed
the continent’s death warrant by weakening its cultural defenses and
handing it over to Muslims. Without the EU, Europe would probably
have diminished in power in global affairs, but it would still have
remained recognizable as "Europe." Now, the continent not only risks
becoming irrelevant, it risks becoming destroyed forever, with the
active aid of the EU.
Fjordman is a noted Norwegian blogger who has written for many
conservative web sites. He used to have his own Fjordman Blog in the
past, but it is no longer active.
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