Bystanders

They’re rioting in Africa,
They’re starving in Spain.
There’s hurricanes in Florida,
And Texas needs rain
The whole world is festering
With unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans,
The Germans hate the Poles;
Italians hate Yugoslavs,
South Africans hate the Dutch,
And I don’t like anybody very much…

Plus ça change, hmm? In the almost fifty years since the Kingston Trio toured with that song (which ends in nuclear destruction), things haven’t changed very much. And yet that world is so lost, so absolutely gone that it’s hard for anyone who didn’t live through the innocence-tied-to-fear world view to understand the times.

Self-hatred had not become endemic, though there were pockets of the virus, particularly in France with its admiration of Sartre’s nihilism. The men who fought World War II still ran things, and they had firm ideas about The Enemy and what needed to be done to contain him. Eisenhower, not an intellectual, warned of the military-industrial complex and didn’t know of the nascent rise of academic mandarins, bent on the destruction of anything un-ironic, and sworn to relativism as an over-arching world view.

America still stood firmly with Israel; the quislings had not yet risen to power. In fact, many of them hadn’t made it to college yet. Mario Savio was unknown.

What was present in our country, and what remains a threat because its spidery fingers have spun such a wide-cast web, was the Communist Party. Now they are draped in ANSWER’s clothing, trying to drum up dissension among illegal immigrants. They are behind much of the wacko, extremist Greenie anti-global, anti-capitalist, and virulently anti-American nihilism. Still as statist as ever, still as dystopian, and still as attractive to the pseudo-intellectuals that swig off the government teat in their academic villages. They are far more tied to their form of the dole as any welfare mother ever was.

They love victims because they love projection. At some level, they must understand what losers they are and thus align themselves with anything or anyone remotely resembling A Victim. Being Americans, though, they have that peculiarly American characteristic: they want to fix it. So they try — with hyper-correct language, with special handicap scores for the handicapped, with vitriol for all the abled who are so pitilessly going about their daily business. Attention must be paid! And paid. And paid. And paid. And then we’ll have a conference and many, many studies all of which will show that the agenda they carried into the quest is the agenda they bring back to us. Amazing, no? Whole industries have grown up around Victims…and those who love them. Not to mention those who hate them — now a thought crime — and those who feed off them. Jesse Jackson is a vampire. A Victim Vampire.

But it gets old. In fact, it’s rapidly ageing and compassion is disappearing in scattered spots around the world. Not here yet, but Europe is always in the vanguard of new intellectual ideas, right?

The first example comes from one of yesterday’s Little Green Footballs’ posts. This one concerns a recent poll in Germany which demonstrates a growing mistrust of Islam:

In spite of official attempts to promote dialog among religions, distrust of Islam continues to grow, with 60 percent of Germans expecting tension between traditional German society and immigrants from Muslim countries, according to an Allensbach study commissioned by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper.

“Germans are increasingly of the opinion that a lasting, peaceful coexistence with the Islamic world will not be possible,” the researchers said in the survey, released Wednesday.

Some 56 percent of Germans said they believed a “clash of cultures” already exists, partly a result of recent incidents that received a large amount of media attention, according to the survey’s authors Elisabeth Noelle and Thomas Petersen.

This isn’t news, exactly. The Germans, like many European natives, distrust other cultures generally. That they would distrust the Muslims among them only makes sense, given their history of treatment of the foreign workers they invited in to do the dirty work when times were good, while limiting their access to citizenship or other jobs.

Notice, though that the “clash of cultures” is partly due to media attention to the problem. Not the actual mayhem and murder that caused the media reports in the first place, but the reports themselves:

The case of a Berlin “honor killing,” a quarrel over two Bonn students who wore burkas to school and discussions concerning increasing schoolyard violence among immigrant children have all made headlines in the German press recently.

“In view of the diffuse feeling of being under threat, and the suspected intolerance of Islam, the readiness of Germans to show tolerance to the Muslim faith is sinking,” Noelle and Petersen wrote.

