The European Disease

From The Brussels Journal:

Liberal politicians, like Hillary Clinton, envy Western Europe for its welfare state. They tell U.S. voters that a European-style welfare state is needed to help the poor. In reality the motives of liberal politicians are not altruistic, but egotistical. Welfare makes people dependent on the state. It is not a coincidence that liberalism and secularism are almost synonyms. Liberals want to replace God by the state.

The difference between Americans and Europeans is the state-dependency of the latter. Contemporary Europe is in crisis. Its welfare systems are running out of money. Its moral and legal order is breaking down, while the influence of radical Islam is growing. Its nation-states are being undermined by the European Union. Most Europeans look on passively. After three generations of welfare dependency, they have lost the ability to take their fate into their own hands.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, North America was colonized by freedom-loving people. They had left Europe because they wanted to live according to their own conscience instead of submitting to the centralist absolutist rulers of the new age that was sweeping across Europe from the 16th century onward. Their traditions were rooted in the late Middle Ages and the Aristotelian philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, which was centered on the individual. God had called man to be free from sin, but in order to be free from sin he had to be virtuous, and in order for virtue to have any value it had to be voluntary, implying that the virtuous man had to be free in every aspect of his life, including his economic activities.

Hence the paradox came about that the civil society developing in America was, in a sense, older than the new Modern Age of the absolutist monarchs governing Europe. When Americans rebelled in 1776, they rebelled against absolutism in order to keep their old freedoms. Theirs was a conservative revolution. Europe had its own series of revolutions from 1789 onward, but these were revolutions of a different sort. They toppled the ruling absolutists to replace them by absolutists of an even more extreme form: totalitarians. These were not satisfied with controlling their subjects' political and economic lives but also wished to control their minds and souls.

Here lies the origin of the European disease, which arose from the systematic loss of faith in the Judeo-Christian God and the Judeo-Christian moral legacy, and an increasing reliance on the state as the source of order, authority and legitimacy. That disease culminated, after causing two world wars, in the creation of the European Union (EU) as a superstate, the god to absorb all gods, with a nihilistic and atheist agenda.

The perceptive Irish philosopher (and British politician) Edmund Burke, who supported the American colonies in their dispute with King George III, noticed already at the time that the spirit of the 1789 French Revolution was totalitarian. The same secularist spirit inspired the Russian Revolution, National Socialism and European welfarism.

No wonder Hillary loves the European model.

Sweden is just further down the path than the rest

Fjordman writes on "The Death of Sweden" in today's Brussels Journal:

I still get questions as to why I, being Norwegian, write more about Sweden than I do about my own country. First of all: I do write about Norway sometimes. And second of all: If you look at capital cities alone, Oslo could quite possibly be the worst city in Scandinavia. However, in virtually all other respects, Sweden is worse. And yes, it is every bit as bad as I say it is.

The primary reason why I write so much about Sweden is because it is the most totalitarian country in the Western world, and should thus serve as a warning to others. The second reason is that Sweden, like my own country, now needs some "tough love." Too many Swedes still cling on to the myth of the "Swedish model" while their country is disintegrating underneath their feet. If Sweden the nation is to be saved – if it still can be saved, I'm not so sure – then Sweden the ideological beacon for mankind must be smashed, because vanity now blocks sanity.

According to news site The Local, a judge who hears migration appeals had his house vandalized by left-wing extremists. Threats were sprayed on the walls, red paint was poured over the steps and an axe was left outside his home. "When a judge in a Swedish court has his home vandalised in this way, it is of course very serious," said Ingvar Paulsson, head of the Gothenburg District Administrative Court . The group Antifascistisk Action (AFA) writes on its homepage that the attack was motivated by the situation of Iraqi asylum seekers. The Swedish Board of Migration has ruled that they should be deported if they cannot show that a threat exists against them personally.

It should be noted here that Sweden alone in 2006 accepted almost as many asylum applications from Iraqis as all other European countries did combined. Native Swedes, who live in a country that was one of the most ethnically homogeneous nations in the world only 30 years ago, will be a minority in their own country within a few decades, if current trends continue. Sweden is self-destructing at a pace that is probably unprecedented in history, but for the extreme Left, even this isn't fast enough.

AFA openly brag about numerous attacks against persons who get their full name and address published on their website. According to them, this is done in order to fight against capitalist exploitation and for a global, classless society. Their logic goes something like this: If you protest against Muslim immigration, you suffer from Islamophobia, which is almost the same as xenophobia, which is almost the same as racism. And racists are almost Fascists and Nazis, as we all know, and they shouldn't be allowed to voice their opinions in public. Hence, if you protest against being assaulted or raped by Muslims, you are evil and need to be silenced. If a native Swede is really lucky, he or she will thus first get mugged or battered by Muslims, and then beaten up a second time by his own extreme Leftists for objecting to being beaten the first time. The state does next to nothing to prevent either, of course. Native Swedes who object to a mass immigration that will render them a minority in their own country within a couple of generations have already been classified as "racists," and racists are for all practical purposes outside of the protection of the law.

According to some observers, Islamophobic hatred is on the rise in Europe. Let's have a look at what constitutes "racist hatred." The following is used as an official example of what is considered an Islamophobic hate crime in Sweden: A Muslim family in a Swedish neighborhood asks whether it is possible for them to get something else to eat other than sausages made out of pork. Linda then answers: "No, we live in Sweden." The family asks what she means by that. Linda repeats that "We live in Sweden, and you have to respect that." The man of the family says that "We respect you, why can't you respect us?" Linda then replies that "No, unfortunately not." She laughs and walks away.

