Eastern Europe and the New Threats to Freedom

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.


The Dutch cartoonist Nekschot (‘Neck Shot’), a friend of the late Theo van Gogh, the filmmaker who was ritually slaughtered by a pious Muslim in 2004, in 2008 became the first-ever cartoonist in modern Western history to be arrested. Gregorius Nekschot was kept in custody for 30 hours for cartoons that are “discriminatory against Muslims and people of darker skin,” as the Public Prosecutor’s Office (OM) in Amsterdam put it. Around 10 police dragged him out of his home in Amsterdam, seized his computer and telephone and told him that his real name would be revealed. Nekschot was released two days later. A complaint had been filed against him in 2005 by the Dutch imam Abdul Jabbar van de Ven, a radical Dutch convert to Islam. After the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, Abdul Jabbar van de Ven said on TV he would thank Allah if he could arrange for the Islam-critical MP Geert Wilders to die, “for example of cancer.”

The arrest of Gregorius Nekschot for a “Multicultural thought crime” was another low for the Netherlands, a country which a few years earlier was known for its openness and tolerance. It was also a new low for the “free West,” which suddenly looks a lot less free.

Lars Hedegaard, President of the Danish Free Press Society/ Trykkefrihedsselskabet has, together with colleagues Helle Merete Brix and Torben Hansen been one of the leading forces behind making tiny Denmark into a frontline state in the battle against Islam. Bruce Bawer gives an account of a meeting with Hedegaard and Brix in Copenhagen in his best-selling book While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from within:

“Hedegaard was of the view, however, that the Danish establishment’s benign neglect of Islamic extremism must have deeper causes than snobbism or hippie nostalgia.. After all, he said, the Islamicization of the Nordic countries was ‘the most fundamental transformation’ they’d experienced in a millennium. Something so monumental, in his opinion, could not be explained simply by a few people’s foolishness or class snobbery. “Heavy consequences,” he insisted, ‘must have heavy causes.’ The surrender of Denmark to Muslims had to be the result of some deep-seated compulsion….His theory was that Western Europe’s ongoing surrender to radical Islam had its roots in the psychic devastation of the First World War. For while that conflict marked America’s ascent to the rank of Great Power, Europeans took it as a devastating proof, Hedegaard said, ‘that our culture was worthless. It was basically destroyed. And that prepared the way for two sorts of totalitarianism’ — Nazism and Communism — and for ‘atrocities of a magnitude that is hard to imagine.’ Those atrocities, in turn, placed upon Europeans an unbearable burden of guilt. The Nazis, he said, ‘made Europe think it is doomed and sinful…and deserves what it has coming.’“
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The destruction brought about by WW1 and WW2 did indeed finished off much of Europe’s self-confidence. The problem is more complex than that, though. If you look at which countries suffered the most during these wars, there is no automatic correlation between that and which countries are most culturally suicidal today. Poland, for instance, is less suicidal than my country, which didn’t take part in WW1 and suffered less than many other nations during WW2. Sweden didn’t (formally) participate in either war, and neither did Switzerland. Both of these countries lack a colonial history (if you believe this is about a “post-colonial guilt complex”), yet Sweden is absolutely crazy, as those reading my essays would know.

In June 2008, Swedish lawmakers voted in favor of a controversial bill allowing all emails and phone calls to be monitored in the name of national security. The new law, set to take effect on January 1st, 2009, will enable the National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) — a civilian agency despite its name — to tap all cross-border Internet and telephone communication. Critics say the law will make Sweden more totalitarian than the former Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe. Even the infamous Stasi in East Germany didn’t have as extensive means of surveillance against private citizens as Sweden will now have.

In order to explain this, we need to consider the prolonged and extremely destructive impact of Marxism in its various forms. It is supremely ironic that the countries in the western half of Europe, which during the Cold War were a part of the “free world,” are in some ways more damaged by Marxist indoctrination than the countries in the eastern half of Europe, where people lived under Communism for generations. We in the West have been undermined by a different strand of Marxism, one seemingly less serious since we have no Gulag here (yet), but one which slowly erodes your very will to live and removes your identity as a people.

According to Czech President Václav Klaus, although Communism or the “hard version” of Socialism is probably over this has not automatically led “to a system we would like to have and live in.” The dominant economic and social system of current Western civilization is based on big and patronizing government, on “extensive regulating of human behavior and on large-scale income redistribution.”

Klaus urges all freedom loving Europeans “to understand this contemporary version of world-wide socialism, because our old concepts may omit some of the crucial features of what is around us just now. We may even find out that the continuous use of the term socialism can be misleading.” The new version of post-Marxist collectivism wants privileges for organized groups, and “in consequence, a refeudalization of society…, multiculturalism, feminism, apolitical technocratism (based on the resentment against politics and politicians), internationalism (and especially its European variant called Europeanism) and a rapidly growing phenomenon I call NGOism.”

