Suggestions for the Future

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.


This essay overlaps to some extent with the essay Recommendations for the West from 2006. How should we respond to the threats our civilization is facing? First of all, ordinary citizens should arm themselves immediately since crime and violence is spreading fast throughout the Western world. Second, we need to reclaim pride in our heritage, which has been systematically taken away from us in recent generations, and restore a proper teaching of this in our education system. We should assume that the mass media and our leaders are not telling us the full truth about the scale and consequences of Muslim immigration.

We are told that the ongoing mass immigration from alien cultures is “good for the economy.” This is demonstrably false and resembles the “Big Lie” technique employed by the Nazis. Even if it were true, I would still reject this argument. I am not willing to give up our existence as a people and the heritage entrusted upon me by my ancestors in the hypothetical hope that doing so will earn me a few chocolate bars or electronic toys, of which we already have plenty. The notion that man is homo economicus, the economic man, nothing more than the sum of his functions as a worker and consumer, is widely shared by both left-wingers and many right-wingers. It is one of the most destructive ideologies of our time and needs to be defeated while there is still something left of European civilization to preserve.

One “anti-Jihadist” in Scandinavia once indicated that it was OK with a Muslim majority in Europe as long as these Muslims respect “human rights.” They won’t, of course, but that’s not the point. The “debate” we have is thus between those who believe we should accept unlimited mass immigration and those who believe we should accept unlimited mass immigration as long as those who replace us believe in “human rights,” where the former groups views the latter as “racists.” At no point is there any debate of whether native Europeans have the right to preserve our cultures and historical identities.

Globalism is the enemy within which needs to be defeated. Globalism does not refer to the impersonal forces of technological globalization (although committed Globalists like to pretend that it does, because this makes their ideological program seem “inevitable”), but to a Utopian ideology stating that erasing all national cultures and states (especially Western ones) is a positive good which should be promoted and forced down people’s throats. Opposition to this undertaking should be banned as “discrimination,” “racism,” “extremism” and “nationalism” (the terms are used as synonyms).

I’ve engaged in long discussions as to whether or not our current weakness is caused by deeper-lying, structural flaws in our civilization or whether it is promoted by certain powerful groups with a dangerous agenda. My answer is that it is both. The ideology of Globalism is indeed promoted by certain elite groups much more than by the average citizen, and these ideas are enforced from above. This is happening all over the Western world, but it is particularly dangerous in Western Europe because of the legislative powers of the European Union and its non-elected oligarchy.

Although Leftists tend to be more aggressive, perhaps the dividing line in the internal struggle in the West is less between Left and Right and more between those who value national sovereignty and European culture and those who do not. Upholding national borders has become more important in the age of globalization, not less. We need to reclaim control over our borders and reject any organization, either the EU, the UN, various human rights groups or others who prevent us from doing this. We must remind our political leaders that we pay national taxes because they are supposed to uphold our national borders. If they can’t do so, the social contract is breached, and we should no longer be required to pay our taxes. National taxes, national borders could become a new rallying cry.

There are both left-wing and right-wing Globalists. They have different agendas, for instance with left-wing Globalists putting emphasis on silencing free speech and promoting “international law” through the United Nations and similar organizations, while right-wing Globalists concentrate more on the free flow of people across borders, just as they want free flow of goods and capital across borders. The Presidential election campaign in the USA in 2008 between Obama and McCain is a race between a left-wing and a right-wing Globalist. Both want open borders, if only for slightly different reasons, and tend to think of countries as ideas, not as entities populated by distinct peoples with shared values and a common history.

An ideological “war within the West” has paved the way for a physical “war against the West” waged by Islamic Jihadists, who correctly view our acceptance of Muslim immigration as a sign of weakness. Perhaps we will need to resolve the war within the West before we can win the war against the West. When Europeans such as Polish king Jan III Sobieski led their troops to victory over the Turks in the 1683 Battle of Vienna, they fought for a number of things: Their country, their culture and their religion. People don’t just need to live; they need something to live for, and fight for.

