Tuesday, February 26, 2008

The Merry Minuet

The bitter argument waged in the comments section of yesterday’s post brought to mind a song from the late 1950s. The Kingston Trio covered a number that came out earlier in the ’50s, and the words were written by the Broadway lyricist Sheldon Harnick.

I had to make some slight modifications to the second stanza:

Merry Minuet

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!

But we can be tranquil, and thankful, and glad,
For man’s been endowed with Islamic Jihad!
And we know for certain that some lovely day,
After greeting the Twelfth Imam, we will all be blown away!

fratricideConsidering all the animosity between Croat and Serb, between Orthodox and Roman Catholic, between Iberians and Central Europeans, between the Irish and the English, and especially between Americans and everyone else, it’s no wonder that the Great Jihad is eating our lunch.

Close your eyes and throw a dart at the timeline of world history. It doesn’t matter where it lands: I can guarantee you that sometime during that year, somewhere on the planet, one group of people was being brutalized, enslaved, massacred, or supplanted by another.

It’s late and I don’t have any time for research, so I’ll just pick a few dates off the top of my head:
- - - - - - - - -
146 B.C. Carthage destroyed by Rome.
70 A.D. The Temple in Jerusalem leveled by the Romans, beginning the Jewish Diaspora.
410 A.D. Rome sacked by the Visigoths.
580 A.D. The Celts at York defeated by the Anglo-Saxons at the Battle of Caer Greu.
711 A.D. The Moorish conquest of Iberia.
793 A.D. The Vikings looted the monastery and Lindisfarne and slaughtered the inhabitants.
1389 A.D. Serbia was defeated by the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo, and absorbed into the Ottoman Empire.
1453 A.D. Constantinople overrun, sacked, and occupied by the Turks.
1658 A.D. Denmark ceded Skåne after being defeated by Sweden.
1759 A.D. The French defeated at the Plains of Abraham; Quebec fell to the British.
1795 A.D. The final partition of Poland. The Polish nation ceased to exist.
1848 A.D. California annexed by the United States after the Mexican-American War.
1865 A.D. Richmond occupied by the Yankees.
1871 A.D. Alsace-Lorraine ceded to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War.
1907 A.D. Indian Territory abolished when Oklahoma became a state.
1922 A.D. The Greeks and Armenians massacred and expelled from Smyrna by the Turks.
1940 A.D. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union.
1945 A.D. The expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia under the Beneš decree.
1950 A.D. Tibet forcibly occupied by China.
2008 A.D. Kosovo removed from the control of Serbia by the United States, Britain, France, and Germany.

I could continue, but you get the idea.

There isn’t a square meter of ground in the world that hasn’t been defiled and brutally taken from one group by another.

Every single existing tribe, people, or ethnic group — every group, even the most peaceful and spiritual Indian tribe — obtained its current territory through violence, stealth, subterfuge, or purchase. Nobody has the original claim to any piece of ground on Earth. There aren’t any truly aboriginal inhabitants.

If we’re going to tear at one another’s throats over the grievances of fifty or a hundred or a thousand years ago, the strife won’t end until the Hosts of Mohammed joyfully celebrate the will of Allah and parade into our emptied cities.

Don’t you think we should forget these old grudges and stand against the common enemy?

Are we going to behave like the English under King Alfred and unite against a foe that threatens us all?

Or shall we be like the Irish, and traduce one another while the enemy hews us to pieces?

Honest to God, what’s wrong with you people??

Serbs are going to have to get along with Croats. Swedes are going to have to put up with Danes. The Irish and the English will have to forget their animosity. The Spaniards and the Portuguese will need to set aside their differences.

And — most difficult of all — I’ll have to learn to make friends with Yankees.

24 comments:

Jim C. said...

The very end of the original song has an appropriate reference:

There's rioting in Africa, whistling)
There's strife in Iran. (whistling)
What nature doesn't do to us (whistling)
Will be done by our fellow man. (whistling)

nikolai said...

Well said...at least a temporary truce is in order :)

On the other hand all that nationalist passion is a good sign if it's re-directed at the primary enemies.

Also, worth mentioning there's a lot of intra-muslim hostility too so hopefully it will all even out.

DoubleTapper said...

I've been reading this blog for a couple of week and am really enjoying it.

Keep up the great work!

DoubleTapper
DoubleTapper@gmail.com
http://doubletapper.blogspot.com

Unknown said...

