This is the second of five installments of Fjordman’s book Defeating Eurabia. Part 1 is here.
For those who wish to republish his work, please read his conditions.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.
Ten Reasons to Get Rid of the European Union
This text was published at the Gates of Vienna blog in early October 2008. It is published here with some later additions.
The EU Promotes Crime and Instability
The EU does not protect the peace in Europe. On the contrary, it undermines stability in the continent by dismantling border controls at a time of the greatest population movements in human history, with many migrants coming from politically unstable countries whose instability spills over to European states. Through its senseless immigration policies, the EU could become partly responsible for triggering civil wars in several European countries. Maybe it will be remembered as the “peace project” which brought war to Europe, again.
The European Union has created a borderless region from Greece to France and from Portugal to Finland, yet the citizens of these countries still pay most of their taxes to nation states whose borders are no longer upheld. It is ridiculous to pay up to half of your income to an entity that no longer controls its own territory or legislation. Unless national borders are re-established, the citizens of EU member states no longer have any obligation to pay taxes at all.
The EU promotes a ridiculous amount of laws and regulations, yet street crime largely goes unpunished. Laws are used to punish the law-abiding while real criminals rule the streets, although this flaw is admittedly shared with many national governments. European authorities make a mockery out of the social contract every single day as they fail to uphold law and order. Unless the relevant authorities improve their efforts against crime drastically, we can expect to see normal European citizens acquire arms for their own protection in rapidly increasing numbers. One can’t blame them, for in several countries, like the UK, Sweden or the Netherlands, the authorities are more concerned with enforcing speech codes and Political Correctness than with dealing with criminals in a forceful way. We need confidence in our police force or we will have to find other means to protect our lives and property.
The EU does not give Europeans a “voice” on the international arena. It’s a bureaucratic monster at best, a dangerous Utopian project at worst. It makes our enemies take us less seriously, not more. It is not about giving anybody a voice; it is about silencing the voices we already have, by depriving us of any say regarding our future and the destinies of our peoples.
Joschka Fischer, ex-German foreign minister, warns that Europe risks becoming a “playground” for upcoming superpowers in the 21st century. He wants more EU cooperation to remedy this. But we already are a playground for foreign nations, for Muslim ones in particular, who can dump their unsustainable population growth in our countries. This is actively encouraged by the EU. It is going to be interesting for future historians to unveil how many European leaders and officials have been bought and paid for by Saudi oil money.
The idea that the EU is going to become a superpower is laughable. Europe at the dawn of the 21st century is a global joke, a decadent and weak continent, despised by its enemies and viewed with pity by its friends. Outsiders don’t expect Europe to generate anything new, quite a few will be surprised if it even survives. This image will not be improved by leaders who attack their own people, sell out their historical legacy to their worst enemies and muzzle those who object to this. It is ridiculous to believe that this ramshackle, top-heavy Frankenstein monster is going to make Europe more competitive.
The EU Weakens Europe’s Cultural Defenses
The EU is systematically surrendering the continent to our worst enemies. When French, Dutch and Irish voters rejected the EU Constitution, the EU elites moved on as if nothing had happened. When the Islamic world says that the EU should work to eradicate “Islamophobia,” they immediately consent to do this. When an organization ignores the interests of its own people yet implements the interests of that people’s enemies, that organization has become an actively hostile entity run by a corrupt class of abject traitors. This is what the EU is today.
Those inhabiting the European continent are first and foremost Germans, Poles, Italians, Hungarians, Portuguese etc. “Europe” has existed mainly to protect the continent against Islamic expansionism. Charles Martel created Europe in the modern sense when he defeated the Arab invasion in the seventh century, aided by people such as Pelayo, who started the Reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula, John Hunyadi and Lazar of Serbia who fought against the Turks in the Balkans and John III Sobieski, King of Poland, who beat the Ottomans during the 1683 Battle of Vienna. The EU is actively working to undo everything Charles Martel and these men achieved. This makes it the anti-European Union.
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Immigrants are a “protected class” for Multiculturalists, who need them as a battering ram to destroy existing identities and forge a new “pan-European” identity (and eventually a “global identity,” I suspect). I found this quote in the magazine Signandsight.som from June 2008. Journalist Arno Widmann witnessed a meeting between Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and theorist Jürgen Habermas. Widmann was extremely impressed by Ramadan: “The Irish are first and foremost Irish, the Danish are Danish, the Germans Germans and the Belgians are primarily Flemish or Walloon. Immigrants who are prevented from becoming Irish, Danes and Germans but who are called upon to be more European that Europeans ever were, have no option other than to become Europeans. They will be the first true Europeans. No Europe without Muslims [emphasis in the original].”
The EU is deliberately destroying the cultural traditions of member states by flooding them with immigrants and eradicating native traditions. This is a gross violation of the rights of the indigenous peoples across an entire continent. Europe has some of the richest cultural traditions on the planet. To replace this with sharia barbarism is a crime against humanity. The European Union is currently the principal (though not the only) motor behind the Islamization of Europe, perhaps the greatest betrayal in this civilization’s history. Appeasement of Islam and Muslims is so deeply immersed into the structural DNA of the EU that the only way to stop the Islamization of the continent is to get rid of the EU. All of it.
The EU Promotes a Bloated Bureaucracy
A study released by the organization Open Europe in August 2008 found that the EU employs an “army” of bureaucrats, and that the actual number of individuals required to run the EU is close to 170,000 — more than 7 times the 23,000 figure sometimes cited by the Commission.
According to them, “The legislative process of the EU is an extremely complex and opaque system, making it very difficult to identify how many people are actually involved in formulating, implementing and overseeing legislation. However, research by Open Europe, using limited available information, shows that just to draft and work out how to implement legislation the EU requires a bureaucratic staff of around 62,026 people. This figure reveals where the EU’s real legislative work is actually done: in committees, behind closed doors and out of the public eye. Most of the work takes place away from the core institutions within Expert Groups, Council Groups, and what are known as Comitology committees.”
Notice how this closed and secretive process of drafting legislation for half a billion people resembles that of a dictatorship. The EU follows a strategy of hide in plain sight and conceals the real power behind layers of bureaucratic complexities. This strategy was also followed with the drafting of the ridiculously long European Constitution.
If somebody presented you with a contract of hundreds of pages of more or less incomprehensible technical language which was to govern all aspects of your life and that of your children and grandchildren, and that person told you to just take his word for it that it is good and could you please sign on the dotted line, would you have accepted it? That is essentially what the EU has done regarding the fate of an entire continent, not just a single family. When some annoying people, such as the Dutch and the Irish, were unkind enough not to consent blindly to their new serfdom, the EU decided that they were bound by the contract they just rejected, anyway. It’s arrogance on a monumental scale, if not plain treason.
The EU is not yet a true, totalitarian entity, but it already holds most of the tools required in order to become one. It has managed to corrupt the national elites to sell out the freedom of their peoples by inviting them to take part in the world’s largest racket, paid for by European taxpayers. The growing pan-European nanny state now interferes with every aspect of social and economic life, governed by an unaccountable, arrogant and often hostile minority of social engineers who wish to impose their way of thinking on the majority.
Excessive Regulation and Centralization is bad for Freedom and for Prosperity
Europe once became a dynamic continent thanks to competition at all levels. It is now virtually impossible to find a sector of society that is untouched by the often excessive EU regulations. The EU functions as a huge superstate centrally directed by statists obsessed by regulations. They have learnt little from history, where central planning has been an almost universal failure. Here is what Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell Jr. say in How The West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation Of The Industrial World:
“Initially, the West’s achievement of autonomy stemmed from a relaxation, or a weakening, of political and religious controls, giving other departments of social life the opportunity to experiment with change. Growth is, of course, a form of change, and growth is impossible when change is not permitted. Any successful change requires a large measure of freedom to experiment. A grant of that kind of freedom costs a society’s rulers their feeling of control, as if they were conceding to others the power to determine the society’s future. The great majority of societies, past and present, have not allowed it. Nor have they escaped from poverty.”
Moreover, “Western technology developed in the special context of a high degree of autonomy among the political, religious, scientific, and economic spheres of social life. Is this high degree of autonomy indispensable to the successful application of technology to economic welfare? Few Western scientists would disagree with the proposition that a high degree of autonomy of the scientific sphere from political or religious control is essential to scientific advance. It is almost as clear that a similar autonomy, in much the same degree, is essential to the economic process of translating scientific advances into goods and services. The technological capability of a society is bound to be degraded if control of either scientific inquiry or innovation is located at points of political or religious authority that combine an interest in controlling the outcome of technological development with the power to restrict or direct experiment. In all well-ordered societies, political authority is dedicated to stability, security, and the status quo. It is thus singularly ill-qualified to direct or channel activity intended to produce instability, insecurity, and change.”
The European Union cannot be anything but anti-liberty because it concentrates far too much power in a centralized bureaucratic system that is almost impossible for outsiders to understand. As the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom:
“To imagine that the economic life of a vast area comprising many different people can be directed or planned by democratic procedure betrays a complete lack of awareness of the problems such planning would raise. Planning on an international scale, even more than is true on a national scale, cannot be anything but a naked rule of force, an imposition by a small group on all the rest of that sort of standard and employment which the planners think suitable for the rest.”
The Lack of a Real Separation of Powers Invites Abuse of Power
The pompous former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing declared that the creation of the EU Constitution was Europe’s “Philadelphia moment,” alluding to the Philadelphia Convention or Constitutional Convention in the newly formed the United States of America in 1787. The USA has its flaws, but if Mr. Giscard d’Estaing had actually understood the American Constitution, he would have discovered that James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and others took great care to implement checks and balances in their new state. This is sorely lacking in the EU. The American constitution is relatively short and understandable whereas the EU Constitution is hundreds of pages long, largely incomprehensible and displays an almost sharia-like desire to regulate all aspects of human life.
Madison, Jefferson, George Washington and the American Founding Fathers acted in the open and were generally elected by their peers. Contrast this with Jean Monnet, who is credited with having laid the foundations of the EU despite the fact that most EU citizens today haven’t heard of him. He was never elected to any public office, but worked behind the scenes to implement a secret agenda. I read an interview with a senior Brussels lobbyist who dubbed Monnet “the most successful lobbyist in history.” To this day, the EU capital of Brussels is dominated by lobbyists. Washington D.C. has its fair share of lobbyists, too, and this can be problematic at times. You can make a good case for claiming that the American system is in trouble and no longer works as it was intended to in the early twenty-first century. Nevertheless, the difference is that the EU capital is dominated only by lobbyists and unelected bureaucrats, with very little real popular influence.
We should study the work of the great eighteenth century French thinker Montesquieu, who admired the British political system. He advocated that the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government should be assigned to different bodies, where each of them would not be powerful enough to impose its will on society. This is because “constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.” This separation of powers is almost totally absent in the European Union, where there is weak to non-existent separation between the legislative, the executive and the judicial branches, and where all of them function without the consent of the public. In short, a small number of people can draft and implement laws without consulting the people, and these take precedence over the laws passed by elected assemblies. This is a blueprint for a dictatorship.
In 2006, the European Commission (the EU’s government) announced that it would send its proposals for EU laws to national parliaments for comment — but it made clear that Brussels would only “take note” of national parliamentarians’ wishes. The European Union’s concept of “consultation” is that the people or their representatives should give their “advice,” and then the EU’s leaders should be free to ignore this advice.
In 2007, former German president Roman Herzog warned that parliamentary democracy was under threat from the EU. Between 1999 and 2004, 84 percent of the legal acts in Germany — and the majority in all EU member states — stemmed from Brussels. According to Herzog, “EU policies suffer to an alarming degree from a lack of democracy and a de facto suspension of the separation of powers.” Despite this, the EU was largely a non-issue during the 2005 German elections. One gets the feeling that the real issues of substance are not subject to public debate. National elections have become an increasingly empty ritual. The important issues have already been settled beforehand behind closed doors.
Free citizens should obey laws that are passed with the best long-term interests of their nation and people in mind. Most of the laws within the EU’s area are no longer passed by elected national representatives, but by unaccountable EU bureaucrats, some of whom could potentially have been bought and paid by our Islamic enemies with Arab oil money. As such, the citizens of these nations no longer have any obligation to obey these laws.
As Montesquieu warned, “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.” He also stated that “Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.” The current problem with the EU is not just the content of laws and the way they are drafted and passed, but also their sheer volume. The 10 new members who joined the EU in 2004 were required to transpose into national law 26,000 items of legislation or 75,000 pages of text. Law-abiding citizens are turned into criminals by laws regulating speech and behavior, while real criminals rule the streets in our cities. This situation will either lead to a police state, to a total breakdown in law and order, or both.
The Lack of Transparency Leaves the EU Vulnerable to Hostile Infiltration
There will no doubt be debates among future historians about how EU leaders could do something as stupid as the creation of the Eurabian networks. I suspect one of the answers will be: They did it because they could. I have heard some Socialists argue that the Communist system of the Soviet Union could have worked if it didn’t end up with a leader like Stalin. This view is fundamentally flawed, for the system itself invited a Stalin, or a Mao; there were no real restraints on the power of the rulers. As Lord Acton said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The same goes for the EU.
At least two conditions must be fulfilled in order to prevent the arbitrary use of power. The first is a system of formal and informal checks and balances, giving the possibility of peacefully removing officials who are not doing their job. The second is transparency, so people know what their representatives are doing. The EU deliberately ignores both these conditions. Vast quantities of power have been transferred to shady backrooms and structures the average citizen hardly knows exist. Eurabia was created through such channels. The reason why European leaders could commit a betrayal as large as this was not only because EU authorities are not formally subjected to the popular will, but because they have made the decision-making process incredibly complicated and moved real power out of the public view.
There is every reason to believe that some of those claiming to be our representatives have been bribed and/or blackmailed by Muslim countries and other enemies to implement agendas hostile to our interests. No system is perfect, but a non-transparent system such as the EU is particularly vulnerable to infiltration from outsiders and hostile foreign interests.
The “anti-discrimination laws” we now see in Western Europe are an indication that the democratic system no longer works as intended. These laws come from a small group of self-appointed leaders who respond to pressure from the Islamic world, not from their own people. The European political elites increasingly risk being seen as collaborators and puppets for our enemies because that’s in many cases how they act.
The EU Leads to Less Freedom of Speech
The EU does nothing to promote freedom in Europe, but rather spends a great deal of time trying to stamp out what’s left of it. The EU, in cooperation with Islamic countries, is rewriting school textbooks across the European continent to present a more “positive” image of Islam. The EU increasingly views the media and the education system simply as a prolonged arm of the state. This is the hallmark of a totalitarian state, which is what the EUSSR is gradually becoming. One gets the feeling that the EU’s concept of a “united Europe” means one nation, one people — and one allowed opinion. It is tempting to say one allowed religion as well: Islam.
According to British writer Daniel Hannan, “Eurocrats instinctively dislike spontaneous activity. To them, ‘unregulated’ is almost synonymous with ‘illegal’. The bureaucratic mindset demands uniformity, licensing, order. Eurocrats are especially upset because many bloggers, being of an anarchic disposition, are anti-Brussels. In the French, Dutch and Irish referendums, the MSM [mainstream media] were uniformly pro-treaty, whereas internet activity was overwhelmingly sceptical. Bruno Waterfield recently reported on a secret Commission report about the danger posed by online libertarians: ‘Apart from official websites, the internet has largely been a space left to anti-European feeling. Given the ability to reach an audience at a much lower cost, and given the simplicity of the No campaign messages, it has proven to be easily malleable during the campaign and pre-campaign period.’ The EU’s solution? Why, to regulate blogs!”
At the time of writing, it looks like the most radical proposals to regulate independent websites have been watered down, but there is no doubt that the EU will make new attempts to censor the Internet, especially since the organization has successfully bribed much of the traditional media. In 2007, the EU agreed to make incitement to racism and xenophobia a crime across the 27-nation bloc. Under the new law, offenders will face up to three years in jail for “public incitement to violence or hatred, directed against a group of persons or a member of such a group defined by reference to race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin.” The term “inciting hatred” against “religion” will no doubt be used to silence critics of Islam, of the EU’s pro-Islamic policies and of mass immigration in general.
Every single action the EU has taken vis-à-vis these subjects have led to more restrictions of free speech, online and offline. There is no reason not to expect that trend to continue, especially since the EU tries consistently to placate Muslims and other immigrant groups in every way possible. The EU’s attempts to crush dissent and silence criticism of its ideas will become increasingly aggressive and hard to ignore.
The EU Fails to Consult its Citizens and Insults Them When Doing So
The Irish referendum in 2008 on the proposed EU Constitution/ Lisbon Treaty is a powerful testimony to the evil nature of the European Union. Before the referendum, a number of EU leaders made it perfectly clear that the Lisbon Treaty was virtually identical to the European Constitution which had been rejected by Dutch and French voters in 2005, and which should then presumably have been dead.
Former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (the chief drafter of the Constitution) said: “the proposals in the original constitutional treaty are practically unchanged. They have simply been dispersed through old treaties in the form of amendments. Why this subtle change? Above all, to head off any threat of referenda by avoiding any form of constitutional vocabulary.” D’Estaing also said: “Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly… All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way.” Spanish PM José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero said: “We have not let a single substantial point of the Constitutional Treaty go…” Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said: “Those who are anti-EU are terrorists. It is psychological terrorism to suggest the specter of a European superstate.”
Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen admitted that he had not read the Lisbon Treaty in full, but nonetheless assured his people that it was good and that Irishmen should vote “yes” based on this assurance. He said that voters were being asked to give the EU a “more effective and efficient decision-making process.”
If a dictator decides to ignore the opinion of everybody else and implement policies as he sees fit without consulting anybody, this could be seen as a “more efficient” decision-making process from a certain point of view. Is it this kind of “efficiency” the EU is promoting? Mr. Cowen doesn’t say, but it’s tempting to speculate that the answer is “yes.” According to the words and actions of the EU elites, the will of the people is merely an annoying speed bump which slows down the implementation of their supremely enlightened policies.
After the referendum, when it was clear that the Irish would have none of this trick, the Irish EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy revealed that he had not read the Lisbon Treaty himself: “I would predict that there won’t be 250 people in the whole of the 4.2 million population of Ireland that have read the treaties cover-to-cover. I further predict that there is not 10 percent of that 250 that will understand every section and subsection,” he said. “But is there anything different about that?” said the Commissioner, adding: “Does anyone read the finance act?” referring to the lengthy documents he drew up when he was finance minister in Ireland.
Let us repeat this again. This man stated — probably correctly — that not more than a couple of dozen people among millions of citizens actually understood the document they were supposed to vote over, yet he saw nothing inherently wrong with this. The EU Constitution/ Lisbon Treaty would finalize the transfer of authority to a new pan-European superstate with almost unlimited powers to direct the affairs and lives of half a billion people in dozens of countries, from Finland to France and from Ireland to Poland. The Irish responded in the only sensible manner, but European leaders made it perfectly clear that they would press on with the project of dismantling European nation states regardless of popular resistance.
French President Sarkozy and German Chancellor Merkel issued a joint statement saying they “hope that the other member states will continue the process of ratification.” The German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said: “The ratification process must continue. I am still convinced that we need this treaty.” The British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said the UK would press on with ratification: “It’s right that we continue with our own process.”
The President of the European Parliament Hans-Gert Pöttering stated: “The ratification process must continue” because “the reform of the European Union is important for citizens, for democracy and for transparency.” In other words: The reason the EU is tossing aside the verdict of the Irish people, as well as the French and Dutch people and numerous others who never got the chance to voice their opinion at all, is for “democracy.”
According to writer Martin Helme, it was always clear that the power elites were not going to accept an Irish “no.” After the first shock they would simply continue carrying out plan A:
“One of the most disgusting and outrageous talking points already being peddled by the Eurocrats and their friends in the liberal mainstream media is that 862,415 Irish voters have no right to block the desired goal of some 450 million Europeans. This distortion of truth should never go unchallenged. First of all, those few million Irish were actually the only citizens in Europe who were asked for their opinion. The rest of the 446 or so millions were never consulted. How can any politician claim that their voters want the ratification of EU constitution/Lisbon Treaty when the entire political class emphatically insisted on not asking the people? In fact, in many countries politicians openly admit that their voters would have done the same as Irish did, i.e. vote against the rotten thing. So it is not the few million Irish voters blocking the will of hundreds of millions of other European voters but very clearly a mass of Irish voters against a few thousand politicians and bureaucrats who make up the European power elite. Secondly, what happened to those 20 million French and Dutch voters who said no to the same document three years ago?”
The European Commission in April 2008 presented a new plan aimed at increasing EU citizens’ involvement in the decision-making process of the 27-nation bloc, as well as making it more popular. “We must consult citizens,” said the Swedish Commissioner Margot Wallström then. She is famous for her remark in 2005 that Europeans needed to approve of the proposed EU constitution or risk a new Holocaust. Three years after the Constitution was first rejected, and still with no Holocaust in sight, the EU no longer pretends to care about the will of the people. When Eurocrats talk about “consulting” citizens, they mean insulting them.
In April 2008, a demonstration comprising people from all walks of life and from most political parties convened in front of the famous and beautiful Staatsoper (State Opera) in the center of Vienna to demonstrate against the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in the Austrian Parliament, which later occurred without holding a referendum. Opinion polls showed that a majority of Austrians were convinced, as they should be, that policy is determined almost exclusively by Brussels. They see local politicians as largely deprived of any power, and many of them were reluctant to grant even more power to the unaccountable EU.
Opinion polls from mid-2008 showed that a strong majority of the Dutch were still against the Lisbon Treaty, which is virtually identical to the Constitution that Dutch voters rejected by 62 to 38 percent in the 2005 referendum. Nevertheless, the Netherlands is going ahead with the ratification of the Treaty even after the Irish rejected it, said Premier Jan Peter Balkenende. The political elites are determined to continue a process which will essentially dismantle their country and reduce it to just another province in an emerging Eurabian superstate, and openly ignore their own people in order to implement this.
As Helme states, “Governments have willfully and knowingly gone against the will of the people, trashed their own constitutions, corrupted their courts to go along with it (thus trashing the rule of law) and started to govern without the consent of the people or the rule of law….This is the path that leads to revolution. Good! As Thomas Jefferson said ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’ I have a feeling that more and more people around Europe are ready for it. How about the politicians?”
The EU Undermines Political Legitimacy and Connections between Rulers and the Ruled
Proponents of the European Union claim that it is a “peace project.” But the EU is not about peace, it is about war: A demographic and cultural war waged against an entire continent, from the Black Sea to the North Sea, in order to destroy European nation states and build an empire run by self-appointed bureaucrats. This is supported by national politicians in order to enhance their personal power, by creating a larger political entity than their individual nation states and by ridding themselves of the constraints of a democratic society. The EU corrupts national political elites into betraying the people they are supposed to serve and protect.
The EU is increasingly dictatorial, but it is a stealth dictatorship whose most dangerous aspects are largely invisible in everyday life. What the average person sees is that it makes it easier for him to travel to other countries without a passport, and use the same Euro currency from Arctic Lapland in Finland to Spain’s Canary Islands off the African coast. This appears convenient, and on some level it is. But it comes at the price of hollowing out the power of national institutions and placing it into the hands of an unelected oligarchy conspiring to usurp ever more power and rearrange the lives of half a billion people. That’s a steep price to pay for a common currency. But people do not clearly see this is their daily lives, and seeing is believing. The enemy that clearly identifies himself as such is sometimes less dangerous than the enemy who is diffused and vague, since you cannot easily mobilize against him.
The insightful British philosopher Roger Scruton in his excellent little book The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, some of which is available online for free, warns that the gradual transfer of legislative powers to “international law” embodied in organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union undermines the traditional system of law in Western nations. The ideology and project of Globalism (Scruton does not use this term, but I do) — for it is a deliberate project, make no mistake about it — is presented to Western citizens as an “inevitable” process. Those disagreeing with this are evil racist or ignorant bigots standing against the tide of history. As Scruton says:
“We have reached the stage where our national jurisdiction is bombarded by laws from outside…even though many of them originate in despotic or criminal governments, and even though hardly any of them are concerned with the maintenance of peace. Even so we, the citizens, are powerless to reject these laws, and they, the legislators, are entirely unanswerable to us, who must obey them….The despotism is coming slowly: the anarchy will happen quickly in its wake, when law is finally detached from the experience of membership, becomes ‘theirs’ but not ‘ours’ and so loses all authority in the hearts of those whom it presumes to discipline….our political elites speak and behave as though there were no such choice to be made — just as the communists did at the time of the Russian Revolution. They refer to an inevitable process, to irreversible changes, and while at times prepared to distinguish a ‘fast’ from a ‘slow’ track into the future, are clear in their minds that these two tracks lead to a single destination — the destination of transnational government, under a common system of law, in which national loyalty will be no more significant than support for a local football team.”
Anthony Coughlan, a senior lecturer at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, states the following in an essay at the EU Observer:
“At a national level when a minister wants to get something done, he or she must have the backing of the prime minister, must have the agreement of the minister for finance if it means spending money, and above all must have majority support in the national parliament, and implicitly amongst voters in the country. Shift the policy area in question to the supranational level of Brussels however, where laws are made primarily by the 27-member Council of Ministers, and the minister in question becomes a member of an oligarchy, a committee of lawmakers, the most powerful in history, making laws for 500 million Europeans, and irremovable as a group regardless of what it does. National parliaments and citizens lose power with every EU treaty, for they no longer have the final say in the policy areas concerned. Individual ministers on the other hand obtain an intoxicating increase in personal power, as they are transformed from members of the executive arm of government at national level, subordinate to a national legislature, into EU-wide legislators at the supranational.”
EU ministers see themselves as architects of a superpower in the making, and can free themselves from scrutiny of their actions by elected national parliaments. According to Coughlan, EU integration represents “a gradual coup by government executives against legislatures, and by politicians against the citizens who elect them.” This process sucks the reality of power from “traditional government institutions, while leaving these still formally intact. They still keep their old names — parliament, government, supreme court — so that their citizens do not get too alarmed, but their classical functions have been transformed.”
The European Union is basically an attempt by the elites in European nations to cooperate on usurping power, bypassing and abolishing the democratic system, a slow-motion coup d’état. Ideas such as “promoting peace” or “promoting free trade” are used as a pretext for this, a bone thrown to fool the gullible masses and veil what is essentially a naked power grab.
The European Union is deeply flawed in its basic construction and cannot function as anything other than an increasingly totalitarian pan-European dictatorship, run by a self-appointed oligarchy. Indeed, there is reason to fear that it was designed that way. Power is concentrated heavily in institutions that are above the formal restraints of public consent and above the informal restraints of public scrutiny and insight. EU authorities can do more or less whatever they want to, as they do in relations to the Arab and Islamic world.
The EU Spreads a Culture of Lies and Corruption
In 2005 (and again in 2006), the EU’s financial watchdog refused to approve the EU’s accounts for the 11th year in a row because they were so full of fraud. The European Court of Auditors refused to give a statement of assurance on the EU’s $160.3 billion budget for 2004. “The vast majority of the payment budget was again materially affected by errors of legality and regularity,” it said. It specifically refused to approve the budgets for the EU’s foreign policy and financial aid programs, many of which are geared towards Arab countries. Half of the project budgets approved by the European Commission were inadequately monitored.
The European Commission, frequently diffused through a complicated web of innocent-sounding organizations, create agreements with Arabs and then quietly implement them as federal EU policy. This is accomplished because billions of Euros are floating around in a system with little outside control, and with a few powerful individuals and groups pulling the strings. Native Europeans are in effect financing their continent’s merger with, in reality colonization by, the Islamic world without their knowledge and without their consent. It must be the first time in human history that an entire continent is being culturally eradicated with bureaucratic precision. This represents perhaps the greatest betrayal in the history of Western civilization, yet is largely ignored by the mainstream media in most Western nations.
After Irish voters had clearly rejected the Lisbon Treaty (the slightly changed, but otherwise recycled version of the European Constitution which had been rejected by French and Dutch voters earlier), Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark said Ireland should be given less than nine months to work out its problems with the Lisbon Treaty prior to the EU’s parliamentary elections in 2009. Rasmussen said that the Irish “no” vote to the Constitution should not stop further work by the Union toward getting the treaty ratified. European leaders, including Danish ones, have generally preferred ratification of the EU Constitution without popular referendums because they know there is powerful resistance to it in many countries. It is meaningless to have referendums if they only come when the elites want them to, and these elites can ignore them if they dislike the results.
Mr. Rasmussen is a great example of how the European Union slowly destroys the democratic system and is deliberately designed to do so. He is supposed to follow the will of and interests of his people, but his actual loyalty lies with the rest of the EU oligarchy. He’s by no means the worst person among EU leaders; this isn’t about his personal flaws, it’s about the EU and how it eventually corrupts even otherwise decent individuals.
The EU is a slow-motion coup d’état conducted against dozens of countries simultaneously. It is designed to empty all organs subjected to the popular will of any real power and transfer it into the hands of an unelected oligarchy. In fact, it’s worse than a coup d’état because this traditionally implied that a group of people seized control over a country. The EU doesn’t just want to seize control over nation states; it wants to abolish them. The EU is organized treason.
The EU elites react as one when faced with challenges to their power base from ordinary people. Participants at every level of the system get well-paid jobs for taking part in it, which means that their pragmatic interests lie with maintaining it. Most of those who know the true nature of the EU have been bribed by the system and remain silent regarding its abuses because they personally benefit from it. Their loyalty has been bought — with the tax money of European citizens — and transferred from their people, where it theoretically should be, to the EU. The EU is their pension plan. When you challenge the EU, you thus constitute a direct threat to their personal financial interests, and they will respond accordingly. The EU can bribe the national elites by appealing to their vanity and sense of importance, by elevating them from a national to an “international level” and by giving them nice cars and fancy jobs with power unrestrained by silly prosaic things such as the will of the people. Just like the Soviet Union, the European Union promotes a culture of lies and corruption which starts at the top and filters down to society as a whole.
Dutchman Derk-Jan Eppink, who has worked behind the scenes of the European Commission, sees a number of similarities between the European Union and the late Soviet Union. The EUSSR, just like the USSR, is administered by a self-appointed political elite from a single bureaucratic center. Its leaders profess belief in a Utopian state. The Soviet Union saw Socialist integration as an irreversible process. The European Union sees integration as a means for an “ever closer Union.” The Soviet Union claimed to act on behalf of a mythical worker. The European Union has its mythical citizen. Eppink concluded the comparison: “All in all, the Soviet Union lacked the self-correcting forces and the self-criticism which are proper to the democratic process. The European Union lacks these properties in the same way. By setting targets which are either too far away or unrealistic, you are undermining the legitimacy of the project and of the institutions which have to implement these policies. With this book, I want to warn for imperial overstretch and for the creation of expectations which are far-fetched and unrealistic. Sometimes I have the impression that the European Union is moving towards the same trap that finished the Soviet Union.”
According to writer Christopher Booker, “when Richard North and I were writing a history of the European Union, trawling hundreds of books and thousands of documents, nothing struck us more than how consistently this grandiose project has been built on deceit as to its true nature (hence our title, The Great Deception). It is more than 60 years since one of its progenitors, Altiero Spinelli, wrote that its aim should be stealthily to assemble the components of a supranational government and only to declare its true purpose at the end of the process by unveiling a ‘constitution’. It is more than 50 years since another founder, Paul-Henri Spaak, advised Jean Monnet, who was above all ‘the Father of Europe’, that the only way to achieve their goal — a politically integrated Europe — was to pretend that it was only a ‘Common Market’.”
Danish EU-critic Henrik Ræder Clausen, who is behind the Europe News website, has reviewed the book The Great Deception by Christopher Booker and Richard North. In the early stages, Jean Monnet was seemingly always at the right place and with the right contacts. The first ideas for a European Union were born after the senseless destruction brought about during the First World War, but they were only implemented after the Second World War:
“The initial ideas for the European Union stem from the period after WWI (not WWII), where the catastrophe just experienced had made a deep impression, and had seeded the ground for trying out new ideas. The League of Nations was one such idea, creating an intergovernmental body to deal with international conflicts, and hopefully to preserve the peace. The various players, Monnet, Salter, and later Spinelli, drafted their first ideas immediately after WWI, in an effort to preclude a repeat of this, possibly the most meaningless war in history. Even the basic structure of the Union, modeled after the League of Nations, was drafted out at this early stage.”
Monnet, who had been doing business and making contacts during WW2, resumed his efforts after the war. He eventually realized that there was little opportunity to make European citizens give up their nation states voluntarily, so in 1954 he changed his strategy. Instead of aiming directly for a supranational Union, Monnet and his allies opted for an Economic Community instead, which gradually evolved over several decades.
According to Clausen, “At this point (the Maastricht Treaty), we are faced with one of the most significant deceptions of the European Union project: It was sold to the European citizens as an economic community, not as a political union. By implementing the political union in small steps, and not making the final goal clear to the public except at a very late stage, the Community founders had pulled off one of the greatest deceptions in history, effectively decoupling the progress from democratic scrutiny and criticism. 1992 marks the end of the European Economic Community and the (troubled) birth of the European Union.”
Is the European Union exclusively bad? There are two schools of thought: Those who believe that the EU represents an idea that was initially good but went awfully wrong somewhere along the way, and those who believe the EU was flawed from its very inception; most people just didn’t see it for what it was. I am willing to listen to the arguments of both camps, but the lies by Mr. Monnet and others do indicate that the EU was steeped in lies and deception from the very first moment of its creation. Either way, this question is by now of secondary importance. What matters at the moment is that the EU has become a monster which threatens the very continued existence of European civilization in any recognizable form.
I am not in any way suggesting that the EU is the only cause of the challenges we are now facing; merely that it constitutes our biggest problem, blocks the solution to other problems and adds several new ones. Political Correctness, suicidal Multiculturalism and Globalism rule the entire Western world, and the low birth rates we have among native Europeans are not caused by the EU. There is a new sense of European solidarity which can be useful in the future. It is quite possible that we could indeed benefit from some form of European cooperation in defense of a shared civilization, but not in the form of the EU as it exists today.
I would like to reform the EU if I could, but I fear that Vladimir Bukovsky is right and that it is the kind of structure which cannot be reformed. There is an incredible amount of frustration, fear and anger simmering among ordinary people across much of Western Europe which is artificially held down by the authorities and the media. There is a possibility that there will be a counter-reaction once the EU is dismantled, but I don’t think we have much of a choice in the present situation. I would liken it to having emergency surgery in order to save your life. If you have the choice between certain death now and possible complications later, you would normally choose possible complications later.
