Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Oh Brave New World, that hath such people in it...

The latest chapter in Fjordman's horror story continues at Dhimmi Watch:
You know you have entered a strange, Eurabian world when leading politicians from Norway, a country straddling the Arctic Circle and with no colonial history, begin their election campaigns in the Pakistani countryside. Before Norway's national elections in 2005, the leader of the Socialist Left party, Kristin Halvorsen, praised all the "blood, sweat and tears Pakistanis in Norway have spent on building the country." While the deputy leader of the Socialist Left party has stated that he wants to abolish private property, its leader Kristin Halvorsen is in 2006 Norway's Minister of Finance. 83 percent of Muslims in Norway voted for Leftist parties in 2005.
... the Fjordman has much more bad but necessary news, as usual.

We need to be continually reminded that we are in some kind of conflict that the west can indeed lose, despite its technological strengths, and notwithstanding the fact that if Islam came to dominate Europe, the continent's productivity would collapse and it probably would not be able to feed itself, much less other parts of the world. This would seem, if we can assume minimally rational people, to preclude the Islamification of Europe, let alone other continents. But rational is not what Fjordman's Europe looks like. In his latest essay, Eric Gans explains the intellectual and anthropological roots of our cultural crisis. The juxtaposition of the intellectual power of Gans' ideas - testatment to the strength of western traditions - and the collapse of western self-confidence in the European heartland is shocking. And yet the internet is here to bring those shocked together, allowing us to hear the new voices we need to hear if we are to find the courage to again celebrate and defend all that is best in our world!

38 comments:

MeaninglessHotAir said...

Technological strengths will not determine the outcome of this struggle one way or the other. Rather, it will come down to will power and belief. Belief in ourselves. Do we have what it takes?

Anonymous said...

Leftists and Muslims have a mutual short-term interest in keeping the Leftist parties in power, and a mutual long-term interest in weakening the traditional, Judeo-Christian culture of Europe.

Leftists and some Hispanics have a mutual short-term interest in keeping the Leftist party in power, but no mutual long-term interest in weakening the traditional, Judeo-Christian culture of America.

So there you have two differences.

Anonymous said...

MHA:

Our saving grace, on this side of the pond, is that we have no Oxbridge elite, no enarques to lead us around by the nose. Actually, we do have such an elite, in an increasingly attenuated form, but it isn't the same as in Europe, where the shadow of Colbert still walks the streets of Paris.

We do have the requisite belief in ourselves, even if our own elites do not. And when the crunch comes, our elites won't have anything meaningful to contribute anyway. And everybody knows it.

Reliapundit said...

we can only lose if the left surrenders.

iow: to defeat the enemy we must defeat the left.

other benefits: ending leftism will end poverty.

iow: to make poverty history we need to make leftism history.

and remeber: baathism is a form of leftism, and binladenism is a form of toatliatianism which depends upon a string stae to coerce people into SUBMISSION.

hence: leftists and binladenists are natural allies.

they are also allied because the contemprary left hates the West and blames it for 3rd world poverty and global warming.

leftist think that anyhthiong or anybody that hastens the end of capitalism is good - including binladenism.

REPEAT: to defeat global jihad we must defeat the elftists at home.

if the leftists at home have their way they will surrender.

buddy larsen said...

RR quoting G. Washington:

"Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion."

This is pretty apt to the post.

truepeers said...

Pedophiles launch own political party. Dutch activists hope eventually to scrap limit on sexual relations

It's not just leftism that is the curse, but decadence and morall corruption as well: "Ad van den Berg, a party founder, told the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper a "ban just makes children curious."

"We want to make pedophilia the subject of discussion," he said.

"We want to get into parliament so we have a voice. Other politicians only talk about us in a negative sense, as if we were criminals," Van den Berg told Reuters. "

It's been said before, i'll say it again: you couldn't make this stuff up.

buddy larsen said...