Contrast this with an example from 2006, when Chancellor of Justice Göran Lambertz discontinued his preliminary investigation regarding anti-Semitism at the great mosque in Stockholm. He wrote that "the lecture at hand contains statements that are strongly degrading to Jews, among other things, they are throughout called brothers of apes and pigs." Furthermore a curse is expressed over the Jews and "Jihad is called for, to kill the Jews, whereby suicide bombers – celebrated as martyrs – are the most effective weapon." Lambertz thought that the "recently mentioned statements in spite of their contents are not to be considered incitement against an ethnic group according to Swedish law." His conclusions were that the preliminary investigation should be discontinued because this incitement against Jews could be said to originate from the Middle East conflict.

This double standard is not just limited to Jews. Dahn Pettersson, a local politician, has been fined 18,000 kronor for writing that 95 percent of all heroin brought in comes via Albanians from Kosovo. "It is never ethnic groups that commit crimes. It is individuals or groups of individuals," prosecutor Mats Svensson told the court, which found Pettersson guilty of "Agitation Against a Minority Group." Svante Nycander, former editor of daily Dagens Nyheter, stated that "the ruling in Malmö District Court is damaging to freedom of expression. Many will take it as proof that the authorities are afraid of uncomfortable truths, and that lacking reasoned counter-arguments they punish those who speak plainly." In Sweden, saying that Muslim Albanians are behind much of the drug traffic in Europe (a fact) is a crime. Making derogatory statements about the native population, however, is just fine.

Bexhet Kelmeni is of Kosovar Albanian origin and lives in Malmö, the country's third largest city, which is set to become the first Scandinavian city with a Muslim majority in a few years. He thinks that it is important that it has now been established that Dahn Pettersson's assertions were criminal. "I am ashamed that there are such politicians," says Kelmeni, who claims that he has been in contact with hundreds of Albanians and all of them have taken offense. "He needs to learn more about the Albanian culture," Kelmeni says. What he doesn't say is that many of the remaining Swedes in Malmö – the natives have been evacuating, or rather fleeing, the city for years due to rampant violence and harassment – get daily lessons in Albanian culture.

Feriz and Pajtim, members of Gangsta Albanian Thug Unit in Malmö, explain how they mug people downtown. They target a lone victim. "We surround him and beat and kick him until he no longer fights back," Feriz says. They are always many more people than their victims. Isn't this cowardly? "I have heard that from many, but I disagree. The whole point is that they're not supposed to have a chance." They don't express any sympathy for their victims. "If they get injured, they just have themselves to blame for being weak," says Pajtim and shrugs. "Many of us took part in gangs which fought against the Serbs in Kosovo. We have violence in our blood." They blame the politicians for why they are mugging, stating that they are bored. If the state could provide them with something to do, maybe they would stop attacking people. But is the lack of leisure pursuits the only reason why they assault people? "No, it's good fun as well," says Feriz.

Criminal gangs of Albanians thus freely admit assaulting Swedes, but Swedes cannot suggest that there are criminal gangs of Albanians. That's just racist.

[. . .]

Is there then no racism in Malmö? Yes, there are some nasty cases of Islamophobia. A bus driver was suspended for discrimination and hatred after he allegedly tried to stop a woman from boarding because she was wearing a burka. According to writer Mats Wahl, arson against schools costs more than 300 million kroner a year. An unofficial survey among 52 Swedish municipalities indicated that at least 114 such cases of arson were registered within the first half of 2006, but accurate numbers were hard to come by. At least 139 schools suffered attempted arson during 2002 alone. Björn Vinberg from the fire department in the Malmö area says it is degrading to put out fires again and again in the same immigrant areas, with school kids laughing at them and lighting a new one just afterwards. No doubt, this must be a protest against the institutionalized and pervasive Islamophobia in Swedish society.

In a country where the tax rate is above 60%, higher than in almost any other country on the planet save perhaps North Korea – which incidentally also has almost as much free speech as Sweden – the natives are attacked on a daily basis by immigrant gangs, yet the state seems unwilling to do anything to stop this. Although Muslims openly brag about targeting Jews and Christians, this doesn't constitute a hate crime. But is does constitute racism and a hate crime if Muslims are not presented with halal sausages at all times or allowed to wear a burka wherever they want to.

According to Professor Wilhelm Agrell, Sweden now has a security policy based on the assumption that territorial defense is no longer needed. Military resources are only deemed relevant as political markers in distant conflicts and their own territory has become nothing more than a training ground. Agrell concludes that "after years of existential angst and budgetary black holes, Sweden's military has finally taken down its flag, emptied its stores and fled the field." The few soldiers they do have are in places such as Afghanistan, not at home. Jan Karlsen from the Swedish Police Union warned in 2007 that the underfunded police force would not be able to keep up with organized crime and ethnic tensions for much longer. Meanwhile, police officers are protesting against a new uniform designed to make them appear less aggressive by replacing boots with shoes, making guns less visible and changing the shirts to a softer, gentler color.

In an article from June 2007 with the title "Summertime — rape time," Aftonbladet, the largest daily in Scandinavia, linked the spike in rapes during the summer to the warm weather. The official number of rape charges in Sweden has more than quadrupled during one generation, even more for girls under the age of 15. If this is due to the warm weather, I suppose the Scandinavian rape wave is caused by global warming? The fact that many of the suspects have a Muslim background, which is also proven by statistics from neighboring Norway, is purely coincidental, no doubt. The number of rapes in the Norwegian capital Oslo is now six times as high per capita as in New York.

Somehow or other it just has to be the fault of either Bush or the Jooos, or both.

Seriously, go back and look at the part where the tax rate in Sweden is 60%. That is really all you need to know. Sweden is run by the Left and this is how the Left governs.

Any questions?