The European Union is not about cooperation for protecting the best interests of Europeans; it is about turning the entire continent into a Multicultural theme park while the natives get culturally deconstructed and demographically crushed. The EU is a large-scale social experiment conducted on hundreds of millions of people. It is not about economics of scale, it is about stupidity of scale. The EU system corrupts virtually everybody who comes close to it. It cannot be reformed, it can only be dismantled.
The EU and the Globalist Alliance
This essay was first published at the Gates of Vienna blog in August 2007. It is republished here with some changes.
One of my challenges when analyzing what’s wrong with the modern West has been trying to figure out the doctrines of Multiculturalism. In Marxism you have the writings of Marx, Engels and others which provide a (seemingly) coherent idea system. In contrast, there is no Multicultural founding document or philosophy. Multicultural doctrines are remarkably inconsistent. The only thing consistent about them is a seeming desire to break down European culture and Western nations. It is possible to trace elements of it to the Frankfurt school of cultural Marxism, to Rousseau’s noble savage etc., but in the end it’s remarkably vague. Perhaps Multiculturalism was intended to sound vaguely positive but confusing, a convenient smokescreen for the project, imposed from above, of dismantling Western nation states. It is plausible that some groups used it as a cover for implementing sweeping changes that could not be openly debated and were frequently the exact opposite of the stated goals. Mass immigration was presented as “enriching our culture.” In fact, it diluted it, and that was probably the point. However, as with all ideologies there were both True Believers who really believed in its ideas and cynics who used it for ulterior motives.
Here is an interesting comment about Multiculturalism posted at a website in, of all places, Bangladesh:
“Multiculturalism is an unnatural and unhealthy condition that can only afflict countries in national decline.… Greed and corruption will characterise the government coupled with oppressive measures directed against its citizens. Lies and deceit will be the stock and trade of media, politicians, and educational institutions.” It “is used to prevent a national consensus among the electorate. It erodes values, cultures, beliefs, religions, ethnic habits, etc. ensuring a swirling river of discontent upon which the multiculturalists rides. It is a perfect method of ensuring that there can never be accord, unity, or a commonly shared destiny among those ruled.”
In other words: Multiculturalism is a tool for divide and conquer. Is there then any point in trying to comprehend its logic at all? Maybe it was just a convenient excuse used for disrupting the established order of nation states by flooding them with mass immigration under the cover of “cultural diversity” or historical inevitability. If that is the case, there never was any coherent logic behind it, so we shouldn’t waste our time looking for one.
This was undertaken by a coalition of different groups with a shared Globalist goal of undermining Western nation states. I heard supporters of mass immigration a generation ago state that all this talk about how it would change our societies into the unrecognizable was scare-mongering and racism. Now, the same groups are saying that yes, our societies have been changed forever. It’s good, and it’s anyway too late to do anything about it, so get used to it! Their propaganda was used to deceive the public and keep it off balance in order to implement potentially irreversible changes with little real debate. They knew they would never get the permission to destroy their own countries, so they simply didn’t ask.
By dismantling national borders, the EU has facilitated the largest migration waves in European history. When Poland became a member, many Poles moved to Britain, Germany etc. This left Poland with a labor shortage. They are now considering importing workers from the Ukraine and Russia to compensate for the Poles that left. At the same time, native Brits are fleeing to Spain because they don’t feel at home in Britain anymore. By such moves, you unleash a chain migration that will eventually smash nations that have existed for ages. Yet this intra-European migration pales in comparison to the immigration from developing nations. The end result will — supposedly — be an entire continent of people without any strong sense of cultural identity or national loyalty, who will be divided, disoriented and presumably easier to control. Stalin did similar things in the Soviet Union, moving large population groups around to unsettle the state and keep it disunited. The European Union has learned a lot from Stalin.
The First World War laid the foundations for the Second World War because it sowed the seeds of resentment in Germany; seeds which bloomed after the Great Depression started in 1929 and led to the rise of the Nazis. It also led to the Russian Revolution and thus to the establishment of Soviet Communism and the Cold War. The combined legacy of the anti-nationalism born out of WW1, the principle of total non-discrimination established after WW2, and the model of an artificial, post-Christian, authoritarian superstate inherited from the Soviet Union are all embodied in the European Union.
Less than a generation after the Cold War ended we are entering a new world war, caused by Western weakness and the resurgent Jihad. The connection between the Cold War and the current world war is not as strong as between WW1 and WW2, but it exists. The West in the 1990s was relieved that the prospect of a global nuclear war was over. We let our guard down because we were reluctant to engage immediately in another ideological confrontation, and this allowed Muslims the opportunity to quietly infiltrate our countries. Hard-Leftists groups within the West, some of which had been actively encouraged by the Soviet Union and the KGB during the Cold War, also regrouped after the latter’s collapse. Moreover, Arabs had been supported by the Soviet Union in the 1970s against Israel and the USA, and Muslims had in return been supported by the Americans against the Soviets in the 1980s in Afghanistan, where Jihadists such as Osama bin Laden learned their trade. Jihad was thus for a while pandered to by both superpowers.
At the American Thinker, James Lewis writes that “Europe has given up on electoral democracy” at the highest and most powerful levels. “For the elites, the emerging EU-SSR is great, because rather than being a minor bureaucrat in London you get the chance to rule all of Europe, with bigger salaries, better food, and richer lobbyists, right across the Channel in the trendy new Euro-capital of Brussels. All you need is to make your regulations so complicated that nobody can understand them.” He believes Europeans are in a state of quiet mourning because of the planned euthanasia of their nation states: “Wall-to-wall elite propaganda has accomplished what a thousand years of European wars and treaties never did. Europe is being hammered and melded into an artificial unity.” This sense of doomed national identity puts a different light on the anti-American neurosis that runs through much of European media.
Lewis dubs the EU “government by hyper-complexity.” Former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, one of the chief architects behind the EU Constitution, admits that the “amending treaty” that is supposed to replace the rejected Constitution (yet is 95% identical to it) was deliberately drafted to make it too complicated for the average citizen to understand: “They [EU leaders] decided that the document should be unreadable. If it is unreadable, it is not constitutional, that was the sort of perception.”
Western Europeans had already accepted steadily increasing powers to the national nanny states for decades. All the EU had to do was to connect these established bureaucratic machineries on a supranational level into a complicated web virtually impenetrable to the average person. Only the skilled specialists and bureaucrats can maneuver within this maze, leaving great, and largely unrecognized and thus formally and informally unrestrained power, in the hands of the few on top pulling the strings.
According to José Manuel Barroso, the Portuguese President of the European Commission, the EU is “the first non-imperial empire” the world has ever seen, which makes me wonder whether he has ever read the tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen. If the EU is an “empire” of anything, it is above all an empire of bureaucrats, made possible because it was established in a culture where bureaucrats already ruled.
Another person with grandiose ideas about the EU (and himself) is former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, who has compared his role in drafting the EU Constitution to that of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Unfortunately, Mr. Giscard is no Thomas Jefferson or James Madison and has apparently understood very little of the American Constitution. Precisely because some Americans were concerned that too much power was granted to the federal government, the Bill of Rights was instituted to ensure the rights of individual citizens. On balance, the US Constitution does create a powerful federal government, but it has decentralized rule and leaves large room for individual liberty. Simply put, the citizens grant the state the right to perform certain tasks on their behalf.
Contrast this with the massive EU Constitution where the state “grants you” certain rights, not including the right to genuine free speech. The Americans and the British have their flaws but I admit I am in favor of the traditional Anglo-American model of limitations on state power, not the French one. I don’t like the idea of an all-powerful state that “grants” you rights. If the state “grants” you rights, it can presumable also revoke them at a later point. It tells you something about the perceived relationship between citizens and the state: The state isn’t here to serve us. We are here to serve the state.
The Canadian newspaper columnist David Warren writes about the “charter of fundamental rights” included in the proposed EU Constitution:
“It is time people realized that ‘human rights codes’ are a weapon employed by the state to suppress disapproved behaviour by the individual. They cannot be wielded by the individual against the state, as independent civil and criminal courts could be. They are star chambers used, and designed to be used, to mount show trials, in which persons who fail to snap to attention when commissar issues the latest political corrections may be publicly demonized. By removing all of their victims’ established legal protections — presumption of innocence, the right to know one’s accuser, to be tried by a jury of one’s peers, et cetera — they put a jackboot directly in the teeth of the tradition of human liberty descending from Magna Carta. The tribunals are created, always, by bureaucratic fiat. Democracy is not quite dead in Europe, but getting that way. The cumbersome, incompetent, ridiculously corrupt, incredibly arrogant, and unelected Euro-bureaucracy is already in a position to dictate trans-European policies that by-pass all national legislatures.”
Stanley Kurtz of the National Review Online reviews historian Walter Laqueur’s book The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent:
“Laqueur returns several times to the failure of Europe’s authorities to consult with the public on immigration. Instead of putting the matter up for debate, government and corporations quietly and unilaterally set policy. Europe’s elite had a bad conscience, given memories of refugees from Nazi Germany who’d been turned away decades earlier. There was also the omnipresent ‘fear of being accused of racism.’ This bizarre combination of multiculturalism and complete disregard for the significance of culture opened up a huge gulf between Europe’s elite and the public — a gulf that emerged openly when France and The Netherlands rejected the proposed EU constitution (in part over concerns about Muslim immigration and the accession of Turkey to the EU). There was, says Laqueur, ‘a backlash against the elites who wanted to impose their policies on a population who had not been consulted.’“
Kurtz wonders what the European elites were thinking when they implemented these policies: “To the question ‘Did they imagine that uncontrolled immigration would not involve major problems?’ Laqueur responds that it is unanswerable. (My guess is that, like today’s market-based immigration advocates in America, European leaders were focused on the immediate need for labor and gave little if any thought to long-term social consequences.)”
Initially in the 1960s, the first trickle of Muslim and other immigration probably wasn’t planned by anybody. It was an accidental result of de-colonization and a desire for short-term labor in booming economies. As I have demonstrated before, this turned into a far more organized cooperation between European and Muslim countries from the 1970s onwards.
Why do ordinary Europeans put up with this? Are we perfectly content with allowing others to run our lives as long as we have food on our table and can still go for a weekend holiday to some exotic resort every now and then?
The primary weapon of the EU has always been deceit, hiding behind labels such as peace and free trade zone. This has worked rather well. I know from personal experience that most Europeans honestly don’t have any idea just how elaborate the Eurabian networks are, or how much EU authorities are selling them out. Many believe it is a crazy conspiracy theory if you point it out to them, just like it was dismissed as scare-mongering earlier if you claimed that this “free trade zone with a few added extras” would eventually morph into a superstate that is subverting the democratic system and unsettling the stability of the entire continent.
Still, the EU-federalists must rely on something else in those cases when this proves insufficient. Their secondary weapon is first of all the common Western respect for law. The reluctance to stage rebellions could be counted upon to prevent serious opposition, especially if combined with a high degree of bureaucracy-induced apathy. Western Europeans have been subjected to an explosion of regulations of every kind. This matters little to those who come from cultures where laws are only abided by if backed up by brute force, but to Westerners, restrained by their cultural sense of fair play, and to Western Europeans emasculated by state propaganda and bureaucracy, this has had a damaging effect.
Western Europeans were used to laws being passed with their best interests in mind, because by and large they had been. Within a few years, all of this has changed. Laws are now passed by EU bureaucrats who don’t give a damn about their interests and by elites who view them as potential stumbling blocks for the new Multicultural society. Yet Europeans, by and large, still adhere to the laws and regulations that are passed by the state because they were accustomed to doing so. Ordinary Europeans are thus held hostage by their own law-abiding nature while the state turns increasingly hostile. This situation may not last forever, though.
The system in Western Europe is based on a minimal use of force. In fact, the armed forces are so weak that in a different age these countries would have been conquered long ago. The situation has only remained stable because of the American military umbrella in Europe, which has provided Western Europeans with an artificial sense of security and aided the growth of Utopian and unsustainable ideologies.
The EU is frequently described as toothless and impotent, but this is inaccurate. It is both unwilling and unable to defend Europeans against external aggressors, but the system is quite capable of subverting the freedom of Europeans. The problem isn’t that the system is powerless, but that it rewards those who use violence while punishing those who don’t. Native Europeans will be ignored or silenced if they try through peaceful means to protest against mass immigration or the ever-expanding pan-European superstate. Violent Muslims, at home and abroad, will get immediate concessions and respect while Europeans are treated with increasing contempt and hostility from those who are supposed to be their leaders.
Lee Harris warns against those who dismiss the idea that Jihad constitutes a serious threat to the West because we are technologically superior to the Islamic world:
“…fear of anarchy — the ultimate fear for those who embrace the politics of reason — can be used to paralyze the political process to the point at which the established order is helpless to control events through normal political channels and power is no longer in the hands of the establishment but lies perilously in the streets….The jihadists do not need to ‘win’ in the battle against the West; it is enough if they can force the West to choose between a dreaded plunge back into the Law of the Jungle and acceding to their demands. This is a formula that has worked many times before and may work again.”
Harris calls this approach the crash of civilization.
If left unchanged, this could sooner or later lead to an outbreak of violence among native Europeans because the system itself rewards violence, and a system that does so invites more violence. If this results in a popular explosion, I don’t think future generations will wonder why it happened; they will wonder why it didn’t happen sooner. At some point, people are going to turn to somebody, anybody, promising to protect their lives, property and culture.
An online document from 2005 written by Traugott Schoefthaler, Executive Director of the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures, one of the EU’s most important instruments for Eurabian cultural cooperation, states the following:
“Theodor W. Adorno and Alfred Horkheimer, in their studies on ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ published shortly after 1945 as a first analysis of the cult of power and violence in Nazi Germany, went deep into psychological terminology of ego- and ethnocentrism. Javier Pérez de Cuéllar and Amin Maalouf come to similar conclusions: Cultural policies need to avoid schematic concepts such as the popular distinction between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. They even warn against further using the term of ‘The Other’ which is standard in almost all intercultural education concepts, since it opens the gate for imposing collective identities on the individual. There is no viable alternative to their proposal of adopting a rights-based approach in dealing with cultural diversity.”
The document further states that the objective of “learning to live together” (one of the Eurabian slogans) “was outlined by the World Commission on Education for the 21st Century chaired by the former President of the European Commission Jacques Delors. Formal education systems are to be geared towards learning environments, teachers from instructors to organisers of learning, schools to centres for daily practice of tolerance by giving way to others’ points of view.”
Moreover, in line with the report by Mr. Delors, the influential French President of the EU Commission from 1985 to 95, “values… cannot be taught in the strict sense: the desire to impose from the outside predetermined values comes down in the end to negating them.”
In plain words: European schoolchildren should be taught to “give up” their cultural identity. Since it is unlikely that it will be required, or accepted, by Muslims to do the same thing, this amounts to unilaterally stripping the cultural identity away from Europeans, thus leaving them defenseless when confronted with a demographically expanding Islamic community.
According to this logic, “identity” in the widest possible sense is the root cause of all conflicts. Consequently, one must assume that if you erase all racial, religious, national and cultural differences, you will end wars. This is strikingly similar to the view of Communists, who envisioned that by erasing economic differences you would end wars. All peoples should gradually be merged into one, if necessary against their will, starting with Western nations.
Richard N. Gardner, Globalist thinker, former US ambassador and currently a professor of law, in Foreign Affairs in 1974 outlined a strategy for gradually eroding national sovereignty through creating “institutions of limited jurisdiction and selected membership.” Gardner thought that such “an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece” would “accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.” He was a member of the Trilateral Commission, which consists of hundreds of powerful individuals from Europe, Asia and North America devoted to promoting closer ties between states, from 1974 to 2005.
I keep bashing Marxists in my writings, and they usually deserve it. I honestly believe it is impossible to write anything meaningful about what ails Europe without taking the prolonged and highly destructive influences of Marxism into account. Still, Marxists are simply not powerful enough by themselves to generate all the problems we are now facing. You would have to be pretty blind not to see the importance of business ties in relations between the West and the Islamic world, certainly in the case of Europe and the Middle East, but also with the United States and Saudi Arabia. Money makes the world go around, after all.
One does not have to be a Socialist to see that the short-term interests of Big Business are not always identical to the long-term interests of the nation as a whole, especially not when it comes to immigration. Multinational corporations, which by their very definition have loyalty towards no nation, should not be allowed to direct national immigration policies.
There are several perspectives one can use when trying to understand the European Union. One is that it is somehow related to the unaccountable bureaucracy of the Soviet Union. This does make some sense, but on the other hand, the EU cannot be properly understood simply as a Marxist organization. It has always held the backing of Big Business interests who want easy access to greater markets. They do not always care about national sovereignty or borders, which are vital to the continued existence of any free society. I am particularly concerned over attempts by various Western corporations to appease Islamic demands for censorship. Both with the Danish cartoons and Geert Wilders’ movie Fitna, business interests were among the most prominent in denouncing these attempts to defend our freedom because they care only about their market shares and not about the wider issues.