We are against Islam. What are we for? I would suggest that one thing we should fight for is national sovereignty and the right to preserve our culture and pass it on to future generations. We are fighting for the right to define our own laws and national policies, not to be held hostage by the United Nations, unaccountable NGOs, transnational progressives or self-appointed guardians of the truth.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the West is the sick man of the world. We provide our sworn enemies with the technology and medicine to multiply, give them the transportation and legal rights to move to our countries (after showing them through TV and movies how much better life is in our part of the world). On top of this, we pay them to colonize our countries and harass our children, while our leaders ban opposition to this as intolerance, discrimination and racism. When did the West stop thinking? Where did we go wrong? Here is the answer an American friend of mine gave:
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“Well, there’s Marxism of course, which was extremely damaging in all its forms. There were the two world wars which killed so many of our people and caused a lack of cultural confidence. Then there was the Pax Americana and the unprecedented safety and affluence it brought to the Western World. We have now had two generations of Westerners, almost three, who have never known real poverty, hunger, war, or ‘the knock on the door in the middle of the night.’ Without a need for survival skills, we had the time and the money to focus on ever-more insane political and cultural ideologies…I think I remember reading something about how the Indian Hindu empires became ripe for conquest by Islam — ‘They focused on becoming good, instead of remaining powerful.’ I can’t remember the source on that though. But that’s what we are now — obsessing about how to be good, not on being powerful. And our ‘goodness’ isn’t worth much if the rest of the world is focused on becoming powerful. Also, you have to remember, a lot of people are making money out of these insane ideologies. The ‘diversity’ industry in the U.S. is worth billions — people with little skills or ability are being given comfy well-paid jobs because of it.. And because of anti-discrimination laws, every organization, whether for profit or not, must have a ‘diversity’ plan to point to if they ever get sued for ‘discrimination.’ It’s literally a recession-proof captive industry. Anyways we’re sick and the whole world knows it. They are coming here to feed off our sickness.”

The West is rapidly declining as a percentage of world population and in danger of being overwhelmed by immigration from poorer countries with booming populations. People of European origins need to adjust our self-image correspondingly and ditch the current ideology of deranged altruism. We are not all-powerful and are not in a position to help everybody in developing countries out of poverty, certainly not by allowing them to move here. We need to develop a new mental paradigm dedicated to our own survival.

We should take a break from mass immigration in general. Any future immigration needs to be strictly controlled and exclusively non-Muslim. This break should be used to demonstrate clearly that the West will no longer serve as the dumping ground for excess population growth in other countries. We have cultures that we’d like to preserve, too, and cannot and should not be expected to accept unlimited number of migrants from other countries.

In my view, the best way to deal with the Islamic world is to have as little to do with it as possible. We should completely stop and if necessary ban Muslim immigration. This could be done in creative and indirect ways, such as banning immigration from nations with citizens known to be engaged in terrorist activities. We should remove all Muslim non-citizens currently in the West and change our laws to ensure that Muslim citizens who advocate sharia, preach Jihad, the inequality of “infidels” and of women should have their citizenship revoked and be deported back to their country of origin.

We need to create an environment where the practice of Islam is made difficult. Much of this can be done in non-discriminatory ways, by simply refusing to allow special pleading to Muslims. Do not allow the Islamic public call to prayer as it is offensive to other faiths. Boys and girls should take part in all sporting and social activities of the school and the community. The veil should be banned in all public institutions, thus contributing to breaking the traditional subjugation of women. Companies and public buildings should not be forced to build prayer rooms for Muslims. Enact laws to eliminate the abuse of family reunification laws. Do not permit major investments by Muslims in Western media or universities.

American columnist Diana West wants us to shift from a pro-democracy offensive to an anti-sharia defensive. Calling this a “War on Terror” as President George W. Bush did in 2001 was a mistake. Baron Bodissey of the Gates of Vienna blog has suggested the slogan “Take Back the Culture,” thus focusing on our internal struggle for traditional European culture.

People should be educated about the realities of Jihad and sharia. Educating non-Muslims about Islam is more important than educating Muslims, but we should do both. Groups of dedicated individuals should engage in efforts to explain the real nature of Islam, emphasizing the division that Islam teaches between Believer and Infidel, the permanent state of war between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb and the use of taqiyya and kitman, religious deception.

As Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch says, we should explain why Islam encourages despotism (because allegiance is owed the ruler as long as he is a Muslim), economic paralysis, intellectual failure (the cult of authority, the hostility to free and skeptical inquiry) in Islamic countries. Let Muslims themselves begin slowly to understand that all of their political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures are a result of Islamic teachings.

Fitzgerald also suggests exploiting the many fissures within the Islamic world: Divide and conquer. Divide and demoralize. Islam has universalist claims but it talks about Arabs as the “best of peoples,” and has been a vehicle for Arab supremacy, to promote Arab conquest of wealthier non-Arab populations. In addition to divisions between Arabs and non-Arab Muslims, we have the sectarian divide between Shias and Sunnis, and the economic division between the fabulously rich oil-and-natural-gas Arab states and the poor Muslim countries.

