TEL AVIV —
A joint exercise now being conducted between thousands of Israeli
troops and the U.S. European Command represents a final test before
Israel begins to deploy one of the most sophisticated missile defense
systems in the world.
When it is complete, Israel’s
multibillion-dollar rocket and missile air defense system will be far
superior to anything in the Middle East and will likely rival, and in
some ways surpass, in speed and targeting, air defenses deployed by
Europe and the United States, its developers say.
The United
States has provided more than $3.3 billion over the past 10 years to
support the defensive system, which will be able to knock down not only
ballistic missiles but also orbiting satellites.
Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama have had a strained relationship, rubbed raw by their deep disagreement over the Iran nuclear deal, U.S. spending on Israel’s air defenses has soared in the past decade, from $133 million in 2006 to $619 million in 2015
.
A
photograph provided by the Israeli Ministry of Defense shows a launch
of the David’s Sling missile defense system. (Israeli Ministry of
Defense/Associated Press)
The Israeli defense
establishment and its American partners have designed a layered system
that will allow the Jewish state to respond to simultaneous attacks from
multiple fronts — the relatively crude homemade rockets lobbed by Hamas
from the Gaza Strip, the midrange rockets and missiles fired by the
Shiite militants of Hezbollah from Lebanon, and the long-range ballistic
missiles being developed by Iran that could carry conventional or
chemical warheads.
In addition, Israel’s new X-Band radar will
allow its forces to detect incoming missiles 500 or 600 miles out, vs.
100 miles, the current limit of their radar tracking systems, according
to summaries of the systems provided to Congress.
“I define the
system as pioneering,” said Uzi Rubin, former head director of Israel’s
missile defense program. “Even the United States doesn’t have anything
as complex, as sophisticated.”
The system will also be able to
prioritize incoming rockets and missiles by calculating their
trajectories. Some missiles may not be intercepted, if their targets are
fields and farms, but projectiles that would hit populated areas or
important infrastructure — such as military bases, oil refineries and
nuclear facilities — would be stopped.
The Israeli missile
defense system is being built in partnership with U.S. defense
contractors, including Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
The
Israelis are planning to start deploying their coordinated system of
radars, launchers and interceptors over the coming months, though there
have been delays in the past, they warn.
In December, Israel and
the U.S. Missile Defense Agency celebrated successful tests of two new
ballistic missile defense systems — David’s Sling, which is designed to
intercept short- and medium-range threats, and Arrow-3, which is
intended to stop long-range attacks and knock out enemy targets in space
by deploying “kamikaze satellites,” or “kill vehicles,” that track their targets.
David’s Sling and Arrow-3 will join Iron Dome and the existing Arrow-2 in coming months.
The Iron Dome batteries were responsible for intercepting 90 percent of their targets
during Israel’s war with Hamas in the summer of 2014, according to the
Israel Defense Forces, when Hamas fired 4,000 rockets and mortar rounds
at Israel from the adjacent Gaza Strip.
On Tuesday, the Defense Ministry announced that major components of the
David’s Sling defense system will be delivered to the Israeli air force
“over the course of several weeks.”
Israel called David’s Sling
“the world’s most revolutionary innovation in the family of interceptor
systems.” The system is designed primarily to handle the kinds of
rockets and missiles, built by Iran and Russia, that are now in the
possession of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon and the Syrian regime of
Bashar al-Assad.
Beyond the threat posed by the splintering of
Syria, Israel is worried that Syrian missiles could be transferred to
Hezbollah or acquired by the Islamic State or al-Qaeda.
In a recent speech, Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah threatened
that his militia’s missiles could strike ammonia storage tanks in
Israel’s Haifa port in a future showdown with Israel, warning that the
damage would be equivalent to an atomic bomb and could kill 800,000
people.
Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon, the Israel Defense Forces head
of operations, said Hezbollah could have upward of 100,000 rockets and
missiles stored in Lebanon.
In 2006, before the deployment of
Iron Dome, Hezbollah fired about 4,000 projectiles at Israel’s northern
cities, causing some 40 civilian deaths and significant damage.
Israel’s military leaders warn civilians that no air defense system is perfect — or even close to it.
“There is no hermetic defense or total security that will intercept
everything fired at Israel. In the next real war, rockets will fall on
the State of Israel,” said Brig. Gen. Zvika Haimovich, commander of the
Israeli air force’s Aerial Defense Division.
Haimovich briefed
reporters last week in the middle of “Juniper Cobra,” a biennial
U.S.-Israel air defense drill, which is scheduled to end Thursday.
More than 1,700 U.S. soldiers and sailors, alongside American civilians
and contractors, are taking part in the exercise, which is focused on
computer simulations of coordinated and sustained air attacks on Israel
from multiple fronts.
In such a scenario, U.S. air defense
probably would come into play, and the drill is designed not only to
test Israel’s soon-to-be-deployed systems but also to improve how well
U.S. and Israeli assets can communicate and coordinate their response.
“The purpose of this exercise is to improve interoperability of our air
defense forces and our combined ability to defend against air and
missile attack,” said Lt. Gen. Timothy Ray, U.S 3rd Air Force commander.
“And just as important,” Ray said, “it signals our resolve to support Israel and strive for peace in the Middle East.”
Booth reported from Jerusalem.
http://www.businessinsider.com/
We spent a day with the world’s most advanced missile system that has China and North Korea spooked
Amanda Macias/Business InsiderStanding by a THAAD launcher at Ft. Bliss, Texas, with Army Capt. Kyle Terza, left, and Capt. Gus Cunningham.
US ARMY MCGREGOR RANGE, New Mexico — The
most advanced missile system on the planet can hunt and blast incoming
missiles right out of the sky with a 100% success rate — and we got to
spend a day with it.
Meet America's THAAD system.
THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) is a unique missile-defense system with unmatched precision, capable of countering threats around the world with its mobility and strategic battery-unit placement.
"It is the most technically advanced missile-defense system in the world," US Army Col. Alan Wiernicki, commander of the 11th Air Defense Artillery Brigade, told Business Insider in an interview.
"Combatant commanders and our allies know this, which puts our THAAD Batteries in very high global demand," Wiernicki added.
And that demand seems poised to rise.
On Wednesday, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un claimed his country had developed miniaturized nuclear warheads, which can be mounted to long-range ballistic missiles.
AP President
Barack Obama gestures toward South Korean President Park Geun-hye
during their joint news conference at the White House on October 16,
2015.
The rogue regime's latest announcement is a follow-through pass to last month's long-range-rocket launch and January's purported hydrogen-bomb test.
Negotiations to equip South Korea with THAAD have been ongoing since South Korean President Park Geun-hye's October 2015 visit to the White House.
As of yet, there has not been a formal move to deploy the missile system.
"The complexity of global-security challenges is increasingly causing combatant commanders to request more Army forces," US Army Capt. Gus Cunningham told Business Insider.
"With that said, THAAD is ready to respond to any request, at any time," Cunningham added.
If a THAAD battery were deployed to South
Korea, depending on its exact location, nearly all incoming missiles
from the North could be eliminated, as displayed by the following graphic from The Heritage Foundation. Heritage Foundation/Amanda Macias/Business Insider
THAAD's protective range would eliminate almost all threats from North Korea.
Meanwhile, China is spooked over the potential THAAD assignment to South Korea.
Chinese Ambassador Qiu Guohong warned that
basing the US-made THAAD missile system in South Korea would irreparably
damage relations between the countries, The Chosunilbo reported.
THAAD deployment, Qiu said,
"would break the strategic balance in the region and create a vicious
cycle of Cold War-style confrontations and an arms race, which could
escalate tensions."
During his most recent visit to Beijing, Secretary of State John Kerry explained that the US was "not hungry or anxious or looking for an opportunity to deploy THAAD," CNN reported.
"THAAD is a purely defensive
weapon. It is purely capable of shooting down a ballistic missile it
intercepts. And it is there for the protection of the United States,"
Kerry said.
"If we can get to denuclearization, there's no need to deploy THAAD," he added.
Currently, there five THAAD batteries — each of approximately 100 soldiers — assigned to Ft. Bliss in El Paso, Texas.
One of those THAAD batteries was deployed to Guam in April 2013 in order to deter North Korean provocations and further defend the Pacific region.
Impressively, the THAAD interceptor does not carry a warhead.
Instead, the interceptor missile uses pure kinetic energy to deliver
"hit to kill" strikes to incoming ballistic threats inside or outside
the atmosphere. Each launcher carries up to eight missiles and can send multiple kill vehicles at once, depending on the severity of the threat.
Lockheed Martin's missile launcher is just one element of the
four-part antimissile system. The graphic below shows the rest of the
components needed for each enemy-target interception.
Lockheed Martin
THAAD's first line of defense is its radar system.
"We have one of the most powerful radars in the world,"
US Army Capt. Kyle Terza, a THAAD battery commander, told Business
Insider.
Raytheon's AN/TPY-2 radar is used to detect, track, and discriminate ballistic missiles in the terminal (or descent) phase of flight.
The mobile radar is about the size of a bus and is so powerful
that it can scan areas the size of entire countries
Once an enemy threat has been identified, THAAD's Fire Control and
Communications (TFCC) support team kicks in. If there is a decision to
engage the incoming missile, the launcher fires an interceptor to hunt for its target.
While in flight, the interceptor will track its target and obliterate it in the sky.
By the end of 2016, the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is scheduled
to deliver an additional 48 THAAD interceptors to the US military,
bringing the total up to 155, according to a statement from the MDA's director, Vice Admiral J.D. Syring, given before the House Armed Service Committee.
According to the MDA, there are more than 6,300 ballistic missiles outside of US, NATO, Russian, and Chinese control.
While other US partners around the globe are interested in purchasing THAAD, the United Arab Emirates is the sole foreign buyer after signing a deal with the Department of Defense for $3.4 billion.
<
The refugee crisis has been turning Europe upside down.
In light of an ongoing influx of migrants and recent security threats,
there has been an increased possibility that the Schengen agreement —
which allows free movement across a wide swathe of Europe — would be
suspended.
Some governments have already introduced temporary controls at their borders, including Hungary at its short border with Slovenia and France at its borders with several countries following the Paris terrorist attacks.
Most recently, Greece was given three months starting in mid-February to tighten its border controls — or else the EU would reintroduce border controls "at all or at specific parts of their internal borders as a matter of last resort."
HSBC's Chief European Economist Karen Ward and her team argued in a
recent note to clients they aren't exactly sold on the idea of
suspending the Schengen agreement, as it wouldn't aid either refugees or
the EU economy.
Ward writes:
Reinstating national borders would not resolve the problem in our view. Indeed it might be the
route towards the worst possible outcome in which a large number of migrants still arrive,
but they are not able to travel to where their chance of employment is greatest and are forced
to live 'underground' without any possibility of officially integrating into society and labor
markets. Economics and government tax receipts will not truly benefit and national disconten
t could rise even further.
As for the rest of the EU economy, she writes that if the Schengen
agreement were suspended, "this would harm trade in an already weak
economic environment and, once again, raise questions about Europe’s
capacity for deeper integration."
Although suspending Schengen doesn't mean that businesses and workers
can't move around Europe at all (there would be passport and vehicle
checks at borders), the following charts shared by Ward suggest that its
suspension could still have a noticeable impact on EU trade and
tourism.
The first chart shows exports of Germany to France against those with
Austria, another country that shares a large land border but was not
part of the original Schengen agreement.
There's a notable acceleration with France relative to Austria in the
years immediately following 1985, when the agreement was first signed,
observes Ward:
HSBC
Similarly, here we have exports from France to Germany against those
of Spain, another big neighbor that wasn't part of the original Schengen
agreement. Interestingly, once the Schengen agreement was expanded in
1997, the difference became less stark:
HSBC
"Although it is hard to draw strong conclusions, or indeed quantify
the precise effect, our view is that dismantling Schengen would have a
notable impact on EU trade," writes Ward.
"And this at a time when the Eurozone economy is already sluggish."
However, the notable exception to Ward's argument is the UK, which
has preformed well in trade with the EU (until recently). Moreover, Ward
cites the Mastercard Global Cities Index data which says that London is
the most visited city in the world, suggesting that the visa
requirement isn't a huge deterrent.
Still, there is also the potential ideological impact from the potential Schengen suspension.
In other words, how this could affect the EU's understanding of "European-ness."
Again, here's Ward:
"For some Schengen is symbolic of the benefits of Europe — according to the latest Eurobarometer the free movement of people is the second most appreciated concrete achievement of the EU ... so an argument could be made that this is a further step away from closer integration and a sense of being 'European.'"
Ultimately, the crux of the issue here is whether or not the EU can
be incentivized to work as a cohesive unit, rather than as individual
states, argues Ward.
"The lack of political and fiscal union posed a threat to EU’s
greatest endeavor –monetary union – at the time of the Greek crisis,"
she wrote.
"The same issue now also challenges Schengen free trade, and raises
further questions about whether Europe really has the capacity for
deeper integration."
http://www.voanews.com/
Migrant Spending Splits German Government
Migrants arrive at a refugee shelter in Friedenau city hall in
FRANKFURT, GERMANY— Germany's leading
Social Democrats on Sunday attacked the conservative finance minister
for being too thrifty in dealing with the migrant crisis, as the rift
widened in the governing coalition over how to cope with an influx of
refugees.
The bitter criticism came after finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble
labeled Social Democrat proposals for wider social spending on housing
and public services to complement the integration of migrants as
"pitiful."
Stephan Weil, the Social Democrat premier of the state of Lower
Saxony, hit back on Sunday, calling for a bigger social services budget
in order not to alienate ordinary Germans as the country accommodates
over one million migrants.
"The finance minister obviously just doesn't get it," Weil told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
Pointing to the high cost of integrating migrants, Weil said "We
cannot create the impression that this is happening at the expense of
the weaker members of our society."
He added that spending on schools and childcare would strengthen the "solidarity of our society."
Heiko Maas, Justice Minister and a Social Democrat, was similarly critical and made a renewed call for more spending.
"What's more important? The people in the country or balancing the budget?"
Christine Lambrecht, a prominent Social Democrat lawmaker, also
disparaged Schaeuble. "After months of big talk and doing nothing, he is
worried that he will have to open his wallet," she said.
Schaeuble, a long-standing proponent of prudence, wants to prevent
Germany spending more than its earns and is unlikely to be easily moved.
If spending were to spiral, it could further weaken German Chancellor Angela Merkel's fading support.
Merkel has seen her ratings plummet due to her handling of migrants.
She is facing the biggest test of her decade in office as she struggles
to secure a Europe-wide plan for dealing with the migrants.
Politicians from the German state of Bavaria's Christian Social
Union, the sister party to Merkel's CDU, have also been critical of her
stance but for different reasons. They want the introduction of a limit
to the number of migrants, similar to that imposed in Austria.
Austria, the last stop on the way to Germany for hundreds of
thousands of migrants, recently imposed restrictions on its borders,
setting off a domino effect in Europe in limiting the flow of people,
and leaving hundreds stranded in Greece.
Merkel has warned about the consequences for Europe of border
closures. But a poor showing by the Christian Democrats in state
elections in March would pressure her to reverse course.
Her conservatives are nervous as they lose ground to the
anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, whose hardline stance on
refugees could bring it big gains in all three German states.
Germany attracted 1.1 million asylum seekers last year, leading to
calls from across the political spectrum for a change in its handling of
refugees coming to Europe to escape war and poverty in Syria,
Afghanistan and elsewhere.
UN: Europe Facing 'Self-Induced Humanitarian Crisis'
Refugees
and migrants, who entered Macedonia from Greece
illegally, walk between
the two lines of the protective fence
along the border line, near
southern Macedonia's town of
Gevgelija, Monday, Feb. 29, 2016.
VOA News
Last updated on: March 01, 2016 7:30 AM
The United Nations warned Tuesday that Europe is near a
"self-induced humanitarian crisis" because governments are imposing
border restrictions and failing to work together as migrants continue to
reach the continent.
Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency, said more
than 130,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean this year, most of
them reaching Greece. The two-month total is near the figure for the
first six months of last year.
Some 24,000 refugees and migrants are in need of accommodation in
Greece, with around 8,500 of them massed next to the border with
Macedonia.
Macedonian police fired tear gas to push back refugees trying to
cross the border from Greece on Monday in the latest clashes between
people seeking to move through Europe and governments trying to control
the flow of people into their territory.
The UNHCR urged Greece and Balkan countries to quickly act in order to prevent a disaster.
Edwards said European nations pledged last year to accept more than
66,000 refugees who reached Greece, but that so far only 325 relocations
have taken place. He said Greece cannot manage the situation by
itself.
European Council President Donald Tusk is visiting Austria on Tuesday
as part of a five-nation trip to work on how to handle the migrant
crisis.
A
woman and children cross the Greek-Macedonian border near
the town of
Gevgelija, Feb. 25, 2016. Merkel has said an EU
solution cannot be done
in a way that abandons Greece.
Germany: No plan that abandons Greece
Austria has held firm to its policy to cap the number of migrants it
allows into the country. That, in combination with measures set up by
others further south along the migration route, has led to bottlenecks
at borders. Those restrictions have drawn sharp criticism from human
rights groups, the United Nations and others in the EU, particularly
Germany.
"When one country defines its limit, another must suffer," German
Chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday. "That is not my Europe."
She said an EU solution cannot be done in a way that abandons Greece,
where more than 100,000 migrants have already arrived this year.