HEY! I'm a Yankee! OK, technically a New Yorker. (According to my father, born in MA, you're not a Yankee unless you were born in CT, MA, RI, NH, VT, or ME.) I came to my senses and moved to North Carolina. Best move I ever made.

And your Irish comparison is a good one. My ancestors spent so much time fighting each other the English were able to kick our butt. Same thing now in our fight against islam.

dienw said...

Hey Baron,
49%+ of New Jerseyians are coming your way. And I'll be going back down again someday soon.

Croat555 said...

Baron,

I never intended to bring our issues here. In fact, I loath that prospect. I was always aware of the possibility, and in most of the few comments I posted here I was careful not to give any ground for it. But, that is one thing, the other is that I'm not being passive in this (tho I'm a local player) and I have no intention to stand still while the mud is being thrown at the name of my people. Hope this is the last of the digression.

Unknown said...

People standing up to defend the idea of their national sovereignty and the pride of their country, is a good thing, says me.

Really bad fevers often cause a convulsion before they break and maybe this is an indicator of the fever of passive surrender and multiculti suicidal idiocy finally breaking.

Unknown said...

I agree that we really should realize who the common enemy is at this point but regarding:
1865 A.D. Richmond occupied by the Yankees.
well, lets just say that some things are going to be hard to swallow.

the doctor said...

Just for a moment I thought I was in a childrens playground last evening . However it was a discussion that was needed to clear the air , now on with the civilised debate .

Unknown said...

Nobody has the original claim to any piece of ground on Earth

Yes well - the borders of Islam aren't bloody because of contested ground, but because of Jihad.

Muslems like Bardhyl should realise that they may not be be considered loyal by their fellow countrymen because islam is a totalitarian ideology hellbent on reinstating a khalifate; not so long as influential muslems like a.o. Erdogan stress the fact that there is Only One Islam..
It's only understandable that the christian cq Western nations wil want to know of their muslem compatriots 'where they stand'

. said...

Very well, Baron, let's get back to basics:

1. Kosovo (and Bosnia and Albania, perhaps even Turkey too) are only threats if you perceive International Islam as a unified, destructive force without variants or deviations from a Wahhabist/Iranian Theocratic norm. Since I do not believe that all Islam is irredeemably evil, I believe that the problems in Kosovo today are due to plain old Balkan misgovernance and criminality, which is on display in the non-Muslim nations of the Balkans as well. And the answer to that is to enforce legal norms upon these nations similar to those which were enforced on Western European nations after World War II and are now being enforced on Eastern European nations, including two (Romania and Bulgaria) that are definitely "Balkan" in nature.

2. There is indeed an enemy Europe faces from fundamentalist Islam of the Arab Sunni variety. What is the best way to face and conquer it? We agree that the weak multiculturalist suicide promoted by the current EU won't do the job. Is the answer a return to strong European nation states in Germany, France, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, etc.? On that path lies disaster for those nations, and for the littler nations like your beloved Denmark caught in between. The answer is to reform and take over the EU in the service of creating a new European nationalist identity stretching from Cape Clear Island to (hopefully someday) the Urals, and from Spitzbergen to Crete. And within that identity there can exist European Muslims such as we see in the Balkans as part of that culture. But the North African and Middle Eastern hordes don't fit in, and perhaps not the Turks either.

Well, those are the basics, Baron. I suspect that you don't agree with my basics, but that's your problem, not mine.

ole said...

Gordon
What exactly is the "disaster" that will automaticly happen if the european nationstates should manage to re-invent them selves ,as I like to believe Denmark is in the process of doing ?
And how, exactly do you imagine that the EU can "reformed" to become a "European nationalist identity "
Somehow I have the feeling we're not talking about the same europe...there must be two of them ?

X said...

All right, Gordon, I'll see my country merged into a rootless "european nationalist state" when the united states merges itself with the rest of those american continents into Los Union Americas.

There is not, and never shall be, a single european demos. We are not a single people. What you are proposing is what created the mess in the balkans in the first place; the union of nations that are not unifiable. The end result will be one member of the union dominating the rest. All of the great european wars were wars of conquest aimed at unification, at the recreation of the holy roman empire, or at the uniting of Europe under a single government. They were wars designed to create a single unified state across the continent of Europe - from the Urals to Cadiz, from Sicily to the Baltic. Why else would successive pretenders to the throne of Charlemagne keep launching new wars of conquest in the continent, except to try and achieve exactly what you have just proposed? Why else would they make the insane decision to invade Russia in the middle of winter (Napoleon, Hitler, the danes and swedes even) except to try and conquer and absorb it into their concept of a single, unified Europe?