Both the sectarian and economic divisions within Islam are best exploited by infidels doing nothing. If the Western world stops giving Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and the Palestinians “aid,” which has in reality become a disguised form of jizya, this will clear the psychological air. And it will force the poorer Arabs and other Muslims to go to the rich Arabs for support.

Right now, Muslims can enjoy the best of both worlds, and follow primitive religious laws while enjoying the fruits of 21st century civilization. We need to drive home the utter failure of the Islamic model by making sure that Muslims should no longer able to count on permanent Western or infidel aid in their overpopulated, self-primitivized states, whose very unviability they are prevented from recognizing by this constant infusion of aid.

We need to deprive Muslims as much as possible of Western jizya in other forms, which means ending foreign aid, but also institute a Manhattan Project for alternative sources of energy, in order to become independent of Arab oil.

As Mr. Fitzgerald asks : “What would the rich Arabs do if the Western world decided to seize their property in the West as the assets of enemy aliens, just as was done to the property owned not only by the German government, but by individual Germans, during World War II? And what would they do if they were to be permanently deprived of easy access to Western medical care?”

We must reject the “You turn into what you fight” argument. Those who fought the Nazis didn’t become Nazis during the Second World War. The truth is, we will become like Muslims if we don’t stand up to them and keep them out of our countries, otherwise they will subdue us and Islamize us by force. The West isn’t feared because we are “oppressors,” we are despised because we are perceived as weak and decadent. Jihadist websites have said that China is not the enemy at the moment. China, too, is an infidel enemy, but Muslims respect the Chinese more than Western nations. We can live with having enemies. The important thing is making sure that our enemies respect us, as Machiavelli indicated in The Prince.

We should implement a policy of containment of the Islamic world, but for this to work we will sometimes have to take military action to crush Muslim pretensions to grandeur. The Buddhists of Central Asia undoubtedly held the “moral high ground” in relations to Muslims. They are all dead now. At the very least, we must be prepared to back up our ideological defenses with force on certain occasions.

Several objections could be raised against the containment option. Some claim that it is too harsh and thus won’t be implemented; others say that it is insufficient and won’t work in the long run. It’s true that in the current political climate, expulsion of sharia-sponsoring Muslims isn’t going to happen, but the current ruling paradigm won’t last. It is likely that we will get civil wars in several Western countries because of the ongoing mass immigration. This will finally demonstrate how serious the situation is and force other Western nations to act.

I have heard comments that it isn’t practically doable to contain the Islamic world behind some artificial Maginot Line. When the Mongols could simply go around the Great Wall of China in the thirteenth century, it will be impossible to contain anybody in an age of modern communication technology. No, it won’t be easy, but we should at least try. Containment isn’t necessarily the only thing we need to do, just the very minimum that is acceptable. Perhaps the spread of nuclear technology will indeed trigger a large-scale war with the Islamic world at some point. The only way to prevent this is to take steps, including military ones, to deprive Muslims of dangerous technology. Jihad is waged by military, political, financial, demographic and diplomatic means. The defense against Jihad has to be equally diverse.

In the post What Can We Do?, Gates of Vienna republished an essay by reader Westerner which was originally posted at American writer Lawrence Auster’s website. Westerner argues that the separationist policy proposed by Auster and others of rolling back, containing, and using military force to quarantine Muslims would not be sufficient to make the non-Islamic world safe, because Islamic regimes would still exist and continue to seek ways to harm us. He therefore proposes a policy aimed at crushing Islam. Nevertheless, my general policy recommendation is to advocate separation and containment. The crucial point is to stress that Islam cannot be reformed and cannot be reconciled with our way of life.

According to blogger Conservative Swede, “In fact it is easier to argue for a stop of ALL immigration, to the general public, than a specific stop of Muslim immigration (maybe not in America, but surely in Sweden and the rest of Europe). People simply know very little about Islam. They need to be educated first, and already that is a big effort. So this is the first step. Before this has been achieved, before the awareness about the true face of Islam is firmly represented among the general public, it becomes pointless to push for deportation of all Muslims at the arenas directed at the general public. The first and current step is about educating people about Islam.” He puts emphasis on the need for breaking the spirit of our Jihadist enemies and finding ways of symbolically defeat them.