According to the intelligent American blog reader Queen, “What we have today is not ‘capitalism!’ It’s fascism. The word fascism is used so much today that we have forgotten it’s original meaning. The real meaning is simply an economic system in which corporations, labor unions and governments all cooperate to create a totalitarian state. In which case, the government gets all totalitarian so it can screw the multi-nationals’ competitors and potential competitors, as well as us, ‘the little guy.’ In the 1930s, it was supposed to be the ‘Third Way’ between liberal capitalism and Communism. No coincidence then that Tony Blair called his system of government, which combines elements of cultural Marxism with corporate fascism, the ‘Third Way.’“
Mass immigration of unskilled people from developing countries is not beneficial for the country as a whole in the long run. The borderless world benefits the super-rich, who can exploit cheap labor and gain access to greater markets. They can spend some of the money they earn from this to retreat, at least for a while, into gated communities to escape the rising insecurity and ethnic tensions brought about by mass immigration. Being mobile, they can move their fortunes formally to nations with low tax levels and let average citizens, the vast majority of the population, foot the bill in the form of rising tensions and rising taxes to pay for health care and education for unskilled immigrants.
This is similar to left-wing parties importing voters and undermining Western nations in favor of whatever version of Utopia is fashionable at the time. It is more than a little ironic that Socialists and the super-rich are allies, not adversaries, in undermining nation states. In general, it is useful to think of an alliance between global capitalism, global Marxism as well as what could be termed global authoritarianism in the sense of unelected individuals working towards a world federal government. It is not just a conspiracy theory; I have read several EU adherents who stated that if we can create a government on a pan-European level, we can create a government on a global level.
Many members of the Western political elites don’t identify with their nations. Left-wingers tend to believe that society should be similar to a non-governmental organization (NGO) and run by a world government, a strengthened version of the United Nations. Some business-oriented right-wingers consider the ideal to be a multinational corporation and think that a country should be run the same way. Just as you in a corporation should be allowed to hire whoever you want, you should be allowed to import whoever you want in this ex-nation-state-turned-corporation.
It is as if the entire political, economic and cultural establishment throughout the Western world, left, centre and right, woke up one day and decided that we now live in the global age, that all cultural and religious differences are irrelevant and that the age of nation states is over. Consequently, we shouldn’t even try to uphold our borders. Those suggesting otherwise are racists and bigots.
To say that the USA currently has a border resembling a Swiss cheese is an insult to Swiss cheese. The “conservative” President George W. Bush doesn’t care one whit about the United States as an actual nation, only as an abstract idea, which puts him squarely in the mainstream of Western leaders. Was he bribed by business interests to keep the border open? Do his family and members of his administration have too close business ties to the Saudis to do anything substantial about Islam? Mr. Bush appears to get positively offended when people suggest that he should do more to uphold the country’s borders against illegal immigration.
This is one scenario that the US Founding Fathers did not foresee: They were scared of the short-sightedness of the average and presumably unenlightened citizen, which is sometimes justified. However, the mass immigration that is now destabilizing the West has been pushed more by the political and cultural elites than by average citizens. Those in favor of the 1965 Immigration Act assured the public that it wouldn’t change the demographic make-up of the USA, but it did, and some of them were probably fully aware of this. They just lied.
When I criticize democracy, this should not be taken as an indication that I believe in elitist rule. I criticize it because it clearly doesn’t automatically ensure freedom of speech and security for life and property, which is the hallmark of true liberty. Another problem is that it isn’t always the best system for long-term decisions because people tend to prefer short-term gains. I still believe, however, that there should be a powerful element of real public influence, to curtail the potential for absolute rulers and abuse of power. We have clearly veered too far in the direction of the latter with the EU, where the ruling elites have skillfully eliminated any constraints on their power.
British philosopher Roger Scruton thinks that “buying and selling of citizenship, often to people who think of it purely as a right and never as a duty, is common throughout Europe. The political élite sees nothing wrong in people collecting passports as they might collect memberships of clubs.” Members of our liberal élite may be immune to xenophobia, but there is an equal fault which they exhibit in abundance, which is the repudiation and fear of home. Scruton calls this oikophobia:
“The rise of oikophobes has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe. The ordinary people of Europe are now deeply anxious about their future. …If the liberal élite will not discuss the matter, and continue to put all blame for the growing anxiety on the xenophobia of the indigenous population while ignoring the oikophobia which is an equal contributory cause, then the likely long-term effect will be a popular explosion.”
The democratic system has significant flaws, but it worked to some extent as long as there was sense of being a demos, a people with a shared identity and common interests. What we are witnessing now is the gradual breakdown of this demos, starting from the top down. Powerful groups frequently have more in common with the elites in other countries than they have with the average citizen in their own. If you no longer believe in your nation as a real entity with a specific culture, it simply becomes a tool for obtaining power, a stepping stone for your global career. Without a pre-political loyalty, emotional ties or even a pragmatic interest in supporting nation states, the democratic system becomes a vehicle for distributing favors to your friends at home and abroad, for fleecing the voters while in power and hopefully ensuring a lucrative international career along the way. You will have few moral inhibitions against importing voters from abroad for maintaining power or because your business buddies who give you financial support desire this. This process has gone further in the self-loathing West than in any other civilization.
Average citizens who still identify with their nation states thus keep electing people who betray their trust. Since the elites identify little with the nations they are supposed to serve, more power to them will only make matters worse, as it already has in Europe. Corrupt and incompetent individuals will always exist. If you get a corrupt leader every now and then you are dealing with a flawed individual. If you constantly, again and again, get corrupt leaders you are dealing with a flawed system.
Our political system is now deeply flawed. The problem is that I cannot easily see how to fix it.
The Immigration Tsunami, Part 2
by Baron Bodissey (Gates of Vienna) October 12, 2008
I wrote last month about the growing immigration crisis in Southern Europe. In the weeks since that post the emergency hasn’t abated; if anything, it has increased. Every day brings a fresh batch of news stories about illegal immigrants landing in Lampedusa, or overwhelming holding facilities in Malta, or being drowned at sea. Despite the acknowledged problem of illegal migrants, Spain is actually inviting farm laborers into the country — this during a recession, and with unemployment reaching new levels.
The material below is compiled from various articles which will appear in tonight’s news feed. It’s important to remember that this is just one day’s selection. News stories like them appear almost every day, although most of them won’t be found in the European MSM [mainstream media].
The EU has actually recognized that it has an illegal immigration problem, and is attempting to cope with it. The latest effort involves a European Coast Guard, which is intended to replace a previous effort which was acknowledged a failure:
“The creation of a European Coastguard is one of the hypotheses the EU must take into consideration to deal with the illegal immigration emergency in the Mediterranean. The Prime Minister of Greece, Kostas Karamanlis, said this during a joint press conference with the Premier of Malta, Lawrence Gonzi, during his 2-day State visit to the island. “Frontex must be reinforced, not abandoned” said Karamanlis, in response to a question in which he was asked to comment the recent statements of mission leader Illka Laitinen, who in an interview admitted that the joint patrols have “failed”. Karamanlis underlined the importance of more cooperation between the EU member States in dealing with the immigration emergency, inviting European partners to start a discussion on the possibility to create a European Coastguard.”
If the EU has designated the current situation an “emergency”, can you imagine how bad it must be?
Part of the problem is that all this immigration from Africa is actually planned; it’s just that the immigrants are jumping the queue a little bit. According to The Daily Express:
“More than 50 million African workers are to be invited to Europe in a far-reaching secretive migration deal, the Daily Express can reveal today. A controversial taxpayer-funded ‘job centre’ opened in Mali this week is just the first step towards promoting “free movement of people in Africa and the EU”. Brussels economists claim Britain and other EU states will ‘need’ 56 million immigrant workers between them by 2050 to make up for the “demographic decline” due to falling birth rates and rising death rates across Europe…’Having sufficient people of working age is vital for the economy and for tax revenue.’ [emphasis added]”
This is the crux of the matter: tax revenue. Despite all the statistical evidence indicating that immigrants absorb more tax revenues than they generate, the elites that run the system persist in the belief that the influx is economically necessary.
Their larger goal is the preservation of the system over which they preside. Those who have children surely want their offspring to partake of the same privileges that they enjoy, and perhaps someday set their hands to the same levers of power. In order to do that, the lumpen proletariat must remain a part of the system, and it matters not a whit if they are “brown” and Muslim, just so long as the power and perks continue to accrue to those at the top of the heap.
Ms Castex said: “It is urgent that member states have a calm approach to immigration. To say ‘yes’, we need immigration … it is not a new development, we must accept it.”
WE MUST ACCEPT IT.
It is pre-ordained. We do not have a choice. What has been decided is what will come to be. No voice crying in the wilderness will deflect us from the plan.
So: we (that is, native Europeans) have agreed to replace ourselves gradually with Muslim immigrants from Africa.
The news article above terms the plan “secretive” rather than “secret”, because it’s not a secret. It may not be blazoned on the front pages of the continent’s newspapers, or printed up on handbills and pasted on lampposts, but it’s not a secret. The plans are part of the public record, buried in cubic miles of the bureaucratic bumf that has emerged from all the planning sessions in Strasbourg or Brussels.
It’s EuroMed, a.k.a. the Mediterranean Union, a.k.a. the Barcelona Agreement of 1995, a.k.a. Eurabia. And if you’re a European, it’s coming to your city, town, or village, no matter how far you are from Lampedusa, or Valletta, or Gibraltar.
The impoverished indigenes of Africa have caught wind of what lies ahead, and they’re not waiting for an official invitation: they’re coming to Europe now:
“51 illegal Moroccan immigrants arrived yesterday in Barcelona on an Italian passenger ship and tried to enter into Spanish territory with false documents and were arrested when they got off the ship by national police officers.”
And they’re willing to take some risks getting to the promised land:
“Searches are taking place along the coastline of Spain on the lookout for around 50 migrants of Moroccan origin, who (according to a survivor) were involved in a shipwreck. The survivor was found on a beach 40 kilometres north of Rabat, near to the body of a man — presumably one of the victims of the wreck. According to Moroccan security sources cited by EFE news agency, the survivor is a young man — originally from Sale (Rabat). According to his testimony, the boat had fifty people on board when it set sail from the Moroccan coast at around 11.30pm on Tuesday night.”
Those numbers were in the dozens; how about hundreds ?
“A large boat with 260 immigrants on board was aided 40 miles south of Lampedusa by Police patrol boats. The boat, 15 meters long was pointed out by the Sirio patrol boat that had previously collected another 143 non EU citizens on three other boats. With the arrival of the last 400 migrants on the island the situation remains critical in the centre where this morning about 1500 people were hosted in a structure that has a capacity for 700 people.”
Or even tens of thousands:
“A total 30,000 illegal immigrants have entered Italy so far this year, the country’s Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni told the Parliament on Thursday, adding that migration has risen “exponentially”. The Government has allocated seven million euros for the construction of new reception centres for illegal immigrants and over 109 million euros to run these centres, said Maroni. On top of these sums, the Government has earmarked 747,000 euros to handle the arrival of illegal immigrants at Italy’s borders, he said.…Migration to Italy has risen “exponentially” from 500,000 people in 1987 to almost 3.5 million this year, Maroni noted. He was speaking the same day that Italy’s central statistics agency ISTAT released data showing a record 3,432,651 foreigners were resident in Italy on 1 January this year, an increase of 16.8 percent over 2007.”
So many immigrants are flooding into Malta that their rate of arrival exceeds the local birth rate:
“The impact of immigrant arrivals on the island-state of Malta is so high that for the first time it has surpassed the birth rate. The statistics which were supplied by the Immigration Commission show that in Malta there are 40 immigrants for every square kilometre, an average that surprisingly surpasses the population density per square kilometre in Finland.”
And remember: this sort of thing is happening every day, day after day, all along the Mediterranean littoral of Southern Europe.
Nothing approaching this has ever happened in peacetime during all of recorded history. No civilization has peacefully allowed itself to be supplanted by migrants.
So there’s no way foretell exactly how all of this will shake out. Still, I feel confident in making a single prediction:
This will not end well.
Stupidity Without Borders — The Alliance of Utopias
The bulk of this essay was published in July 2006. It is republished here with some changes.
“One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.” — Former Algerian President Houari Boumedienne in a speech at the UN in 1974.
“Soon we will take power in this country. Those who criticize us now, will regret it. They will have to serve us. Prepare, for the hour is near.” — Belgium-based imam in 1994.
The 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries have witnessed the most spectacular population growth in human history, most of it in Third World countries. The world’s population, estimated at 6.4 billion in 2006, grows by more than 70 million people per year. In sixty years, Brazil’s population has increased by 318 per cent; Ethiopia’s by 503 per cent. There are now 73 million people in Ethiopia — more than the population of Britain or France.
At the same time, many of the most economically successful countries, both in the East and in the West, have problems with ageing or declining populations. At its peak around 1910, one-quarter of the world’s population lived in Europe or North America. Today the percentage has probably declined to about one-eighth. South Korea’s birthrate has dropped to the point where the average Korean woman is expected to have only one child throughout her life. The U.S. still has a birthrate of more than two, while the U.K. saw births inch up from 1.63 to 1.74 and Germany from 1.34 to 1.37 in the same period. The low birthrate problem in Asia is rooted in women’s rising social and economic standing. Japan’s birthrate was 1.28, comparable to Taiwan’s 1.22, and Hong Kong’s 0.94.
“Europe and Japan are now facing a population problem that is unprecedented in human history,” said Bill Butz, president of the Population Reference Bureau. Countries have lost people because of wars, disease and natural disasters but never because women stopped having enough children. Japan announced that its population had shrunk in 2005 for the first time, and that it was now the world’s most elderly nation. Italy was second. On average, women must have 2.1 children in their lifetimes for a society to replenish itself, accounting for infant mortality and other factors. Only one country in Europe — Muslim Albania — has a fertility rate above 2. Russia’s fertility rate is 1.28.
Writer Spengler in the Asia Times Online commented that demography is destiny: “Never in recorded history have prosperous and peaceful nations chosen to disappear from the face of the earth. Yet that is what the Europeans have chosen to do. Back in 1348 Europe suffered the Black Death….The plague reduced the estimated European population by about a third. In the next 50 years, Europe’s population will relive — in slow motion — that plague demography, losing about a fifth of its population by 2050.”
Historian Niall Ferguson reveals how Islam is winning the numbers game. “If fertility persisted at such low levels, within 50 years Spain’s population would decline by 3-4 million, Italy’s by a fifth. Not even two World Wars had inflicted such an absolute decline in population.” “In 1950 there had been three times as many people in Britain as in Iran. By 1995 the population of Iran had overtaken that of Britain. By 2050, the population of Iran could be more than 50 per cent larger. At the time of writing, the annual rate of population growth is more than seven times higher in Iran than in Britain.”
We thus have a situation with an explosive population growth in failed countries, while many of the most economically and technologically advanced nations, Eastern and Western, have stagnating populations. This strange and possibly unprecedented situation, which could perhaps be labelled “survival of the least fit”, will have dramatic consequences for the world. It is already producing the largest migration waves in history, threatening to swamp islands of prosperity in a sea of poverty.
Lenin stated that “Marxism is based on internationalism or it is nothing.” “The emancipation of the workers is not a local, nor a national, but an international problem,” wrote Marx. Karl Marx has defined the essence of Socialism as abolishing private property. Let’s assume for a moment that a country can be treated as the “property” of its citizens. Its inhabitants are responsible for creating its infrastructure. They have built its roads and communications, its schools, universities and medical facilities. They have created its political institutions and instilled in its people the mental capacities needed for upholding them. Is it then wrong for the citizens of this country to want to enjoy the benefits of what they have themselves created?
According to Marxist logic, yes.
Imagine you have two such houses next to each other. In House A, the inhabitants have over a period of generations created a tidy and functioning household. They have limited their number of children because they wanted to give all of them a proper education. In House B, the inhabitants live in a dysfunctional household with too many children who have received little higher education. One day they decide to move to their neighbors’. Many of the inhabitants of House A are protesting, but some of them think this might be a good idea. There is room for more people in House A, they say. In addition to this, Amnesty International, the United Nations and others claim that it is “racist” and “against international law” for the inhabitants of House A to expel the intruders. Pretty soon, House A has been turned into an overpopulated and dysfunctional household just like House B.
This is what is happening to the West today. Europe could become a failed continent itself, importing the problems of Africa and the Islamic world. The notion that everybody should be free to move anywhere they want to, and that preventing them from moving into your home is “racism, xenophobia and bigotry,” is the Communism of the 21st century. And it will probably have the same effect, only on an even large scale.
Communism creates poverty because when people don’t own property, they cannot plan for the future. If you and your children cannot enjoy the fruits of your efforts and work, but have to watch others take it away, you will no longer bother to go the extra mile or mobilize your full creativity to generate improvements.
Unrestricted immigration from failed states will eventually destroy global centres of excellence, the same way Communism did. This is definitely bad for the people who will lose what were once functioning countries, but in the long run bad for everybody else, too. It will deprive the inhabitants of Third World countries of the incentives needed to change their own nations if they can simply move somewhere else and refrain from confronting the reasons for their failures.