Tusk will finish his tour in Greece after stops in Slovenia, Croatia
and Macedonia. Next week the EU will have a summit with Turkey, a
country it has pressured to help stop the flow of migrants from the
Middle East into Europe.
Also Tuesday, crews in Calais, France continued dismantling part of a
sprawling camp as a group of migrants protested and police kept watch.
The site has served as a home to migrants hoping to make their way in
Britain. It had grown to house an estimated 6,000 people in December
and has since dropped to about 4,000 people.
A
woman falls as refugees with their children run away after
Macedonian
police used tear gas to dispearse refugees trying
to break the gate to
enter Macedonia, Feb. 29, 2016.
'A challenge for all of us'
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday the refugee crisis is a
problem for the entire world, and that nothing would help stem the flow
of people more than ending the war in Syria.
"It is a global challenge and it is not somebody else's problem," he said. "It's a test of all of us."
Kerry said the ultimate goal of diplomats like himself is to make
sure people can live peacefully in their own country and not feel the
need to go somewhere else.
He highlighted the "unbelievable burden" shouldered by Turkey and
other Syrian neighbors Jordan and Lebanon. Together, they are currently
hosting nearly 4.5 million Syrian refugees. But their struggle to
provide for such a big influx has led many people to seek a better life
in Europe where governments have been wary of admitting too many
newcomers.
Struggling with limited resources to house migrants itself, Macedonia
had briefly closed its border last week, only to re-open it but with
much stricter controls, allowing only a few hundred people to pass
through over the weekend - not enough to alleviate the constant influx
of new arrivals as thousands come to the Greek mainland by ferries and
immediately head north.
http://www.voanews.com/
UN: Refugee Crisis in Europe Could Explode into Violence
Lisa Schlein
Last updated on: March 01, 2016 3:58 PM
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND—
The United Nations refugee agency
warns Europe is on the verge of an explosive self-induced humanitarian
crisis, which could spiral out of control and result in widespread
violence.
The agency reports
the number of refugees and migrants in Greece in need of shelter has
soared to 24,000. This, it says, includes around 8,500 people stranded
near the border with Macedonia. It says the crowded conditions are
leading to shortages of food, shelter, water and sanitation.
Vincent Cochetel is UNHCR's refugee crisis in Europe coordinator. He
says the congestion at border crossings along the Balkan migratory route
is leading to frustration among the migrants and refugees.
“They do not understand that they can no longer move onward, that
they have to queue; they have to go through the relocation process - for
those eligible for relocation and it is not everybody. So, there is a
lot of frustration building up, which may lead to acts of violence,”
said Cochetel.
Migrants rest under a tree at the Victoria Square
in Athens, Greece, March 1, 2016.
A peaceful protest Monday near the Macedonian border turned violent
as police threw tear gas canisters to force refugees and migrants away
from the razor-wire fence.
Nearly 132,000 people, half of them women and children, have made the
perilous Mediterranean Sea crossing this year, exceeding the total for
the first half of 2015. Almost all have landed in Greece.
UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards says the European Union must
absolutely go through with the plan it approved last year for an
equitable relocation of refugees among its 28 members.
“It should concern everyone that despite commitments to relocate
66,400 refugees from Greece, states have so far pledged only 1,539
spaces, and only 325 actual relocations have occurred,” he said.
The UNHCR says Greece must urgently increase its ability to
accommodate and support the masses of people arriving and that more
resources, and better coordination among EU member states, are critical.
http://www.bloomberg.com/
Merkel Says Euro Is at Risk If Europe Crumbles in Refugee Crisis
German chancellor sounds warning as next EU summit looms
Takes message to thr
German
Chancellor Angela Merkel said Europe’s discord over refugees threatens
the euro, raising the stakes as European Union leaders prepare for their
next emergency meeting to stem the crisis.
“If we disintegrate
into small countries again, a common currency will be very difficult,”
Merkel said at a party rally late Monday in the western German town of
Volkmarsen. “What we are seeing in recent days, with certain countries
going their own way to the detriment of another country like Greece --
that isn’t the European way.”
Angela Merkel speaks in Volkmarsen.
Photographer: Martin Leissl/Bloomberg
Televised scenes of migrants being tear-gassed
by Macedonian police at the Greek border are underscoring the
humanitarian crisis as the rush to close borders bottles up refugees on
the EU’s southeastern frontier. With nations along the so-called Balkans
route blocking refugees from heading north from Greece, Merkel warned
other EU nations on Sunday against allowing “chaos” to develop in a country that already “has many problems.”
Leaders
of the EU’s 28 governments plan to meet Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu next Monday in Brussels to try to complete an agreement to
limit the influx of people crossing the Aegean Sea to Greece. Croatian
Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic, whose country lies on the Balkans
route, meets Merkel for talks in Berlin later Tuesday.
Latest
polling suggests a possible turnaround Merkel’s approval ratings, which
have slid since about 1 million refugees arrived in Germany last year.
While 59 percent of Germans say they are unhappy with Merkel’s open-door
policy, backing for her work as chancellor more broadly rose to 54
percent in late February from 46 percent at the start of the month, according to the poll for broadcaster ARD.
Merkel
is taking her message to voters in three German states that go to the
polls on March 13, including a campaign rally in the southern city of
Freiburg later Tuesday. The contests in Baden-Wuerttemberg,
Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt are partly a test of her refugee
policy, with polls suggesting a decline in support for her Christian
Democratic Union since last fall and gains for the anti-immigration
Alternative for Germany party, or AfD.
Polls in
Baden-Wuerttemberg, where Freiburg is located, show the CDU running
neck-in-neck with the state’s governing Green Party, which ousted the
CDU from power five years ago in a region that’s home to companies
including carmakers Daimler AG and Porsche SE.
My
background is basically European -- and more specifically, Western
European. I have lived and worked in many of those countries, and I
know most of the major cities intimately -- from Stockholm in the north,
Newcastle, London, Paris, The Hague, Munich, Vienna, to Rome and Erice,
Sicily in the south. I have also spent several months in Moscow and in
Jerusalem as a guest of academic institutions.
Economic Suicide
The
ongoing economic suicide of Europe is based on a faulty understanding
of the climate issue by most Western politicians and on their extreme
policy response, based on emotion rather than logic and science. The
major European economies have reacted irrationally to contrived,
unjustified fear of imagined global-warming disasters
Perhaps
I should explain that the climate has not been warming for the past 18
years -- and even if it had been warming, it would be no disaster. The
EU wants to cut emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, a
natural plant-fertilizer, by 40% within 15 years -- by 2030. This
insane drive to replace energy sources from fossil fuels that release
plant-friendly CO2 into the atmosphere has led to greatly increased
costs of energy. As is well understood, such actions not only hurt
economic growth, but they increase poverty levels and therefore threaten
the social fabric of these nations.
There
are some exceptions. of course: France and Belgium rely heavily on
nuclear energy; Austria and Norway rely heavily on hydro. Poland has
actively resisted the general trend to demonize CO2, but the UK and
Germany, which has been the power-house of European economic growth, are
severely threatened by their insistence on installing wind and solar
energy. The latter is especially inappropriate to the Continent and to
Great Britain.
The
pity of it all is that these economic sacrifices in Western Europe will
hardly affect the level of atmospheric CO2 -- which is controlled
globally by huge emissions from China -- and soon also from India.
Unfortunately,
during the past few years, and even during the White House
administration of George W. Bush, the United States has tended to move
in the same direction -- and energy costs have gone up markedly.
The
regulatory burdens created by the EPA’s “War on Coal,” by holding up
permits for pipelines and for exploration-production of fuels on Federal
lands, etc, are imposing real costs on US households, which are the
equivalent of a large energy tax -- except that none of these increased
costs flow into the US Treasury.
Cultural, plus even more dangerous Demographic Suicide,
But
it is cultural suicide, which adds to economic suicide and spells doom
for the future of Western Europe. I have in mind here the heavy
immigration from Islamic nations -- with most immigrants unwilling to
adjust to the prevailing culture of the host country.
Examples
are rampant. In Great Britain, the dangerous immigration has come
mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh, Islamic successors to the British
rule over India; Hindu immigrants present no special problem. In
Southern Europe, the Low Countries, and most of Scandinavia, much of the
immigration has been from Somalia and North Africa. France has
experienced massive immigration from North Africa and other African
French-speaking former colonies.
In
many of these nations now, these immigrant communities have formed
enclaves that the native inhabitants can no longer enter safely; even
the police have great difficulty controlling law and order in these
enclaves. Examples exist in cities like Birmingham, Amsterdam, Malmo
(Sweden), Paris and Marseille. Germany seems slightly better off, with
immigrants from Turkey making some effort to become good Germans. Of
course, the aim of many in these enclaves is to take over the host
country -- using available democratic means -- and institute Sharia
(Islamic law).
It
is clear that these immigrants are taking advantage of the democratic
nature of the host nations and their willingness to grant asylum status
and lavish economic subsidies to any who declare themselves as
refugees. A prime example is Sweden, where multi-culturalism runs wild
and is supported by the government-subsidized and beholden media. So
far, no real revolt yet -- except for some grumbling from the indigenous
population (whom the compliant media denounce as “racists.”)
Least
affected have been the Slavic nations, which were formerly under Soviet
domination. Perhaps because of their delayed economic development,
they have not been as attractive a destination for immigrants.
Ironically, these East-Europeans may yet save Western civilization.
The
United States faces a rather special situation. There is much
immigration, mostly illegal, from south of the border. But these Latino
immigrants are not Islamic; they share similar cultural values with
native-born Americans -- and most are making an effort to adapt to the
prevailing culture. The main danger is one of national security. With
porous borders, potential terrorists can easily slip into the United
States and create mayhem.
A
peculiar problem exists in Israel, which has experienced illegal
Islamic (!) immigration, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea. We are told
that some southern suburbs of Tel Aviv now resemble a Third-World
nation. Efforts are underway to deport these illegal immigrants; but
standing in the way is Israel’s Supreme Court, a group of unelected
liberal lawyers, who personally oppose the Parliament-passed law of
deportation -- certainly an anomalous situation by US standards.
Russia
has experienced problems of its own, mainly from Islamic provinces in
the Caucasus. The suppression of the Chechen revolt has caused a
violent reaction, leading to major terror acts, even in Moscow.
Exacerbating
the Islamic “conquest“ of Western Europe is the fact that the
indigenous people -- from Swedes to Spaniards -- are not reproducing
themselves. Whatever the cause may be, the number of children per
family is well below the replacement level of 2.11; in some countries it
is as low as 1.30. The statistics are frightening -- as seen in
records of births, welfare rolls, and school attendance. By
mid-century, parts of Europe will have a Moslem majority -- and even
before then it will be too late to rectify the situation.
What of the future?
With
ongoing internal battles within Islamic groups, it is not easy to
predict the future. In Syria, some 200,000 have been killed and
millions have been turned into refugees. The rise of the “Islamic
State” in the last few months promises a brutal suppression of any who
hold even a slightly different Islamic view. Their announced goal is to
set up a theocratic Caliphate in any lands that have ever been under
Islamic rule -- including most of the Balkans, Andalus-Spain, and of
course Israel.
At
the battle of Tours in 732, Charles Martell stopped the advance into
France of Moslem armies from the Iberian peninsula. In 1571, in the
great naval battle of Lepanto, off Greece, a Spanish-Italian fleet
defeated the Turks. In their farthest advance into Central Europe, a
Turkish army besieged Vienna in 1683. Christian forces, under the
command of King John Sobieski of Poland, defeated the invaders
decisively and saved Western civilization.
Americans have twice saved Europe in the 20th
century and may soon be forced to defend Europe again against a new
threat. The first assault on Western European civilization came from
Nazi Germany and its allies; it took a bloody World-War-II (1939-1945)
to defeat them. Certainly, without US intervention, Western Europe, and
even Britain, might now be part of a German-ruled dictatorship, a sort
of involuntary European Union. It is doubtful also whether the Soviet
Union could have withstood Hitler’s onslaught without the active
material assistance of the United States.
The
second threat to Europe came from the post-1945 Soviet Union; it was
dominated by the specter of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. The
“Warsaw Pact” encompassed even a large part of Germany. This
“Cold-War” threat was neutralized thanks to the steadfastness of the
United States -- but also by the internal economic problems brought
about by the planned economy of the Soviet empire.
The
new threat of course is Islamo-Fascism and its aim to introduce Sharia
-- in at least those parts of Europe that had been Muslim lands in the
past, but aiming really at all of Europe -- and eventually the rest of
the world. This new threat uses a method of warfare that is different
from the past and more insidious. Terrorism has come into its own,
partly based on large Islamic populations in Western Europe.
Coupled
with this external threat is the internal one from Islamic fanatics,
many of them born in Europe -- and even from converts. We have seen
this happen in Spain, and more recently in Britain. Their methods have
been crude and their weapons have been primitive; but with nuclear
proliferation and with the possibility of chemical and biological
warfare, these threats have to be taken very seriously.
Fighting
these threats takes resources for surveillance, intelligence, sundry
military expenditures, and weapons, both offensive and defensive.
Resilience requires above all a strong economy. And one cannot have a
strong economy without adequate energy resources – which gets us back to
the issue of climate fears.
The
problem now is that while the threat of terrorism is growing, so is the
suicidal drive to limit the use of energy and thereby also economic
growth. This internal threat is particularly strong in Europe and has
been called, quite properly, eco-Bolshevism. It would have all the
earmarks of the failed Soviet system, with government involvement in
every facet of the economy and with energy restrictions reducing
economic growth.
There
is no question that the policies being discussed now in Europe and in
the United States would be extremely costly, would force industrial
cutbacks and of course massive job losses. All of these exacerbate
social tension in nations that have a large number of immigrants, who
traditionally have the highest unemployment levels.
Will the US step up again and save Europe? Doubtful
One
may ask: Is there any way to stop this steamroller? There’s probably
little hope that such an initiative can come from Europe; it may have to
come from the United States. Somehow we would have to convince
European leaders that their policies, based on global-warming fears, are
mistaken. That job may prove to be very difficult -- unless there is a
drastic change in current US policy. But it is something that has to
be done if we want Europe to survive economically, as an ally against
the threat of Islamo-Fascism.
I
don’t believe that the US is prepared to save Europe; just listen to
our Secretary of State: Speaking in Boston on Oct 9, John Kerry
pronounced that climate change, if left unaddressed, will result in the
end of times: “Life as you know it on Earth ends,” Kerry said. Last
February, Kerry claimed that climate change was the world’s “most
fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” Not nuclear bombs in the hands of
the terrorist-sponsoring regime of Iran -- or in the hands of ISIS or
al Qaeda; not Ebola or some fearsome epidemic of a lethal disease.
According to Kerry, climate change is the real number-one
national-security threat.
US
media, academia, and other opinion-makers are chiming in. In her
latest work of science-fiction, Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes, co-author of
the mendacious Merchants of Doubt, imagines a future world devastated by climate change.She
generously gives the West another 80 years -- well beyond her own life
span, of course. But she totally ignores the dangers of rising
Islamo-Fascism and of demography. Just listen:
The
year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of
climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring
temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought and -- finally --
the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093, when the
disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration
and a complete reshuffling of the global order. Writing from the Second
People's Republic of China on the 300th anniversary of the Great
Collapse, a senior scholar presents a gripping and deeply disturbing
account of how the children of the Enlightenment -- the political and
economic elites of the so-called advanced industrial societies -- failed
to act, and so brought about the collapse of Western civilization.
So don’t look to the US to come to the rescue of a doomed Western
Europe. It is unlikely that our children or grandchildren will be
fortunate enough to experience the charms of great cities like London,
Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome – or what’s left of them.
S.
Fred Singer is professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and
director of the Science & Environmental Policy Project. His
specialty is atmospheric and space physics. An expert in remote sensing
and satellites, he served as the founding director of the US Weather
Satellite Service and, more recently, as vice chair of the US National
Advisory Committee on Oceans & Atmosphere. He is a senior fellow of
the Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute. He co-authored
theNY Timesbest-seller Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 years.
In 2007, he founded and has since chaired the NIPCC (Nongovernmental
International Panel on Climate Change), which has released several
scientific reports [See www.NIPCCreport.org]. For recent writings, seehttp://www.americanthinker.com/s_fred_singer/and also Google Scholar
Europe
is more than a year into the largest migrant crisis since the Second
World War. More than a million have made their way to Germany alone over
the past year. Some are refugees and asylum-seekers from Syria and
Iraq, but it now appears that a significant number, as much as 60
percent, are economic migrants from North Africa, Afghanistan, and the Middle East, simply seeking better prospects in Europe.
The European Union, thanks to its common border policy, is
overwhelmed and paralyzed—that border union has proven to be only as
strong as its weakest member. Once inside the EU, migrants can travel to
whichever country seems most welcoming inside the 26-state Schengen area. Some countries, in defiance of EU rules, have imposed unilateral border controls and asylum caps
as thousands more arrive daily from Turkey and elsewhere. EU leaders
recently agreed to an emergency measure that allows Great Britain to
restrict welfare benefits for EU migrants even as a so-called “Brexit,”
or a British exit from the EU, looms as a real possibility.
Europeans leaders are of course trying to downplay the severity of
the crisis even as its disruptive effects become impossible to ignore.
On New Year’s Eve in cities across Germany, gangs of Arab and North
African men, some of whom were later discovered to be asylum-seekers,
robbed and sexually assaulted scores of women. Before police had
completed their investigation, the European Commission declared
there was “no link” between the migrant crisis and the attacks, the
incidents were merely “a matter of public order.” Fearing a xenophobic
backlash, the commission proclaimed itself “the voice of reason.”