Either way the outcome won't be good

From The Brussels Journal:

Last week, a German court sentenced a 55-year old Lutheran pastor to one year in jail for “Volksverhetzung” (incitement of the people) because he compared the killing of the unborn in contemporary Germany to the holocaust. Next week, the Council of Europe is going to vote on a resolution imposing Darwinism as Europe’s official ideology. The European governments are asked to fight the expression of creationist opinions, such as young earth and intelligent design theories. According to the Council of Europe these theories are “undemocratic” and “a threat to human rights.”

[. . .]

Volksverhetzung is a crime which the Nazis often invoked against their enemies and which contemporary Germany also uses to intimidate homeschoolers. Soon, the German authorities will be able to use the same charge against people who question Darwin’s evolution theory.

It is a race to see which comes about first, The EUSSR or Eurabia.

Are the Europeans beginning to stand up for themselves?

Normally news about a large scale riot in an urban center would be a bad thing, but in this case I can't help but feel hopeful. It would seem that there is some spine left in Europe after all. From The Brussels Journal:

Ondiep, a working class neighbourhood in the Dutch town of Utrecht, is in turmoil. After the death last Sunday of Rinie Mulder, a 54-year old indigenous Dutchman who was shot by a police officer, non-immigrant citizens went on a rampage, burning cars, looting shops and arsoning a community centre in “inverted Paris style riots.” According to our sources the police officer who killed Mulder is a woman of Moroccan origin.

The Ondiep residents have been complaining for months about harassment and intimidation by immigrant youths of Moroccan origin. The Dutch mainstream media do not go into much detail about what is going on. Most of them do not mention the ethnicity of the victim and the police officer, though the riots clearly have an ethnic nature.

Apparently Mulder intervened when Muslim youths harassed a pregnant native Dutch woman. He was able to grab the knife of one of the youths. When the police arrived Mulder was shot because he had raised the knife. Witnesses say Mulder was indicating to the police that he had called for them.

Locals claim the police has failed to protect them for years. They say the authorities are afraid of the immigrants and tolerate their criminal behaviour. After the death of Mulder the indigenous Dutch decided they had had enough and started riots which went on for two continuous nights. The police made 130 arrests: 60 of them are Ondiep residents. According to the mainstream media the others are mainly “football hooligans” from other parts of the country. Annie Brouwer-Korf, the Socialist mayor of Utrecht, has ordered Ondiep to be sealed off from the rest of town to keep non-residents out. She expressed some sympathy for the frustrated Ondiep residents. “I understand that residents are sometimes upset about the nuisance around their own house and neighbourhood. That does you no good whatsoever.”

They are also posting this update:

The Dutch police deny that the police officer who killed Rinie Mulder is of Moroccan or Turkish descent. Esther, a Dutch blogger, refers to a post on a Moroccan website saying the police officer is Turkish, not Moroccan. The post has, however, been removed. Yesterday, we reported, relying on sources in Ondiep, that the officer was a Moroccan woman.

It remains unclear what happened in the Utrecht neighbourhood Ondiep on Sunday evening when a police officer shot 54-year old Mulder. According to some press reports, which also rely on rumours, Mulder was drunk when he and a friend became involved in a quarrel with immigrant youths. When the police intervened they shot Mulder. The man had been complaining about harassment by immigrant youths for months. Neighbours accuse the police of turning a blind eye to the youths’ behaviour.

Following Mulder’s death indigenous Dutch have started rioting. According to the authorities many rioters came from outside the neighbourhood.

The police have placed fences and cameras around the neighbourhood, and have closed it off to non-residents. The closure of the neighborhood will be reviewed day by day. The fines for those entering are going up. On Tuesday the fine amounted to 200 euros, on Wednesday to 300 euros and on Thursday to 400 euros.

Ondiep has now literally become a no-go area.

Think back on all the reports you have heard about Muslim "youths" rioting in various European cities. Now ask yourself if authorities have moved so swiftly and decisively to isolate the rioting area and moved in so quickly to make arrests.

It would seem that the government thinks that native Europeans standing up and starting to push back at the colonization of their nations by Third World Islamic trash is much more threatening than the odd bit of vandalism, arson, rape and murder by that aforementioned Islamic trash when perpetuated against the natives.

If this sounds screwed up to you then you prove yourself to be sane.

Yes, Europe can be even more craven

From The Brussels Journal:

In 1863, at the height of Tsarist Russian imperial expansion, the French polemicist Alfred Mercier wrote in Du Panlatinisme that “Russian domination, a benefit for ignorant and savage peoples, or ones corrupted by the vices of decrepit civilizations, would be a calamity for Europe.” Mercier would not object to Russia’s incursions into Central Asia, and was confident that “as long as Europe remains what it is today, that is, strong and disciplined, the czars’ cannons will knock at its doors in vain.” Europe, Mercier reasoned, would be preserved by its “vitality.”

Presently, Europe’s vitality is being questioned by many, on geopolitical, economic, social, and demographic grounds. At the same time, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, despite facing similar challenges, is geopolitically resurgent. NATO expansion, the UN’s plans in Kosovo, and US plans to expand missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic have all drawn the Kremlin’s ire, and at the recent Munich Conference on Security Policy, Putin spoke troublingly of unspecified “asymmetrical” responses. Although some European leaders responded appropriately to such veiled threats (for instance the Swedish and Czech foreign ministers and NATO Secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer), the comment most indicative of Europe’s current predicament vis-à-vis Russia came from a Green MEP from Germany, Angelika Beer. “We need Russia for energy and Kosovo. He [Putin] knows that – but perhaps he is going over the top.” Even that statement would seem too strident for many Russophile European policymakers.

This candid willingness to acknowledge dependence on Russia, specifically energy dependence, is discomfiting. After all, recent news out of the Republic of Georgia indicates that Russia ’s foreign policy aims can indeed be deflected effectively. Late last year, in response to tensions between Moscow and Tbilisi, Putin recalled his ambassador to Georgia, closed border crossings between Russia and its Caucasus neighbor, and banned importation of three of Georgia’s biggest exports – wine, mineral water, and tangerines – on spurious health grounds.