We can be united without a political union. We can be united without handing over our sovereignty to the greater whole. Unity of will and purpose does not require unity of government - and I think you will find that we stand a much better chance of uniting if we are not forced into divisive "union" - of any sort - against the will of our people.

. said...

archonix and ole, we have a conondrum here. You decry the fact that every great European war has been a war of conquest and attempted unification. And yet you want to return to a system of aggressive national identities that inevitably led to these wars. And if you are a small European nation like Denmark, you will be inevitably be swallowed up by the big bad Germans, French, and English, and they fight their wars of conquest to the death.

After 1945, Europe's leaders and its peoples had really two choices. The first was to try to regroup under a different political paradigm, that of unity through federalism and cooperation. The other was to be unified by the Soviet Union. With the help of the U.S., Europe chose the former course. And eventually this powerful idea, and the will to persevere with it both militarily and economically, led to the collapse of the Soviet Communist imperialism and the reintegration of the lost nations of Central and Eastern Europe into the new framework.

This is a great, a wondrous accomplishment. And now you want to go back to the old ways?

European unity is even more important now for a reason that readers of this blog are well aware of - the menace of Islam, the Islam of Saudi Arabia and the Arab culture, perhaps even the Turkish culture too. A unified Europe, under better political leadership than the feckless group currently in charge, can meet this challenge and ensure long-term preservation and prosperity for Western Civilization. A disunited Europe will fail. Of what use is Denmark's new-found cultural awareness if immigrants from the Middle East continue to move to Sweden and Germany?

Whether Europe has a strong federalist system, as with the United States, or a weaker confederation (perhaps like the pre-Constitutional American Articles of Confederation) is a choice for Europeans to make - if I were one I would choose the latter course. But European unity is essential to meet the challenges so amply illustrated on this blog. Denmark cannot go it alone. Great Britain possibly could, until a resurgent continental power brings it to the brink of destruction in a catastrophic war as has happened so many times in its history.

X said...

By that token, then, why not unite the entire world under a single government and solve all our problems in one fell swoop.

No. You are proposing nothing that has not been tried before. Those wars didn't start because of simple nationalism, they started because someone got the idea of uniting the continent under a single banner. Their banner. Anything that involves artificial unification, whether by bullet, sword or the stroke of a pen, is suspect in my book for that very reason.

We did not have just two choices, as you claimed. We had several, not least being the possibility of simple free trade. I can only keep repeating this: there is no need for political union in order to create unity of purpose. A continent of freely trading nations would be far more effective without any sort of political, supranational organisations dictating from the centre. Of course a continent of freely trading nations cannot occur when there is an overarching political construct trying to create a "national identify" for that continent without the consent of the peoples it claims to be working for. That sort of behaviour causes resentment. It causes resurgence of "bad" nationalism. It binds nations to each other in such ways that they are obligated to do all sorts of insane things that any normal, free nation would not even consider. You are proposing nothing less than a return to the sort of tangled mess of treaties that caused the Great War.

We do not need political union in order to be united. We will stand a far greater chance of uniting against the common threat if we are free to make that choice as free nations. In order to be free nations, we must be sovereign - that is, we must not be obliged by treaty to act in certain ways. Anything less than the absolute freedom of a nation to determine its own destiny is, I would say, a betrayal of the very ideas you seem to believe you are promoting. In order to be free, we must be free, that is we must have the ability to defend our borders, determine what is in our best interest as a nation and, importantly, carry that out. A free nation with strong borders is a strong nation. It is able to defend itself. A nation obliged by treaty to weaken itself by absorption into a greater whole composed of heterogeneous cultures is not free, and not strong. A union of such nations becomes less than the sum of its parts, and not greater, and consequently the nations that make up such a union are less able to defend themselves and more vulnerable as a result.

Frank said...

Gordon said:
You decry the fact that every great European war has been a war of conquest and attempted unification. And yet you want to return to a system of aggressive national identities that inevitably led to these wars.


I have heard this sophomoric nonsense nigh unto death from propagandists and the unclever undergrads they manage to bamboozle for a couple of years during their educational sojourns.