Many pro-immigrationists use slogans such as “No human is illegal” to argue that immigrants who have entered a country illegally should be allowed to stay. But countries which don’t differentiate between citizens and non-citizens cannot long survive. A favorite quotation in the US is from the poem The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus; a sonnet written in 1883 that is now engraved on a wall in the base of the Statue of Liberty:
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
It’s a great poem, but it’s just that, a poem. The global population today is 6.5 billion, and will rise to 8, 9 or even 10 billion in the near future. The “poor and wretched” of the earth make up literally billions of people. Should they all move to the USA? How many people can Americans take in before their country falls apart?
The mantra that “diversity is enriching” does not have any real basis in facts. There are more than 20 member countries in the Arab League. Does “cultural diversity” increase globally if, say, Denmark becomes Arabized due to immigration? You would then get just another Arab country, while the only Denmark in existence would be erased. If “cultural diversity” is our yardstick, today’s Muslim immigration to Europe is a disaster. We are replacing unique cultures developed over centuries with burkas and sharia.
Moreover, many politicians and intellectuals fail to appreciate just how much communication technology has changed the rules of the game. When people praise immigration that took place a hundred or two hundred years ago, they are talking about a world that no longer exists, like generals planning for the last war. Modern technology means that immigrants can live in Western countries as if they never left home, visit their original homeland frequently, watch satellite TV in the language of their parents instead of the language of their adopted country, and stay in touch with their relatives back home through the Internet.
Globalization has made it easier than ever not just to move physically to the other side of the world, but also to live one place physically and on the other side of the world mentally. The full implications of this technological revolution are too complicated to be properly predicted or understood by any one individual, but they are bound to have far-reaching and sometimes unsettling consequences for the nations involved, especially if combined with a deliberate, open-border ideology.
Observer Mac Johnson points out that in the past, admission into the USA was regarded as a very rare and generous gift. Today, admission into the US or any Western democracy “is regarded by many as something between a civil right and an entitlement. Indeed, many seem to believe that the host population should be grateful to them for having arrived. Many immigrants, therefore, arrive as colonists, wishing only to set up a slightly wealthier version of their homeland.” He also points out that until the mid-20th Century, immigration to America occurred from a very restricted pool of nations. “For all our celebration of the great melting pot, America was mostly melting European peoples in that pot. These peoples shared a great deal of cultural inheritance before ever setting foot in America.”
Besides, it is not clear whether experiences from the USA, Canada or Australia can easily be transferred to Europe. The colonization of and immigration to these countries was indeed violent and unacceptable by today’s moral standards. To put it in a brutal way: A country can only become a “successful immigration society” if the indigenous population has been marginalized. In the USA today, only about 3% (the number is disputed) of the population is made up of Native Americans; the rest are all descendants of immigrants.
British commentator Anthony Browne, author of the book “Do We Need Mass Immigration?,” points out that the migration waves we are witnessing now are unique. “What is happening now is the result of sustained migration pressure the likes of which the world has never seen before….The revolution in ‘human rights’ means that as soon as anyone gets past passport control they are pretty much guaranteed to stay. 47,000 illegal immigrants were detected in 2000, but just 6,000 were sent home….A hundred years ago, most people in the west rarely moved even to the next village; now whole villages from Bangladesh are relocating to northern England.”
He quotes the then president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, who in 2000 was asked by the Los Angeles Times how the country was going to feed, clothe, house and employ the expected doubling of her population by 2050. She replied: “We’ll send them to America. Globalisation will take that problem away, as you free up all factors of production, also labour. There’ll be free movement, country to country. Globalisation in its purest form should not have any boundaries, so small countries with big populations should be able to send population to countries with big boundaries and small populations.”
Browne confronts the assertion that “mass immigration is normal, irreversible and beneficial to host societies” as a “damaging illusion. Rather, the current experience of developed western countries, faced with huge inflows of people…is unprecedented and damaging. The process can and should be stopped, in the interests of the rich diversity of nations it will otherwise crush….In 1924, the US government passed legislation that effectively closed the door on European immigration, opening the door to immigration from poor countries with new legislation only in 1965. Australia has shown in recent years that tough policies can reduce illegal immigration to virtually zero….Pro-immigration campaigners who tell the people of Europe that ‘mass immigration cannot be stopped’ are adopting the policies of despots through history of quelling opposition by telling opponents that resistance is futile. All that is needed is political will.”
American military historian and columnist Victor Davis Hanson talks about how mass immigration is the product of a de facto alliance between the Libertarian Right and the Multicultural Left. The economic Libertarians can be represented by Swedish writer Johan Norberg, author of the book In Defence of Global Capitalism. Norberg can have valuable insights into the flaws of the Scandinavian welfare state model. However, his commitment to a “free market, open border” ideology blinds him to the threat posed by Muslim immigration, an ideological blind spot that is almost as big as the ones we find in Marxists. According to him, “at the moment there is a problem. The right supports one part of globalisation — the free movement of capital and goods — while the left tends to support another part, the free movement of people.”
Norberg believes immigration is already so extensive it would be unwise to halt it. Pointing out there were 15 million Muslims in Europe, he noted in a 2003 article: “If we close the borders, if we alienate this substantial minority, we risk creating resentment between ethnic and religious groups, and only the fundamentalists would gain….If people were allowed to cross borders at will, they would take their ideas and their labour and skills with them. This is all part of free trade, and it’s a paradox that many liberals don’t see this.”
Japan has a declining and ageing population, Yemen and Pakistan have booming populations. Does anybody seriously believe that it would be “good” for the Japanese to open their doors to millions of Muslims from Yemen? “Do you have any education?” “Yes, I know the Koran by heart and can say ‘Death to the infidels!’ in ten different ways.” “Splendid, just what we need here in Japan. Can you start tomorrow on developing a new line of plasma TV screens for SONY?”
When it comes to stagnating populations and Muslim immigration, the problems are not nearly as damaging as the cure.
Ethnically homogeneous nations enjoy a “trust bonus” which reduces the amount of conflict. There is little evidence that any theoretical “diversity” bonus from immigration will cancel out the loss of this “trust bonus.” South Korea and Japan are among the world leaders in technology. They are both ethnically homogeneous nations. Even China, which does have significant ethnic minorities, could soon be more ethnically homogeneous than many so-called Western nations. There will be no lack of “diversity” in the 21st century, but there could be a lack of functioning, coherent nation states. Maybe the West will “celebrate diversity” until our countries fall apart, and global leadership will be transferred to East Asia.
Yes, it is true that the ability to attract ambitious and talented scientists from other countries has benefited the USA in the past, and given it an edge over Europe. However, it is not without dangers to “celebrate diversity” in a country as diverse as the US. Americans should try celebrating what binds them together instead, or they may wake up one day and discover that they don’t really have a lot in common. What then for the United States?
Anthony Browne notes that Britain “became the largest economic power in the world in the nineteenth century, in the almost complete absence of immigration to these isles. Japan became the world’s second largest economy after the second world war in the almost total absence of immigration. Britain can never compete on the basis of low wages with low cost countries such as China for the simple reason that the cost of living is so much higher, and it is a mistake to try. Although cheap labour immigration may have staved off the demise of those industries for a short while, it also compromised them by encouraging them to go down the cheap labour route, and discouraging them from going up the high productivity/value added route.”
The revered former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, stated in a testimony given to the U.S. Senate: “Although discovery of new technologies is to some degree a matter of luck, we know that human activities do respond to economic incentives. A relative shortage of workers should increase the incentives for developing labor-saving technologies and may actually spur technological development.”
Robert Rowthorn, academic economist, criticizes the claim, frequently repeated by Tony Blair’s Labour government since it took office in 1997, that “if we don’t have immigration, we won’t have economic growth.” According to Rowthorn, “if you repeat something often enough, you can perhaps make people believe it.” There is no evidence “that large-scale immigration generates large-scale economic benefits for the existing population as a whole. On the contrary, all the research suggests that the benefits are either close to zero, or negative” as unskilled migrants and their families often are net consumers of taxes.
“Immigration can’t solve the pensions crisis, nor solve the problem of an ageing population, as its advocates so often claim. It can, at most, delay the day of reckoning, because, of course, immigrants themselves grow old, and they need pensions….The injection of large numbers of unskilled workers into the economy does not benefit the bulk of the population to any great extent. It benefits the nanny-and housecleaner-using classes; it benefits employers who want to pay low wages; but it does not benefit indigenous, unskilled Britons. While Britain has always had immigration, the recent influx is totally without precedent in modern times.”
Rowthorn also points out, correctly, that “refugees and others granted special leave to remain under the asylum rules account for only 10 per cent of immigration to Britain. Most permanent immigration consists of people who are economic migrants together with their dependants.” Most of them aren’t people fleeing persecution.
People smuggling has become one of the world’s biggest and most lucrative businesses, with professional smugglers who demand high payments. In one case in Norway, a boy around eight years old said his mother and siblings in Kosovo were dead. An investigation into his case, however, found his parents and siblings living in Greece. Fully 94 percent of would-be refugees arriving in Norway lack valid identification papers. In the last four years, 50% of those who have been refused asylum in Sweden have gone underground and have simply vanished. And of the half who have actually been sent home, a full 20% have come straight back to Sweden to try their luck again.
In Iran, the Committee for the Commemoration of Martyrs of the Global Islamic Campaign bragged that it was targeting potential suicide bombers in Britain because of the relative ease with which UK passport-holders could enter Israel. “Do you think getting hold of a British passport for an Iranian citizen is hard? Tens of passports are issued for Iranian asylum seekers in Britain every day. There are hundreds of other ways available to us, such as illegal entry [into Britain], fake passports, etc.” One gang is estimated to have smuggled 100,000 illegal immigrants, mainly Turkish Kurds, into Britain. These economic migrants paid between £3,000 and £5,000 to be transported via an elaborate and dangerous route.
“We were just tired of living in the forest,” explained a young man from Guinea-Bissau. “There was nothing to eat, there was nothing to drink.” In mid-September, Africans began assaulting the frontier of Spain’s small enclaves in Africa en masse. Deploying crude ladders made of branches, they used their weight to bring the fences down in places. As one of them put it, “We go in a group and all jump at once. We know that some will get through, that others will be injured and others may die, but we have to get through, whatever the cost.”
Rickard Sandell of the Royal Elcano Institute in Madrid predicted that the migration now underway could signal the prospect of an African “mass exodus” and armed conflict. What one sees today “is only the beginning of an immigration phenomenon that could evolve into one of the largest in history… the mass assault on Spain’s African border may just be a first warning of what to expect of the future.” With its shores only about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the African coast, Spain is in the frontline of the fight against illegal immigration.
José Zapatero, Spain’s Prime Minister, said during a visit to the Canary Islands that his country would “spare no resources” to curb illegal immigration from Africa. However, his Socialist government launched an amnesty for more than 600,000 illegal immigrants the year before, thus greatly encouraging more illegal immigration. Moreover, due to the borderless nature of modern Europe caused by the European Union, once you get into Spain or any other EU country, you are free to move on to others.
The so-called Schengen Agreement, signed by a total of 26 countries, means that border posts and checks have been removed between European countries and common external border controls established. These are not always working very well. Since the pre-political loyalty, as Roger Scruton would have called it, for most people in Europe is with their nation states and not with “Europe,” not all countries care too much about upholding the borders of other nations. There have been reports of Italian police, for instance, releasing illegal immigrants on the border, free to go further north. Not their country, not their problem.
At the time of the greatest population explosion in the history of the human race on its mainly Muslim southern borders, and when half of all Arab youths express a desire to move to the West, European authorities decide that it’s a brilliant idea to remove as many border controls as possible. And EU bureaucrats are quietly working to extend the “four freedoms of the EU,” including the free movement of people between countries, to include the Arab world.
Just like a scene from The Camp of the Saints, the controversial book by Jean Raspail, thousands of African immigrants have come ashore the Mediterranean island of Malta the past four years, most often making the crossing from Libya in open fishing boats, heading for the European mainland. And the tiny island of Malta feels overwhelmed. “We don’t want a multicultural society,” said Martin Degiorgio, a leader of an anti-immigration group. “Haven’t you seen the problems it has brought to France and Britain?” Scicluna, the government adviser, said that it was “utterly unrealistic to think you can pull up the drawbridge” and that the country needed time to adjust to immigration. “We’ve got to live with it. We’ve got to adapt to it. We have got to make it work,” he said.
Massive movements of people have in the past almost always triggered wars. There is little reason to expect our countries to be an exception. Nearly 200 million people in 2006 lived outside their country of origin. That is a number similar to the entire planet’s population during what we in European history call the Migration Period, which triggered the downfall of the Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries. The similarities have not gone unnoticed by everybody.
Rear Admiral Chris Parry, one of Britain’s most senior military strategists, has warned that Western civilization faces a threat on a par with the barbarian invasions that destroyed the Roman Empire. “Globalisation makes assimilation seem redundant and old-fashioned… [the process] acts as a sort of reverse colonisation, where groups of people are self-contained, going back and forth between their countries, exploiting sophisticated networks and using instant communication on phones and the internet.” Third World instability could lick at the edges of the West as pirates attack holidaymakers from fast boats. “At some time in the next 10 years it may not be safe to sail a yacht between Gibraltar and Malta.” The effects will be magnified as borders become more porous and some areas sink beyond effective government control. Parry expected the world population to grow to about 8.4 billion in 2035, with some giant metropolises becoming ungovernable. The subsequent mass population movements, Parry argued, could lead to the “Rome scenario.”
The waves of migration that the Western world is faced with now are far, far greater in scope and speed than those which brought down the Roman Empire. At least 2.2 million migrants will arrive in the West every year until 2050, according to a United Nations report from 2007. The world’s population could reach an estimated 9.2 billion by the middle of this century.
It is striking that it appears to be taken for granted by the UN that we will sit back, bleed to death and accept all these millions flooding our countries. It is presented like a natural disaster, as if the massive population growth cannot be stopped by the nations in question or the ensuing migration cannot be limited by Western countries. Both assumptions are wrong. Westerners cannot and should not take responsibility for billions of people in other parts of the world. They will have to limit their population growth to a sustainable level. We have already accepted more immigration than any society has done peacefully in human history.
Many people watch with resigned fatalism — a fatalism which used to be alien to Western culture — as we are told by our leaders and media that this is “inevitable.” But nothing is inevitable. Our societies will collapse if this continues, yet we are supposed to be quiet bystanders to our own demise. Right-wingers tell us that it will be “good for the economy,” and left-wingers attack us for “racism” if we desire our own continued existence. As blog reader An Indian Living in the West writes:
“They say that all ‘rich nations’ will face mass immigration. But, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and even Malaysia are also rich nations. Immigration to those countries is close to zero. I think that immigration is matter of government policy and national will. If the will is there, you can have zero immigration or limited immigration. But there isn’t the will to do anything about immigration in the West. Instead they sit and wring their hands.…If there was ever a picture of a society that has been completely finished, this is it. You don’t have to discriminate on racial grounds or religious grounds, just reduce the annual quota to 1000 or 10000. Nothing illiberal about that. But they cannot contemplate even that! Westerners amuse me. Even the worst cowards in the so-called ‘third world’ have more spine than this.”
He is right: The West does seem to have lost its willpower, and certain groups deliberately want to dismantle existing nation states.
The Danish writer Carsten Ringsmose was a speaker at a conference at the University of Odense on the immigration-related topic of “Recognition and integration.” He outlined the projected population growth for the Islamic world, and stated that if recent prognoses are correct, the Islamic world will witness a population growth more than the equivalent of all EU member countries combined within just a few decades. One of the other speakers suggested that this population boom could be solved through migration to the West, which would mean that Denmark, with a present population of 5.4 million inhabitants, would have to accept perhaps 9.5 million predominantly Muslim immigrants within two generations. The man who suggested this, accompanied by segments of the audience, laughed when Mr. Ringsmose suggested that this simply wasn’t doable.
The German professor of sociology Gunnar Heinsohn worries about what he calls the “demographic capitulation” of European nations. He fears that their imploding birth rates will lead to the collapse of the welfare state, and that immigration cannot solve this problem. He does not believe that material aid to countries with large youth populations will prevent wars and terror. On the contrary, it may in fact increase unrest and violence. Over the course of five generations (1900-2000), the population in predominantly Muslim countries has grown from 150 million to 1200 million. He notes that Western countries are funding the Palestinian population explosion, among others, and argues that this must stop. He believes the West should stay out of the affairs of Muslim countries with expanding populations as much as possible, and only interfere briefly if they threaten us directly.
In June 2007, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, along with Chancellor (and PM-in-waiting) Gordon Brown and Conservative Party leader David Cameron, met Muslim leaders at a conference organized by The Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme. Blair opened the conference by defending Islam as a religion of “moderation and modernity” as he announced a £1M government fund to aid teaching of the religion and train imams, and designated Islamic studies as “strategically important” to the British national interest. Timothy Winter, lecturer in Islamic Studies at Cambridge, said: “The question facing British society, and society as a whole, is not how we encourage minorities to engage with western countries, but how those countries define themselves as a collage of different religious cultures.”
In other words: Britain, Germany, France and other Western countries with white majorities are no longer nations with a distinct heritage, only random spaces on the map with a “collage of different cultures.”
Westerners are the suckers of the 21st century. The rest of the world is entitled to preserve itself. We, on the other hand, are not. We don’t have interests of our own. We exist solely as a vehicle for funding other nations, and as the obedient dumping ground for their excess population growth. If we assert the right to defend our borders, representatives of left-leaning non-governmental organizations, NGOs aided by our so-called leaders, will come down upon us like a ton of bricks. Westerners are funding the unsustainable growth rates in the developing world through material aid and medical advances. Later we are told to let them into our countries, where we will continue funding our own colonization and eventual eradication through welfare payments. We are paying others to multiply and conquer our lands. This policy is insane and evil, and it has to stop.