Instead of buckling under Russian pressure, tiny Georgia, led by Rose Revolution leader President Mikheil Saakashvili, managed to hold firm. Georgia diversified its natural gas imports, expanded its trade relations with nearby states, began to set up an innovative free trade zone on the Black Sea, and exploited Russia’s client de facto states (e.g. Abkhazia and South Ossetia) to facilitate black market exports of Georgian tangerines, considered a delicacy in Russia. Russia, realizing that the blockade was hopeless, has ratcheted down its sanctions and returned its ambassador.

The lesson of the so-called “Tangerine Crisis” is that even a diminutive republic in the Caucasus can stand up to Russian pressure, provided it exhibits the sort of vitality Alfred Mercier spoke of in 1863. Surely the European Union, and its constituent states and their representatives, need not preface responses to veiled Russian threats with assurances of dependence. But, repeatedly, Russophile elements within Europe have done precisely this. Perhaps European policymakers would be surprised by how many of the threats they face would be mitigated or eliminated by acting in a manner consistent with the strength, discipline, and vitality that Mercier proposed and that Georgia, for example, has lately exhibited.

In order for Europe to respond forcefully and firmly to this kind of threat it would be necessary for the Eurocrats to have confidence in Europe. They would need to have the kind of faith their civilization that Europeans used to have, but for the most part, no longer do.

European elites, at least the majority of them, no longer believe in European exceptionalism. For all too many Europe's colonial past leaves it permanently tainted with the stains of racism and exploitation and for this reason it does not really deserve to survive. This explaines why they are so willing, if not eager, to see their cultures buried under a tidal wave of Muslim immigration.

For others there is simply too much money to be made by selling out their nations as was the case with France and Germany's leaders who were found to have been on Saddam Hussein's payroll.

The Netherlands copes with Islamic violence

According to The Brussels Journal the Dutch are facing a problem:

The Netherlands may soon witness an outburst of ethnic violence. An official report published last Wednesday states that “tensions between various ethnic and cultural groups of youths are seriously underestimated.” The report points out that the Dutch authorities fail to grasp the gravity of the problem. It warns the government in The Hague that if nothing is done the country will soon witness situations similar to those in France. There violent clashes, which erupted in late 2005, have led to the police abandoning immigrant suburbs to gangs of Muslim youths, who have now taken over effective control of more than 750 French urban neighborhoods.

They are attempting to deal with it in a typically Dutch manner:

Following the 2004 assassination of Theo van Gogh by a young Moroccan immigrant the Dutch minister of Integration, Rita Verdonk, installed four so-called “intervention teams for interethnic tensions.” The teams are made up of social workers whose task it is to advise local authorities on ways to deal with groups of unassimilated and criminal youths.

[. . .]

The intervention teams recommend an expansion of the social worker approach to defuse the situation. This is a typically Dutch way of doing things, which is widely applied, even among Dutch troops in Afghanistan who prefer to have tea with the Taliban rather than fight them. Last year the police of The Hague sent officers on a “cultural training” trip to Morocco because, as Gerard Bouman, the The Hague police chief (who has meanwhile been promoted to head of the Dutch state security services), said, “Criminal Moroccan youths […] do not behave like indigenous Dutch. They rave about Moroccan culture. Hence, we have to know the latter, too.”

Of course the authorities in Morocco have their own ideas about how to deal with lawless elements:

In Morocco, the Dutch police officers discovered that their Moroccan colleagues were astonished to hear that the Dutch have problems with criminal Moroccan youths. In Morocco officers are known to beat the hell out of criminals.

This goes a very long way to explaining why Morocco has a much lower crime rate than The Netherlands.

Of course the native Dutch "man in the street" has his own, and good ideas about how to deal with criminal punks:

A poll conducted by Elsevier, the largest Dutch weekly, indicates that 80% of its readers prefer a “harsh treatment” of troublemaking youths rather than “sending in more multicultural intervention teams.”

But that would not empower the multicultural elite so it must be ignored.

If you think that what is going on in Europe is a good thing and represents what we need here in America then keep voting for Democrats.

There is still someone in the UK who makes sense

From The Brussels Journal:

A quote from Jasper Gerard in The Observer, 7 January 2007

[Simone Clarke] might be a nut, but why crack her with a sledgehammer? If you can no longer hold views liberal society rightly regards as repugnant, how liberal is your society? […] We are faced with McCarthyism in reverse, an illiberal liberalism. Perhaps we should call it Livingstonism, after Ken. Or maybe Stourtonism, for its home is the BBC.

Of course the tactics of smear which go under the name "McCarthyism" are the stock-in-trade of the left. Since they cannot win a debate with logic and facts they resort to personal attacks. They use loaded terms like "Nazi" or "fascist" or "racist" in order to shut down debate.

People like Simone Clarke and her BNP who stand up to them and refuse to be intimidated are their worst nightmare and must be hammered into submission or destroyed outright. For if the smears lose their power to frighten the left loses its power.

The lynching continues

Paul Belien has some comments on the ongoing situation in England involving Simone Clarke the leading ballerina at the English National Ballet. Ms. Clarke was recently outed by the far left-wing newspaper The Guardian as a member of the BNP, a political party which worries about the uncontrolled immigration into the UK of islamist militants, rising crime rates and confiscatory taxes.