I have been criticized because my talk about containment and the need to limit even non-Muslim immigration smacks of the siege mentality of a friendless West. Advocating a policy of much stricter immigration control in general isn’t based on isolationism, it’s based on realism. We’re in the middle of the largest migration waves in human history. The simple fact is that far more people want to live in the West than we can possibly let in. Technology has made it easier for people to settle in other countries, and easier for them to stay in touch with their original homeland as if they never left. We have to deal with this fact by slowing the immigration rates to assimilation levels; otherwise our societies will eventually break down.

I’m advocating isolation of the Islamic world, not of the West. Even if we cannot allow all non-Muslims to freely settle in our lands, this does not mean that they have to be our enemies. Jihad is being waged against the entire non-Muslim world, not just the West. We should stop trying to “win the hearts and minds” of Muslims instead cooperate with other non-Muslims.

The United Nations is heavily infiltrated by Islamic groups. We should starve it for funds and ridicule it at any given opportunity. As an alternative to the UN, we could create an organization where only democratic states could become members. The most important principle at this point is to contain the Islamic world. We simply cannot allow our enemies to have influence over our policies, which they do through the UN.

Europeans need to totally dismantle the European Union and regain national control over our borders and legislation. The EU is so deeply flawed and infiltrated by pro-Islamic thinking that it simply cannot be reformed. No, the EU isn’t the only problem we have, but it is the worst, and we can’t fix our other problems as long as the EU is in charge. And let’s end the stupid support for the Palestinians that the Eurabians have encouraged and start supporting our cultural cousin, Israel. Europe’s first line of defense starts in Jerusalem.

Europeans should adopt legislation similar to the First and Second Amendments in the American Bill of Rights, securing the right to free speech and gun ownership. The reason why European authorities are becoming increasingly totalitarian in their censorship efforts is to conceal the fact that they are no longer willing or able to uphold even the most basic security of their citizenry, far less our national borders.

We need to ditch the welfare state, which is probably doomed anyway. The welfare state wasn’t all bad, but it cannot compete in a world of billions of capitalists in low-cost countries. It creates a false sense of security in a dog-eat-dog world and breeds a passivity that is very dangerous in our struggle for survival. We should use the money to strengthen our border controls and rebuild credible militaries.. Western Europeans have lived under Pax Americana for so long that we have forgotten how to defend ourselves. This needs to change, and soon.

I recently read the book The Shock Doctrine by the prominent left-wing intellectual Naomi Klein. That is, I made an attempt to read it. I gave up after a few chapters. Klein talks about how clean slate ideologies are dangerous, and mentions in passing some crimes committed by the Soviet regime and the criticism which followed its collapse. Then she says:

The process has sparked heated debate around the world about how many of these atrocities stemmed from the ideology invoked, as opposed to its distortion by adherents like Stalin, Ceausescu, Mao and Pol Pot. ‘It was flesh-and-blood Communism that imposed wholesale repression, culminating in a state-sponsored reign of terror,’ writes Stéphane Courtois, co-author of the contentious Black Book of Communism. ‘Is the ideology itself blameless?’ Of course it is not. It doesn’t follow that all forms of Communism are inherently genocidal, as some have gleefully claimed, but it was certainly an interpretation of Communist theory that was doctrinaire, authoritarian, and contemptuous of pluralism that led to Stalin’s purges and to Mao’s re-education camps. Authoritarian Communism is, and should be, forever tainted by those real-world laboratories. But what of the contemporary crusade to liberate world markets?

Klein claims that not all forms of market systems have to be inherently violent. They can leave room for free health care, too. She condemns “authoritarian interpretations” of Communism, but not necessarily Communism as such. Exactly where we can find examples of non-authoritarian Communism she doesn’t say. That’s as far as self-criticism has progressed in the political Left a generation after we “defeated” Socialism.

The economist Milton Friedman, along with F. Hayek, is one of the villains of Naomi Klein’s book. According to her, Friedman has stated that “only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Friedman believes that during a crisis, we only have a brief window of opportunity before society slips back into the “tyranny of the status quo,” and that we need to use this opportunity or lose it.

This is actually sound advice and in my view the strategy Western survivalists should follow. When I first started writing as Fjordman I focused on how to “fix the system.” I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that the system cannot be fixed. Not only does it have too many enemies; it also contains too many internal contradictions. If we define the “system” as mass immigration from alien cultures, Globalism, Multiculturalism and suppression of free speech in the name of “tolerance,” then this is going to collapse. It’s inevitable.