Truepeers, re your post on the decay; an aquaintance of mine does pro-bono legal work for a group--well, here's his words, pasted from email:

Oh, and you should see this group. They have an annual fundraising party at a local park here in total white bread middle America. It looks like the Hell's Angels have taken over. Quite a contrast. I went to their annual meeting in Fayetteville last year. Scary looking dudes, yet not like their appearance at all. You have to pass an FBI check to join, and I think (but cannot prove, and really do not want to know) they might on occasion deal with members who do not toe the legal line in an extra-judicial fashion. They arrange with schools and present on how they will protect the kids if they need it, and typically later the principle then gets a couple of visits from kids in trouble (which is exactly what happened at my partner's wife's school). And they protect the kids, it is all about the kids to them. They absolutely use intimidation against child molesters in an effort to protect the child, and make the child comfortable testifying against what is usually an adult "roommate" of some sort. Hopefully a former roommate. They do not take the law into their own hands, they merely visit the kid, make sure the kid knows he/she can call if they need help, and they show up for trials and sit in the back. Always as a group, no one is permitted to visit a child alone. I do not consider that vigilantism. An interesting group.

Anonymous said...

David:

The “mainstream” of the Democratic Party, if it attains power, will unhesitatingly appease the Islamic nihilists. In its heart of hearts, the view that violence only begets further violence is pervasive.

Very possibly. We see this appeasement on US campuses today, and it will probably get worse.

But there is a wildcard. European social welfarism and its attendant philosophy has been a kind of cultural touchstone for the American Left since the end of World War II. What happens to the American Left once Europe degenerates into a kind of continental Yugoslavia of nativist fascism versus islamofascism? Where is their model then, as their beloved, high culture European welfare state collapses?

truepeers said...

Buddy, that's what I love about AMericans: they can independently organize themselves to meet all needs. Now I don't think there are a lot of Dutch people with sympathy for these pedophiles, but the fact that these people can come out in public without being lynched says something, I think, about the deference to elite liberal authority, the inability of ordinary folk to take charge of problems, that Europe now seems to suffer. It only means that the necessary feedback loops aren't there, and when they do emerge they will have a lot of rough edges.

truepeers said...

SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned that German intelligence agencies have prevented three German women from travelling to Iraq in recent weeks. The women, who have close contacts to the Islamist scene in Germany and at least one whom has converted to Islam, came to the attention of intelligence agencies after one of them had announced on an Internet site that she intended to blow herself and her child up in Iraq.
link

Unknown said...

Well you can have crazies on both sides of the political divide, look at those folks who were banned from demonstrating at funerals for our troops...they were claiming God is mad because America went gay or something. Anytime people start to think they have all the aswers they get dangerous.

When I read Reading Lolita in Tehran the author made mention of the fact that there was an alliance between the left and the fanatics. It lasted as long as it took for them to get in power and then the fanatics turned on the leftists.

truepeers said...

Anytime people start to think they have all the aswers they get dangerous.

-perhaps; but equally, anytime people think that the ordinary people are louts who know nothing, and that, more generally, people should be full of doubt given the complexity of things, and accordingly that we should defer to properly credentialled expertise to show us the way, well, then people get dangerous too. Reasonable doubt must rest on firm ground, on an understanding of the nature of social order and morality. Otherwise, we get, to take an extreme example, defenders of pedophilia in the name of liberal doubt: maybe the children really do want it and are better for it, who are those conservative moralists, who are homophobes to boot, to tell us what is right and wrong?

buddy larsen said...

A powerful tool that mobility has cost us.

truepeers said...

Just looked at the article overview, Buddy, but it seems like the only groups that do shunning are religious sects. It appears the article isn't written by people who have been shunned by liberal secularists, like conservatives in a university; but that would be impossible because liberals don't shun it seems the article is saying. Perhaps with mobility comes a new kind of shunning?

buddy larsen said...

Wikipedia has an awful lot of liberalish nuance, for sure, in many of its articles.

But the question is, is there a middle way to handle our societal decay?

Ignoring it is no good (as a culture, we're now unsuccessfully trying that) and who wants oppressive governmental moral ediction (which will fail, anyway)?

So what do we have left, but a return to (ahem) "judgementalism"?

The old "bluenoses" of the 19th century perhaps remembered something now forgotten.

The 20th century West has run pell-mell from the "Victorian attitude"--and probably rightfully.

Problem is, that "new" direction seems to lead inexorably to the Dutch situation which led us into this conversation.

You can see it in the faces of perps--they're no longer ashamed, because they've been listening to the zeitgeist, and are now all brother political prisoners.

buddy larsen said...

That's what is important about that biker gang. Those people are straws in the wind--like the Minutemen, like whatever spontaneous ad-hoc operators will quietly band together to finally stop the terrorists.