Mr. Belien compares Simone Clarke to Katharina Blum the heroine of the Heinrich Böll novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum:

. . . In the story the reporter, Werner Tötges, works for Die Zeitung, a right-wing mass circulation paper. Tötges deliberately ruins the life of Katharina Blum, a divorced housewife, who has met Ludwig Götten, a bank robber on the run from the police.
Katharina is innocent. She does not know who Götten, whom she bumped into at a carnival party, really is. Nevertheless, since Götten has escaped the law, Tötges concocts a story depicting Katharina as Götten’s accomplice. The journalist tracks down her friends and family, including her ex-husband, and publishes a wild story in which Katharina Blum is depicted as a fervent communist and an accomplice of Götten.

In order to set the record straight, Katharina agrees to grant Tötges an interview. The journalist, however, distorts her story to inform his readers how “cold and calculating” she is and to cast suspicion on her socialist father and brother. Die Zeitung crushes Katharina and her family completely, causing the death of her sick mother. When finally Tötges forces his way into Katharina’s home and proposes to let her off the hook if they have sex together, she ends the ordeal by shooting him, aware that her life has been utterly destroyed.

I very highly recomend going over and reading Mr. Belien's entire post. Europe is growing progressively less free on an almost daily basis. The fact is that they are an ally to the United States in name only and will soon not even be that.

Like I said, Europe is NOT free

Also from The Brussels Journal a post further supporting my point that Europe is no longer anything that could be called a "free" society. The issue under discussion is the treatment being inflicted upon the BNP, a nationalist political party in the UK.

The most recent example of the persecution that BNP members are being subjected to is the "outing" of the names of party members in the leftist press along with calls for party members to be denied jobs and socially ostracised.

Since lying about the BNP does not work very well in the age of the Internet, the gentler forms of destruction are being supplemented by stronger. Its leader has just been acquitted after a trial for speech crimes that did not exist when I was a boy. Its known members are losing their jobs in public bodies up and down the country. It has trouble getting its material printed. Banks are being persuaded to close its accounts. The legal machinery is in place to deny it access to the ballot in elections.

Mr Cobain’s articles must be seen as part of this attempted destruction of a political party. Let it become known that middle class supporters will be named and have their careers destroyed, and party membership will not proceed far beyond the working classes. Let it be made effectively impossible for any middle class person to stand as a BNP candidate, and the only candidates will be criminals and fools, who can then be held up as a reason not to vote BNP.

Much of this would be happening if there were a Conservative Government. But the intensity of the persecution faced by the BNP is peculiar to Labour. There has been a strain of antinomianism in our politics since 1997 not seen in centuries. From Tony Blair down, the Ministers believe passionately that they can and therefore must turn England into some kind of multicultural love feast. Their vision of a transformed England is not very clear. But, as with an impressionist painting, vagueness of detail is compensated by vividness of colour.

These people cannot imagine that anyone of good will could fail to believe as they do. Therefore, all opposition is evil, and may rightly be put down without regard for traditional norms of right and justice and common decency. See, as an example of this, how Peter Hain defends as a Minister police state measures that he used to condemn when used by the South African Government. To the Saints of New Labour, all things are lawful.

It helps that most of these people used to be Marxists. They no longer seem to believe in the positive doctrines of Marxism, but they retain its assumption that the traditional norms are mere “bourgeois legality”.

We can, therefore, look forward to much more of this. Sooner or later, our ruling class will shut down all electoral dissent. The only possible opposition will then be on the streets.

Now, I am able to say this from a position of safety. Neither I nor the Libertarian Alliance expect to suffer in any measurable degree from this shutting down of debate. We live in a potemkin democracy, where only limited diversity of opinion is tolerated. But even so, there must be some opposition.

I am fortunate enough to find myself in the licensed opposition. I face no official discrimination that I can see. I am allowed to work in state universities. I am allowed regular appearances in the media. I am not obviously under surveillance. This may be because our ruling class does not regard libertarians as much of a threat. It may be because someone outside the ruling class has to be tolerated, for the sake of keeping up the pretence of liberal democracy. Whatever the reason, we do not operate under any of the disadvantages that the real dissidents of the BNP must take as facts of life.

This imposes a duty on me and my friends to speak up in defence of the dissidents. Unlike the other “rights” organisations, we believe in freedom of speech with no exceptions. We do not enquire into the substance of a person’s views before defending his right to express them.

We denounce the persecution of the BNP. Though I do not expect them to pay any attention, I call on Liberty and the Conservative Party to do likewise.

Sean Gabb is the author of this piece and it the director of the Libertarian Alliance.

One quibble I have with Mr. Gabb is his contention that if no middle class persons can be found to stand for election as BNP candidates that the only alternatives will be "criminals and fools". Does Mr. Gabb believe that every last working class person in the UK is a "criminal" or "fool"?

Reading this could cause your head to explode

From The Brussels Journal:

Last week, the Paris police issued a prohibition on the distribution to the homeless of soup containing pork meat or fat. According to the police authorities – the same ones who are incapable of restoring law and order in the Paris suburbs – distributing soup containing pork or lard is a racist offence since some people in need might be Muslim and hence not allowed to eat pork. Yesterday, however, an administrative court of first instance in Paris ruled that distributing pork soup is not racist. Today Bertrand Delanoë, the Mayor of Paris, told the Paris police to appeal the court ruling.

[. . .]

On 28 December the Paris police prefecture issued a prohibition on the distribution of the soup, denouncing the “xenophobic character of a charity that excludes people of Jewish and Muslim confessions.” Paris police officers had to enforce the prohibition. This time the policemen did not need to enter certain Paris suburbs because the ruling sharia authorities in those no-go areas ensure that no pork soup is served there.

Yesterday’s court ruling, which again allowed the serving of pork soup, was criticized by Bertrand Delanoë. The Paris mayor said he was “astonished” to learn that the court tolerates an initiative which “knowingly excludes Jews and Muslims.” “Confronted with this xenophobic initiative, I want to express again that the city denounces and opposes every form of discrimination, racism and anti-Semitism,” the mayor said. He asked the police prefecture to appeal the verdict.