Late Measures Are Cold Comfort
Such talk has been common in Europe over the past year. But it’s cold
comfort for a growing number of Europeans who have waning confidence
that their governments are able or willing to stop the flow of migrants.
One February poll found 58 percent of Germans want border controls to
keep out migrants even if it hurts the economy, and more than half don’t
believe it will be possible to integrate migrants into German society.
Across the continent, political leaders are losing popular support.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s approval rate is at a four-year low,
with only 46 percent of Germans supporting her (from a high of 75
percent in April 2015). François Hollande could become the first sitting
French president to face a primary challenge from within his own party as it becomes clear he could lose a 2017 contest to the right-wing National Front’s Marine Le Pen over the migrant crisis.
The problem for Europe’s leaders, as Douglas Murray wrote recently in The Spectator, is that voters simply don’t believe they will do anything:
Now there are the usual attempts to crowd-please from certain
politicians and officials who are talking about how they might have to
deport these people. But they won’t, will they? Does anybody honestly
believe that the Swedish authorities are currently preparing to deport
80,000 fake asylum seekers from their country?
[…] Given that it has taken in more than a million people in the last
twelve months, is Germany now going to deport as many as three quarters
of a million fake asylum seekers from its territory? Of course not. They
will not even attempt it. Everybody in Europe knows that. And everybody
following events and weighing up their chances from outside Europe
knows that.
A Prophetic, Apocalyptic Tale
All of this calls to mind a 1973 novel by French writer Jean Raspail—The Camp of the Saints,
an apocalyptic tale about the collapse of European civilization. Much
of it could be lifted from the news coming out of Europe. In the book,
one million impoverished Indians make their way by boat from the Ganges
to the shores of southern France with no intention of adopting French
ways; they come simply to claim for themselves what Europeans have and
they do not.
At the heart of the novel is a moral question: Is the West willing to defend itself?
Unwilling to turn away the Ganges fleet for what they claim is
universal brotherhood and compassion—but is in fact Western guilt—the
government and all the country’s major institutions agree the migrants
must be welcomed as a matter of moral duty and penance for France’s past
sins. When the armada finally makes landfall, French society breaks
down, exhausted and acquiescent, passively colonized by an unarmed army
of castaways.
At the heart of the novel is a moral question: Is the West willing to
defend itself? Denounced upon publication four decades ago as a racist,
xenophobic fantasy, Raspail’s book now seems vaguely prophetic—not
because of what it tells us about refugees from the Third World but
because of what it reveals about European civilization.
The circumstances of today’s migrants are certainly different than
Raspail’s Indians, but the feckless response of European leaders are
eerily similar to those in the novel. When news of the Ganges fleet—a
hundred derelict ships each with a thousand wretched passengers—reaches
France, government officials call a press conference to express their
solidarity.
“Far be it from us to pass judgment,” one choked up minister says.
“Far better to think of these poor, homeless souls as citizens of the
world, in search of their promised land.” Calling for an international
commission to provide the fleet with food and supplies, the minister
cautions that, “Whatever qualms some of us may have about the outcome of
an affair unparalleled in its desperation, we are duty-bound to keep
them to ourselves, and to say for all to hear: ‘These men are my
brothers!’”
How Civilizations Die
When The Camp of the Saints first appeared in English in 1975, a review for The New York Times declared that “reading Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints is like being trapped at a cocktail party with a normal-looking fellow who suddenly starts a perfervid racist diatribe.”
Only a reader looking for an easy way to dismiss his larger thesis would find racism or fascism at the heart of the novel.
Time magazine ran a review under the headline, “Poor White
Trash,” and said it read like it had “come off a mimeograph machine in
some dank cellar.” Others called it a “fascist fantasy,” a “jerry-built
nightmare,” and a “flood of bilious exacerbation from France.” As
recently as September of last year, Rod Dreher echoed these sentiments, calling it “a repulsive book” that endorses “white supremacy.”
But in fact, Raspail has nothing much to say about race. Only a
reader looking for an easy way to dismiss his larger thesis would find
racism or fascism at the heart of the novel. The Indians of the Ganges
fleet are a rather obvious stand-in for impoverished migrants from what
is today politely called the “developing” world, and Raspail is not
primarily concerned with them but with France and European civilization
at large. In the introduction to a 1985 reprint, Raspail explains that
he chose as his migrant antagonists Indians, and not the nearby North
Africans and Arabs, because of a “refusal to enter the false debate
about racism and anti-racism in French daily life.”
Careful readers have understood this. When National Review covered The Camp of the Saints
upon its first publication in English, in 1975, reviewer Jeffery Hart
argued the racism label was inapt. “Raspail is not really writing about
race—he is writing about civilization, and in particular the
civilization of the West,” wrote Hart. “He is stating an obvious but
outrageous truth. Civilization involves particular forms of being. It is
not an amorphous mass.”
Raspail’s story, that is, is not about white supremacy but about how
civilizations die. His argument is that they die of neglect. To properly
speak of culture is to describe something alive, but the French society
sketched out in The Camp of the Saints has lost its will to
live, and therefore its ability to defend itself from those who seek to
conquer it. No one cares enough to water the garden, and it withers.
What Migrants Believe Matters
To use a contemporary term, we might say that Raspail rejects
multiculturalism—not as a preference, but as a possibility. In the long
term, Europe can either prefer its own civilization and culture, and
defend it, or capitulate to another. But it cannot, as the novel tells
it, absorb masses of unassimilated members of another culture and expect
to survive. It will be changed forever, and the change will be in the
direction of the immigrants’ way of life, and away from that of the
native-born. This is a difficult truth to accept in our egalitarian age.
All men are created equal. But we know from hard
experience that this is not a ‘universal value.’ It is not indigenous
to all the world’s cultures.
But Raspail demands an answer. Even Dreher, though repulsed, admits
that the novel poses serious questions, “even if Raspail answers them in
a way that provokes disgust, and that Christians, at least, will find
unacceptable.” Perhaps not all Christians. After all, much of what
Christianity has bequeathed to the West is clarity about human nature.
The fragile thing the American Founders built is based after all on a
rigorous acceptance of a Christian view of human nature: All men are
created equal. But we know from hard experience that this is not a
“universal value.” It is not indigenous to all the world’s cultures.
European leaders don’t want to admit this, but it can’t be denied:
What migrants believe has a great deal to do with whether and how they
will assimilate. Europe, of all places, should know this. The EU has
decades of experience with unassimilated Muslim migrants—entire
communities and neighborhoods spanning two and three generations, the
most recent of which are arguably less assimilated than their parents.
In most EU countries they form an isolated underclass with very few ties
or allegiance to their host country.
The Immigration Marriage Problem
In 2009, Christopher Caldwell wrote a brilliant, disquieting book
about what this seething Muslim population portends for Europe. The
marital behavior of Muslim immigrants gets special attention, in part
because it demonstrates the depth of the cultural problem. Caldwell puts
it bluntly: “In a lot of European countries, marriage is not just an
aspect of the immigration problem; it is the immigration problem.”
‘They don’t necessarily want a European life. They may want a Third World life at a European standard of living.’
That’s because many Muslim immigrants don’t marry Europeans or even
European-born “westernized” Muslims; they import spouses, often underage
girls, from their ethnic homelands. In Germany, half of ethnically
Turkish Germans seek spouses in Turkey. In Denmark, a large majority of
Turks and Pakistanis do the same—and not just immigrants, but also
second and third-generation descendants of immigrants. In France,
family-related immigration makes up 78 percent of permanent legal
immigration. Perhaps this wouldn’t be a problem if all these spouses
were assimilating, but they’re not.
In the face of such a large-scale choice not to assimilate, European
governments have found themselves powerless to act without compromising
the rights of the entire populations. Consider the Danish marriage law.
In the wake of the 2004 murder of Theo Van Gogh, the Netherlands passed a
law requiring civics examinations and language tests on anyone seeking
to marry a Dutch citizen. Germany passed a similar law. “What makes the
measure defensible against EU human rights laws is that it is race,
religion, and ethnicity-blind,” writes Caldwell. “It achieves this race
blindness by stripping rights wantonly from all citizens, rather than
targeting the problem it seeks to address.”
Because Europeans believe, or at least claim to believe, their values
are universal and not tied to any particular culture, they are forced
to be disingenuous about the need for such laws in the first place.
Caldwell quotes former British cabinet member George Walden musing on
what he’d do about Islam in Britain were he still in office. His lines
could have come verbatim from a character in The Camp of the Saints:
I’d be so alarmed by the situation I’d do everything
possible to suggest it was under control. It’s up to politicians to play
mood music in a crisis, and up to the people to understand that there’s
little else governments can do. The last thing they can say is that we
face a threat to which we can see no end because it’s based on a
fundamental clash of cultures. On the IRA we told the truth; on the
Islamic problem, we lie.
Raspail, who today is 90 years old, would likely not be surprised at
this because he understands the problem is not a matter of policy or
politics. It’s something deeper. “The West is empty,” he wrote in that
1985 introduction, “even if it has not yet become really aware of it. An
extraordinarily inventive civilization, surely the only one capable of
meeting the challenges of the third millennium, the West has no soul
left.”
Lose Your Culture, Lose Your Soul
Once you get beyond the handwringing about racism and fascism,
Raspail’s polemical—at times frantic—novel is really about this
collective loss of soul. A culture is in the end a way of life, even an
identity. When one grows to love all the particular customs and
traditions of one’s culture, it can be very much like loving a person.
It is something unique in the world, and it belongs to you.
The Camp of the Saints opens with a portrait of someone like
this, an old professor who dearly loves his country and his culture. He
is the last person in his village the night before the Ganges fleet
makes landfall. Everyone else has long since fled, but he will not go.
He lives in a house built by his ancestors in 1673 and occupied by his
family in an unbroken line since then. On that last night, he prepares
for himself a great feast, carefully laying it all out on a massive
table.
While the old man sat there, eating and drinking, savoring swallow after
swallow, he set his eyes wandering over the spacious room. A
time-consuming task, since his glance stopped to linger on everything it
touched, and since every confrontation was a new act of love. Now and
then his eyes would fill with tears, but they were tears of joy. Each
object in this house proclaimed the dignity of those who had lived
here—their discretion, their propriety, their reserve, their taste for
those solid traditions that one generation can pass on to the next, so
long as it still takes pride in itself. And the old man’s soul was in
everything, too. In the fine old bindings, the rustic benches, the
Virgin carved in wood, the big cane chairs, the hexagonal tiles, the
beams in the ceiling, the ivory crucifix with its sprig of dried
boxwood, and a hundred other things as well.
The book ends as it begins, with a sense of deep personal loss. The
narrator is writing from Switzerland, the last European country to
capitulate to the migrant invaders. He sits alone, the night before the
borders are to be opened, “slowly repeating, over and over, the
melancholy words of an old prince Bibesco, trying to drum them into my
head: ‘The fall of Constantinople is a personal misfortune that happened
to all of us only last week.’”
Let us suppose that along the coast of Normandy up to one
million non-EU migrants are waiting to be packed like sardines in small
unseaworthy vessels and to cross the English Channel.
Let us suppose that first the Royal Navy, then the navies of a dozen
other EU countries, start to search for all such vessels in the Channel
right up to the French coast, out into the North Sea and the Atlantic
even, and then ferry all the passengers on board to Dover, Folkestone,
Hastings, Eastbourne and Brighton in a surreal modern-day never-ending
version of the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940. Would the British government
agree to take them all? What of the British people? And if they did
agree, what would the British government and people do with all the
migrants? How would they cope?
Well, Italy has been invaded in just this way, by migrants from many
nations all coming over here from Libya. And Italy’s unelected
government has agreed to take them all. This makes the Italian people —
who are among the least racist in Europe — very angry. It’s hard to
blame them.
In October 2013, Italy’s previous unelected government, which like
the current one was left-wing, ordered the Italian navy to search for
and rescue all boat people in the Sicilian channel and beyond. This
hugely expensive operation — ‘Mare Nostrum’ — ran until October last
year and rescued nearly 190,000 people. The Italian government took this
decision after a migrant boat sank with the loss of 360 lives 500 yards
from an idyllic beach on the island of Lampedusa, once a resort of
choice for the right-on rich.
The same left-wing Italian government also took the extraordinary
step of decriminalising illegal immigration, which means among other
things that none of the boat people are arrested once on dry land.
Instead, they are taken to ‘Centri di accoglienza’ (welcome centres) for
identification and a decision on their destinies. In theory, only those
who identify themselves and claim political asylum can remain in Italy
until their application is refused — or, if it is accepted,
indefinitely. And in theory, under the Dublin Accords, they can only
claim political asylum in Italy — the country where they arrived in the
EU. In practice, however, only a minority claim political asylum in
Italy. Pretty well all of them remain there incognito, or else move on
to other EU countries.
Here’s how it works. In the welcome centres, they are given free
board and lodging plus mobile phones, €3 a day in pocket money, and
lessons — if they can be bothered — in such things as ice-cream-making
or driving a car and (I nearly forgot) Italian. Their presence in these
welcome centres is voluntary and they are free to come and go, though
not to work, and each of them costs those Italians who do pay tax €35 a
day (nearly €13,000 a year). Yes, they are supposed to have their
photographs and fingerprints taken, but many refuse and the Italian
police, it seems, do not insist. As the Italian interior minister,
Angelino Alfano, explained to a TV reporter the other day: ‘They don’t
want to be identified here — otherwise, under the Dublin Accords, they
would have to stay in our country. So when a police officer is in front
of an Eritrean who is two metres tall who doesn’t want his fingerprints
taken, he can’t break his fingers, but must respect his human rights.’
This year, there is space for just 75,000 migrants in such places.
Hotels are filling the breach, including the four-star Kulm hotel
perched high above the luxury resort of Portofino on the Ligurian coast.
But most of the rescued migrants could not care less about all that
jazz and have just disappeared.
The ones who stay long in the welcome centres are those who have
revealed their identities in order to apply for political asylum in
Italy. Last year, 64,900 migrants did so in Italy — roughly a third of
those saved by the Italian navy. But this being Italy, the judicial
system only had time to reach a decision on half those applications
(accepting 60 per cent of them), and anyway, thanks to the byzantine
Italian appeals procedure, those refused asylum can remain for years.
Even if their asylum claim is finally rejected and by some cruel quirk
of fate they are actually handed a deportation order, it is easily
ignored: last year Italy forcibly deported just 6,944 people — a figure
set to shrink even more once a law before parliament is passed banning
deportation to countries where human rights are abused.
Fair enough, you might say, if all the asylum seekers were genuine
refugees from war zones. But contrary to the impression given by most of
the world’s media, hardly any of 2014’s intake were from war-torn
countries such as Syria or Iraq (though it is true that the number of
Syrians is now rising).
Last year, most were from sub-Saharan Africa. Top of the league table
were the Nigerians, followed by the Malians and the Gambians, the
Senegalese and even the Pakistanis — who together made up 70 per cent of
the total. No doubt these countries are no picnic to live in, and parts
of some of them are war zones, but that should not, and in theory does
not, guarantee refugee status. It is also a fact that most boat people
are young single men and the price of a ticket on a people-smuggling
boat is €2,000 (nearly two years’ pay for the average worker in Mali).
It’s worth remembering here that the majority of the boat people are
Muslims and reports suggest that a small number are Islamic terrorists.
The terrorists of ISIS are, we know from their Twitter feeds, obsessed
with taking their crusade to Rome. One of those arrested in connection
with the Islamic terrorist attack on the Bardo National Museum of Tunis
in March had crossed the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy in a migrant
boat in February.
Many refugees have no intention of staying in Italy, which is hardly
surprising. For a start, only people who lose a full-time job are
entitled to unemployment benefit. Italy, thanks to the straitjacket of
the single currency, has been mired in recession for most of the past
six years, with an official unemployment rate of 13 per cent (the real
rate is probably 20 per cent) and the youth unemployment rate at a
staggering 43 per cent.
The government of Matteo Renzi — the man billed as the Latin left’s
answer to Tony Blair — seems happy to ferry into Italy a vast army of
migrants with no real idea what to do with them except hope that they
move on to other EU countries. The Italian premier has also been quick
to champion the Euro-luvvie definition of this as a ‘European’ and not
an ‘Italian’ crisis. So as of spring 2015, the ferry service is now
operated not just by the Italian navy in the Sicilian channel but across
the entire Mediterranean by the navies of many other EU countries,
including the Royal Navy. This year, they have brought 54,000 boat
people into Italy and a further 48,000 into Greece, and the summer
migration season is not even in full swing yet.
Recently, Nick Cooke-Priest, captain of the British vessel involved in the rescue mission, HMS Bulwark,
told reporters that ‘the indications are that there are 450,000 to
500,000 migrants in Libya who are waiting’ to reach Italy. The British
Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said ‘We could see hundreds of
thousands trying to cross this summer.’ Fabrice Leggeri, the head of the
EU’s border agency Frontex, has put the figure even higher, at ‘between
500,000 and a million’. So huge are the numbers that Italian police
often just dump coach loads of migrants in town squares or at main
railway stations which are then turned into temporary camps. Government
policy is to try and spread the migrants out throughout the peninsula to
lessen their impact; but now many regional and town councils (of all
political persuasions), especially in the north, are in open revolt and
refusing to take any more. Scabies is rife (of 46,000 migrants tested
this year, 4,700 were infested) and one in four migrants is said by
doctors to have Hepatitis C. The anti-immigration vote is rocketing and
the Italian left has taken a hammering in the recent regional and city
elections.