In the middle of the massive waves of migration in the 21st century it is suicidal to cling on to ideas of a “borderless world.” Yet in the West, there seems to be an alliance between the anti-national forces of the political Left and the Libertarian ideals and short-term desire for cheap labor of the political Right, who denounce their critics as “racists.” Perhaps we can call it an Alliance of Utopias. What these Western Utopians don’t understand is that there is another, competing Utopia of a borderless world: The Islamic Caliphate. As long as the Islamic world can dump their excess population in infidel countries and Muslims make up a majority — some say 70% — of the world’s refugees, any policies of not maintaining our borders will only pave the way for the Islamization of our lands. And it will happen with the blessing of many of our intellectuals, both right-wing and left-wing.
A plague on both their houses.
Fourteen Centuries of War against European Civilization
The following essay is an amalgam of my previous online essays, among them Who Are We, Who Are Our Enemies — The Cost of Historical Amnesia, Why We Should Oppose an Independent Kosovo, Refuting God’s Crucible and The Truth About Islam in Europe. After publishing it, I see that I should probably have called it “Foruteen Centuries of War against Civilization,” since Islamic Jihad targets any civilization worthy of the name, Eastern or Western. But the primary focus of this book is Europe, and so will the focus of this essay be.
“The Jihad, the Islamic so-called Holy War, has been a fact of life in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Near and Middle East for more than 1300 years, but this is the first history of the Muslim wars in Europe ever to be published. Hundreds of books, however, have appeared on its Christian counterpart, the Crusades, to which the Jihad is often compared, although they lasted less than two hundred years and unlike the Jihad, which is universal, were largely but not completely confined to the Holy Land. Moreover, the Crusades have been over for more than 700 years, while a Jihad is still going on in the world. The Jihad has been the most unrecorded and disregarded major event of history. It has, in fact, been largely ignored. For instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica gives the Crusades eighty times more space than the Jihad.”
The above quote is from Paul Fregosi’s book Jihad in the West from 1998. Mr. Fregosi found that his book about the history of Islamic Holy War in Europe from the 7th to the 20th centuries was difficult to get published in the mid-1990s, when publishers had the Salman Rushdie case in fresh memory.
A few years later, perhaps the most comprehensive and scholarly book on the subject to date, The Legacy of Jihad, was published by Andrew G. Bostom. He has written about what he calls “ America’s First War on Terror.” Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain, respectively, met in 1786 in London with the Tripolitan Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. These future American presidents were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty which would spare the United States the ravages of Jihad piracy — murder and enslavement emanating from the so-called Barbary States of North Africa, corresponding to modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.
Bostom notes that “an aggressive jihad was already being waged against the United States almost 200 years prior to America becoming a dominant international power in the Middle East.” Israel has nothing to do with it. The Barbary Jihad piracy had been going on since the earliest Arab-Islamic expansion in the 7th and 8th centuries. Francisco Gabrieli states that:
According to present-day concepts of international relations, such activities amounted to piracy, but they correspond perfectly to jihad, an Islamic religious duty. The conquest of Crete, in the east, and a good portion of the corsair warfare along the Provencal and Italian coasts, in the West, are among the most conspicuous instances of such “private initiative” which contributed to Arab domination in the Mediterranean.
A proto-typical Muslim naval razzia occurred in 846 when a fleet of Arab Jihadists arrived at the mouth of the Tiber, made their way to Rome, sacked the city, and carried away from the basilica of St. Peter all of the gold and silver it contained. The creation of the Vatican as a walled “city within a city” was in response to the recurrent threat of Islamic Jihad raids.
Bostom notes that “By June/July 1815 the ably commanded U.S. naval forces had dealt their Barbary jihadist adversaries a quick series of crushing defeats. This success ignited the imagination of the Old World powers to rise up against the Barbary pirates.”
Yet some Arabs seem to miss the good old days when they could extract jizya payments from the West. Libyan terrorist-sponsoring leader Muammar Gaddafi has stated that he thinks that European nations should pay 10 billion euros ($12.7 billion dollars) a year to Africa to help it stop migrants seeking a better life flooding northwards into Europe. He added without elaborating: “Earth belongs to everybody. Why they (young Africans) emigrated to Europe — this should be answered by Europeans.” Apart from being a clear-cut example of how migration, or rather population dumping, has become a tool for blackmail in the 21st century, this is a throwback to the age when Tripoli could extract payments from Europe.
Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, developed new methodical enumeration in his book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters which indicates that perhaps one and one-quarter million white European Christians were enslaved by Barbary Muslims just from 1530 through 1780 — a far greater number than had been estimated before:
“Enslavement was a very real possibility for anyone who traveled in the Mediterranean, or who lived along the shores in places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England and Iceland. Much of what has been written gives the impression that there were not many slaves and minimizes the impact that slavery had on Europe,” Davis said. “Most accounts only look at slavery in one place, or only for a short period of time. But when you take a broader, longer view, the massive scope of this slavery and its powerful impact become clear.”
Corsairs from cities in North Africa — Tunis, Algiers etc. — would raid ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, as well as seaside villages to capture men, women and children. The impact was devastating — France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships, and long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants.
At its peak, the destruction and depopulation of some areas probably exceeded what European slavers would later inflict on the African interior. The lives of European slaves were often no better than the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, which tapped into the pre-established Islamic slave-trade in Africa. “As far as daily living conditions, the Mediterranean slaves certainly didn’t have it better,” Davis says. While African slaves did grueling labor on sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas, European slaves were often worked just as hard and as lethally — in quarries, in heavy construction, and above all rowing the corsair galleys.
Throughout most of the seventeenth century, the English alone lost at least 400 sailors a year to the slavers. One American slave reported that 130 American seamen had been enslaved by the Algerians in the Mediterranean and Atlantic just between 1785 and 1793 (which prompted the later military response from the Americans). In his book White Gold, Giles Milton describes how regular Jihad razzias in Europe extended as far north as Iceland. Even during the time of Queen Elizabeth I, while William Shakespeare was writing his plays and poems, young Englishmen risked being surprised by a fleet of Muslim pirates showing up at their village, or being kidnapped while fishing at sea:
“By the end of the dreadful summer of 1625, the mayor of Plymouth reckoned that 1,000 skiffs had been destroyed, and a similar number of villagers carried off into slavery.” Such events took place across much of Europe, also in Wales and southern Ireland: “In 1631…200 Islamic soldiers…sailed to the village of Baltimore, storming ashore with swords drawn and catching the villagers totally by surprise. (They) carried off 237 men, women, and children and took them to Algiers…The French padre Pierre Dan was in the city (Algiers) at the time…He witnessed the sale of the captives in the slave auction. ‘It was a pitiful sight to see them exposed in the market…Women were separated from their husbands and the children from their fathers…on one side a husband was sold; on the other his wife; and her daughter was torn from her arms without the hope that they’d ever see each other again’.”
The Englishman Thomas Pellow was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three years after being captured by Barbary pirates as a cabin boy on a small English vessel in 1716. He was tortured until he accepted Islam. For weeks he was beaten and starved, and finally gave in after his torturer resorted to “burning my flesh off my bones by fire, which the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner.”
God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 was written by David Levering Lewis, the American historian and two-time winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. He states that Muslims did not enslave their co-religionists, only infidels. Yes, but why is that better?
As Robert Spencer writes in his book Religion of Peace?:
“The Qur’an says that the followers of Muhammad are ‘ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another’ (48:29), and that the unbelievers are the ‘worst of created beings’ (98:6). One may exercise the Golden Rule in relation to a fellow Muslim, but according to the laws of Islam, the same courtesy is not to be extended to unbelievers. That is one principal reason why the primary source of slaves in the Islamic world has been non-Muslims, whether Jews, Christians, Hindus, or pagans. Most slaves were non-Muslims who had been captured during jihad warfare.”
Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history. When it was finally abolished this was due to Western pressure, especially the efforts of the British Empire. Spencer again:
“Nor was there a Muslim abolitionist movement, no Clarkson, Wilberforce, or Garrison. When the slave trade ended, it was ended not through Muslim efforts but through British military force. Even so, there is evidence that slavery continues beneath the surface in some Muslim countries — notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962; Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970; and Niger, which didn’t abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals. There are even slavery cases involving Muslims in the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan al-Turki was sentenced in September 2006 to twenty-seven years to life in prison for keeping a woman as a slave in his Colorado home. For his part, al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias.”
Jihad slavery was widespread in Africa and in many regions of Asia. Indian historian K. S. Lal states that wherever Jihadists conquered a territory, “there developed a system of slavery peculiar to the clime, terrain, and populace of the place.” When Muslim armies invaded India, “its people began to be enslaved in droves to be sold in foreign lands or employed in various capacities on menial and not-so-menial jobs within the country.”
Briefly summed up, God’s Crucible laments the fact that Charles Martel, “the Hammer,” halted the advancing Islamic Jihad at the Battle of Tours or, Battle of Poitiers, in 732:
“Had ‘Abd al-Rahman’s men prevailed that October day, the post-Roman Occident would probably have been incorporated into a cosmopolitan, Muslim regnum unobstructed by borders, as they hypothesize — one devoid of a priestly caste, animated by the dogma of equality of the faithful, and respectful of all religious faiths. Curiously, such speculation has a French pedigree. Forty years ago, two historians, Jean-Henri Roy and Jean Deviosse enumerated the benefits of a Muslim triumph at Poitiers: astronomy; trigonometry; Arabic numerals; the corpus of Greek philosophy. ‘We [Europe] would have gained 267 years,’ according to their calculations. ‘We might have been spared the wars of religion.’ To press the logic of this disconcerting analysis, the victory of Charles the Hammer must be seen as greatly contributing to the creation of an economically retarded, balkanized, fratricidal Europe that, in defining itself in opposition to Islam, made virtues out of religious persecution, cultural particularism, and hereditary aristocracy.”
David Levering Lewis is clearly sympathetic towards this view, and writes that the Carolingian order, established Charles Martel (Carolus in Latin) and his grandson Charlemagne, was “religiously intolerant, intellectually impoverished, socially calcified, and economically primitive.” Curiously, he mentions in passing that there was continuous “out-migration to the Christian kingdoms” from al-Andalus. Why did they move to the Christian lands, whose economy was “little better than late Neolithic,” if life was so sweet in al-Andalus? Lewis states that: “At the end of the eighth century, Europe was militarily strong enough to defend itself from Islam, thanks in part to Charlemagne and his predecessors. The question was whether it was politically, economically, and culturally better off for being able to do so.”
God’s Crucible was published during a time when Spain and Portugal under Islamic occupation are being hailed as a model of coexistence with Islam. The European Union recently announced its intentions of expanding to include the Muslim Middle East and North Africa. There is a concerted effort going on to present Islam as something non-threatening, indeed benevolent. In May 2008, Germany’s Der Spiegel, Europe’s largest weekly magazine, hailed al-Andalus as a “ Multicultural model “ for Europe:
“For nearly 800 years, the inhabitants of al-Andalus, as the Arab dynasties called their empire on the Iberian Peninsula, allowed Jews, Christians and Muslims to coexist in a spirit of mutual respect — a situation that benefited all.” Never mind that Richard Fletcher states in his book Moorish Spain that “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.”
The European Union, the Council of Europe and numerous Islamic organizations are working hard to rewrite European school textbooks in order to promote Islam. In the European Parliament, the German Christian Democrat Hans-Gert Pöttering has stated that textbooks should be reviewed for intolerant depictions of Islam to ensure that they don’t propagate “prejudice.” He suggested that the EU should co-operate with the Organization of the Islamic Conference to create a textbook review committee. The OIC desires to rewrite textbooks around the world to remove anything critical of Islam, silence mentioning of the victims of 1400 years of Islamic Jihad and glorify the achievements of “Islamic civilization.”
Robert Spencer writes in Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t:
“Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong enunciates the common wisdom when she says that ‘until 1492, Jews and Christians lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain — a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe.’ Even the U.S. State Department has proclaimed that ‘during the Islamic period in Spain, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in peace and mutual respect, creating a diverse society in which vibrant exchanges of ideas took place.’“
Those who want a second opinion can start with reading the online essay Andalusian Myth, Eurabian Reality by Bat Ye’or and Andrew G. Bostom:
“There were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova (756-912), nor later. Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women.”
David Levering Lewis mentions “a small group of Andalusian Christians” filled with “fanaticism” who engaged in “a senseless spike in religious provocation” where individual Christian priests and laypersons “publicly disrespected mosques, the Qur’an, and the Prophet’s name.” Because of this, Cordoba’s qadi (Islamic judge), poor thing, had no choice. The ruler Muhammad I “approved his qadi‘s death sentence in 851-52 for thirteen Christians for whom clemency was impolitic if not impossible under Malikite Sharia.”
Unfortunately, these “Christian militants,” as Mr. Lewis calls them, were still deaf to all pleas of behaving in a properly submissive manner to Muslims, and more death sentences ensued:
Twenty or so ‘Mozarab martyrs’ were dispatched in 853 or the year following, and a dozen more afterward. In another wave of Christian blasphemy in 859, thirteen more were executed, along with two daughters of a prominent Muslim family living in distant Huesca who defiantly disclosed their secret Christian conversion.
Lewis believes that: “A poll taken of Andalusians of all faiths would have shown an overwhelming disapproval of the ‘Mozarab martyrs.’ These Christian extremists were an aberration not because they acted outside history but because they were premature — three centuries ahead of the history whose intense cultural nationalism and religious intolerance were inculcated in the decades after the Battle of Clavijo.”
The “religious intolerance” he is referring to is not the Jihad waged against Christians and Jews in Spain and Portugal; it is the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula. It is traditionally seen to have begun with Pelayo in 718. Although initially slow, it speeded up from the eleventh century onwards. The Portuguese had been liberated in 1249 under King Afonso III. The concept “Holy War” was originally alien to Christianity and was imported to Europe only after Europeans had been confronted with centuries of Islamic Jihad.
Lewis himself states (correctly) that people during this “golden age of tolerance” were executed for criticizing Islam. Isn’t that disturbing, given that al-Andalus is now supposed to serve as the blueprint for our coexistence with Islam, according to our authorities and media? “Blasphemy” against Islam and Muhammad is punishable by death in sharia law, which is why the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim in Amsterdam in 2004.
Even for non-Muslims who accept Islamic rule life is harsh, with severe economic strains and the constant threat of violence in the back of your mind. Scholar Bat Ye’or is an expert on dhimmitude, the oppressive and humiliating system for non-Muslims under Islamic rule, described in the book Islam and Dhimmitude. She writes this about the Jihad slave system:
“When Amr conquered Tripoli (Libya) in 643, he forced the Jewish and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to the Arab army as part of their jizya. From 652 until its conquest in 1276, Nubia was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves to Cairo. Treaties concluded with the towns of Transoxiana [Iranian central Asia], Sijistan [eastern Iran], Armenia, and Fezzan (Maghreb) under the Umayyads and Abbasids stipulated an annual dispatch of slaves from both sexes. However, the main sources for the supply of slaves remained the regular raids on villages within the dar-al-harb [non-Islamic regions] and the military expeditions which swept more deeply into the infidel lands, emptying towns and provinces of their inhabitants.”
Sir Jadunath Sarkar, the pre-eminent historian of Mughal India, wrote this about dhimmitude:
“The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional period only.…A non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery. He lives under a contract (dhimma) with the State.…In short, his continued existence in the State after the conquest of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon his person and property made subservient to the cause of Islam.”
This “modified form of slavery” is now frequently referred to as the pinnacle of “tolerance.” If the semi-slaves desire equal rights and self-determination, Jihad resumes. This is what happened with the non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire, starting with the Serbs and the Greeks in the 19th century, and continuing with Bulgarians and others. They were repressed with massacres, culminating in the outright Jihad genocide by Turkish and Kurdish Muslims against Armenians in the early 20th century. The Jews of Israel are not only attacked because they are Jews, but primarily because they are Jews who do not meekly disarm and accept the status of servitude that they should have according to Islamic law. They are disobedient dhimmis, just as the Armenians were.
Living under Islamic rule was a serious burden even at the best of times, also economically with the jizya tax. According to Robert Spencer, “Although the strictness with which the laws of dhimmitude (the subservient status of Jews and Christians) were enforced varied, they were never abolished, and during times of relaxation the subject populations always lived in fear that they would be enforced with new stringency. Muslim rulers did not forget that the Qur’an mandates that both Jews and Christians must ‘feel themselves subdued.’ One notable instance is recounted by Arab historian Philip Hitti: ‘The caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 and 854 decreed that Christians and Jews should affix wooden images of devils to their houses, level their graves even with the ground, wear outer garments of honey color, i.e., yellow, put two honey-colored patches on the clothes of their slaves… and ride only on mules and asses with wooden saddles marked by two pomegranate-like balls on the cantle.’“
In 1888, a Tunisian Jew noted: “The Jew is prohibited in this country to wear the same clothes as a Muslim and may not wear a red tarbush. He can be seen to bow down with his whole body to a Muslim child and permit him the traditional privilege of striking him in the face, a gesture that can prove to be of the gravest consequence. Indeed, the present writer has received such blows. In such matters the offenders act with complete impunity, for this has been the custom from time immemorial.”