What needs to be stressed here. What if fact cannot be stressed too strongly is that the Paris city government is seeking to ban PRIVATE CHARITIES who use NO PUBLIC MONEY from GIVING AWAY FOOD.

This mayor wants to ban private citizens from giving away food because not everyone's religion will allow them to eat it.

Does anyone still think the European Union is remotely free?

The post on Brussels Journal ends with a question:

Mayor Delanoë is a Socialist and an outspoken homosexual. Religious Muslims oppose homosexuality at least as much as they oppose pork soup. If the mayor considers it a racist hate crime for a private organization to offer the homeless pork soup when some of the homeless might be Muslims, he may ponder the question whether it is not a racist hate crime for a city to have a gay mayor when some of the city’s citizens are Muslims.

Your answer Mr. Mayor?

Paging Winston Smith

From The Brussels Journal:

A quote from al-Guardian, 1 January 2007

Officials from the English National Ballet [ENB] faced calls to sack one of their leading dancers yesterday after Simone Clarke defied criticism and gave a detailed interview defending her support for the British National party. Two weeks after she was named by the Guardian as a card-carrying member of the far right group, the ballerina hit out at her critics, voicing her belief that the BNP seemed to be the only party “willing to take a stand” against immigration.

[...] Clarke, 36, who will take the lead in the ENB's production of Giselle at the London Coliseum next week, said she had been called a “racist and a fascist” since her decision to join the BNP 18 months ago became public. One report claimed that following the Guardian’s revelations, fellow dancers confronted her before a matinee performance of The Nutcracker. She told the Mail on Sunday: “Everything will be different now. I will be known as the BNP Ballerina. I think that will stick with me for life.” But she added: “I don’t regret anything. I will stay a member.”

[. . .]

Lee Jasper, equalities director for the mayor of London and chairman of the National Assembly Against Racism, […] called on funders and David Lammy, the arts minister, to intervene. Inayat Bunglawala, of the Muslim Council of Britain, said people had a right to their private political views but added: “This will taint the ENB in the eyes of many minority communities. Questions need to be asked about how someone in that position can be allowed to abuse that position to promote the BNP.” […] Clarke’s membership became public in reports by Guardian reporter Ian Cobain, who used a pseudonym to join the far right party and was quickly selected to become its central London organiser. During his seven months undercover, Clarke told him that immigration “has really got out of hand”.

Things have gone further in the UK than I had feared. Apparently they have their very own branch of the Thought Police. Who is the Minister of Love over there now anyway?

A community beyond shame indeed

To all the people who think that things are about as bad as they can get in America I present you with this story from Belgium. Courtesy of The Brussels Journal:

Serge Régnier (as some readers may remember) is a 47-year old Belgian with three wives and thirty children. In 1986 Régnier married Christine Wuest (who is now 38). They have fifteen children, between 19 years and 11 months old. A couple of years later, Christine’s homeless sister Karine Wuest (now 35 years old) came to live with the couple. Soon she fell in love with Serge. Christine consented in her husband taking her sister as a second wife. Serge and Karine have six children, between 10 years and 10 months old.

All that time, Serge had been meeting his former girlfriend Judith De Leenheer (now 38 years old). When Judith’s marriage broke up – which was not altogether surprising since all her children were Serge’s rather than her husband’s – Serge asked his two wives whether they would mind taking her in. They did not mind. Serge and Judith have nine children, between 18 years and 10 months old. They all live together in Serge’s house in Marcinelle, a town in Wallonia, the French-speaking South of Belgium.

The Belgians call Régnier, a stocky, balding man with a fringe of beard, the “Marcinelle bull.” Non-Belgians wonder perhaps how he provides for his large family. Here is the answer.

Régnier applied for and received the status of an invalid from Wallonia's generous welfare authorities. He consequently receives a welfare check of over €1,000 a month. His three wives are all unemployed. Hence, they each get €800 in unemployment benefits. On top of this the family receives €4,000 in child allowances. This makes a grand total of more than €7,400 a month ($9,700 or £4,960) – all of it provided by Belgium’s taxpayers. All the money matters in the household are taken care of by Serge. His wives are only interested in children. They have told the press that they each hope to have another baby in 2007.

[. . .]

Indeed, last Tuesday the Belgian paper Gazet van Antwerpen wrote that there are marital problems in the Régnier household. His three wives complain that their husband is often away from home, while they do not know where he is. They suspect there is a fourth woman. “We are partners, friends. There is no jealousy here, at least not between us three,” they told the paper. But while four is a marriage, five is a crowd. The wives are also increasingly frustrated because Serge does not seem prepared to give them another baby yet. “Judith, Karine and I each want three more children,” says Christine. “So did Serge a few months ago, but suddenly no more. What must we make of that?” she asks. Régnier, however, denies he is cheating on his wives. “They will get their children, but not for the moment,” he says.

The wives are also cross because Régnier often withdraws into his room, locking the door. He is the only one to have a room of his own in the house. There he has a television set and a small fridge. The women complain he sits there watching football and drinking beer, while they cook, wash and iron and take care of the children. Régnier ignores their complaints, and tells the journalist: “I do not know whether you are married but if you have one wife you can imagine what it is like to have three.”

A story like Régnier’s is probably only possible in the south of Belgium, where a man can spend his life in idleness while the taxpayers provide him with enough income to sustain three women and thirty children. Wallonia is a Socialist stronghold which is subsidized by Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern half of the country. Belgium is a country in which any major government decision requires approval in both Flanders and Wallonia. The Constitution stipulates that every major change requires a majority in both parts of the country. This has doomed the country to inertia and it has inevitably led to the corruption of Wallonia.