Do you get the feeling it’s not the Islamists’ behavior that leads to fear, but rather the media reports about it? Well, the all powerful media managed to produce this statistic:

When asked what they associate with the word “Islam,” 91 percent of respondents connected the religion to the discrimination of women, and 61 percent called Islam “undemocratic.” Eight percent of Germans associated “peacefulness” with Islam.

The Germans are even willing to abridge religious freedom to contain the Islamists, or better yet, to encourage them to live elsewhere:

About 40 percent of Germans queried were willing to limit the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion if constricting the practice of the Muslim religion would lead to fewer violent Muslims choosing to live in Germany. Over half of those who took part, 56 percent, agreed with the statement, “If some Muslim countries forbid building churches, then it should be forbidden to build mosques here.”

Meanwhile, Spain is ratcheting up its own efforts to contain the strangers currently overwhelming some of their territories. A reader sends this report from Breitbart:

Spain has put the last touches to initiatives, including a strengthened presence in Africa, to try to stem the swelling tide of immigrants from the continent heading for its shores.

The government’s plan was agreed as it was announced that a total of 656 African illegal immigrants had arrived in Spain’s Canary Islands in the space of 24 hours.

In Madrid Deputy Prime Minister Maria-Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said after a cabinet meeting she would be going to Brussels next week to discuss the issue with, among others, European Commission President Jose Manuel Durao Barroso.
She said that “more Europe” had to be one of the weapons in the battle against would-be illegal immigration.

An “Africa plan” was to be implemented within the space of 48 hours, said de la Vega. The headquarters will be in the Senegalese capital Dakar, under the supervision of a specially appointed ambassador, Miguel Angel Mazarambroz.
His staff will cover the west African states Cape Verde, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Niger and Senegal.

The Spanish official said embassies would be opened in Mali and Cape Verde and the mission in Sudan would be reopened to reinforce Spain’s diplomatic presence in sub-Saharan Africa, at present limited to embassies in eight states (Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Senegal).

The scale of the problem is illustrated by figures showing that with well over 1,000 arrivals in the Canary Islands this week alone, the total for the year to date is now 7,384. That compared with 4,751 for the whole of last year and 8,500 in 2004.

According to the Red Cross, hundreds of would-be immigrants have drowned in seas off Spain since the end of last year. Many travel in overcrowded makeshift boats not suited to the high seas.

Red Cross workers on the Canaries say they are overwhelmed with the “avalanche” of people arriving every day, many of whom are in need of immediate medical treatment.

In all, around 2,400 immigrants without papers are awaiting processing in the archipelago.

The Canary Islands, Spanish territory and therefore part of the European Union, have been targeted by would-be immigrants since passage became more difficult from Morocco to Europe via the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, the scene last year of violent attempts by would-be immigrants to storm them. Sixteen people died in the incidents after which prospective immigrants were rounded up and dumped in the desert. Since then security measures have been tightened on both sides of the Mediterranean.

We reported this last October, when Spain began to beat back the immigrants:

Spain plans to build a third high-security fence between its enclave Melilla and Morocco as an added measure to keep out immigrants who have repeatedly stormed the barriers in recent weeks, Interior Ministry delegate Jose Fernandez Chacon said Tuesday.

Seems like the great unwashed and unwanted hordes, desperate for work, are risking death and dismemberment:

Hundreds of poor sub-Saharan African immigrants gathered in northern Morocco have stormed the fences repeatedly over the past two weeks in a bid to enter Europe. Five immigrants were killed in a similar charge last week at Ceuta, Spain’s other enclave on the northern Moroccan coast. Both city enclaves already have twin 3-meter (10-foot) razor fences around their perimeters.

Does Europe think the hordes can be contained? Do we? Is dumping the unwashed unwanted in the desert a solution?

What is to be done to prevent the Islamist meltdown in Europe? And what is to be done about the Mexican surge into the Southwest United States? Does Spain see this beating back the desperate as a solution or merely a holding action?

How are we different? Or are we?

As Thomas Merton said, there are no innocent bystanders. Helpless ones, like you and me, perhaps…