Syl said...

I was watching CNN as they were showing sad sad pictures from the quake zone in indonesia.

One village they showed had every house flattened except the 'mayor's. His was built of reinforced concrete.

Only rich nations can afford building codes (and pollution codes). And it seemed so simple to me. Give all those poor folks property rights--deeds to the bit of land they sit on, an independent judiciary to enforce contracts, a good police force to reduce criminality, free speech, and guns to fend of the radical Islamists, and that country would be rich too.

A thousand NGO's couldn't do 1/100th as much for them.

It all seems so simple.

Then we see rich Europe going in the other direction. Even talk of state control of property.

Is it in our genes that when we have it good we forget why?

Anonymous said...

Buddy:

Those people are straws in the wind--like the Minutemen, like whatever spontaneous ad-hoc operators will quietly band together to finally stop the terrorists.

Yes. I have been feeling this more and more. Now, I've never been in battle, but I've been in disasters. And in disasters everything - everything - comes down to individual, small group initiative and damn the rules and full speed ahead. Well, yes, there are rules of course, but you get my drift. I think if you really want to win, it has to be that way. I'm reading Shattered Sword - The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway told largely from the Japanese side. And on their side, let's just say there wasn't that kind of initiative, that ability to self-organize. That is what will save us.

truepeers said...

Yes, I agree, we need to find some kind of return to the judgmentalism of ordinary people, but of a better variety than the Victorian. Again, I don't think we ever entirely gave up judgmentalism (few nihilists are entirely nihilistic: they are full of judgments that lead them into a kind of soft nihilism). 20thC. liberals just focussed their judgmentalism on all the traditional values (so as to value their modern, specialized expertise as the ultimate arbiter once traditional knowledge was slain). So if we equate liberalism with the state solution you reject, we are in agreement, though of course a lot of liberals also make a case of being against the state (think ACLU); however, I don't find the liberals convincing, since I see them as being ultimately agents of the state, creating a need for a bigger state to substitute for the civil society they help erode in the name of civil society. But I admit, there is a lot of paradox in all of this: it is not all unidirectional.

There was a news story here in Canada over the weekend. The police north of Toronto were upset because two people were killed by road racers. The young friends of these road racers crowded around the accident scene, clamoring to get good photos of the wreckage. The cops said the youth were full of contemp for the police line, and callous as can be. They were living in their own reality in which only the youthful machismo of speed mattered. AMong themselves, they no doubt judged and shunned, but they were detached from the judgmentalism of any larger society. What to do with kids like that? Well, I want to throw them in jail and take away their licenses for a long time. But, as you say, the state solution is not without its limits, and the only real solution is for ordinary people to make the dangerous and their families pay socially? But how to do this in our anomic suburbs? I think a lot of people want to have conservative values, but how to enforce them? If, e.g., I phoned up the employer of the father of a street racer to suggest they put on some "social" pressure, would they? Not if a lot of the liberal lawyers have their say. It will take a paradigm shift in society so that we can imagine Mothers Against Street Racers getting their way into the heads of parents and employers everywhere.

buddy larsen said...

I dunno--sometimes it seems that liberalism is all about surfaces. Take the concept of "individualism" for instance. Those kids at that accident scene will say--if challenged on their behavior--that "it's a free country" and that they have individual rights to act however they please.

And who is nowadays objecting to that definition of freedom? Conservatives--the old champions of unfettered individualism, that's who.

Watch old movies on TCM--today's anonymity, this freedom from the strictures of the community, is a new thing (due to wealth, cheap energy, electronics, the successful banishing of the wolf from the door).

It's "progress" so long as every man wants to be--and can be--an island.

buddy larsen said...

Ah, my last post, that wasn't me, it was my invisible friend, Captain Obvious.

truepeers said...

Well we do and we don't want to be islands. It all depends on the situation and it's never going to go all the one way or the other, right? One thing's for sure: they made better movies when people weren't so insular. Life still had a lot of meaning accesible via esthetic creativity. But we still crave meaning - that's fundamental to who we are - so I imagine this will mean we will find our way beyond the relativism and nihilism soon enough. The media will be different though. Blogging, for example.

Your cousin, Mr. Oblivious

truepeers said...