The premise is silly. National identities lead about as "inevitably" to wars as women's legs lead to rape, or cars lead to pedestrian death. The implied causality in such a idiotic supposition is without any merit at all, really, since most of the world's wars took place before even a nation was spawned or a nationalist born. This nonsense is an empty meme, concocted by fools and knaves, and a good many Comintern operatives with more than a shade of ulterior motive. Wars have been fought for religion, feudal obligation, land, freedom, conquest, survival, food, loot, even for women; and in fact very few have been fought for nationalism per se.

Gordon, with all due respect, you create for yourself the image of an empty headed liberal, spouting banal leftist boilerplate without any real understanding and often without even a spare thought. Maybe you're smart and clever, but you portray yourself as one of those semi-educated spreaders of sanctimony and platitudinous manure. It's really rather embarrassing.

nikolai said...

"And yet you want to return to a system of aggressive national identities that inevitably led to these wars."

And...always inevitably led to the failure of european empire and tyranny. Nationalism has been as much a protector of liberty as a destroyer of it.

I've also come to the belief that democracy is born from, and requires a natural "demos". The tribe/nation is the most natural demos there is. The only EU I'd ever support would be a very flat alliance of sovereign nation states. Given that most of Europe's wars were pre-democratic I don't think that's impossible at all.

Also, part of our current problem with internal Islam is because the political and media elites of Europe want a political union against the instincts of the European tribes. Mass immigration and multi-culturalism is being deliberately used to destroy the national identities of Europe so they stop wanting to be independent. To create the EU they are destroying Europe.

Also government has to be close. The further the government gets from the people the worse it gets.

Afonso Henriques said...

Please, please, please... let me praise the words of Archonix:

"There is not, and never shall be, a single european demos. We are not a single people."

Bloody right!!!
For us Europe is nothing more than "The West", it is a civilisation (the greateest of all), just it.

Europe is composed by every European Nations, simple as that.

When the Nations of Europe are to be dead, there will be no Europe anymore, it will be destroyed, and so it will the Civilisation.

Nation is like the walls, Europe is the roof, our path to the skies. Though, we are humans, not Gods (as Europa) so we'll have to live under the same roof, under the same God(s), but in different bedrooms with strong walls. That is Europe.

We are not one, we are many.

BTW, let this enter your heads:

"All of the great european wars were wars of conquest aimed at unification, at the recreation of the holy roman empire, or at the uniting of Europe under a single government."

That's why I hate Hitler, Napoleon and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
That's exactly why I praise the Britts so baddly. Britain, has always standed truly for Europe. And no, Nazi Germany was about Europe to be subjugated to Germany, same with Napoleon. Britain is somehow different. And that thing with the Irish? It's just bad neighbourig, just like Hoomer Simpson and Ned Flanders.

"We can be united without a political union. We can be united without handing over our sovereignty to the greater whole. Unity of will and purpose does not require unity of government - and I think you will find that we stand a much better chance of uniting if we are not forced into divisive "union" - of any sort"
Avé Archonix, Avé!

Afonso Henriques said...

"Wars have been fought for religion, feudal obligation, land, freedom, conquest, survival, food, loot, even for women; and in fact very few have been fought for nationalism per se."

ScottSA, wars fought for woman, are Nationalistic wars if the woman we are fighting for is "our women". Actually, I do think that Nationalism is much, much older than the XIX century. The Romans had it, the Greeks had it, even the Germanic barbarians had it! Portugal (with Galiza as its born place) and England and Scotland are countries born from Nationalism, and are much older than the XIX century.

With Nationalism we can only have "Good wars", wars for preservation, wars in which we fight for the people, etc. The wars that are fought for other reasons, such as Imperialism (Hitler, Napoleon) are bad wars.

That´s why I'm with Serbia!

Beach Girl said...

OMG, Baron, not the Yankees! Not tha Yankees! That will surely give me the vapors!

Wonderful post!

What the heck is the matter with us? Can't we see what Big Mo and his band of cut-throats in Armani suits have planned for us? Just search on the mosque nearest you or do a search in Mexico as an example for mosques - the jihadists are on the move and building "cover" and beach-heads as they go.

And a note to Hugo Chavez, Mad Jad would have not trouble "kicking Chavez to the curb" once he's through with him (Chavez).

Whether it's law suits or ski masks, they're all working for the same thing - our demise. Who was it who said at the founding of The United States of America - Gentlemen, we can either all hang together or surely we will hang seperately...

Great post...

Afonso Henriques said...