The EU — urged on in particular by an increasingly desperate Italy
and Greece — is trying to draw up a quota deal to distribute the huge
migrant army; but as with the single currency, when push comes to shove,
it is every nation for itself. Despite months of talks, there are few
signs of an agreement even on the small numbers being bandied about. A
couple of months ago, there was much talk about UN sanctioned military
action by the EU to stop the smugglers’ boats putting to sea from the
Libyan coast. For weeks now, the silence on that subject has been
deafening.
The French have ‘closed’ their border with Italy on the Côte d’Azur
in defiance of the Schengen Agreement, which guarantees free movement
within member nations. They are rigorously checking trains, cars and
even footpaths across the mountains, and sending any illegal migrants
back to Italy; they say they have sent back 6,000 this year. The
justification is simple: the Italians are failing to identify these
people and distinguish economic migrants from refugees. Who can argue
with that? The Austrians are doing the same at the Brenner Pass in the
Alps.
Pope Francis said last month that leaving the boat people to drown
(about 3,500 are known to have died last year, and already nearly 2,000
this year) is ‘an attack against life’ akin to abortion. All of us feel
it to be our moral duty to save lives where we can. Yet it cannot be our
moral duty to ferry such vast numbers across the Mediterranean into
Italy and Europe for ever, unless they are genuine refugees. In fact,
our moral duty is not to do so — and the only solution is the one which
few politicians dare even talk about, let alone implement: that the
navies of the EU should stop the ferry service and start a blockade of
Libya.
Prime Minister Renzi tried to pretend that the migrant crisis did not
exist, but now that it has turned into an emergency he can remain
silent no longer. He blames other EU countries for putting the nation
before the union — in this latest meltdown of EU collective
responsibility — and the British and the French in particular for
getting rid of Muammar Gaddafi and turning Libya into a failed state.
When Gaddafi was in power, thanks to a deal struck with Berlusconi, who
like Blair had an excellent rapport with the Colonel, the number of boat
people slowed to a trickle.
Signor Renzi now threatens his EU partners with what he calls ‘Plan
B’ but refuses to reveal the details. It is thought to involve, among
other things, refusing the EU fleet permission to land rescued migrants
in Italy, and giving all migrants already here temporary leave-to-remain
cards — in order to fox the French and flood Europe with them. That’ll
teach them. The Italians call Renzi ‘Il Rottamatore’ (the Demolition
Man) because of his vow to reform Italy root and branch. The nickname
may end up being more apt than anybody realised.
Nicholas Farrell is the author of Mussolini: A New Life.
http://www.westernjournalism.com/
Scary: Radical Islam Is Completely Taking Over Europe. See Why America Could Be Next
(Editor’s
note: In a generation or two, the US will ask itself: “Who lost
Europe?” Here is the speech of Geert Wilders, Chairman of the Party for
Freedom the Netherlands, at the Four Seasons in New York, introducing an
Alliance of Patriots and announcing the Facing Jihad Conference in
Jerusalem.)
Dear friends,
Thank you very much for inviting me.
I come to America with a mission. All is not well in the old world.
There is a tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be
optimistic. We might be in the final stages of the Islamization of
Europe. This not only is a clear and present danger to the future of
Europe itself; it is a threat to America and the sheer survival of the
West. The United States is the last bastion of Western civilization,
facing an Islamic Europe.
First, I will describe the situation on the ground in Europe. Then, I
will say a few things about Islam. To close, I will tell you about a
meeting in Jerusalem.
The Europe you know is changing.
You have probably seen the landmarks. But in all of these cities,
sometimes a few blocks away from your tourist destination, there is
another world. It is the world of the parallel society created by Muslim
mass-migration.
All throughout Europe, a new reality is rising: entire Muslim
neighborhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen.
And if they are, they might regret it. This goes for the police as well.
It’s the world of head scarves, where women walk around in figureless
tents, with baby strollers and a group of children. Their husbands, or
slaveholders if you prefer, walk three steps ahead. With mosques on many
street corners. The shops have signs you and I cannot read. You will be
hard-pressed to find any economic activity. These are Muslim ghettos
controlled by religious fanatics. These are Muslim neighborhoods, and
they are mushrooming in every city across Europe. These are the
building-blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions
of Europe , street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by
city.
There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe . With larger
congregations than there are in churches. And in every European city,
there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in
the region. Clearly, the signal is: we rule.
Many European cities are already one-quarter Muslim: just take
Amsterdam , Marseille, and Malmo in Sweden. In many cities, the majority
of the under-18 population is Muslim. Paris is now surrounded by a ring
of Muslim neighborhoods. Mohammed is the most popular name among boys
in many cities.
In some elementary schools in Amsterdam, the farm can no longer be
mentioned because that would also mean mentioning the pig, and that
would be an insult to Muslims.
Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark only serve halal food to
all pupils. In once-tolerant Amsterdam, gays are beaten up almost
exclusively by Muslims. Non-Muslim women routinely hear ‘whore, whore.’
Satellite dishes are not pointed to local TV stations, but to stations
in the country of origin.
In France, schoolteachers are advised to avoid authors deemed
offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is
increasingly true of Darwin. The history of the Holocaust can no longer
be taught because of Muslim sensitivity.
In England, sharia courts are now officially part of the British
legal system. Many neighborhoods in France are no-go areas for women
without head scarves. Last week, a man almost died after being beaten up
by Muslims in Brussels because he was drinking during the Ramadan.
Jews are fleeing France in record numbers, on the run for the worst
wave of anti-Semitism since World War II. French is now commonly spoken
on the streets of Tel Aviv and Netanya, Israel. I could go on forever
with stories like this. Stories about Islamization.
San Diego University recently calculated that a staggering 25 percent
of the population in Europe will be Muslim just 12 years from now.
Bernhard Lewis has predicted a Muslim majority by the end of this
century.
Now these are just numbers. And the numbers would not be threatening
if the Muslim immigrants had a strong desire to assimilate. But there
are few signs of that. The Pew Research Center reported that half of
French Muslims see their loyalty to Islam as greater than their loyalty
to France. One-third of French Muslims do not object to suicide attacks.
The British Centre for Social Cohesion reported that one-third of
British Muslim students are in favor of a worldwide caliphate. Muslims
demand what they call ‘respect’. And this is how we give them respect.
We have Muslim official state holidays.
The Christian-Democratic attorney general is willing to accept sharia
in the Netherlands if there is a Muslim majority. We have cabinet
members with passports from Morocco and Turkey.
Muslim demands are supported by unlawful behavior, ranging from petty
crimes and random violence, for example, against ambulance workers and
bus drivers, to small-scale riots. Paris has seen its uprising in the
low-income suburbs, the banlieus. I call the perpetrators ‘settlers’
because that is what they are. They do not come to integrate into our
societies; they come to integrate our society into their Dar-al-Islam.
Therefore, they are settlers.
Much of this street violence I mentioned is directed exclusively
against non-Muslims, forcing many native people to leave their
neighborhoods, their cities, their countries. Moreover, Muslims are now a
swing vote not to be ignored.
The second thing you need to know is the importance of Mohammed the
prophet. His behavior is an example to all Muslims and cannot be
criticized. Now, if Mohammed had been a man of peace, let us say like
Ghandi and Mother Theresa wrapped in one, there would be no problem. But
Mohammed was a warlord, a mass murderer, a pedophile, and had several
marriages – at the same time. Islamic tradition tells us how he fought
in battles, how he had his enemies murdered and even had prisoners of
war executed. Mohammed himself slaughtered the Jewish tribe of Banu
Qurayza. If it is good for Islam, it is good. If it is bad for Islam, it
is bad.
Let no one fool you about Islam being a religion. Sure, it has a god,
and a here-after, and 72 virgins. But in its essence, Islam is a
political ideology. It is a system that lays down detailed rules for
society and the life of every person. Islam wants to dictate every
aspect of life. Islam means ‘submission’. Islam is not compatible with
freedom and democracy because what it strives for is sharia. If you want
to compare Islam to anything, compare it to communism or
national-socialism; these are all totalitarian ideologies.
Now you know why Winston Churchill called Islam ‘the most retrograde force in the world’, and why he compared Mein Kampf
to the Quran. The public has wholeheartedly accepted the Palestinian
narrative, and sees Israel as the aggressor. I have lived in this
country and visited it dozens of times. I support Israel, first, because
it is the Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile up to and
including Auschwitz , second because it is a democracy, and third
because Israel is our first line of defense.
This tiny country is situated on the fault line of jihad, frustrating
Islam’s territorial advance. Israel is facing the front lines of Jihad,
like Kashmir, Kosovo, the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Darfur in
Sudan, Lebanon, and Aceh in Indonesia . Israel is simply in the way, the
same way West-Berlin was during the Cold War.
The war against Israel is not a war against Israel. It is a war
against the West. It is Jihad. Israel is simply receiving the blows that
are meant for all of us. If there would have been no Israel, Islamic
imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its
desire for conquest. Thanks to Israeli parents who send their children
to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can
sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming.
Many in Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to
address the grievances of our Muslim minorities. But if Israel were, God
forbid, to go down, it would not bring any solace to the West. It would
not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their
behavior and accept our values. On the contrary, the end of Israel would
give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam. They would, and
rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is weak, and
doomed.
The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam,
but only the beginning. It would mean the start of the final battle for
world domination. If they can get Israel, they can get everything.
So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of
Islamization as a ‘right-wing extremists’ or ‘racists’. In my country,
the Netherlands, 60 percent of the population now sees the mass
immigration of Muslims as the number one policy mistake since World War
II. And another 60 percent sees Islam as the biggest threat.
Yet there is a greater danger than terrorist attacks, the scenario of
America as the last man standing. The lights may go out in Europe
faster than you can imagine. An Islamic Europe means a Europe without
freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare,
and a loss of military might for America – as its allies will turn into
enemies, enemies with atomic bombs. With an Islamic Europe, it would be
up to America alone to preserve the heritage of Rome, Athens, and
Jerusalem.
Dear friends, liberty is the most precious of gifts. My generation
never had to fight for this freedom; it was offered to us on a silver
platter, by people who fought for it with their lives. All throughout
Europe, American cemeteries remind us of the young boys who never made
it home, and whose memory we cherish. My generation does not own this
freedom; we are merely its custodians. We can only hand over this
hard-won liberty to Europe’s children in the same state in which it was
offered to us. We cannot strike a deal with mullahs and imams. Future
generations would never forgive us. We cannot squander our liberties. We
simply do not have the right to do so.
We have to take the necessary action now to stop this Islamic stupidity from destroying the free world that we know. The views expressed in this opinion article are solely those of
their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by
WesternJournalism.com.
http://www.wsj.com/
Immigration and Islam: Europe’s Crisis of Faith
France and the rest of Western Europe have never honestly confronted the issues raised by Muslim immigration
Two women talk as
police officers stand in front of the courthouse
in Meaux, near Paris,
on Sept. 22, 2011. The court convicted two
other women for publicly
wearing Islamic veils; France banned
The terrorist assault on the French satirical magazine Charlie
Hebdo on Jan. 7 may have been organized by al Qaeda’s affiliate in
Yemen. But the attack, along with another at a Paris kosher market days
later, was carried out by French Muslims descended from recent waves of
North African and West African immigration. Well before the attacks,
which left 17 dead, the French were discussing the possibility that
tensions with the country’s own Muslim community were leading France
toward some kind of armed confrontation.
Consider Éric Zemmour, a
slashing television debater and a gifted polemicist. His history of the
collapse of France’s postwar political order, “Le suicide français,”
was No. 1 on the best-seller lists for several weeks this fall. “Today,
our elites think it’s France that needs to change to suit Islam, and not
the other way around,” Mr. Zemmour said on a late-night talk show in
October, “and I think that with this system, we’re headed toward civil
war.”
More recently, Michel Houellebecq published “Submission,”
a novel set in the near future. In it, the re-election of France’s
current president, François Hollande, has drawn recruits to a shadowy
group proclaiming its European identity. “Sooner or later, civil war
between Muslims and the rest of the population is inevitable,” a
sympathizer explains. “They draw the conclusion that the sooner this war
begins, the better chance they’ll have of winning it.” Published, as it
happened, on the morning of the attacks, Mr. Houellebecq’s novel
replaced Mr. Zemmour’s at the top of the best-seller list, where it
remains.
Two days after the Charlie Hebdo killings, there was a
disturbing indication on Le Monde’s website of how French people were
thinking. One item about the killing vastly outpaced all others in
popularity. The reactions of Europe’s leaders was shared about 5,000
times, tales of Muslim schoolchildren with mixed feelings about 6,000, a
detailed account of the Charlie Hebdo editorial meeting ended by the
attack, 9,000. Topping them all, shared 28,000 times, was a story about
reprisals: “Mosques become targets, French Muslims uneasy.” Those clicks
are the sound of French fear that something larger may be under way.
Marine Le Pen of
France’s Front National acknowledges supporters on Nov. 30. Populist
parties are rising across Europe as voters feel abandoned by the
mainstream political class.
Photo:
Getty Images
France’s problem has elements of a military threat, a religious
conflict and a violent civil-rights movement. It is not unique. Every
country of Western Europe has a version. For a half-century, millions of
immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa have arrived, lured by
work, welfare, marriage and a refuge from war. There are about 20
million Muslims in Europe, with some 5 million of them in France,
according to the demographer Michèle Tribalat. That amounts to roughly
8% of the population of France, compared with about 5% of both the U.K.
and Germany.
Such a migration is not something that Europeans
would have countenanced at any other moment in their generally
xenophobic history, and the politicians who permitted it to happen were
not lucky. The movement coincided with a collapse in European
birthrates, which lent the immigration an unstoppable momentum, and with
the rise of modern political Islam, which gave the diaspora a radical
edge.
A woman holds up a sign that says, ‘I am Charlie, I am Jewish
I am a Muslim, I am French’ during a rally in Paris on Jan. 1
Photo:
Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
So impressed were the Europeans with their own generosity that they
failed to notice that the population of second- and third-generation
immigrants was growing bigger, stronger, more unified and less inclined
to take moral instruction. This is partly a demographic problem. Since
the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western Europe has had some of the lowest
birthrates of any civilization on record. Without immigration, Europe’s
population would fall by a hundred million by midcentury, according to
U.N. estimates.
When mass immigration began, Europeans did not
give much thought to the influence of Islam. In the 1960s, there might
have been worries that a North African was, say, a Nasserite Arab
nationalist, but not that he was a would-be jihadist. Too many Europeans
forgot that people carry a long past within them—and that, even when
they do not, they sometimes wish to. Materialistic, acquisitive, averse
to God and family, Europe’s culture appeared cold, dead and unsatisfying
to many Muslims. It failed to satisfy a lot of non-Muslims too, but
until they ran out of borrowed money with the 2008 crash, they could
avoid facing it squarely.
Europeans didn’t know enough about the
cultural background of Muslims to browbeat them the same way they did
the native-born. Muslims felt none of the historic guilt over fascism
and colonialism that so affected non-Muslim Europeans. They had a
freedom of political action that Europeans lacked.
As European
politics grew duller and the stakes lower, many political romantics
looked enviously at the aspirations of the Muslim poor, particularly
regarding Palestine. You could see a hint of this last weekend in the
BBC journalist who interrupted a mourning Frenchwoman, distraught about
the targeting of Jews for murder at a kosher supermarket, to say that
“the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands.”
In a world
that prized “identity,” Muslim immigrants were aristocrats. Those who
became radicalized developed the most monstrous kind of self-regard. A
chilling moment in the most recent terrorist drama came when the TV
network RTL phoned the kosher supermarket where the Malian-French
hostage-taker, Amedy Coulibaly, was holding his victims at gunpoint. He
refused to talk but hung up the phone carelessly. The newspaper Le
Monde was able to publish a transcript of the strutting stupidity to
which he then gave expression:
“They’re always trying to make you
believe that Muslims are terrorists. Me, I’m born in France. If they
hadn’t been attacked elsewhere, I wouldn’t be here…Think of the people
who had Bashar al-Assad in Syria. They were torturing people…We didn’t
intervene for years…Then bombers, coalition of 50,000 countries, all
that…Why did they do that?”
The Muslim community is not to be
confused with the terrorists it produces. But left to its own, it
probably lacks the means, the inclination and the courage to stand up to
the faction, however small, that supports terrorism. In 1995, there
were riots among French Muslims after the arrest of Khalid Kelkal of
Lyon, who had planted several bombs—in a train station, near a Jewish
school, on a high-speed rail track. In 2012, when Mohamed Merah of
Toulouse was killed by police after having gunned down soldiers, a rabbi
and three Jewish elementary-school children, his brother professed
himself “proud,” and his father threatened to file a wrongful-death suit
against the government.
Populist parties like
the U.K. Independence Party wind up, by voter demand, placing
immigration and multiculturalism at the center of their concerns.
Photo:
PA Wire/Zuma Press
What continues is the deafness of France’s government and mainstream
parties to public opinion (and popular suffrage) on the issues of
immigration and a multiethnic society. Mr. Hollande’s approval ratings
have risen since the attacks, but they are still below 30%. In January
2013, according to the newsweekly L’Express, 74% of the French said that
Islam “is not compatible with French society.” Though that number fell
last year, it is almost certain to be higher now.
Voters all
across Europe feel abandoned by the mainstream political class, which is
why populist parties are everywhere on the rise. Whatever the biggest
initial grievance of these parties—opposition to the European Union for
the U.K. Independence Party, opposition to the euro for Alternative für
Deutschland, corruption for Italy’s 5 Star Movement—all wind up, by
voter demand, placing immigration and multiculturalism at the center of
their concerns.