Maimonides, the renowned medieval Jewish philosopher and physician who had to flee Islamic-ruled Spain due to an aggressive Jihad, stated that “the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us… Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.” Jews could teach rabbinic law to Christians, but Muslims will interpret what they are taught “according to their erroneous principles and they will oppress us. [F]or this reason… they hate all [non-Muslims] who live among them.” Christians “admit that the text of the Torah, such as we have it, is intact.”
What about science and learning? Scholar Toby E. Huff, author of the book The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, warns that if Islam had taken over Europe, later Western scientific achievements would have been impossible:
“If Spain had persisted as an Islamic land into the later centuries — say, until the time of Napoleon — it would have retained all the ideological, legal, and institutional defects of Islamic civilization. A Spain dominated by Islamic law would have been unable to found new universities based on the European model of legally autonomous corporate governance, as corporations do not exist in Islamic law. Furthermore, the Islamic model of education rested on the absolute primacy of fiqh, of legal studies, and the standard of preserving the great traditions of the past. This was symbolically reflected in the ijaza, the personal authorization to transmit knowledge from the past given by a learned man, a tradition quite different from the West’s group-administered certification (through examination) of demonstrated learning. In the actual event, the founding of Spanish universities in the thirteenth century, first in Palencia (1208-9), Valladolid, Salamanca (1227-8), and so on, occurred in long-established Christian areas, and the universities were modeled after the constitutions of Paris and Bologna.”
Greek learning was never integrated into the regular curriculum at Islamic schools, as it was in European universities. The German-Syrian writer Bassam Tibi in his book Islam Between Culture and Politics points out that “science” in the Islamic madrasa meant the study of the Koran, the hadith, Arab history etc.:
“Some Islamic historians wrongly translate the term madrasa as university. This is plainly incorrect: If we understand a university as universitas litterarum, or consider, without the bias of Eurocentrism, the case of the universitas magistrorum of the thirteenth century in Paris, we are bound to recognise that the university as a seat for free and unrestrained enquiry based on reason, is a European innovation in the history of mankind.”
According to the leading scholar Edward Grant in Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus, Islam is a theocracy in which religion and state form a single entity. There is thus no secular state apparatus distinct from the Islamic religion:
“[Islamic madrasas] had as their primary mission the teaching of the Islamic religion, and paid little attention to the foreign sciences, which, as we saw, were comprised of the science and natural philosophy derived ultimately from the Greeks. The analytical subjects derived from the Greeks certainly did not have equal status with religious and theological subjects. Indeed, the foreign sciences played a rather marginal role in the madrasas, which formed the core of Islamic higher education. Only those subjects that illuminated the Qur’an or the religious law were taught. One such subject was logic, which was found useful not only in semantics but was also regarded as helpful in avoiding simple errors of inference. The primary function of the madrasas, however, was ‘to preserve learning and defend orthodoxy’ (Mottahedeh 1985, 91). In Islam, most theologians did not regard natural philosophy as a subject helpful to a better understanding of religion. On the contrary, it was usually viewed as a subject capable of subverting the Islamic religion and, therefore, as potentially dangerous to the faith. Natural philosophy always remained a peripheral discipline in the lands of Islam and was never institutionalized within the educational system, as it was in Latin Christendom.”
Fear and uncertainty afflicted all too many Islamic natural philosophers. As Grant states, “Without the separation of church and state, and the developments that proceeded as a consequence, the West would not have produced a deeply rooted natural philosophy that was disseminated through Europe by virtue of an extensive network of universities, which laid the foundation for the great scientific advances made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, advances that have continued to the present day.”
Jihad continues to this day in the Balkans, a region which was for centuries under brutal Turkish rule. According to writer Ruth King, “When Serbia became independent of Byzantine rule in the 12th century, its economic, cultural, social and religious institutions were among the most advanced in Europe. Serbia functioned as a bridge between Greco-Byzantine civilization and the developing Western Renaissance. The center of the Serbian Orthodox Church was in Kosovo where churches, monasteries and monastic communities were established. A form of census in 1330, the ‘Decani Charter,’ detailed the list of chartered villages and households, of which only two percent were Albanian. The Ottomans invaded Serbia in 1389 and consolidated their rule in 1459, propelling major parts of the Balkan peninsula and adjacent southeast Europe into a Koran-dictated Dark Ages.”
Early in the twentieth century Serbian Christians comprised roughly two-thirds of the population of Kosovo. After WW2, Communist dictator Tito did not allow Serbs who fled from their homes to return and did not enforce border controls as thousands of Albanians moved into Kosovo. This later led to escalating violence against Christian Serbs.
As King says, “Initially, the media reported the situation in Kosovo fairly. For example, in July 1982 The New York Times noted: ‘Serbs have been harassed by Albanians and have packed up and left the region. The Albanian nationalists have a two-point platform, first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then to merge with Albania for a greater Albania. Some 57,000 Serbs have left Kosovo in the last decade.’ Five years later, in 1987, the Times was still reporting the persecution of Serbs within Kosovo. ‘Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, wells poisoned, crops burned, Slavic boys knifed. Young Albanians have been told to rape Serbian girls… Officials in Belgrade view the ethnic Albanian challenge as imperiling the foundations of the multinational experiment called federal Yugoslavia… Ethnic Albanians already control almost every phase of life in the autonomous province of Kosovo, including the police, judiciary, civil service, schools, and factories.’“
It was this situation that led to the rise of Serb nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic. However, according to Ruth King, “While the brutality of the Milosevic regime was indeed a complicating factor, he is long gone, but the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] continues its assault on Serbs, on their churches, priests, homes, even on civilians sitting in cafes, this under the nose of the U.S. and UN troops.”
Bosnia’s wartime president Alija Izetbegovic died in 2003, hailed as a moderate Muslim leader. Little was said in Western media about his 1970 Islamic Declaration, where he advocated “a struggle for creating a great Islamic federation from Morocco to Indonesia, from the tropical Africa to the Central Asia,” and that “The Islamic movement should and must start taking over the power as soon as it is morally and numerically strong enough to not only overthrow the existing non-Islamic, but also to build up a new Islamic authority.”
According to Hugh Fitzgerald, “One must keep in mind both the way in which some atrocities ascribed to Serbs were exaggerated, while the atrocities inflicted on them were minimized or ignored altogether. But what was most disturbing was that there was no context to anything: nothing about the centuries of Muslim rule. Had such a history been discussed early on, Western governments might have understood and attempted to assuage the deep fears evoked by the Bosnian Muslim leader, Izetbegovic, when he wrote that he intended to create a Muslim state in Bosnia and impose the Sharia not merely there, but everywhere that Muslims had once ruled in the Balkans. Had the Western world shown the slightest intelligent sympathy or understanding of what that set off in the imagination of many Serbs (and elsewhere, among the Christians in the Balkans and in Greece), there might never have been such a violent Serbian reaction, and someone like Milosevic might never have obtained power.”
In 1809, after the battle on Cegar Hill, by order of Turkish pasha Hurshid the skulls of the killed Serbian soldiers were built in a tower, Skull Tower, on the way to Constantinople. 3 meters high, Skull Tower was built out of 952 skulls as a warning to the Serbian people not to oppose their Muslim rulers. Some years later, a chapel was built over the skulls.
Similar Jihad massacres were committed not only against the Serbs, but against the Greeks, the Bulgarians and other non-Muslims who slowly rebelled against the Ottoman Empire throughout the 19th century. Professor Vahakn Dadrian and others have clearly identified Jihad as a critical factor in the Armenian genocide in the early 20th century.
As Efraim Karsh notes, “The Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in response to the nationalist aspirations of their European subjects. The Greek war of independence of the 1820’s, the Danubian uprisings of 1848 and the attendant Crimean war, the Balkan explosion of the 1870’s, the Greco-Ottoman war of 1897—all were painful reminders of the costs of resisting Islamic imperial rule.”
In his book Onward Muslim Soldiers, Robert Spencer quotes a letter describing the oppression of dhimmis, written in 1860 by the British Consul in Sarajevo, James Zohrab:
“The hatred of the Christians toward the Bosniak Mussulmans is intense. During a period of nearly 300 years they were subjected to much oppression and cruelty. For them no other law but the caprice of their masters existed… Oppression cannot now be carried on as openly as formerly, but it must not be supposed that, because the Government employés do not generally appear as the oppressors, the Christians are well treated and protected.”
Yosef Bodansky, director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Conventional Warfare in Washington in the USA, has stated that the Balkans was a “springboard for Islamic extremism” in Europe, with the Islamic Republic of Iran as the main driving force behind it. Iran and Saudi Arabia supplied funding, weapons and men to the Bosnians during the war following the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and terrorist organization Al-Qaeda gained a foothold in the Balkans. Saudi Arabia has invested more than $1 billion in the Sarajevo region alone, for projects that include the construction of 158 mosques. Apparently, the Islamic dhimmitude-system is slowly returning for the remaining non-Muslims in this former province of the Ottoman Empire.
The Bosnian capital of Sarajevo has become an entirely Muslim city, a Croat deputy in the Bosnian Parliament, Branko Zrno, said in August 2008. Christian Serbs and Croats have no institutional protection and continue to leave the capital. Non-Muslims suffer discrimination and are denied their rights. Zrno said that the Croatian presence in the city has been halved and that neither Croats nor Serbs hold any important posts in local government. Serbs claim that in the city of 400,000 only 7,000 Serbs have remained, compared to 160,000 before the 1992-1995 civil war. The Serb claims have been supported by the Muslim President of the Bosnian Helsinki committee for human rights, Srdjan Dizdarevic, who said in a recent interview that Sarajevo had become a “monoethnic” city. “Over 90 percent of Sarajevo inhabitants belong to only one group, the Bosniacs,” Dizdarevic told weekly Fokus. “Ethnic cleansing in this city has, unfortunately, been successfully completed. If the will exists to reconstruct Bosnia on multiethnic principles, one should start with Sarajevo,” he concluded.
Dimitar Angelov elucidates the impact of the Ottoman Jihad on the vanquished Balkan populations:
“…the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula accomplished by the Turks over the course of about two centuries caused the incalculable ruin of material goods, countless massacres, the enslavement and exile of a great part of the population — in a word, a general and protracted decline of productivity, as was the case with Asia Minor after it was occupied by the same invaders. This decline in productivity is all the more striking when one recalls that in the mid-fourteenth century, as the Ottomans were gaining a foothold on the peninsula, the States that existed there — Byzantium, Bulgaria and Serbia — had already reached a rather high level of economic and cultural development….The campaigns of Mourad II (1421-1451) and especially those of his successor, Mahomet II (1451-1481) in Serbia, Bosnia, Albania and in the Byzantine princedom of the Peloponnesus, were of a particularly devastating character.”
This Ottoman Jihad tradition is still continued by “secular” Turkey to this day. Michael J. Totten visited Varosha, the Ghost City of Cyprus, in 2005. The city was deserted during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and is now fenced off and patrolled by the Turkish occupiers. The Turks carved up the island. Greek Cypriot citizens in Varosha expected to return to their homes within days. Instead, the Turks seized the empty city and wrapped it in fencing and wire.
In March 2006, Italian Luigi Geninazzi made a report from the same area. 180,000 persons live in the northern part of the island, 100,000 of whom are colonists originally from mainland Turkey. According to Geninazzi, the Islamization of the north of Cyprus has been concretized in the destruction of all that was Christian. Yannis Eliades, director of the Byzantine Museum of Nicosia, calculates that 25,000 icons have disappeared from the churches in the zone occupied by the Turks. Stupendous Byzantine and Romanesque churches, imposing monasteries, mosaics and frescoes have been sacked, violated, and destroyed. Many have been turned into restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. Geninazzi confronted Huseyn Ozel, a government spokesman for the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, with this. Most of the mosques in Greek Cypriot territory have been restored. So why are churches still today being turned into mosques? The Turkish Cypriot functionary spreads his arms wide: “It is an Ottoman custom…”
“There are religious centres in Bulgaria that belong to Islamic groups financed mostly by Saudi Arabian groups,” the head of Bulgarian military intelligence has warned. According to him, the centres were in southern and southeastern Bulgaria, where the country’s Muslims, mainly of Turkish origin, are concentrated, and “had links with similar organisations in Kosovo, Bosnia and Macedonia. For them Bulgaria seems to be a transit point to Western Europe.” He said the steps were taken to prevent terrorist groups gaining a foothold in Bulgaria, which shares a border with Turkey. Bulgaria’s Muslim minority accounts for more than 10 percent of the country’s population.
The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia passed a law allowing ethnic Albanians to display the Albanian national flag in areas where they form the majority. The decision came as a result of seven months of heavy fighting in 2001 involving Albanian separatists, and following pressure from the European Union, always ready to please Muslims.
Ethnic Albanians make up about 25 per cent of Macedonia’s population. If the demographic trends are anything like in Kosovo, where the predominantly Muslim Albanians have been out-breeding their non-Muslim neighbors, Macedonians could be facing serious trouble in the future. In Kosovo, dozens of churches and monasteries have been destroyed or damaged following ethnic cleansing of Christian Serbs, all under the auspices of NATO soldiers.
Raphael Israeli in his 2008 book The Islamic Challenge in Europe tracks the Islamization of various European countries, from Switzerland to Britain, and describes efforts to recreate the Ottoman Empire and use the Balkans as a launching pad for Jihad:
“After the fall of Communism in the new regime recognized, in 1991, the self-declared Republic of Kosovo, and its head, Ibrahim Rugova, opened an office in Tirana. The disintegration of Yugoslavia by necessity revived the old dreams of the Greater Albania, which now eyed not only Kosovo, but also parts of Macedonia, Greece, Serbia, and Montenegro where an Albanian population had settled over the years. The rising of Muslim consciousness in the Balkans, after the Bosnian precedent…now acts as a catalyst to draw together, under the combined banners of Greater Albania and Islam, all the Albanian populations of that region. In 1992 joined the Conference of Islamic Countries, and it has been working to attract support by other Islamic countries to the Greater Albania plan, actually presenting itself as ‘the shield of Islam’ in the Balkans. It has been noted that while the Albanian demographic explosion in Kosovo, which has allowed them to predominate and demand secession, has not taken place in Albania itself, perhaps an indication, as in Palestine and Bosnia, that the ‘battle of the womb’ heralded by nationalists and Muslim fundamentalists, is not merely a natural growth but may be also politically motivated.”
Miroljub Jevtic, professor at the Belgrade University and author of a number of books on the topic of Islam and politics, believes the Western world is in favor of detaching Kosovo from Christian Serbia by fiat and making it into an independent (Muslim) state. The main argument of those supporting this scenario, notably in the United States, is to improve their image in the eyes of the Islamic world and “co-opt the influence of Islamic ‘extremists.’“
Jevtic notes that “the fact that since the arrival of NATO to Kosovo over 150 Christian churches have been destroyed and some 400 mosques have been built, or are under construction, is for the Muslims a proof that if there is a faith which is supported by true God — it is Islam! Because, why would the Christian God, why would Jesus, permit the destruction of churches, where He, Jesus, is glorified? Why would He, at the same time, permit the construction of mosques, where His existence as God is denied? Why would He permit it, moreover, in the presence of men who bear arms and who claim to be Christians?”
Miroljub Jevtic warns that the European Union’s support for Albanian Muslim demands could backfire badly: “Granting the independence to Kosovo will be taken as proof of Europe’s own wish to cease to exist, as it not only allows the expansion of Islam but is actively promoting it by aiding those who are destroying churches, raping nuns, spitting on crosses and daubing with excrement holy images of Christ.”
In Kosovo, dozens of churches and monasteries have been destroyed following ethnic cleansing of Christian Serbs by the predominantly Muslim Albanians, all under the auspices of NATO soldiers, and Muslims are not ungrateful. Kosovo Albanians plan to honor their “savior,” former US President Bill Clinton, by erecting a statue of him. Yet in 2007, four Albanians from Kosovo along with other Muslims were arrested for conspiring to attack Fort Dix, a military base in New Jersey, the USA, in order “to kill as many soldiers as possible.”
Western governments are pushing for independence for a group of Jihadist thugs who recently wanted to create the Osama bin Laden mosque in Kosovo. This name was eventually changed for public relations reasons since the Albanians knew they needed American political support. In June 2007 the visiting US President George W. Bush was hailed as a hero by a group of Albanians, who allegedly also stole his watch. “Sooner rather than later you’ve got to say ‘Enough’s enough — Kosovo is independent,’“ Bush told cheering Albanians. As German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung later commented, “Why should the Albanians settle for autonomy when George W. Bush had already promised them their own state?”
President Bush declared a “War on Terror” after the Jihadist attacks in 2001. There have been no major terrorist attacks in the US between 2001 and 2008, which is a positive achievement. Nevertheless, the primary thing he has achieved is bleeding American tax payers financially and American soldiers literally while overseeing the eradication of non-Muslim communities in Iraq, and while the Islamization of the West continues unabated. His administration supports independence for terrorist-sponsoring Muslims in the Balkans and in the Palestinian territories. I suspect he will be judged harshly by future historians. But then virtually all Western leaders have failed during this time, not just him. Our societies have failed.