Good discussion of some of these themes (i.e. "what's wrong with the professors"): here

buddy larsen said...

That Gans piece is mighty good. I'm going at it slowly, stopping when I need to reflect and absorb. So far, I'm almost all the way through the first sentence.

buddy larsen said...

It's nature to strive to insulate oneself from shock, and it's nature to also feel less alive the better we get at it. It's pure paradox--like the white guilt in Gans' work--in the end, you can understand that you deserve none--and then you feel guilty for not feeling guilty.
\;-D

Anonymous said...

Buddy:

then you feel guilty for not feeling guilty.

I don't feel guilty over a godamn thing.

Well, . . .

buddy larsen said...

You don't? Shame on you!

Anonymous said...

You noticed the enigmatic ellipses.

I could explain them, but it may not be permissible to allow the thread to, umm, degenerate even though we've reached 31 comments. Anyway, it's dinner time.

Rick Ballard said...

C'mon Buddy, Gans isn't that hard. I've got two paragraphs down at 87% comprehension already.

I had to stop at "Europe’s rapidly declining indigenous population" and check facts, though - and he's not 100% on target there. The net losers (per the CIA Factbook) in Europe are Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Georgia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Belarus, Armenia, Czech Republic, Croatia, Austria, Greece, Sweden and Slovenia.

Net indigenous gainers are: Belgium, Luxembourg,
Bosnia, Portugal, Finland, Denmark, Georgia, Slovakia
Switzerland, Norway, Armenia, Spain, Serbia, Ireland, United Kingdom, Albania, Netherlands and France - with Netherlands and France registering the greatest gains.

It's true that there is a total decline but 80% of it is accounted for in three countries - Russia, Ukraine and Germany. The tighter the embrace of Communism, the heavier the negative impact on demographics - which makes sense.

I'm still trying to figure out France, they've got more to feel guilty about than.. well, almost anybody.

truepeers said...

Rick, over what time period are those gains in the indigenous population? The population is certainly aging, with the baby boomers getting old but not yet engaged in the big die off. I think you can reasonably speak of decline if the youth demographic is small. Everything I'm reading says that the fertility rate is much less than 2.1 per woman in many of those countries, for many years now.

Rick Ballard said...

TP,

I have been focused on immigration and current births/deaths ratios. I understand the 2.1 number a little but I don't know how it accounts for the significant number of 'never marrieds' that occurred due to WWII. I think that births per thousand may be more significant but I need to think it all the way through. Remember - France made 'arrangements' in WWII that saved millions of French lives, life being extraordinarily more valuable to the French than honor.

truepeers said...

I think the big difference may be that many Eastern Europeans, at least Russians, die at around fifty. So any post-WWII population decline shows us much sooner there. Indigenous is also a vague term: France, e.g., has many immigrants who have a lot of children, born in France, while the French French have many fewer proportionately.

buddy larsen said...

The French were perfidious at least back as far as the extermination of the Knights Templar, when the king and his boyhood friend the pope decided to cancel their debts. And they've been perfidious since the Armistice in WWI. But during WWI, their military did fight like the devil, and bled enormously. I always keep that in mind when regarding the race--it could pop and be a contender again, if it found the desire. Better hurry, tho.

Anonymous said...

Buddy:

Once I think in the Parc Monceau, I saw two Paris cops go after some kid who had probably stolen a wallet or done a "dine and dash" at a nearby cafe or the like. One cop flying tackled him and with the cop on his back the kid went skidding through the gravel face down for about ten feet. Normal stuff. You go to Africa and there are French garrisons in several countries. These troops often look to be tough customers. I wouldn't want to mess with them.

So on the one hand you have this incessant appeasement of the Islamofascists. On the other you have those tough as nails gendarmes. Who knows where this will end.

Rick Ballard said...

The French were in 12th place in WWII for combat causalties, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland all had more than 50% more casualties with smaller populations. Tossing in the 40K or so Frenchmen who dies fighting for Hitler doesn't change things much.

TP,

I'm not sure how to factor in that cradle to early grave health care situation for the truly socialist countries of the east. Like I said, I need to look at it some more.

truepeers said...

Charles (a Flares reader) reports on the French fighting back.

buddy larsen said...

Something in their favor, they are the only people yet to've sunk a GreenPeace (GreenPiece?) boat.

buddy larsen said...
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