[. . .]

In Flanders, which has a strong freemarket culture, there is a large political majority to change the present welfare system. The Flemish want to lower taxes and to reform social security to reduce abuse. But Wallonia blocks all reforms and the Walloon Socialist party guarantees voters that, as long as they support the Socialists, money from Flemish taxpayers will keep flowing to the nearly 50% of the Walloons who are employed or subsidized by the government, including “invalids” like Serge Régnier.

In 2006 the 6 million Flemings subsidized the 4 million Walloons at a rate of €11.5 billion (an enormous amount of money compared to the €14 billion which is the U.S.’s annual spending on foreign aid). Among the frustrated Flemings there is a growing call for secession from Belgium. This has begun to worry the Belgian establishment. This became particularly apparent after a hoax television news item last week in which the end of Belgium was announced.

When Caroline De Gruyter, a journalist from the Netherlands, visited Wallonia five years ago she was amazed to meet several families that had been on the dole for three generations and did not have a single relative who was officially employed. The families liked it that way. They all voted for the Socialist Party, because it guaranteed that Flemish money would keep flowing to Wallonia. They described the attitude of Flemish nationalists “who do not want to pay taxes to support the Walloon jobless” as “unsocial behaviour!” One of the things that struck De Gruyter was that they admitted to having no shame. It prompted her to call them “a Community beyond Shame.”

See, it can always get worse.

And make no mistake American leftists are reading stories like this out of Europe and growing enraged at how "backward" the US is because we don't have a welfare system as generous as Belgium's.

Now that their party controls congress rest assured that they will try to "fix" that.

Merry Christmas.

Violent crime-infested . . . Europe

Ernest Baert read Fjordman's post on rape rates in Europe and was inspired to look into international crime statistics. He posted his conclusions on The Brussels Journal today. It seems that the best data is that compiled by Interpol, however Interpol has removed its crime statistics from its website. It seems that the nations of Europe do not want their citizens (or subjects as the case may be) to know certain uncomfortable facts.

Facts like these:

In the latest published ICVS, the percentage of the population which claims a personal experience of crime (excluding murder) during the preceding twelve months is higher in all countries than official statistics would lead one to assume : ranging from 16.4% in Norway to 31.5% in the Netherlands. The US (24.2%) and Canada (25.2%) are both average.

According to ICVS, overall crime rates are the highest Commonwealth (Australia, New Zealand, England) followed by northern European protestant countries (Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, but with Norway a clear exception), whilst the “safer” countries tend to be more Catholic/Latin/Southern European, such as Austria, Italy, Belgium and, yes, Northern Ireland (as mentioned above, murders are not covered by ICVS…). Note that the bulk of these crime rates are relatively minor crime.

The US is average in terms of overall experienced crime rates (ICVS), but for the most violent crime, murder, has the highest rates in absolute terms (Interpol), 5.6 per 100,000 inhabitants per year, vs. 4.1 in France for example, although the gap is rapidly shrinking and smaller than most people think.

Overall experienced crime rates are rising in most countries, for instance with violent crimes like Assault tripling in England and doubling in France during the nineties (ICVS). The US is one of the few exceptions to this trend, In fact, Interpol statistics show sharply reduced murder rates in the US (albeit from a high level). Among the five most violent crime categories in the Interpol statistics : (i) murder, (ii) serious assault, (iii) aggravated theft, (iv) robbery and (v) car theft, France had already overtaken the US by 2002 for the last three crimes, and looked like overtaking the US by 2004 for murder and assault as well. According to Interpol, England had fewer murders, assaults and robbery than France, but was also rapidly converging with the US. (Teaser, which Interpol member states had most to hide under continued publication of Interpol comparative statistics, the US or EU countries like France ?)

A lot has been written about the large decline in US crime rates in the last 2 decades and as usual different and sometimes conflicting explanations have been given, including : (i) the declining birth rate (in part, because of high abortion rates), leading to fewer young males around, (ii) better policing methods and the so-called zero-tolerance approach (and there seems to be some indication of a correlation between different policing methods in US cities and the change in local crime rates), and (iii) the very high incarceration rates in the US (i.e. the more people you lock up, the less crime is committed outside the prison walls). If one assumes each of these three factors has had an impact on falling US crime rates, then the conclusion seems to be that for Europe, where birth rates have fallen even more than the US, but violent crime has risen fast over the last two decades, there must be something seriously amiss with policing and incarceration policies in Europe.

Reporting rates, i.e. the percentage of experienced crime actually reported to police varies significantly across borders : for instance, for Assault, more than 40% of cases are reported in the Anglo-Saxon countries - where the incidence is relatively high - and in Belgium, and less than 25% in Germany, Austria and Italy). But reporting rates varies even more depending on the type of crime : almost in all countries, more than 90% of all car thefts are reported, but reporting rates for Assault and Robbery, far more violent and unpleasant experiences are typically only half those of car thefts. For Sexual Offenses the reporting rates suggest that police reports only represent the tip of an iceberg. The fact that many car owners have theft insurance makes them obviously more likely to report a theft, because with cover there is near certainty of compensation for the victim. But the low reporting rates for other crimes may illustrate why so many ordinary people treat the conclusions of official crime statistics with a pinch of salt, despite being told by the elites that all is well and this feeling of insecurity is an imagination. New York was an unsafe city twenty years ago, but was one of the first to try the zero tolerance approach, with good results. New York threw over board its tradition of turning a blind eye to so much crime because there were no liberals left anymore : they had all been mugged (if not worse…).

You see it seems that the United States is not the crime-ridden cesspool compared to Europe that most Europeans (and US elites) believe it to be. It would seem that in most kinds of crime Europe is very close to surpassing or has already surpassed America.