In France, it is the Front National, a party
with antecedents on the far right, that has been the big beneficiary. In
the last national election, for seats in the European Parliament, the
FN, led by Marine Le Pen (daughter of the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le
Pen), topped the polls. But the ruling Socialists froze the Front
National out of the recent national ceremonies of mourning, limiting
participation in the Paris rally to those parties it deemed
“republican.” This risks damaging the cause of republicanism more than
the cause of Le Pen and her followers.
Acts of terrorism can
occur without shaking a country to its core. These latest attacks, awful
as they were, could be taken in stride if the majority in France felt
itself secure. But it does not. Thanks to wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen,
thousands of young people who share the indignation of the Kouachis and
Coulibaly are now battle-hardened and heavily armed.
France,
like Europe more broadly, has been careless for decades. It has not
recognized that free countries are for peoples strong enough to defend
them. A willingness to join hands and to march in solidarity is a good
first response to the awful events of early January. It will not be
enough. Mr. Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly
Standard and the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe:
Immigration, Islam and the West.”
The Camp of the Saints is a novel about population migration and its consequences. In Calcutta, India, the Belgian government announces a policy in which Indian babies will be adopted and raised in Belgium. The policy is reversed after the Belgian consulate is inundated with poverty-stricken parents eager to give up their infant children.
An Indian "wise man" then rallies the masses to make an exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera,
where almost no one remains except for the military and a few
civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge
fleet of run-down freighters approaching the French coast.
The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration
and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate
into French culture but want the goods that are in short supply in their
native India. Although the novel focuses on France, the rest of the
West shares its fate.
Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of the United Kingdom must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia. The one holdout until the end of the novel is Switzerland, but by then international pressure isolating it as a rogue state for not opening its borders forces it to capitulate.
In 1975 Time
magazine panned the novel as a "bilious tirade" that only required a
response because it "arrives trailing clouds of praise from French
savants, including Dramatist Jean Anouilh
('A haunting book of irresistible force and calm logic'), with the
imprint of a respected U.S. publisher and a teasing pre-publication ad
campaign ('The end of the white world is near')".[3]Jeffrey Hart in the National Review
lauded the novel, stating "in freer and more intelligent circles in
Europe, the book is a sensation and Raspail is a prize-winner…his plot
is both simple and brilliant”.[4] In 1983, Linda Chavez declared she was "appalled" at the novel, and called it "racist, xenophobic and paranoid".[5] The December 1994 cover story of The Atlantic Monthly focused on the themes of the novel, analyzing them in the context of international relations.[6](This was at about the same time that The Social Contract Press chose to bring it back into U.S. publication.[7])
In 2002 Lionel Shriver
described the novel as "both prescient and appalling," certainly
"racist" but "written with tremendous verbal energy and passion."
Shriver writes that the book "gives bilious voice to an emotion whose
expression is increasingly taboo in the West, but that can grow only
more virulent when suppressed: the fierce resentment felt by majority
populations when that status seems threatened."[8] William F. Buckley, Jr. praised the book in 2004 as "a great novel" which raised questions on how to respond to massive illegal immigration.[9] In 2005 the conservative Chilton Williamson praised the book as "one of the most uncompromising works of literary reaction in the 20th century."[10] In 2001 the Southern Poverty Law Center described it as "widely revered by American white supremacists and is a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries,"[11]
and as recently as October of 2015 condemned the novel as "the favorite
racist fantasy of the anti-immigrant movement in the US."[12]
The book returned to the bestseller list in 2011.[1]
Rome's lesson for the EU regarding mass immigration
image: http://edge.liveleak.com/80281E/u/u/ll2/attention.gif Part of channel(s): Liveleakers (promoted)
Europe's bitter lesson on immigration doesn't have to come from law books, it could come from history books as well.
At the height of the Roman Empire, Rome controlled all of what is now
western Europe all the way to what is now Armenia and present day Iraq.
Rome was the center of development and innovation for western
civilization and cities such as Rome developed to include plumbing and
irrigation to farms far beyond the reach of rivers, lakes and streams.
Though Rome was an empire, the Senate still exist, even if it was only a
mouthpiece of the emperor. Most of the world's trade either came from
Rome and went to Rome. Rome had built itself to be a massive
civilization.
However, as with all great empires in history, the first step toward its
demise was complacency. As the Roman imperial government became stable,
bureaucrats appeared and with them came ignorance. At times the people
did rise up against them, these rebellions would either be put down
viciously or the army would side with the rebels in aiding with the
removal of corrupt provincial and city governors. At times, these
rebellions would topple emperors. To placate these developments, the
Roman government implemented the first vestiges of welfare- giving
people food to eat and a place to live. A lot of times this came on the
backs of the Romans that did pay their taxes. With this came fewer
incentives to work, especially since there are fewer people to do jobs
that needed to be done. As labor shortages arose, who were the Romans to
turn to?
The answer came from beyond its frontiers.
As barbarians for the east storm their way west, killing and destroying
civilizations in their paths, they forced massive amounts of people
west. The farther west the ruthless barbarians went, the closer these
ethnic groups came to Rome until their communities buttressed the
frontiers themselves. At first, Rome forbade entrance to these groups
fearing they would have a threatening influence on Roman society. But
some politicians saw this as a political opportunity; if they helped
these 'foreigners' integrate into Roman society, they would repay the
politicians by helping them remain in power.
These politicians, either senators or governors, would reach out and
invite these foreigners into the Roman empire. They soon took up jobs
that the Romans didn't want to do, sometimes for money and sometimes for
food and a place to live. Over time, their children and their
descendants would integrate into Roman society. Some would move on to be
soldiers in its army and some even gained enough influence to become
senators themselves. This was nothing new- as Rome conquered Europe and
the people of those lands would become Roman slaves and then themselves
Roman citizens. But the migration toward Rome was something new and
overtime it would become a burden. As more and more peoples sought
shelter within Rome, they came to outnumber Roman citizens, even those
who were from conquered lands. As more came, not only did it become
difficult to feed and house them, it became difficult for the government
to appease its own people. Sometimes Romans would riot against the
growing foreign population. But soon, it became apparent that the
massive number of foreigners going into Rome would lead to its own
demise.
As these foreign groups grew in size through birth and further
migration, they also grew impatient with the government's inability to
take care of their people. Then, these disaffected peoples would arm
themselves and eventually attack Rome itself. Several times, migrant
groups that had seen Rome as their sanctuary turned on their hosts and
destroyed the city that symbolized the empire.
The ferocity and frequency of these attacks increased overtime to the
point that Rome could not defend itself against foreign invasions. So
not only would foreign armies attack and pillage the once great city,
but foreign groups that Rome thought would be their allies turned on
them and by the 400's, Rome had been destroyed so much so many times
that when the empire was divided into a western empire and an eastern
empire (which became the Byzantine empire), Rome and western Europe, was
left in its own rot and thrown to the foreign invaders who would fight
over its leftovers.
Right now, Europe is again being threatened by millions of foreign
invaders who are bent on destroying European society. Everyday,
thousands of people are seen now daily clamoring from rickety boats
trying to reach the EU or die trying. The main EU body says that its the
humanely thing to do by helping them. But are they?
As soon as they are in the EU, gullible politicians give them similar
welfare benefits that the Romans gave more than a thousand years ago.
The same amount and spirit of charity the governments give are also
being given on the backs of hardworking Europeans without much of a
choice- they either give or they can be called racist or bigots because
the main recipients are not white Europeans. But I'm not talking about
whites when I talk of the EU. Like the EU, Roman society was
multi-ethnic and multiracial as Rome included lands in Africa and what
is now the middle east. But what tied them together was SPQR- For the Senate and People of Rome ,
which identified them proudly as Romans. However, like back then,
immigrants are threatening to unravel years of hard work that was done
to make what the EU stands for today, especially since ww2, which
happened less then a hundred years ago.
Many of us joke at the idea that the EU could become a part of the
muslim world, but it is not a joke since a similar pattern of immigrant
violence brought down one of the most mightiest empires in history.
muslims are keen to this, that is why they see taking Europe as being a
cakewalk for them and, sadly, they might be right. Unless politicians
wake up to the nightmare they are creating, they are complicit to the
destruction of the EU, like the way greedy and ambitious senators and
governors lent an unwitting helping hand in destroying Rome.
Rome's lesson for the EU regarding mass immigration
http://www.heritage.org/
The Future of European Civilization: Lessons for America
America has much to learn from Europe’s current
condition. In Europe, the decline in religious faith has led to a
universal weakening of society and a loss of confidence in the value of
its civilization. And the effects of this have been grave: throngs of
unassimilated immigrants, unchecked military threats from abroad, and
confusion about national identity threaten Europe’s future. America, by
contrast, still shows many signs of strength. Nonetheless, should we
lose our sense of shared identity, Europe’s path likely awaits.
Key Points
The threats confronting Europe also
confront America: mass immigration of people whose loyalty cannot be
guaranteed, the purging of religious assumptions from the public square,
and the state’s growth which squeezes out civil society.
Europe is also threatened by the rise of
confused human rights doctrines which often contradict common sense,
the law, and national security interests.
Americans have something Europeans lack: a sense of shared identity.
This sense of identity depends on borders, laws defined by territory, and preserving the idea of the nation.
In a gloomy but strangely enthralling book published
at the end of the First World War, the historian and polymath Oswald
Spengler wrote of the decline of the West, arguing that Europe was
moving inevitably to its end according to a pattern that can be observed
among civilizations from the beginning of recorded history. Each
historical superorganism, he argued, displays its distinctive and
defining spirit through its culture. That of the West is
“Faustian”—involving an outgoing and conquering attitude to the world
displayed in the science, art, and institutions that came to fruition at
the Reformation, spread themselves far and wide through the
Enlightenment, and then reached a crisis at the French Revolution.
After that great period, things began to ossify into rigid legal and
bureaucratic forms. Thus was born the period of “civilization,” typified
by Napoleon’s new rationalization of the old spirit of France. Culture
leads to civilization, which in turn leads to decay and then death. The
culture of the West, Spengler argued, will dwindle to a purely
mechanical simulacrum of its former greatness before disappearing
entirely.
In the wake of the First World War, Europe was more than normally
receptive to stories of its doom, and Spengler was eagerly embraced by
the reading public. Despite a polemical attack from G. K. Chesterton,
his brand of cultural pessimism survived to gather momentum with the
outbreak of the Second World War and to exert a mesmerizing influence
over the post-war literary world.
Many of Spengler’s arguments are sophistical, many of his facts are
invented and his comparisons far-fetched, but it is difficult, on
reading Spengler now, to think that his prophecy of doom was entirely
unfounded. In one particular, he has surely been proven right, which is
that the culture of Europe is destined to become an empty shell, held in
place by rigid structures of law and bureaucracy around the void where
art and religion were once enthroned in splendor.
In one particular, however, Spengler seems to have been wholly
off-beam, and that is America. His Eurocentric vision is focused, like
that of Marx, on the great turning points in our continental history:
the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French
Revolution. He has nothing, or nothing significant, to say about the
other revolution that preceded the French by 13 years and which led to
the founding of the longest-lasting democracy that the world has so far
known.
The American Revolution was, for Spengler, a distant commotion like
the bursting of a supernova light-years away in space, a tiny pinpoint
of light in the ambient darkness, but the nation that was born on these
shores has proved itself more resilient, more creative, and more able to
sustain its defining mission than any other in the modern world. It is,
of course, tied to Europe, and to one European country in particular,
by language, history, culture, and institutions. It is a product of the
European diaspora, and in particular of the English religious and
political inheritance. The American Constitution does not make sense
without that inheritance and is in one interpretation simply an attempt
to transcribe into a document the civic freedom that the English won for
themselves over centuries of common-law government.
Nevertheless, the American Revolution was in itself a move away from
Europe, an attempt to embark on a different kind of history from those
that had prevailed across the ocean, and although the ties to Britain
remain, it is not possible to predict the condition of America from the
facts presented by Europe. It could be that the rapid and radical
decline that we witness on our side of the Atlantic has no equivalent
here. Or, if it has an equivalent, it would be presumptuous to assume
that the American decline can be understood outside the special context
provided by the history and self-image of the United States.
The European Union and the Threats to Europe
Let me summarize some relevant facts about Europe and its
civilization today. There is no doubt in my mind both that Europe is now
profoundly threatened and also that the approach of the European Union
to the threats is informed by a comprehensive failure to understand
them. The threats come from both inside and outside, and the two are
connected.
From inside, we confront the radicalization of our Muslim populations
and the loss of the core structures of European society: the family,
marriage, the Christian faith, and little platoons built from those
things. From outside, we confront mass migration of populations seeking
the benefits of European legal order without assuming the cost. And we
confront a growing military threat from Russia. In the past, that threat
has been countered by the NATO alliance, but the alliance has been
weakened both by European indifference and by the isolationist foreign
policy of the Obama Administration.
The radicalization of our Muslim populations is connected to the
migration problem: Not all those fleeing the Middle East are hostile to
the Islamist philosophy of ISIS. Many come ready to bear arms against
their hosts, and recent atrocities in France have shown the extent to
which new arrivals are ready and willing to join the cause of Allah
against the infidel. As ISIS consolidates its grip on Syria and loses
what support it has among the local populations, it will increasingly
seek to export its Islamist ideology and the violence associated with
it.
Such is the lesson of modern history: that revolutionary governments
become stable when they can export their chaos to their neighbors.
Europe has defenses against armed invasion, but it has no defenses
against those who invade without weapons.
The big questions in my mind are these: To what extent is the loss of
our traditional religion and the culture that grew from it responsible
for our weakness in the face of these threats, and what could we
conceivably do now to remedy the defect?
Those questions are difficult even to discuss. The EU institutions
have made a point of removing all references to the Christian religion
and its moral legacy from official documents, on the view that such
things will constitute discrimination in favor of one group of Europeans
over another. Cases brought before the European Court of Human Rights
and also the European Court of Justice (the court charged with the
application and enforcement of the treaties) are pushing for
continent-wide laws permitting gay marriage, easy divorce, and abortion
on demand, as well as laws banning the crucifix from public places and
curtailing the teaching of the Christian religion in schools.
These initiatives have their parallels here in America, and in the
same way that liberal activists have used the Supreme Court to overrule
the religion-based decisions of state legislatures, secularists and
Islamists are using the European courts to impose their vision on the
nation-states of Europe.
The De-Christianizing of Europe
This de-Christianizing of Europe is being pursued also through the
European Parliament and its Fundamental Rights Agency, charged with the
advocacy of human rights at all legislative levels. The Fundamental
Rights Agency is led by activists in the cause of “gender equality” and
LGBT rights and is inherently hostile to the traditional family and to
the religion-based morality that shaped it. It is now pressing for the
recognition of abortion as a human right—presumably a right of the
mother rather than the child. It is active in promoting the “gender
agenda” wherever this can be brought into play and is staffed largely by
people who have spent their lives as busybodies and who have never done
what my parents would have called an honest job of work.
It is true, of course, that activists gather always at the top and
try to push society in the direction that they favor, but their getting
to the top is not independent of the fact that they are allowed
to get to the top, and the people who allow them are those whom they
wish to control. In any case, whatever the cause, there is no doubt as
to the effect. Europe is rapidly jettisoning its Christian heritage and
has found nothing to put in the place of it save the religion of “human
rights.”
I call this a religion because it is designed expressly to fill the
hole in people’s worldview that is left when religion is taken away. The
notion of a human right purports to offer the ground for moral
opinions, for legal precepts, for policies designed to establish order
in places where people are in competition and conflict. However, it is
itself without foundations. If you ask what religion commands or
forbids, you usually get a clear answer in terms of God’s revealed law
or the Magisterium of the church. If you ask what rights are human or
natural or fundamental, you get a different answer depending on whom you
ask, and nobody seems to agree with anyone else regarding the procedure
for resolving conflicts.
Consider the dispute over marriage. Is it a right or not? If so, what
does it permit? Does it grant a right to marry a partner of the same
sex? And if yes, does it therefore permit incestuous marriage too? The
arguments are endless, and nobody knows how to settle them.
Things are made more complex still by the inclusion, in all European
provisions, of “non-discrimination” as a human right. When offering a
benefit, a contract of employment, a place in a college, or a bed in a
hospital, you are commanded not to discriminate on grounds of…there then
follows a list derived from the victims of recent history: race, ethnic
group, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and whatever is next to be
discovered. But all coherent societies are based on discrimination: A
society is an “in-group,” however large and however hospitable to
newcomers.
Non-discrimination laws effectively tie the hands of the indigenous
European communities, forbidding them from offering privileges to their
existing members while permitting every kind of discrimination among the
incoming migrants. It is natural for an immigrant family to offer jobs
to its own members, to discriminate on grounds of race, ethnic group,
religion, and (without necessarily mentioning this) gender and
orientation. Hence, European cities are increasingly places of tightly
knit immigrant communities with fiercely defended territory, from which
the fair-minded indigenous inhabitants are excluded because they will
not and cannot offer privileges to their kind.
Effects of the “Rights Culture”
We are witnessing, in effect, the removal of the old religion that
provided foundations to the moral and legal inheritance of Europe and
its replacement with a quasi-religion that is inherently foundationless.
Nobody knows how to settle the question whether this or that privilege,
freedom, or claim is a “human right,” and the European Court of Human
Rights is now overwhelmed by a backlog of cases in which just about
every piece of legislation passed by national parliaments in recent
times is at stake.