It is no exaggeration to say that a generation after the Cold War ended, various Marxists or related left-wing groups control much of the education system and the media in the Western world. As I’ve written in my essay Democracy and the Media Bias, native Europeans face three enemies simultaneously when fighting against the Islamization of their lands:

• Enemy 1 is the anti-Western bias of our media and academia, which is a common theme throughout the Western world.
  
• Enemy 2 are Eurabians and EU-federalists, who deliberately break down established nation states in favor of a pan-European superstate.
  
• Enemy 3 are Muslims.

The fact that members of the media and the academia tend to be more, sometimes a lot more, left-leaning politically than the average populace is well-attested and documented in all the countries I have been able to check, and it seems a fair guess that this trend is universal throughout the Western world. But why is the situation like this?

One could claim that this is the effect of the Western Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, or alternatively a product of the Cold War. But if you believe the esteemed Friedrich Hayek in his writings about Socialism and the intellectuals, the trend was discernible already in the late 1940s, before the Cold War. How do we explain that? One plausible hypothesis could be to assume that those with conservative viewpoints will generally direct their energies towards business and commerce, while those with left-leaning sympathies desire to get into positions where they can influence people’s minds. Over time, this could mean that in an open society, the media, the academia and the intelligentsia will tend to gravitate towards the political Left and become dominated by people sympathetic towards Utopian ideas. Because of the positions they have gained, their political bias will significantly influence what information is presented to the general masses, and how.

Hungarian blog reader Bela, who experienced Communism personally, believes that “Marxism is not dead but resurrected and alive.” He blames the rising levels of totalitarianism in the EU on the general passivity of Western Europeans, who do not rebel against the EUrocrats, but meekly comply with their regulations: “There was no mass protest against Solana and Co. Ever. Anyplace. They succumbed to the cherished Socialism, willful Islamisation and loss of freedom of expression bereft of duress or the threat of it should they refuse to comply; — without hiccups or growling.”

I think he is a little bit harsh in saying so. The most important reason for the general passivity is that the average European still doesn’t understand just how bad the EU is and how organized its pro-Islamic betrayal is. The EU’s primary weapon is deception, combined with extreme levels of organizational complexity and incomprehensible bureaucratic language. The EU’s secondary weapon is the general Western respect for law and reluctance to stage armed rebellions. Nevertheless, it is true that Western Europeans follow rules and regulations without asking too many questions. I have earlier asked whether the EU could have been established if people had not been accustomed to living in complex welfare state bureaucracies before, and the likely answer to that is no. The EU is an empire of bureaucrats, established in countries where bureaucrats already ruled. Their work has been made easier by populations conditioned by generations of indoctrination with cultural Marxism.

According to Bela, cultural Marxism is an invention by the Leftists A. Gramsci and G. Lukacs to destroy the Western capitalism. Since under Soviet occupation there was no capitalism in the Eastern bloc to be destroyed, cultural Marxism never came to existence over there and contemporary Easterners have never heard of it. This corresponds well with the views I have expressed in the essay Political Correctness — The Revenge of Marxism.

I have heard people who have grown up in former Communist countries say that we in the West are at least as brainwashed by Multiculturalism and Political Correctness as they ever were with Communism, perhaps more so. The scary thing is, I sometimes believe they are right. A Norwegian newspaper called Dagens Næringsliv exposed the fact that the largest “anti-racist” organization in the country, SOS Rasisme, was heavily infiltrated by Communists and extreme Leftists. They infiltrated the organization in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, in other words, during the downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe. They went directly from Communism to Multiculturalism, which should indicate that at least some of them viewed Multiculturalism as the continuation of Communism by other means. It speaks volumes about the close connection between economic Marxism and cultural Marxism. They just have different means of reaching the same ends.

The separation of church and state in the West paved the way for greater political liberty, but it was never intentionally designed to do so. In other words: One of the greatest inventions in European history was unplanned. In contrast, the Communist societies in Eastern Europe planned the entire society down to the last detail, and they failed miserably. The lesson is: You cannot plan everything and shouldn’t try. Yet the EU is now doing this same mistake, only in a slightly different way. That is why calling it the EUSSR is more than just a joke.

Right now, some countries in Eastern Europe are healthier than most countries in Western Europe. The problems of Multiculturalism have infected the entire Western world, not just Western Europe, but they have become institutionalized to an alarming degree in the EU. Maybe the countries of east-central Europe will be the strongholds of European civilization in this century; that is conceivable. But as long as they are members of the European Union, the official Multiculturalism and cultural Marxism of the EUSSR will slowly but surely destroy them, too. It’s only a matter of time. This is why it is of such great importance to destroy the EU, to ensure that at least some regions of Europe can survive this and hopefully regenerate.