The goal of European and Western survivalists — and that’s what we are, it is our very survival that is at stake — should not be to “fix the system,” but to be mentally and physically prepared for its collapse, and to develop coherent answers to what went wrong and prepare to implement the necessary remedies when the time comes. We need to seize the window of opportunity, and in order to do so, we need to define clearly what we want to achieve. What went wrong with our civilization, and how can we survive and hopefully regenerate, despite being an increasingly vulnerable minority in an often hostile world?

I have suggested that we never won the Cold War as decisively as we should have done. The enemy has been regrouping and now largely controls our media and educational institutions less than a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We did not have public trials against the supporters of Marxism just as we did against Nazism. This was a serious mistake which we should not repeat again. If or when the European Union collapses and Multiculturalism is defeated, we need to stage public trials against the creators of Eurabia and denounce the lies continuously told by our media and academia. Their ideology needs to be exposed as evil.

The political elites implement the agendas of our enemies and ignore the interests of their own people. They are collaborators and should be treated accordingly. The problem is that they currently feel quite comfortable and secure. They fear the reactions of Muslims, but despise their own people. They view us as sheep, existing only to provide them with champagne and nice cars and to be guinea pigs in their grandiose social experiments. Change will only come when they fear us, and the consequences of their own betrayal, more than they fear Muslims.

People of European origins can gain a future by reclaiming our past, and end the hostility to our civilization and heritage which is too often taught in our education system today. We need to reject those who demonize us simply because we desire self-determination. In order to achieve this, we need to regain control over our national borders and legislation, and we need to reclaim control over the media. Those who control the media, control society.

It is easy to blame others, but we have to accept responsibility for our situation. Yes, we have indeed been betrayed by our leaders, but that’s still only part of the problem. People tend to get the governments they deserve. Maybe we get weak leaders because we are weak, or because they can exploit weaknesses in our mentality to get us where they want to; above all anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, our excessive desire for consensus and suppression of dissent, the anti-individualistic legacy from Socialism and the passivity bred by welfare state bureaucracy. Muslims are stuck with their problems and corrupt leaders and blame everybody else for their own failures because they can never admit they are caused by deep flaws in their culture.. We shouldn’t make the same mistake. Europeans export wine; Arabs export whine. That’s the way it should be.

In his book The River War published in 1899, Winston Churchill wrote about the cursed effects of Mohammedanism (which is what Islam really is):

The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities — but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

This description remains right today. Nevertheless, bad as it is, Islam isn’t the cause of our current weakness; it is a secondary infection. In addition to plain decadence, there is a widespread feeling in much of Europe that nothing is worth fighting for, certainly not through armed struggle. There are no Great Truths, everything is equal. Maybe Europe’s faith in itself died in Auschwitz, but it was severely wounded in the trenches of the First World War. It was WW1 that radicalized Europe, triggered the Russian Revolution and the rise of Soviet Communism, and filled Germany, including a young corporal named Adolf Hitler, with a desire for vengeance and much of the ammunition they needed for their rise to power in the 1930s.

I have heard claims that European civilization will not survive the twenty-first century. A century is a very long time, we should remember that. Would anybody (except a Churchill) in the early twentieth century, when Europe was strong and powerful, have predicted that Europe would now be in the process of being overpowered by Algerians and Pakistanis? Things change. They can change for the worse, but they can also change for the better. Our ancestors, better men and women than we are, held the line against Islam for more than one thousand years, sacrificing their blood for the continent. By doing so, they not only preserved the European heartland and thus Western civilization itself, but quite possibly the world in general from unchallenged Islamic dominance. The stakes involved now are no less than they were then, possibly even greater.

Some people claim that Europe isn’t worth fighting for, and that many people here deserve what’s coming. Some of them probably do, yes. The problem is that the people who deserve most to be punished for the current mess are the ones who are least likely to pay the price. The creators of Eurabia will be the first to flee the continent when the going gets tough, leaving those who have hardly heard of Eurabia and never approved of its creation to fight.

Edmund Burke believed that if a society can be seen as a contract, we must recognize that most parties to the contract are either dead or not yet born. I like that idea, which means that when you fight for a country, you don’t just fight for the ones that are there now, but for those who lived there before and for those who will live there in the future. If we don’t want to fight for what Europe is today then let us fight for what it once was, and maybe, just maybe, for what it may become once more. There was real greatness in this continent once. It seems a long time ago now, but we can get there again. Meanwhile, let us work to ensure the survival of European civilization, which is now very much in question.