This development has led, however, to a sudden burst of Christian
nostalgia—not only among the older generation, but among young people
too. There are evangelical movements in the cities which reach out to
the young and attempt to include them in a purified Christian vision.
This new evangelism is not opposed to the official “rights” culture but
carves out a private space within it—a space where, taking advantage of
the permissions granted by the secular order, the old discipline can be
adopted as a personal cross.
This privatized Christianity can be found in surprising places. One
of them is worth mentioning, since it concerns the art form that more
than any other expresses the “Faustian” spirit of Europe as Spengler
discerned it: namely, music.
Following the example of Messiaen in France, a new generation of
composers has emerged eager to compose liturgical and spiritual music,
usually quite difficult music that will be heard only in the concert
hall, but nevertheless music with the old message, written in defiance
of the secular culture. Notable in Britain is Sir James MacMillan, whose
knighthood, recently bestowed, is a sign that this way of reviving
Christian values does not offend the powers that be. MacMillan is a
Catholic Scot; his predecessor as the voice of Christian music in
Britain, Sir John Tavener, was a Greek Orthodox Englishman; and
MacMillan’s most important rival for the ear of Christians in Britain is
John Rutter, who is an Anglican, wedded to the old harmless,
half-believing rites of our national church.
I mention these people because they exemplify a phenomenon that can
be encountered all across Europe, which is the search for the old God of
the continent in the sacred buildings, liturgies, and music of our
various churches, even and especially among people who don’t set foot in
a church on a Sunday for fear of being trapped into prayer.
The marks of Christianity have therefore not been rubbed out from the
high culture of Europe. There are still poets, composers, painters, and
sculptors who accept the old role of the artist as the one who praises
God in the name of his fellow human beings and who represents their
dignity before the throne of the Lord.
Another interesting effect of the rights pandemic is the increasing
turn of young Muslims to a fervent “Salafist” version of their faith.
The rights idea leaves everything that is most important in the life of a
Muslim without official endorsement: In everything to do with sex,
marriage, and the family, in the operation of the law, in the division
of the day and the hours of work and recreation, the Muslim heart is at
odds with the new official Europe.
Had Christianity retained its status as the foundation of domestic
custom and public law, it would have been easier for a Muslim to accept
the European order. Our way of life would have seemed like a form of
obedience and a human adaptation to the will of God. But the
foundationless idea of human rights leaves the Muslim no alternative but
to dismiss the secular law entirely as an impertinent attempt by human
beings to usurp a privilege which is God’s alone: the privilege of
guiding us to our salvation. We see in the young people eagerly
travelling to Syria to join ISIS, in the growth of religious schools and
unofficial shari’a courts, and in the wearing of the hijab and (where
permitted) the niqab and the burqa a defiant Islamic culture that
refuses to belong to the European order and which defines itself
increasingly against that order.
One interesting side-effect of this has been the trafficking of
vulnerable girls from the infidel community, an effect that has been
devastating in our English cities. I have touched on this matter in my
recent novel The Disappeared, in which I attempt to show some
of the fault lines between the new Islamized underclass and the
surrounding culture of nothingness.
Another interesting side-effect of Islamization has been the growth
of anti-Semitism in Europe. It was inconceivable in my youth that anyone
should voice an anti-Semitic sentiment, still more inconceivable that
he should exhibit violence, contemptuous language, or any kind of
assault towards others on account of their Jewishness. This has changed,
and changed almost overnight.
Of course, people say that it is all the result of the bad behavior
of Israel, but what is now considered bad behavior is precisely what was
cheered on and endorsed a decade ago. The real cause of the new wave of
anti-Semitism is the growing self-confidence and numbers of the Muslim
minority—a fact that you cannot publicly declare in Britain, still less
in France or Belgium, for fear of provoking the charge of Islamophobia
and even the threat of legal action.
So much for the rights culture, which displays its foundationless
character precisely in this matter for which it should put itself
aggressively on display. It is precisely the advocates of human rights
as a social panacea who are the most ardent in seeking excuses for
anti-Semitism.
External Threats to Europe
Mass Migration. This brings me to the external
threats to Europe, the one explicit and obvious, which is mass
migration, the other implicit and insinuating, which is the growing
military readiness of Russia. The migration problem has been exacerbated
by three factors:
The instability and violence in Africa and the Middle East;
The welfare culture of European nations; and
The effect of the EU’s mobility provisions, which have made it
impossible for member states either to control the movement of people or
to affirm national loyalty as the sine qua non of residence.
Looking back on it, we can see that when the original participants
signed up to the Treaty of Rome in 1954, the idea of free movement of
people would have had no perceivable consequences: The small number of
adjacent member states enjoyed the same prospects for employment,
housing, welfare, and the rest. Nobody would particularly want to leave
unless his job required it, and there was no dominant language that gave
the key to all foreign parts.
Now, with the expansion of the Union, that provision in the treaty
has become the cause of massive disruption: the flight of the educated
elite from Eastern Europe, the overwhelming of the welfare systems in
Western Europe, and the crowding of millions of migrants into Britain
and Ireland, the only European countries where the international
language is spoken. The most important consequence of this is that if a
migrant can make it to any country in the Union and somehow (it is never
very difficult) gain the permission to reside there, he can then
migrate to his country of choice.
The result for us in Britain is the breakdown of our welfare system;
the destructive overloading of our infrastructure; the collapse of a
precious planning system that had served to keep the country looking
roughly as it had always done during all the decades since the Second
World War; and, last but by no means least, the total destruction of our
state schools, in which city teachers have to teach classes of children
for whom English is at best a second language and in which topics like
national history, English literature, Christian scripture, Latin, and
music appreciation have next to no meaning even though they are, or
were, the foundation of everything that England once was.
That this problem has been exacerbated by the EU is an
understatement. It was created by the EU and by the destructive attempt
to govern a continent by a treaty, bypassing the legislatures of all
signatory states. A treaty can be amended only by a laborious process
and only assuming the consent of all the original signatories. It cannot
by its nature adapt to changes that occur with the rapidity of wars,
natural disasters, and mass migrations.
There is no way, in my view, that the EU could now adapt to the
inflow of unwanted migrants, and it therefore responds by pretending
that the migrants are really wanted, that inward migration is an
economic benefit, and that no other factor needs to be considered. This
is the message sent out to the world by the German political class, and
the extraordinary fact is that it comes from a nation that once
destroyed Europe in the name of its own search for Lebensraum.
All of Europe is now waiting for the politicians to come up with a
policy that will solve or at least ease the migration problem, but
because the EU is construed as a business deal—though a merger rather
than (as for Napoleon and Hitler) an acquisition—it cannot address the
cause of the problem. People are migrating into Europe because
conditions are intolerable in much of the Middle East and because there
is no cost, but only gain, for those engaged in people trafficking.
Had the EU taken the form of a military alliance rather than a social
and economic merger, it would perhaps have been able to respond to
ISIS, to the breakdown of order in Libya, and to the situation in Iraq.
For these are, for European civilization, military issues, to
be solved in the end by force. But without American leadership, which
vanished with the election of President Barack Obama, Europe is unable
to involve itself in policing those parts of the world that are
exporting their chaos to Europe.
The failure of Europe in this matter illustrates the application of
the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is always increasing but can
be made to decrease within a closed system. The active policy of the EU,
which has been to dissolve borders and renounce the use of force, has
created an open system without the resources to counter the entropy
pouring in from outside. Confrontation with Russia. The same weakness is
manifest in the confrontation with Russia. Vladimir Putin has understood
that the outer borders of Europe are porous and that the withdrawal of
American interest is now more or less inevitable, given the failure of
the European leadership to understand the need for it.
Having seized parts of Georgia, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine without
any real cost, other than sanctions that mean as little as such
sanctions always do, Putin is beginning to probe NATO defense lines in
the Baltic States and Eastern Poland. The farcical peace treaty in
Ukraine, negotiated by German Chancellor Merkel and French President
Hollande in Minsk, shows exactly how pointless in such circumstances is
diplomacy not backed by the threat of force. In every way, Putin is
being presented with the image of Europe as a military pushover and
responding accordingly.
Of course, the Russian elite won’t want to bomb London, since they
own it (another consequence of the EU, which has made land and buildings
into property that aliens as well as citizens can buy and sell).
However, it seems that the Russian army’s strategic planning has shifted
ominously from escalation to de-escalation as the central strand (so I
learn from contacts in Polish intelligence). In other words, not
invasion followed by the threat of a nuclear bomb, but a nuclear bomb
followed by occupation.
Importance of National Sentiment and Local Attachments
All in all, taking the external and the internal threats together, it
is difficult to be cheerful about the future of European civilization.
However, what I have said is not the end of the story by any means.
There are signs that people in Eastern Europe, and in the Baltic
States especially, are seriously concerned about Russian ambitions, and
there are some of them who do not take this as just another reason to
flee to London. There is a growing awareness in the European political
class that if mass migration is not brought under control, Britain and
perhaps other Northern countries will withdraw from the Union, which
will in all probability collapse in consequence.
For there to be a successful turnaround in confronting these two
external threats, however, there must also be a rebirth of national
sentiment and local attachments. So far, the foundationless ideology of
rights has wiped away the emotions that would be needed if people are to
be resolute in defense of their shared assets. We see at every level
the retreat from confrontation, the embarrassed refusal to affirm our
patrimony or its legitimate claim for sacrifice. The only first-person
plural that is officially allowed is that of Europe itself, though it is
a “we” that few people now understand and which has in any case been
bowdlerized by the political elite.
But we also see, here and there, the signs of social and cultural
renewal. During the 19th century, many Europeans thought they could
compensate for the decline of the Christian faith by attaching
themselves to ideologies: socialism, nationalism, communism, Marxism.
The rights panacea is the latest of these, but we know or ought to know
that it does not work. It is only by reconnecting with our true
inheritance that we can develop the kind of first-person plural that
will enable us to stand together against the growing threats to us.
I mentioned the encouraging examples set by English composers in
recent years. I could mention the movement of Catholic youth in Italy
around the Rimini meetings established by Father Giussani. I could
mention the reaction in France—confused as yet and unfocused—to the
recent Islamist atrocities. I could mention the extraordinary rebirth of
representational painting around the work of Odd Nerdrum in Norway and
the emergence in Britain of poets, such as Ruth Padel, John Burnside,
and Don Paterson, who speak directly to both young and old in a language
that also recuperates our past.
Even popular culture is moving in the same direction, trying as best
it can to recapture the sense of belonging and enchantment, as in the
film epics of Harry Potter, Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings.
I don’t say that these blockbuster movies are great works of art, but
they are not repudiations of our civilization either. In fact, they are
affirmations which convey confused but real guidance to young people
concerning the values that made them what they are.
Lessons for America
There are lessons in this for America. The threats confronting Europe
confront America too: mass immigration of people whose loyalty cannot
be guaranteed or who may, like the Boston bombers, see the host society
as the devil’s work; the purging of Christian assumptions from the law
and the public square and the replacement of them by the contradictory
panacea of human rights; the unwillingness to confront threats while
they can still be confronted—notably the threats posed by Russia and
China.
But there is one thing that Americans have which we Europeans lack:
namely, a sense of shared identity, of being included together in an
enterprise the rewards of which and the costs of which are distributed
among us all. This sense of identity depends upon borders. It depends
upon a law defined by territory and human procedures rather than by God.
And it depends on the idea of the nation.
Looking at Europe and at what follows when the political class loses
all sight of that idea, Americans should recognize how lucky they are
and how they must at all costs hold onto the belief in themselves as one
nation. And if they add to that phrase the two words “under God,” they
will be on the way to protecting the principal thing that we Europeans
have lost.
It is not difficult for Americans to learn that lesson. In every
crisis, they stand together as a nation, and the tradition of charitable
giving is as strong here as it ever was. It is well known that
Americans give more per capita to charitable causes than the people of
any other country, and even if you complain that 2 percent of GDP is not
much, it compares interestingly with the 0.2 percent of France and the
less than 0.1 percent of Germany. Of course, in France and Germany, the
state looks after those in need, but that is exactly the European
problem: namely, that the state has grown to replace the bonds of civil
society and little by little to extinguish them.
This goes hand in hand with a decline in national feeling—indeed, in
the case of Germany, with a repudiation of national feeling among the
political elite, which treads the world with exquisite softness for fear
of the Nazi shadow that creeps along behind. Learning to value your
nation as a symbol of your togetherness in a shared land is, in my view,
the way forward for all who would live as citizens. It is what has
disappeared from the Middle East and what is now under threat in Europe,
but it is not under threat here, and long may that continue.
This brings me to a point in which Europe has the edge on America,
which is the innate respect of Europeans for their aesthetic
inheritance. Our landscapes and townscapes are dear to us and have been
protected through all the destruction wrought by two world wars to
survive as symbols of our long-standing settlement.
America is a new country, whose planning laws arose from the need to
build quickly and, when the opportunity arose, move on. As a result, the
country is now encumbered with vast urban wastelands like Detroit. Very
few American cities have a center where anyone wants to reside, and all
of them have begun to spread like a fungus over the landscape, forcing
people to depend on fossil fuels and hours behind the wheel for the
basic needs of life. There is a kind of loneliness that advances with
the suburbs as closely knit communities are replaced with people too
comfortable in their boxes to have much need of neighbors.
This was not always so. Americans in the 19th and early 20th
centuries wanted their cities to emulate those of Europe. Architecture
was properly taught according to the beaux-arts tradition in the
American schools, and city fathers were keen to lay out streets, parks,
and city centers as public domains in which all residents have an
interest. Look at the photographs of New York at the beginning of the
20th century, or the Chicago of Louis Sullivan, and you will see
beautiful townscapes and facades, public spaces and genial details that
match in every way the great achievement of Europe.
Of course, American architects are as greedy as their European
counterparts and have no qualms in destroying environments if there is
money to be made in doing so, but the result is not appreciated by the
people, as is shown by the fact that, while no educated American would
go to Detroit, Tampa, or Houston for a holiday, almost all want to visit
Florence, Paris, or Rome. So here is one particular in which America
can learn from Europe—and indeed, with the New Urbanism movement, is
beginning to do so. But it will require strength of will to resist the
corporate interests and the ideological fantasies of the schools of
architecture.
A new revolution from below is needed here, and it should model
itself on the long-standing revolution from below that we have had in
England and which I document in my book How to Think Seriously About the Planet.
We in England have taken possession of our landscape and townscape and
said “no” to those who want to make it unrecognizable as a human
habitat. The habit of saying “no” to new things goes against the grain
for most Americans, but some noes are also yeses, and this is especially
true of those said on behalf of a loved inheritance and a symbol of
what we are. —Roger Scruton is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center and a contributing editor of The New Atlantis. He
is the author of over 30 books on a variety of topics including How to
Be a Conservative, The Meaning of Conservatism, and An Intelligent
Person’s Guide to Modern Culture.
http://www.heresyblog.net/
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
"We Africans Will Control the West": A Message to Europe and America from an African Invader
African boat invaders aka "New Europeans" (Source)
As Europe continues to absorb hostile
hordes of illegal African "migrants" who are flooding the shores of the
Mediterranean, it is becoming increasingly clear that these (primarily
Muslim) invaders pose an existential threat to the survival of Europe as
we know it. They are coming as conquerors, not as
immigrants. Their boats are full of young males of fighting age, and
they are demanding that European taxpayers feed, house, and provide
medical care for them upon arrival. Astoundingly, the traitorous left has
acquiesced to the demands of these African invaders, as Frederica
Mogherini, the High Representative of the EU(SSR) for Foreign Affairs
and Security Policy, has stated that "no migrants intercepted at sea should be sent back against their will." (It should be noted that Mrs. Mogherini, in her early years, was a member of the Italian Communist Youth Federation, the youth wing of the Italian Communist Party.) In other words, any illegal African
invader who can make it to Europe will be allowed to stay in Europe and
will be exempt from deportation.
Within this context, all Europeans
should be aware of a threatening Youtube video posted by an African
invader, in which this invader exposes the Africans' true motives for
invading Europe in large numbers. This invader, "Doctor" Ebou Bah, makes a
number of threatening statements in his video, and I will be responding
to three of his most preposterous statements. "Doctor Bah's" first preposterous
statement was his claim that Africans will invade Europe and America at
all costs, no matter what we do to try to prevent them from invading us:
"Let me put it to the European
Union and America. You see we the blacks? Even when you guys put a
barbed wire between Europe and Africa, we will jump the barbed wire. You
guys buy one of the most expensive concrete, we will dig and dig and
dig and dig, until we are in Europe. You guys build an ocean between
Africa and America or Europe, we will swim until until until we are in
Europe."
What Dr. Bah must not realize is that
Europe and America are not trying to keep them out. Our borders are wide
open to everyone who seeks to enter our lands. You do not have to jump
barbed wire, dig beneath concrete, or swim across oceans to invade us. Thanks to the leftists who took control
of our nations in the 1960's, we are welcoming Dr. Bah and his comrades
with open arms, then showering them with taxpayer-funded housing, food,
and medical care. Moreover, Communists such as Angela "Germany is becoming a country of immigration"
Merkel and Frederica "All illegals are welcome to stay" Mogherini are
ensuring that the African and Muslim invasion of Europe will continue
unabated, and that the invasion will be facilitated by the Communists
who control the EUSSR.