According to blog reader Bela: “You are mistaken in this regard: as you know I am not mincing words and I prefer to be harsh only to underscore my point. Eastern Europeans are not ‘gentleman’-like people like Westerners. They are uncivil and savages (I am too): remember the Balkans, no amount of bloody Russian oppression stopped the Hungarians to rebel in 56, so did the Czech in 68, the Poles all the times. These people are hard headed and rough, immune to the niceties of the Western ‘intellectuals’; unless you curse and use vulgar expressions they don’t even understand what the hell are you talking about. No amount of EU brainwashing will change the prevailing mentality regardless whether it’s good or bad or disgusting. When I was in E. Europe last year nobody talked about the EU; the farther you are from the center the less influence you have over distant events.”

I have used the word “totalitarian” about the EU a number of times. What I mean by that is not that the EU is a fully totalitarian entity today, but that it is adopting measures which will increasingly move the organization and the continent towards totalitarianism. Frankly, the pace with which the EU moves in a totalitarian direction is greater than I anticipated a couple of years ago. This trend has been aided by the tensions created by mass immigration in general and Muslim immigration in particular. I have more than once wondered whether mass immigration has been introduced specifically to destroy any internal coherence in formerly stable, democratic nation states and thus facilitate the transfer of power to a new authoritarian oligarchy. Even if that wasn’t the intended result, it certainly is the actual result.

History has demonstrated that in order commit evil on a truly monumental scale, you need the support of ideology backed by bureaucrats, jurists and the machinery of a totalitarian state. Since Socialism generally leads in a totalitarian direction, facilitated by modern technological advances, an all-encompassing state will make organized violence against certain groups more likely.

The Hungarian author Imre Kertész, Holocaust survivor and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, writes in the magazine signandsight.com that “the genuine novelties of the twentieth century were the totalitarian state and Auschwitz. The anti-Semitism of the nineteenth century, for instance, was as yet barely able, nor even would have wished, to imagine a Final Solution. Auschwitz, therefore, cannot be accounted for by the common-or-garden, archaic, not to say classical concepts of anti-Semitism….In order to murder millions of Jews the totalitarian state had need, in the final analysis, not so much of anti-Semites as good organisers. We need to see clearly that no totalitarianism of party or state can exist without discrimination, and the totalitarian form of discrimination is necessarily mass murder.”

Discrimination against native Europeans is now virtually mandatory in the EU, as they are the only ethnic groups who should not be allowed to retain their culture and identity. Despite the fact that racist violence targeting whites from southern Africa to Western European cities is now a daily occurrence, racism against whites is rarely presented as a problem. It is presumably OK, merely an extension of the official government policies.

Kertész warns, timely in these Multicultural days, that “a civilisation that does not clearly proclaim its values, or which leaves these proclaimed values high and dry, is stepping on the path to perdition and terminal debility. Then others will pronounce their values, and in the mouths of these others they will no longer be values but just so many pretexts for untrammeled power, untrammeled destruction.”

This is exactly what is happening in the capital city of the European Union, in Brussels, Belgium. In September 2007 Freddy Thielemans, the mayor of Brussels, banned a demonstration against the Islamization of Europe, even though virtually all kinds of demonstrations are usually allowed. When some demonstrators did show up for a peaceful demonstration anyway, they were brutally arrested by the police. According to Thielemans, “I decided to forbid the September 11 demonstration,” the mayor wrote, because “First and foremost the organizers have chosen the symbolic date of 9/11. The intention is obviously to confound the terrorist activities of Muslim extremists on the one hand and Islam as a religion and all Muslims on the other hand….Such incitement to discrimination and hatred, which we usually call racism and xenophobia, is forbidden by a considerable number of international treaties and is punished by our penal laws and by the European legislation.”

Mr. Thielemans’ ruling Socialist party, the largest party in Brussels, caters for Muslim immigrants. The majority of its municipal council are Muslims. Even though Mr. Thielemans is against criticism of Islam, he doesn’t mind mocking Christians. In 2005, upon hearing the news of the death of Pope John Paul II, he ordered “Champagne for everyone!” This means that the authorities in the heart of the EU are enforcing sharia law and banning the natives from protesting against their own displacement. The authorities no longer have any legitimacy whatsoever.

Native Europeans are guinea pigs in an evil social experiment, a recycled version of the Communist idea of perpetual peace. Since wars are caused by “differences,” the way to permanently end all wars is to permanently end all differences. While the Communists focused on economic differences, the Globalists and Multiculturalists focus on cultural, religious and racial differences. Once these have been erased and all people have been merged into one, starting with white majority Western nations since they are most “different,” we will all live in peace. There will be no more national borders or national laws. All laws will be passed by the United Nations, and the world will be as one. We will be one global nation, one nation, under sharia. So we are being raped and murdered, but it’s for a good cause. The sooner we accept our own state-sponsored eradication, the better..

I wonder what future generations will call this time period. The Age of Insanity? The Age of Humiliation? Or perhaps the Age of Betrayal? There are many alternatives. Let us hope it will be followed by an Age of Revival.