Even in the category of murder, where the US still leads, the difference was never that great and the gap is rapidly closing.

Mr. Baert mentions difference in birthrates, policing philosophy and incarceration rates between the US and Europe. He discounts birthrate as a factor because Europe's is lower than ours. The difference would seem to be found in Americas embrace of zero-tolerance policing and our willingness to lock up criminals.

Another factor that Mr. Baert doesn't cover is the difference in firearms ownership rates and the different legal philosophy regarding firearms in the US and Europe. Sarah Brady and her crowd would have us believe that the comparatively easy access to guns and the high rate of civilian firearms ownership in the US contribute to the violence of our society. Yet it seems that in some ways we are less violent than Europe and that even in the areas where we lead them they are catching up quickly.

This is despite the fact that firearms have recently become even more accessible with the sunsetting of the Brady Law and the rapid spread of "shall issue" concealed carry laws across the nation.

In fact a good argument could be made that Americans' access to firearms (the most efficient means of self defense) are a factor in the very good showing we make in this international comparison.

Of course this will have no affect on the Brady Bunch. What motivates them is not a desire to control crime. What animates the gun control activists (almost all of them left-liberals) is a pure hatred toward and fear of people who like guns.

The taming of the "shrew" - Muslim style

Fjordman discusses an unpleasant topic on The Brussels Journal:

There has been an explosive increase in the number of rape charges in the city of Oslo, but both the media and the authorities consistently refuse to tell us why. They did do so, however, in 2001, when two out of Norway's three largest newspapers, Aftenposten and Dagbladet, reported that most of these rape charges involve an immigrant perp, which again mostly means Muslims. Both newspapers have since then conveniently “forgotten” about this, and have never connected the issue to Muslim immigration although the number of rape charges has continued to rise to historic levels. They are thus at best guilty of extreme incompetence, since their former articles about this issue are still available online.

[. . .]

Two out of three charged with rape in Norway’s capital are immigrants with a non-western background according to a police study. The number of rape cases is also rising steadily. Unni Wikan, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, in 2001 said that “Norwegian women must take their share of responsibility for these rapes” because Muslim men found their manner of dress provocative. The professor’s conclusion was not that Muslim men living in the West needed to adjust to Western norms, but the exact opposite: “Norwegian women must realize that we live in a Multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”

This is what dhimmitude means. To restructure the behavior of non-Muslims in a society so that it conforms to Islamic norms. To the Muslim this seems completely natural because Mohammad promised them that the whole world was theirs. Therefore it is the responsibility of every non-Muslim in every country to either convert to Islam, accept dhimmitude or die. They may freely choose whichever of these three options appeals to them because there is no coercion in religion.

To a good Koran-believing Muslim man a woman is either a good Muslim woman (meaning that she is the property of some man) or she is a prostitute. Western women not only refuse to act like good Muslim women, they insist on considering themselves the equal of men. This enrages Muslim men who not only resent Western women acting this way, but deeply fear that their own Muslim women will get ideas of equality of their own.

So the good Muslim man puts the Western whore in her place and sends a warning to all the good Muslim women. When they are caught and put in jail for this they become outraged (their default position) and insist that they are entitled to special treatment under the law. They are supported in this by their dhimmi allies within the multicultural ruling elites, the judiciary, the media, political leaders and the academy.

If the whole thing makes you want to vomit congratulations. You are still a free human being.

Slouching toward extinction

Paul Belien notes a disturbing fact in a post to The Brussels Journal:

Most popular name for newborn boys in Brussels, the “capital of Europe,” in 2005: Mohamed, followed by Adam, Ayoub, Rayan and Mehdi.

Of course this indicates that the majority of babies being born in Brussels are being born to Muslim parents. And we know that the Muslim population in Belgium, as in every other European nation, is unassimilated for the most part. The Muslim population of Europe is, again for the most part, hostile to the nations which have take them in and given them access to a quality of life that they simply could not have dreamed of in their ancestral homelands.

The above bit of data also points up another disturbing fact. That the native populations of Europe are not reproducing at a rate sufficient to replace themselves.

The are several reasons for a society to experience a decline in its birthrate. One is that when a society reaches a certain point of stability and prosperity that doors of possibility are opened up for the citizens. People simply have too much to do, too many things to experience to tie themselves down for years changing diapers and answering an endless series of "why, why why" questions.

Another reason, one on the opposite end of the scale, is that the people have lost hope for a better future. When Robert A Heinlein and his wife visited the Soviet Union in the early sixties Mrs. Heinlein, who had become proficient in Russian in preparation for their trip, made it a point to strike up conversations with as many of the ordinary people they encountered as she could. One of the questions she always made a point of asking people was about their families, children, grandchildren, siblings and so on.

Based on her data sample she calculated (she was a mathematician) that the Russians were not reproducing at the replacement rate. The people had been ground down under totalitarian communism to the point where they simply gave up. More and more of them reached the subconscious conclusion that it was better to end the line here and now rather than give another generation to the State to further grind down.

In the case of Western Europe I would guess that a combination of both factors are at work. On the one hand the comfort of their cradle-to-grave welfare states and their surplus of leisure time (35 hour work weeks and 2 full months of paid vacation every year) along with government subsidized contraception and abortion make having children an easily avoided distraction from all of the interesting and fun things they could otherwise be doing.

On the other hand the "one-two punch" of the loss of their traditional Christian faith, which has been replaced with the "dry wells" of socialism and scientism, and the rise of moral relativism and multiculturalism, which feed on the "White guilt" of their colonial past, have robbed them of any real hope for the future.

These two factors cooperate to produce slow motion cultural suicide. To people in the grip of this mindset the Muslim minority (soon to grow into a majority) within their borders is not a malignancy to be excised, but the elemental force of History which cannot be resisted but only submitted to.