As for the United States, our dear
leader King Hussein, disciple of the honorable Reverend Wright, is
actively importing masses of African and Muslim "refugees" into American
communities, despite backlash from states such as South Carolina and Idaho. With that being said, my message to Dr. Bah is this: Nothing is stopping you from illegally
invading Europe and America. In fact, our leaders are assisting and
funding these illegal invasions. But what you and your comrades must keep
in mind is that by illegally invading our lands, you are placing
yourselves at great risk. This is because your allies on the left
(King Hussein, Merkel, Renzi, Hollande) are not going to be in charge
forever, and the Nationalists who are coming to replace these traitors
will not be as tolerant of your presence in our lands. I believe that sometime very soon you
invaders will be wishing you had never stepped foot on European (or
American) soil and will be begging for our mercy. I advise you to leave
while you still have a chance and while tolerant, effeminate cowards are
still in charge of our nations. Decades of mass legal and illegal
immigration has awoken the European peoples, and we are discovering that
we must regain the warrior mentality of our forefathers if our nations
are to survive. We are a sleeping giant who is slowly
awakening, and illegal hostile invaders certainly do not want to be
present in our lands when we rise up to take back what is rightfully
ours.
Moving on to Dr. Bah's second preposterous statment:
"Right now you guys are
complaining that we the blacks should not come. We are coming to get
what belongs to us. Yes, you used our grandparents, did you compensate
us? No. We are here to get that compensation. We Africans, we will still
come, no matter what you guys did. We will still come. We are coming.
We the Africans, we are coming."
First off, our lands do not belong to
Africans. And we have every right to insist that we do not want Africans
(and Muslims) in our territories, because, in general, Africans and
Muslims have brought nothing but violence, chaos, dysfunction, and
terror into our lands. It is no longer safe for European
children to walk their own streets after dark anymore, thanks to the
presence of violent, predatory third-world immigrants in many of our
major cities.
Prior to the left's facilitated mass
immigration into our lands, it was not necessary to lock our doors every
time we left the house. But thanks to our new and "diverse" countrymen,
many Europeans (and Americans) no longer feel safe in our own
neighborhoods. We have every right to complain about
more of your people entering our lands, and furthermore, we have every
right to appeal to our government's to remove all illegal immigrants
from our territories. As for Bah's threat that "we Africans
are coming", it should be noted that Europeans and Americans do not fear
Africans taking over our lands whatsoever. These groups lack the intelligence,
organization, forethought, and ingenuity to defeat us. Your people could
never defeat ours in a state of total war, regardless of numerical
superiority. In truth, we do not view your people as a
threatening enemy. Our real enemies are our fellow Europeans who have
embraced Communism, Marxism, Maoism, Trotskyism, Leninism, Stalinism,
and every other "ism" that seeks to undermine, subvert, and eventually
destroy Western Civilization. African invaders are only present in
Europe because the aforementioned leftists have brought you here and
funded your lifestyles with the tax dollars of native Europeans. This state of affairs is no longer
acceptable to a large number of Europeans, and patriots and Nationalists
throughout Europe are coalescing to eliminate the threats to the
survival of Europe and Western Civilization at large.
"We started from America. The
president is what, African. From here, from America, we go to England.
We have France. We have Germany. We have Italy. At the end of the day,
we'll control everything. We Africans will control the West. Every day
we will have sex with our wives so that we can have more children, At
the end of the day, we can conquer the entire Europe."
In my view, this was the most ridiculous statement of all. It is absolutely incredulous for Dr. Bah
to assume that America, France, Germany, and Italy will be controlled
by Africans. Africans lack the ability to even control their own city
blocks, so how in the world are they going to control technologically
advanced and developed Western nations? Not long ago, Africans were handed the
keys to a highly developed Western nation, South Africa, and managed to
turn that country into a third-world hellhole of murder, rape, and mass
chaos within the span of two decades.
Despite what Dr. Bah seems to believe,
Germany, Italy, America, France, and England will never be controlled by
Africans. Africans will not control the West, nor will they conquer the
entire continent of Europe. Those who believe as Dr. Bah believes
must not have read their history books. Europeans fought off the
Mongols, the Huns, the Turks, the Berbers, the Ottomans, and every other
external threat that has ever threatened the survival of Europe, its
peoples, and its civilization. It may have taken hundreds of years in
some cases, but each and every time European warriors have fought back
all foreign invaders and purged them from our territories. This is not
hyperbole, this is a historical fact.
Normans expelling Muslims from Sicily in the 11th century (Source)
Conclusion Westerners must remember that invaders
such as Dr. Bah are being imported to our nations by the left, granted
citizenship by the left, and then they form political alliances with the
treasonous left. Then, they stab us in the back by
claiming we are racists, white supremacists, and that we have white
privilege, despite the fact that Westerners have been more than
welcoming to the third-world masses who have come to our nations since
the 1960's, and the fact that it is primarily the tax dollars of the
conservative working-class (not the left's dependency class) that has
subsidized their housing, food, and health care.
Immigrants protesting against "racist" America (Source)
Indeed, a majority of the third-world
invaders who continue to flock to our nations are forming political
alliances with the Communists, who are embarked on a program of
dissolution of all national identities in Europe, which includes the
demographic replacement of the native European peoples with "new"
Europeans, who the Communists bestow with generous benefits, while
covering up immigrant crimes against native Europeans. We must not allow one more immigrant
into our lands and we must remove all illegal immigrants from our
territories as quickly as possible. Muslim immigrants, in particular,
must be deported en masse to Islamic countries where they can practice
Sharia law in peace, far away from the "racist" and "Islamophobic"
Westerners.
This may seem like a radical proposal,
but what is actually radical is the fact that the left's program of mass
immigration was forced on us without our consent. We were never asked
if we wanted to become multicultural, multi-ethnic proposition nations.
We were never consulted about this. And despite the left's claims that
Europeans and Americans who oppose mass immigration are "racists" and
"white supremacists", that could not be further than the truth. Would the third-world be following us
around everywhere if we were violent and xenophobic? Of course not. We
have been extremely tolerant of the invaders in our midst, which is why
they choose to come to our lands rather than Muslim, African, and Asian
nations. Without a doubt, no Muslim, African, or
Asian nations would ever accept the levels of humiliation the Europeans
and Americans have put up with at the hands of outsiders. Thus, we are now opposing immigration in
large numbers because we have been so tolerant and welcoming to these
foreigners, yet we have been paid back with ingratitude, hostility, and
subversion. It is only a matter of time before
Europe and America turn "far-right". Liberalism and Marxism are dying a
slow, painful death, and Nationalists are priming to fill the political
vacuum created by the left's collapse. My advice to invaders like Dr. Bah is to
get out of our countries while you can. Because if history serves as a
guide, your experience in our territories may not end up being so
pleasant if you continue to provoke us.
When did we give up? And can we reenergize Western society?
As we approach 2016, the West is experiencing a civilizational loss
of self-confidence, arising from a narcissistic fatalism and cataclysmic
failure of institutional leadership.
At every turn, it seems, the weak and uncertain leadership of the
West is submitting to the strength and evil certainty of radical Islam,
of which Winston Churchill warned more than a century ago “no stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”
We began giving up our self-confidence a century ago when the Western
governments who fought on both sides of World War I abandoned classical
liberalism and its associated political philosophy of constitutional
liberty and replaced it with autocratic top-down, state controlled
central planning.
Modern liberalism, as practiced by the Democratic Party in the United
States in 2015 and 2016 and its state-centric counterparts in Europe,
bears little resemblance to classical liberalism.
“The ideology of classical liberalism is closer to what today is a
current of conservatism in the United States,” Richard Huddleson wrote in his 1999 book, Modern Political Philosophy.
Central to the classical liberalism of the nineteenth
century is a commitment to the liberty of individual citizens. Freedom
of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of
assembly were core commitments of classic liberalism, as was the
underlying conception of just government as the protection of the
liberties of individual citizens. Also central to classical liberalsim
was a commitment to a system of free markets as the best way to organize
economic life.
There is little wonder that progressivism reached its early zenith
under the direction of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, the same
commander-in-chief who supervised the collective resource management
imposed upon the American people throughout World War I.
The constitutionally destructive consequence of World War I was noted by Leonard Liggio, who wrote recently at the Acton Institute:
Classical liberalism was the dominant philosophy in the
United States and England, really, until about the First World War. The
war, unfortunately, was a disaster for liberalism, because it disrupted
constitutional order. All the countries at war used extreme measures of
repression. Even England and America created police states on the model
of Germany or their Czarist allies and trampled liberty underfoot. At
the same time, they trampled economic liberty by allocating resources
through central planning, again modeled on the German desperation as
they were cut off by the wartime blockade. In fact, Lenin viewed the
German wartime operations of centralization as the model for his
Bolshevik regime. It gave him what he felt were practical models for
creating centralized direction of the economy once the Bolshevik
revolution occurred.
So the First World War was this great watershed, a great tragedy for
all who were killed or wounded on the battlefield, for the many who died
or were disabled by the epidemics that followed, and for the economic
waste that prevented investment in the postwar period and led to the
great depression and to movements toward greater government control. So,
everywhere, liberalism was put on the defensive by this catastrophe.
The bulwark of classical liberalism is constitutional liberty, which is defined
as “such freedom as is enjoyed by the citizens of a country or state
under the protection of its constitution; the aggregate of those
personal, civil, and political rights of the individual which are
guarantied by the constitution and secured against invasion by the
government or any of its agencies.”
“I hold that governments are meant to be, and must remain, the
servants of the citizens; that states and federations only come into
existence and can only by justified by preserving the ‘life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness’ in the homes and families of individuals. The
true right and power rest in the individual. He gives of his right and
power to the State, expecting and requiring thereby in return to receive
certain advantages and guarantees,” Winston Churchill wrote in his classic 1936 essay, “What Good’s a Constitution?”, a definitive description of constitutional liberty.
“The 19th century was the century of classical liberalism. Partly for
that reason it was also the century of ever-increasing economic and
political liberty, relative international peace, relative price
stability and unprecedented economic growth,” John Goodman, founder of
the National Center for Policy Analysis and its president for 31 years,
now head of the Goodman Institute, wrote recently.
“By contrast, the 20th century was the century that rejected
classical liberalism. Partly for that reason, it was the century of
dictatorship, depression and war. Nearly 265 million people were killed
by their own governments (in addition to all the deaths from wars!) in
the 20th century – more than in any previous century and possibly more
than in all previous centuries combined,” Goodman noted.
The 21st century, unfortunately, has seen an accelerating decline in
Western self-confidence, one seen in the cringe inducing weakness of its
political leaders. They respond to the challenge of radical Islam with
the same type of appeasement shown by British prime minister Neville
Chamberlain to Hitler in the 1930s, rather than the strength and moral
certitude of his successor, Churchill, who ultimately helped lead the
West to victory in World War II.
History shows that strength attracts followers. The latest example that confirms this maxim is the recent report
that the Islamic terrorists at ISIS are actively planning to increase
their attacks on innocent civilians in the West, in an attempt to
provoke one final, huge decisive battle.
“Where is our modern Churchill to exercise the strength of the West
to resist this terroristic swagger?” every day citizens in the United
States and Europe wonder aloud.
More importantly, “Why have our political institutions produced such weak and feckless leaders?”
A recent Rasmussen Reports Poll indicates
that dissatisfaction with President Obama’s leadership-or lack thereof-
is at record levels and is on the rise. Dissatisfaction with European
leaders is also high.
Several conservative authors in America, among them Mark Steyn, have observed this decline in the West, but none have offered a specific solution to reverse this trend.
A hint at the direction in which the resurrection of the West may be
found comes, surprisingly, from two British authors, one of whom is a
former cabinet minister in the government of British Labour prime
minister Tony Blair.
Almost a decade ago British entrepreneur Richard Koch (no relation to
the American Koch Brothers) and former United Kingdom cabinet member
Chris Smith wrote a prescient book called Suicide of the West.
In it they argued:
One hundred years ago, most Westerners felt tremendous
pride and confidence in their civilisation. They knew what it stood for,
and they believed in it. Today that sense has gone.
That is largely because the six principal ideas which underpinned
Western confidence – those of Christianity, optimism, science, economic
growth, [classical] liberalism and individualism – have suffered a
century of sustained attack. These ideas no longer inspire or unite the
West as they once did.
In an exclusive email interview with Breitbart News, Koch, who is also a Huffington Post contributor, offers a surprisingly upbeat view of the future of Western Civilization as we close out 2015.
Restoring the self-confidence of the West, Koch says, is something that must originate with the individual, not the group.
“This is not a battle of empires or wars, which are no longer effective at winning hearts and minds,” Koch tells Breitbart News.
“It is a matter of inculcating calm self-confidence, individual and
collective, and refusing to be drawn into all the sound and fury that
can dismay and distract us,” Koch adds.
Radical Islam poses a threat to the West, Koch argues, put it has not
yet reached the power of Nazism or communism in the 1930s. Koch tells
Breitbart News:
I see radical Islam as a particularly nasty little virus,
comparable to Nazism or communism in the 1920s (before they became
really powerful). We can’t be complacent but we have to be careful in
how we respond. We have a civilization and they don’t; we have the moral
high ground. Their ideology is particularly repugnant and it will have
very limited appeal in the West, if we maintain our values. There will
always be a few people who want the excitement of an extreme cause and
licence to kill, but terrorism is nothing new and it can be largely
defeated, if not eliminated. But of course we have to deal with Isil –
and cutting off their huge flow of money should be the top priority.
Koch argues a combination of individualism and “maintaining our values” will, in the long run, redeem the West.
While Koch excels at diagnosing the problems of the West, he
understates the existential threat posed by radical Islam and offers an
insufficient, passive prescription to remedy the West’s decline.
Koch views Western Civilization as something of a “self-correcting
system.” But now, as its very existence is threatened by radical Islam, a
more pro-active solution is demanded.
This is particularly true since, as Koch and Smith point out in
Suicide of the West, the attacks on the principal ideas that brought the
West to dominance come primarily from within—from individuals who have
benefited financially from the very culture upon which their wealth was
created. (Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and other Silicon Valley
technology oligarchs, as well as atheist progressive George Soros
immediately come to mind as examples of this group.)
What is needed to reverse that decline is a very focused “back to
basics” movement to restore believe in these six principal ideas –
Christianity, optimism, science, economic growth, classical liberalism
(in its political expression of constitutional liberty and its economic
expression of free markets) and individualism – and more importantly,
the transfer of belief in these principal ideas to subsequent
generations.
Therein lies the rub.
In a popular culture subsumed by triviality – where most know a great
deal about current entertainment trends and how to use their
smartphones – but little else, “back to basics” is easier said than
done.
Here’s one look at what “back to basics” means for the six principal ideas that built the West.
“Back to basics” in classical liberalism and constitutional liberty means the re-assertion
of state sovereignty and individual rights in the face of increasing
constitutional usurpations by the executive branch, statutorily
unauthorized regulations, and a spineless and ineffective federal
legislative branch.
“Back to basics” in Christianity translates into encouraging the
growth and flourishing of Christianity in the West by removing the
State’s power to exercise control over the operation of Christian
churches and organizations and the conduct of individual Christians who
are acting within the law.
It does not mean government approved enforcement of Christian belief on other citizens.
It also means a complete separation of church and state when it comes
to the delivery of government sanctioned “social justice” programs.
“Public private partnerships” where church organizations are paid
lucratively to carry out liberal government policies, such as the Unholy Alliance
between Christian “non-profits” and the Department of Health and Human
Services Office of Refugee Resettlement, must come to an end.
In addition, it means ending the government persecution of Christians
in business matters large and small, the most egregious of which is the
recent actions by the State of Oregon forcing Christian bakers to pay an estimated $135,000 fine to a gay couple who demanded they bake a wedding cake for them, a demand they refused.
History shows that Christianity thrives when it is completely
independent of government. When it becomes the “official” state
religion, or “partners” with the state, it becomes corrupt, weak, and
devoid of intellectual vigor.
Richard Koch and Leonard Liggio agree on the critical role played by Christianity in the rise of the West.
“Of all the civilizations around the world, why did only the Christian West become both free and prosperous?” Leonard Liggio asked at the Acton Institute.
“Many scholars have studied this and have come to the conclusion that
this is due to the fact that the religious institutions were totally
separate from, and often in conflict with, political institutions only
in the Christian West. This created the space in which free institutions
could emerge. The idea of independent religious institutions is absent
even in Eastern Christianity; their religious institutions are part of
the bureaucracy of the state,” Liggio wrote.
“In Western Europe, though, the religious institutions were
autonomous among themselves, and totally independent from and often in
opposition to state power. The result was the creation of a polycentric
system. And whenever this system was threatened by claims of total
empire by the political rulers, Christian philosophy was utilized as
part of its defense,” Liggio added.
“So within that space, the economic institutions–often modeled on the
religious institutions as autonomous entities–could flourish and
survive,” Liggio concluded.
Coincident to the decline of Christianity is a rise of triviality in the West.
“There is a frivolity and lack of moral seriousness afflicting the
West, but this too is not unprecedented or wholly bad. The Nazis, the
communists, and radical Islamists were or are terribly serious,” Koch
says.
“Modern Western liberal society is probably the most humane and
decent ever seen on the face of the earth. I would like to see more
moral seriousness, but of the right kind. Establishing this is like
walking through a minefield,” Koch adds.
“Back to basics” in optimism requires a return to the American “can-do” spirit and the western values of the enlightenment.
Simply put, the easiest way to return optimism to America and the
West is to take a blow torch to the regulatory state and dismantle the
vast majority of paralyzing regulations that afflict businesses and
individuals.