I know that nobody reads this anymore and that i will probabily not get any answer, but let me tell you Baron, this was a great post. I liked it very much.

I just only think you got somethings wrong. This Balkan mess, did not happened from yesterday. The error was let Yugoslavia live after 1945.

If we want to stand united we have to solve our problems, otherwise we will fall into war sooner or later. If we are to solve our problems we will get instantaneously stronger.

"Considering all the animosity between Orthodox and Roman Catholic, between Iberians and Central Europeans"

I personaly do not think that there are any animosity between Catholics and Orthodox (except for Croats and Serbs, but it has nothing to due with religion. They had a war recently, just it). Much less between Iberians and Central Europeans. Where did you got that? Iberians don't like Central Europeans? The otherwise? I really can not get it...

"Nobody has the original claim to any piece of ground on Earth."
I would dare you to talk about my country, but you have much else to do...

"If we’re going to tear at one another’s throats over the grievances of fifty or a hundred or a thousand years ago, the strife won’t end until the Hosts of Mohammed joyfully celebrate the will of Allah and parade into our emptied cities.
Don’t you think we should forget these old grudges and stand against the common enemy?"

This is what you don't get it, Baron, sadly, in my opinion.
We better to solve our differences, our ddivergences now, otherwise we may well "tear at one other throat's" sooner than you can think of. Who knew what would help to Yugoslavia 2 years before the death of Titto?

We better solve our problems now, in peace. Otherwise it will be a mess in the future. Not to speak that we will be incapable of work together eficiently.

All this because we can not forget, we are Europeans, we do not forget. When the European Union is gone (and it will be in my lifetime), I don't believe that Spaniards would let go their imperialism, I think they will turn it towards me. Actually, the PhD thesis of Franco was "How to conquer Portugal in ten days". Not that the Spaniards would be capable of it, but it would not be pretty.

"The Spaniards and the Portuguese will need to set aside their differences."
Set aside? Spain is just like Yugoslavia, it has the Basques as Yugoslavia had the Slovenes, it has the Catalans, as Yugoslavia had the Croats, it has the Galegos (Galicians) as Yugoslavia had the Hungarians of Vojvodina, The Andaluzians as Yugoslavs had the Macedonians. That's our differences. That and that Spain have stole Portugal some "lands" from the time when Napoleon invaded us, they should have gave that to us according to the Congress of Vienna but they did it. That's our differences.

Despite all that, I do soleneley recognise Spain as a country with its right to exist. I just feel bad for what's happening in Barcelona, for exemple.
There is (almost) nothing to put aside, we can perfectly work together. As a metter of fact, I think Portugal did not recognize Kosovo in solidarity towards Spain. It is what we shall do. I am for an Iberian Union, if just they left (all) the Portuguese (people and terrain) to be independent under the same state.

Zenster said...

Beach Girl: Who was it who said at the founding of The United States of America - Gentlemen, we can either all hang together or surely we will hang seperately...

That would be the inimitable Benjamin Franklin.

Unknown said...

One thing more - about the incredible fact that for the Serbs Kosovo Polje seems to have been only yesterday: while reading Mazower's The Balkans I realised that by forcefully unifying people who have not (yet)formed a demos, i.e. trying to unite them from above - not organically - as has happened in eastern europe under the communists - or under islam, for that matter - their natural evolution is frozen, and the countries 'solidify' as it were. Then, when the tiranny comes to an end they awake, and seem to go on where they left off hundreds of years ago.

In the ages it took the rest of the free peoples of Europe to struggle for supremacy, land and identity in our countless wars and conflicts eastern Europe was frozen in submission under the blanket of a tirannical empire.
So I guess it's only natural they need time to settle the remnants of their subjugation.

Islam has left a thorn in their flesh - an alien cultural and religious thorn that has to be prised out.
I'm very curious to know just how much bad blood the more or less forced conversion of a part of the population has instilled in the national body politic, especially now that the effect of that infusion is making itself known.

The strange thing is that most converted peoples seem to be oblivious of the fact that actually they were vanguished; they seem to suffer from Stockholm syndrome: the rapist has left, but still they carry a torch for their enemy..
I think VS Naipaul hit the nail on the head when he subtitled his book A Journey among the Converted Peoples of Islam or something to that effect

thll said...

Looking out from within Europe is not the same as looking at Europe from without. Inside we see the trees, outside they see the forest. We may not want to be Europeans but that's what we are to outsiders.