Throughout our history, we Americans have been renowned for our
ability for getting things done. But when government tells us how we can
and cannot live, that optimism turns to pessimism and fatalism, when
every positive action is held back by paralyzing regulations.
Coincident with the rise of big government has been the growing cult of “victimhood,” the antithesis of optimism.
Similarly, “back to basics” in economic growth requires the application of an even bigger blow torch to the regulatory state.
“The strange thing is that the underlying reality of the world and
especially the West is better than ever. Most people in the world now
live in some kind of market system, that is working slowly but
remorselessly to eliminate the bulk of poverty and deprivation,” Koch
notes.
“Things are getting better, but it doesn’t feel that way,” Koch adds.
A more limited government with dramatically diminished regulatory
powers would unleash the entrepreneurial explosion, which in turn will
turn the sluggish 2 percent economic growth experienced under the Obama
administration into real economic growth that reinvigorates the
diminishing middle class, that broad portion of the population that
currently knows why “things getting better” don’t feel that way.
“Back to basics” in individualism requires an end to penalizing
students and workers who actually exhibit individual thinking. Our
schools, both at the elementary, high school, and collegiate level, need
to return to the values of the enlightenment, where free and open
inquiry are encouraged and allowed. They must cease acting as the
propaganda enforcement arms of the social welfare state.
“Back to basics” in science is perhaps the trickiest of all, Science
and technology are advancing at a breathtaking pace and such success
does not immediately suggest a need for change.
As Richard Koch accurately notes, “the world’s top universities,
science, and technology have never been more vibrant or productive.
Business is more creative than ever, producing miracles from the
internet to the iPod and smartphone.”
While this is true, it is also the case that what Churchill observed
in 1899 about the role of science in Western society is no longer true.
“Were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of
science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the
civilisation of modern Europe might fall [to radical Islam], as fell the
civilisation of ancient Rome,” Churchill wrote in his second book, The River War.
Capital, technological skill, and effective organizations will
continue to combine in such a way as to drive the frontiers of applied
science further and faster than we can currently imagine.
Yet many of those who control those forces currently have little
loyalty to constitutional liberty, and are guided more by their personal
desires to shape the world to their own peculiar political and social
justice philosophies through the exercise of their own wealth and power.
It is unclear whether Western Civilization in 2016 and beyond will be “sheltered in the strong arms of science.”
A movement to go “back to basics” in these six principal ideas that
brought the West to dominance, while ambitious, is completely consistent
with the grassroots energy that brought the Tea Party movement to
prominence in 2009.
It has the added advantage that it is not dependent upon a collectivist effort, but rather on millions of individual efforts.
If you want to know why the West is losing its self-confidence, look
in the mirror. If you’re not working ceaselessly to return yourself,
your family and your immediate sphere of influence back to the basics of
these six principal ideas that brought the West to the top, you’re
responsible, in your own small way, for its continued decline.
If leaders are weak and feckless, replace them. If institutions are failing, reform and reinvigorate them.
Don’t rail at the moon. Lasso it.
Hungary says 900 'no-go areas' in Europe
Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban has taken a hard line on the European Union's migrant crisis (AFP Photo/John Thys)
Budapest
(AFP) - Europe has more than 900 "no-go areas" with large immigrant
populations, Hungary's government claims on a hard-hitting new website
aimed at drumming up opposition to an EU scheme to share out migrants
around the bloc.
In
these areas "with a high number of immigrants", for example in Paris,
London, Stockholm or Berlin, the authorities have "little or no control"
and "norms of the host society barely prevail," the site says.
Asked
for the source of the information, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs
told AFP on Friday it came from "data publicly available on the
Internet," without giving further details.
The
website, launched this week ahead of referendum in Hungary in the
second half of the year on the EU quota plan, also features a ticking
clock representing a migrant entering Europe every 12 seconds.
"The mandatory European quotas increase the terrorist risk in Europe and imperils our culture," the website says.
"Illegal
migrants cross the borders unchecked, so we do not know who they are
and what their intentions are. We do not know how many of them are
disguised as terrorists," it adds.
Prime
Minister Viktor Orban's government voted against an EU plan in
September to distribute 160,000 asylum-seekers among member states via
quotas, and in December joined Slovakia in filing a legal complaint.
So
far, only 1,100 have been relocated, with Hungary not taking a single
one. If Hungarian voters reject the quotas in the referendum, as surveys
suggest, this would be another blow for the troubled scheme.
Orban,
whose hard line in the EU's migrant crisis saw him seal Hungary's
southern borders, announced the referendum in February, saying Brussels
has no right to "redraw Europe's cultural and religious identity."
The
referendum question will ask: "Do you want the EU to prescribe the
mandatory relocation of non-Hungarian citizens to Hungary without the
approval of the Hungarian parliament?"
http://www.newsweek.com/
Muslims Are Creating ‘Nations Within Nations’ Says Former Head of U.K. Equalities Commission
By Lucy Clarke-Billings Trevor
Phillips, the (now former) Chair of the Equality and Human Rights
Commission, speaks at the British Chamber of Commerce Annual Conference
held at the headquarters of BAFTA on March 18, 2010 in London, England. Oli Scarff/Getty
The former head of Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission
(EHRC), Trevor Phillips, has admitted he “got almost everything wrong”
regarding immigration in a new report, claiming Muslims are creating “nations within nations” in the West.
Phillips says followers of Islam hold very different values from the rest of society and many want to lead separate lives.
The former head of the U.K.’s equalities watchdog also advocates the
monitoring of ethnic minority populations on housing estates to stop
them becoming “ghetto villages.”
He says schools may have to consider a 50 per cent limit on Muslim, or other minority pupils, to encourage social integration.
And he says disturbing survey findings point to a growing chasm
between the attitudes of many British Muslims and their compatriots.
Phillips’ intervention comes after he was asked to analyse the
findings of a major survey on Muslim attitudes in the U.K., which will
form the basis of Channel 4’s documentary, What British Muslims Really Think, which is due to air on Wednesday night. An ICM poll released to the Times, in Britain, ahead of the broadcast reveals:
• One in five Muslims in Britain never enter a non-Muslim house
• 39 per cent of Muslims, male and female, say a woman should always obey her husband
• 31 per cent of British Muslims support the right of a man to have more than one wife
• 52 per cent of Muslims did not believe that homosexuality should be legal
• 23 per cent of Muslims support the introduction of Sharia law rather than the laws laid down by parliament
The documentary will portray the U.K.’s Muslims as a “nation within a nation” that has its own geography and values.
Phillips commissioned a report into Britain and Islamophobia in 1997
which, according to both Phillips himself and academics across the
country, popularised the phrase which has now become synonymous with any
criticism of Islam or Muslims.
“It’s not as though we couldn’t have seen this coming. But we’ve repeatedly failed to spot the warning signs,” he now writes in The Times , in response to new data collected.
“Twenty years ago… I published the report titled Islamophobia: A
Challenge for Us All, we thought that the real risk of the arrival of
new communities was discrimination against Muslims.
“Our 1996 survey of recent incidents showed that there was plenty of it around. But we got almost everything else wrong.” In an article for the Daily Mail, Phillips warns of a “life-and-death struggle for the soul of British Islam.”
“Britain is in many ways a better place than it’s ever been—more prosperous, more diverse, more liberal.
“But for some of our fellow citizens, we’re heading in entirely the
wrong direction. So much so that some of them would rather live under a
wholly different system.
“Indeed, a significant minority of Britain’s three million Muslims
consider us a nation of such low morals that they would rather live more
separately from their non-Muslim countrymen, preferably under sharia
law.
“This sobering conclusion comes from the most comprehensive survey of British Muslims ever conducted, commissioned by Channel 4.
“Having been asked to examine its results, I believe it holds a grim message for all of us.
“There is a life-and-death struggle for the soul of British Islam—and
this is not a battle that the rest of us can afford to sit out. We need
to take sides.”
• U.S., Israel fulfilling Kalergi’s radical dream of mongrelized Europe, America.
By Ronald L. Ray —
World War III is under way. It is not a typical war, fought with guns and munitions on the front lines. Nor do the armies of a million invaderscarry firearms. But it is a world war—a race war—nonetheless, and its goal is to extinguish every last vestige of Christian and white civilization from the Earth. Far from an accident, it was long planned.
Sinister forces have cajoled and coerced Westernpolitical leaders into betraying their own peoples to a seething mass of foreigners, who areoverwhelming societal structures and bringing about the collapse of entire cultures. It is a war ofdemography as destiny, driven forward by the imperialistic aggressions of the United States and Israel, as they destroy nations across North Africaand the Middle East, creating an artificial migration of peoples not seen on such a scale for nearly 2,000 years.
Photographs of thousands of Asian and African “refugees,” disturbing in themselves, are not the entire story. Although a centuries-long effort, thewar’s modern salient was publicized a hundred years ago, both in America and Europe.
Some claim Jewish Communist Party apparatchik IsraelCohen wrote in 1912, “By propounding into the consciousness of the dark races that for centuriesthey have been oppressed by whites, we can mold them to the program of the Communist Party. . . .[We] will endeavor to instill in the whites a guilt complex for their exploitation of the negroes . . .and begin a process which will deliver America to our cause.”
In Europe, the war strategy was laid out in 1925by Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi, a half-Austrian, half-Japanese diplomat, whose wife ofthe time was Jewish and undoubtedly influenced his views. Coudenhove Kalergi was the father ofthe Pan-European movement, designed to create today’s European Union (EU).
In Praktischer Idealismus [Practical Idealism], he wrote, “The man of thefuture will be a mongrel. Today’s races and classes will disappear owing to the disappearing of space,time and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its outward appearance to theancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals.”
Once the white race has been eliminated,Coudenhove Kalergi envisioned that the New World Order will be ruled by the Jews, whom hesaw—as they themselves—as a “master race.” “Instead of destroying European Judaism, Europe, against her will, refined and educated this people,driving them to their future status as a leading nation through this artificial evolutionary process.”
This cultural communist was supported by thelikes of Baron Louis de Rothschild, banker Max Warburg, Zionist Bernard Baruch, the B’nai B’rithMasonic lodge, libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises and later the Central Intelligence Agency. The European and Americanrulers, who today cause and promote the inundating floods of non-whites and non-Christiansinto white, historically Christian countries, are following the Coudenhove Kalergi plan.
At the behest of Zionist plutocrats and Israeliterrorists, the U.S. and its allies have militarily destroyed or dismembered numerous nations:Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine and more. Economiesand infrastructures were ruined deliberately, leading those who can to exit their native homes for the mirage of greater prosperity in Europe andAmerica. Millions are moving into Europe, and, rather than improve the lot of the wrecked countries,so people can stay at home, Western governments foment and foster the intruding hordes.
Diabolical forces demand the coming racewars, to eliminate Christians and whites, and reduce the world population to a sixth of its size. Butit is not just corrupt governments and clandestine organizations at work. Even multinational corporationslike pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline plcseem to have a sinister hand in the matter.
The result will be the catastrophic loss of thebest classes from Africa and Asia and the complete destabilization of European economies, which cannotsupport the invaders. While Pope Francis follows the foolery of “free migration,” the AfricanCatholic bishops see things more clearly, warning those who would leave to stay and help their own peoples. It is not primarily those truly harmed bywar flooding Europe, but largely the educated classes. And those who do not have the money to travel are subsidized by U.S organizations.
However, not all the aliens are friendly. They are almost solely responsible for astronomical increases in European violent crime, and the presenceof terrorists among the “refugees” has been documented. The frequently violent and law-defying,order-destroying behavior of the foreigners on the march—and numerous photographs—prove that they are a well-funded, well-supplied revolutionary band, not peaceful immigrants.
The European peoples recognize what is happening and oppose the coming white genocide, but they have no power, because they are unarmed.A proposed EU “protection force” for dealing with the migration crisis no doubt is really intended to suppress the native whites.
So far, only the Eastern Europeans—Hungary,Slovakia and the Czech Republic—have stood up at all for their peoples and civilizations. But it isnot enough. Nor is America free of danger, where 70% of United Nations refugees are settled, along with the millions of illegal aliens bringing the race war to a formerly great country.
Ronald L. Ray is a freelance author and an assistant editor of THE BARNES REVIEW. He is a descendant of several patriots of the American War for Independence.
- See more at: http://americanfreepress.net/using-mass-migration-to-commit-genocide/#sthash.wudRV9SF.dpuf
• U.S., Israel fulfilling Kalergi’s radical dream of mongrelized Europe, America.
By Ronald L. Ray —
World War III is under way. It is not a typical war, fought with guns and munitions on the front lines. Nor do the armies of a million invaderscarry firearms. But it is a world war—a race war—nonetheless, and its goal is to extinguish every last vestige of Christian and white civilization from the Earth. Far from an accident, it was long planned.
Sinister forces have cajoled and coerced Westernpolitical leaders into betraying their own peoples to a seething mass of foreigners, who areoverwhelming societal structures and bringing about the collapse of entire cultures. It is a war ofdemography as destiny, driven forward by the imperialistic aggressions of the United States and Israel, as they destroy nations across North Africaand the Middle East, creating an artificial migration of peoples not seen on such a scale for nearly 2,000 years.
Photographs of thousands of Asian and African “refugees,” disturbing in themselves, are not the entire story. Although a centuries-long effort, thewar’s modern salient was publicized a hundred years ago, both in America and Europe.
Some claim Jewish Communist Party apparatchik IsraelCohen wrote in 1912, “By propounding into the consciousness of the dark races that for centuriesthey have been oppressed by whites, we can mold them to the program of the Communist Party. . . .[We] will endeavor to instill in the whites a guilt complex for their exploitation of the negroes . . .and begin a process which will deliver America to our cause.”
In Europe, the war strategy was laid out in 1925by Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi, a half-Austrian, half-Japanese diplomat, whose wife ofthe time was Jewish and undoubtedly influenced his views. Coudenhove Kalergi was the father ofthe Pan-European movement, designed to create today’s European Union (EU).
In Praktischer Idealismus [Practical Idealism], he wrote, “The man of thefuture will be a mongrel. Today’s races and classes will disappear owing to the disappearing of space,time and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its outward appearance to theancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals.”
Once the white race has been eliminated,Coudenhove Kalergi envisioned that the New World Order will be ruled by the Jews, whom hesaw—as they themselves—as a “master race.” “Instead of destroying European Judaism, Europe, against her will, refined and educated this people,driving them to their future status as a leading nation through this artificial evolutionary process.”
This cultural communist was supported by thelikes of Baron Louis de Rothschild, banker Max Warburg, Zionist Bernard Baruch, the B’nai B’rithMasonic lodge, libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises and later the Central Intelligence Agency. The European and Americanrulers, who today cause and promote the inundating floods of non-whites and non-Christiansinto white, historically Christian countries, are following the Coudenhove Kalergi plan.
At the behest of Zionist plutocrats and Israeliterrorists, the U.S. and its allies have militarily destroyed or dismembered numerous nations:Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine and more. Economiesand infrastructures were ruined deliberately, leading those who can to exit their native homes for the mirage of greater prosperity in Europe andAmerica. Millions are moving into Europe, and, rather than improve the lot of the wrecked countries,so people can stay at home, Western governments foment and foster the intruding hordes.
Diabolical forces demand the coming racewars, to eliminate Christians and whites, and reduce the world population to a sixth of its size. Butit is not just corrupt governments and clandestine organizations at work. Even multinational corporationslike pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline plcseem to have a sinister hand in the matter.
The result will be the catastrophic loss of thebest classes from Africa and Asia and the complete destabilization of European economies, which cannotsupport the invaders. While Pope Francis follows the foolery of “free migration,” the AfricanCatholic bishops see things more clearly, warning those who would leave to stay and help their own peoples. It is not primarily those truly harmed bywar flooding Europe, but largely the educated classes. And those who do not have the money to travel are subsidized by U.S organizations.
However, not all the aliens are friendly. They are almost solely responsible for astronomical increases in European violent crime, and the presenceof terrorists among the “refugees” has been documented. The frequently violent and law-defying,order-destroying behavior of the foreigners on the march—and numerous photographs—prove that they are a well-funded, well-supplied revolutionary band, not peaceful immigrants.
The European peoples recognize what is happening and oppose the coming white genocide, but they have no power, because they are unarmed.A proposed EU “protection force” for dealing with the migration crisis no doubt is really intended to suppress the native whites.
So far, only the Eastern Europeans—Hungary,Slovakia and the Czech Republic—have stood up at all for their peoples and civilizations. But it isnot enough. Nor is America free of danger, where 70% of United Nations refugees are settled, along with the millions of illegal aliens bringing the race war to a formerly great country.
Ronald L. Ray is a freelance author and an assistant editor of THE BARNES REVIEW. He is a descendant of several patriots of the American War for Independence.
- See more at: http://americanfreepress.net/using-mass-migration-to-commit-genocide/#sthash.wudRV9SF.dpuf
A
photograph provided by the Israeli Ministry of Defense shows a launch
of the David’s Sling missile defense system. (Israeli Ministry of
Defense/Associated Press)
Refugees
and migrants, who entered Macedonia from Greece
A
woman and children cross the Greek-Macedonian border near
Germany: No plan that abandons Greece
A
woman falls as refugees with their children run away after
'A challenge for all of us'
Migrants rest under a tree at the Victoria Square
A peaceful protest Monday near the Macedonian border turned violent
as police threw tear gas canisters to force refugees and migrants away
from the razor-wire fence.
Part of channel(s): Liveleakers (promoted)