In a commentary, “We bombed the wrong side?” former Canadian UNPROFOR Commander Lewis MacKenzie wrote, “The Kosovo-Albanians have played us like a Stradivarius. We have subsidized and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure and independent Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence in the early ‘90s and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary. When they achieve independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, just consider the message of encouragement this sends to other terrorist-supported independence movements around the world.”
Martti Ahtisaari, former President of Finland and later Chief United Nations negotiator for Kosovo, caused anger in Serbia when he stated that “Serbs are guilty as a people,” implying that they would have to pay for it, possibly by losing the province of Kosovo. I disagree with him. It is one thing to criticize the brutality of the Milosevic regime. It is quite another thing to claim that “Serbs are guilty as a people.” If anybody in the Balkans can be called guilty as a people, it is the Turks, not the Serbs. The Turks have left a trail of blood across much of Europe and the Mediterranean for centuries, culminating in the Armenian genocide in the 20th century, which Turkey still refuses to acknowledge, let alone apologize for.
One of the last news items I added for this book was the announcement that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2008 was awarded to Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari for three decades of mediation around the world. Serbian politicians and analysts reacted with dismay to the information. Belgrade analyst Cvijetin Milivojevic laughed when he heard about it. “Ahtisaari negotiated no peace in Kosovo, but awarded ethnic Albanians a state on Serbian territory,” Milivojevic told Adnkronos International ( AKI ). “He was, in fact, rewarded for carrying out the orders of the major powers.” Ahtisaari was the only international mediator whose plan was not approved by the UN Security Council, but was implemented in Kosovo by a policy of force supported by both the USA and the EU.
Kosovo President Fatmir Sejdiu congratulated former Finnish President Ahtisaari for winning the Nobel Peace Prize, saying it was given to the most deserving person. Ahtisaari is regarded as a villain in Serbia and a hero in Kosovo over his mediation in talks on the status of Kosovo in 2005-2007. The talks failed, but Ahtisaari hammered out a Western-backed road map to independence. Kosovo’s Albanian majority declared independence in February 2008, using his plan. The Kosovo assembly welcomed Ahtisaari’s prize as a “victory” which will help in further recognition of Kosovo’s independence.
Just for the record: I’m not blaming Ahtisaari personally for the Kosovo mess; he was a tool for NATO. But his role contributed to his winning the Peace Prize, and I think that’s wrong.
I once listened to a speech by Patrick Sookhdeo, a brave former Muslim who has published books such as Global Jihad: The Future in the Face of Militant Islam. Sookhdeo had done a lot of excellent — and frightening — research regarding the Islamization of Western Europe, especially Britain. He recalled having a conversation with a senior Western official regarding what would happen if Muslims in a region of, say, Britain or the Netherlands, should declare that they would no longer accept the laws of the central government and formed a breakaway Islamic Republic. This official then replied that they would probably have to quietly accept that. When witnessing Muslim riots in France and elsewhere, which more and more resemble a civil war, this question is no longer just hypothetical.
As writer Julia Gorin has warned, “An independent Kosovo will serve as a nod to secessionists worldwide,” and “history will show what no one cares to understand: the current world war began officially in Yugoslavia.”
Granting Jihadists independence in Kosovo after they conducted ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims has established an extremely dangerous precedent. Not only is it immoral to sacrifice the freedom or existence of smaller nations, be that the Serbs or the Israelis, in order to save your own skin. As the example of Czechoslovakia demonstrated prior to WW2, it is also counterproductive. Supporting independence for Muslim Albanians in Kosovo will not lead to stabilization of the Balkans; it will rather lead to the Balkanization of the West. The new thug state will serve as a launching pad for Jihad activities against non-Muslims, just like an independent Palestinian state would do in the Middle East. In Kosovo, the Russians are right and Western leaders, both in the European Union and the United States, are wrong. The Serbs have suffered enough and don’t need to be stabbed in the back by the West as well.
Janos (John) Hunyadi, Hungarian warrior and captain-general, is today virtually unknown outside Hungary and the Balkans, but he probably did more than any other individual in stemming the Turkish invasion in the fifteenth century. His actions spanned all the countries of south-eastern Europe, leading international armies, negotiating with kings and popes. He died of plague after having destroyed an Ottoman fleet outside Belgrade in1456. His work slowed the Muslim advance, and may thus have saved Western Europe from falling to Islam. By extension, he may have helped save Western civilization in North America and Australia, too. Yet hardly anybody in West knows who he is. Our children don’t learn his name, they are only taught about the evils of Western colonialism and the dangers of Islamophobia.
Western Europe today is a strange and very dangerous mix of arrogance and self-loathing. Muslims are creating havoc and attacking their non-Muslim neighbors from Thailand to India. It is extremely arrogant to believe that the result will be any different in the Netherlands, Britain or Italy, or for that matter in the United States or Canada, than it has been everywhere else. It won’t. If we had the humility to listen to the advice of the Hindus of India or even our Christian cousins in south-eastern Europe, we wouldn’t be in as much trouble as we are now.
On the other hand, if we didn’t have such a culture of self-loathing, where our own cultural traditions are ridiculed in favor of a meaningless Multicultural cocktail, we probably wouldn’t have allowed massive Muslim immigration, either. There doesn’t have to be a contradiction between being proud of your cultural heritage and knowing that there may still be lessons you can learn from others. A wise man can do both. Westerners of our age do neither.
Sun Tzu, a contemporary of the great Chinese thinker Confucius, wrote The Art of War, the extremely influential book on military strategy, 2500 years ago. It is a book that deserves to be read in full, but one of the most famous quotations is this one: “So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”
The West has forgotten who our enemies are, but worse, we have also forgotten who we are. We are going to pay a heavy price for this historical amnesia.
Reparations from Muslims?
This essay was first published at Pamela Geller’s website Atlas Shrugs in September 2008. It is republished here with a few changes.
In early September 2008, demands were made that France must make reparations for its colonial past in Algeria. The calls followed the signing between Italy and Libya of a 5 billion dollar investment agreement to resolve colonial-era disputes. The 25-year deal includes the construction of a highway running between Egypt and Tunisia and the return to Libya of a prized ancient marble statue taken to Rome in colonial times. The settlement was a “complete and moral acknowledgement of the damage inflicted on Libya by Italy during the colonial period,” said Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. “Italy committed historic errors in Libya, and the Italian government’s move to apologise is positive,” secretary of Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) party, Al-Said Abu Haja, told Algerian daily El-Khabar. The FLN led the war of independence from France between 1954 and 1962. “We hope that the European Union will be able to put pressure on other former colonial powers such as France and get it to make amends for what it did in Algeria,” Haja added. “Algeria asked for France to apologise long before Libya [asked Italy]. The French occupied us for 130 years.”
I’m not an expert on French colonial history, but if I recall correctly, the French were at least partly motivated for establishing themselves in Algeria due to the Barbary pirates, who continued their evil activities well into the nineteenth century. The period of French colonial rule is the only period of civilization Algeria has experienced since the Romans. Muslims have been raiding Europe, especially the southern regions but sometimes even north of the Alps, continuously since the seventh century. In fact, the only period during more than 1300 years they haven’t done this was during the time of European colonialism. That’s what they are whining about now. This is compensation for lost jizya. Moreover, there are now more North Africans in France than there ever were Frenchmen in North Africa. If non-Europeans can resist colonization and expel intruders, why can’t Europeans do the same thing?
What about the Spanish and the Portuguese, who were under colonial rule far longer than were the Algerians? As Ibn Warraq says in his book Defending the West:
“Where the French presence lasted fewer than four years before they were ignominiously expelled by the British and Turks, the Ottomans had been the masters of Egypt since 1517, a total of 280 years. Even if we count the later British and French protectorates, Egypt was under Western control for sixty-seven years, Syria for twenty-one years, and Iraq for only fifteen — and, of course, Saudi Arabia was never under Western control. Contrast this with southern Spain, which was under the Muslim yoke for 781 years, Greece for 381 years, and the splendid new Christian capital that eclipsed Rome — Byzantium — which is still in Muslim hands. But no Spanish or Greek politics of victimhood apparently exist.”
From their strongholds in the Iberian Peninsula and elsewhere, Muslims raided the Mediterranean for many centuries. Here is Timothy Gregory in A History of Byzantium:
“In 826/8 Crete was taken by Arab adventurers from Spain, and in 827/9 Spanish Arabs were able to establish footholds in Sicily. The Arab presence on these two islands was to have serious repercussions for Byzantium. Crete became a base for Arab ‘pirates’ who made the Aegean and its shorelines unsafe for the Byzantines and presumably also disrupted trade in the area. The Arab bases on Sicily were the beginning of a long contest between Byzantines and Arabs for control of southern Italy and Sicily that was also to involve the papacy and, eventually, other powers from Western Europe. The Arabs also used these Sicilian bases to raid Italy and the Balkans.”
In 846 some Muslim Arabs arrived in a fleet at the mouth of the Tiber, made their way to Rome, sacked the city, and carried away from the basilica of St. Peter all of the gold and silver it contained. As Sandro Magister states:
“In 827 the Arabs had conquered Sicily, which they kept under their dominion for two and a half centuries. Rome was under serious threat from nearby. In 847, the year after the assault, the newly elected pope Leo IV began the construction of walls around the entire perimeter of the Vatican, 12 meters high and equipped with 44 towers. He completed the project in six years. These are the ‘Leonine’ walls, and significant traces of them still remain. But very few today know that these walls were erected to defend the see of Peter from an Islamic jihad in the ninth century, during which Rome was assaulted and Sicily was conquered, the Muslim armies occupied Bari and Brindisi in Italy for thirty years; Taranto for forty; Benevento for ten; they attacked Naples, Capua, Calabria, and Sardinia several times; they put the abbey of Montecassino to fire and the sword; they even made skirmishes in northern Italy, arriving from Spain and crossing over the Alps.”
The reason why the Vatican became a “city within the city” in Rome with fortifications was due to repeated attacks by Muslims (Saracens). Here are a couple of quotes from the book Rome: Art & Architecture, edited by Marco Bussagli:
“Leo IV’s major building project is generally considered to be the fortification of the Vatican area. After the devastation wrought by the Saracens in St. Peter’s, profoundly shocking to the Christian world, it was decided to fortify the area around St. Peter’s tomb. Leo III had already made this decision, but little had been done because of the theft of the materials set aside for the job. Leo IV, who had already undertaken the repair of the Aurelian walls, gates, and towers, organized the work in such a way that within four years he saw it complete. On June 27, 852 the ceremony of consecration of the walls was performed, in the presence of the pope and clergy, who, barefoot and with heads smeared with ashes, processed round the entire circuit of the fortifications, sprinkling them with holy water and at every gate calling on divine protection against the enemy that threatened the inhabitants. The enclosed area was to take on the status of a city in its own right, which was both separate and distinct from the Urbe of Rome, despite its proximity to it.”
“Despite defeat in 849 and 916 in the coastal cities of Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi, the Saracens continued to lay waste to the countryside and sack the outskirts of Rome, causing the already precarious living conditions of the urban population to deteriorate still further. In the face of this continuing external threat, not only was the Vatican area fortified, but the churches of San Sebastiano on the Appian WaySant’Agnese on Via Nomentana, and San Lorenzo on Via Tiburtina were strengthened.”
Among the finest sets of chess from medieval times are the Lewis Chessmen, believed to have been made in Trondheim, Norway, in the twelfth century. They were carved from walrus ivory, which was often imported from the Norse colony in Greenland. According to Jared Diamond in Collapse:
“Greenland’s most prized exports mentioned in Norwegian records were five products derived from Arctic animals rare or absent in most of Europe: walrus ivory from walrus tusks, walrus hide (valued because it yielded the strongest rope for ships), live polar bears or their hides as a spectacular status symbol, tusks of the narwhal (a small whale) known then in Europe as unicorn horns, and live gyrfalcons (the world’s largest falcon). Walrus tusks became the only ivory available in medieval Europe for carving after Moslems gained control of the Mediterranean, thereby cutting off supplies of elephant ivory to Christian Europe. As an example of the value placed on Greenland gyrfalcons, 12 of those birds sufficed in 1396 to ransom the Duke of Burgundy’s son after he was captured by the Saracens [Muslims].”
It is interesting to notice how Diamond, who usually ignores Islam in his writings, casually mentions the fact that Muslims “controlled the Mediterranean” and “cut Europe off” from contact with other cultures. Jihad piracy, slavery and attacks on European countries remained a constant menace from the seventh century until the so-called Barbary States in North Africa in the nineteenth century. Some would argue that it is resurfacing again now, for instance in the form of kidnapping of Western tourists which is becoming increasingly common as I write these words, encouraged by the ransom money often paid by European authorities.
The Age of Exploration during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was undertaken in order to get away from Muslims and re-establish contact with the civilizations of Asia without hostile middlemen. Norman Davies puts it this way in his monumental Europe: A History:
“Islam’s conquests turned Europe into Christianity’s main base. At the same time the great swathe of Muslim territory cut the Christians off from virtually all direct contact with other religions and civilizations. The barrier of militant Islam turned the [European] Peninsula in on itself, severing or transforming many of the earlier lines of commercial, intellectual and political intercourse.”
There were no universities in the Islamic world. I have encountered few if any institutions outside of Europe that I would call “universities” in the Western sense before modern times. Among the best candidates is the Great Monastery of Nalanda in India, which was a Buddhist institution. It was not built by Muslims, it was destroyed by Muslims.
Already before AD 1300, Europeans had created an expanding network of universities, an institution that had no real equivalent in any other civilization on earth, and had invented mechanical clocks and eyeglasses, which was also not done in any other civilization. It is easy to underestimate the importance of this, but the ability to make accurate measurements of natural phenomena was of vital importance during the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. The use of glass lenses for eyeglasses led directly to the development of the microscope and the telescope and the birth of modern medicine and astronomy. The network of universities facilitated the spread of information and debate and served as an incubator for many later scientific advances. All of these innovations were made centuries before European colonialism had begun, indeed at a time when Europe itself was a victim of colonialism and had been so for many centuries. Parts of Spain were still under Islamic occupation, an aggressive Jihad was being waged by the Turks in the remaining Byzantine lands, and the coasts from France via Italy to Croatia had been subject to centuries of Islamic raids.
Muslims complain because they want the good, old days of jizya payments back.
Those who were hit the hardest were the Balkan populations. The Balkans, with its close connections to Byzantium, was a reasonably sophisticated region of Europe in medieval times, until the Ottomans Turks devastated much of the area. One of the most appalling aspects of this was the practice of devshirme, the collecting of boys among the Christian minorities who were forcibly converted to Islam and taught to hate their own kin. Dr. Andrew G. Bostom, author of the books The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism and The Legacy of Jihad, quotes the work of scholar Vasiliki Papoulia, who highlights the continuous desperate struggle of the Christian populations against this forcefully imposed Ottoman levy:
“It is obvious that the population strongly resented…this measure [and the levy] could be carried out only by force. Those who refused to surrender their sons— the healthiest, the handsomest and the most intelligent— were on the spot put to death by hanging. Nevertheless we have examples of armed resistance. In 1565 a revolt took place in Epirus and Albania. The inhabitants killed the recruiting officers and the revolt was put down only after the sultan sent five hundred janissaries in support of the local sanjak—bey. We are better informed, thanks to the historic archives of Yerroia, about the uprising in Naousa in 1705 where the inhabitants killed the Silahdar Ahmed Celebi and his assistants and fled to the mountains as rebels. Some of them were later arrested and put to death.”
The Christian subjects tried for centuries to combat this evil practice:
“Since there was no possibility of escaping [the levy] the population resorted to several subterfuges. Some left their villages and fled to certain cities which enjoyed exemption from the child levy or migrated to Venetian—held territories. The result was a depopulation of the countryside. Others had their children marry at an early age…Nicephorus Angelus…states that at times the children ran away on their own initiative, but when they heard that the authorities had arrested their parents and were torturing them to death, returned and gave themselves up. La Giulletiere cites the case of a young Athenian who returned from hiding in order to save his father’s life and then chose to die himself rather than abjure his faith. According to the evidence in Turkish sources, some parents even succeeded in abducting their children after they had been recruited. The most successful way of escaping recruitment was through bribery. That the latter was very widespread is evident from the large amounts of money confiscated by the sultan from corrupt…officials.”
Lee Harris in his book The Suicide of Reason describes how this practice of devshirme, the process of culling the strongest and fittest “alpha boys,” targeted the non-Muslim subject populations:
“The bodyguard of Janissaries ‘had the task of protecting the sovereign from internal and external enemies,’ writes scholar Vasiliki Papoulia. ‘In order to fulfill this task it was subjected to very rigorous and special training, the janissary education famous in Ottoman society. This training made possible the spiritual transformation of Christian children into ardent fighters for the glory of the sultan and their newly acquired Islamic faith.’ Because the Christian boys had to be transformed into single-minded fanatics, it was not enough that they simply inherit their position. They had to be brainwashed into it, as we would say today, and this could be done most effectively with boys who had been completely cut off from all family ties. By taking the boys from their homes, and transporting them to virtually another world, devçirme assured that there would be no conflict of loyalties between family and duty to the empire. All loyalty would be focused on the group itself and on the sultan.”
This practice drained the strength of the Christian populations. Harris again:
“The culling of these alpha boys had two effects, both of them good for the Ottoman Empire, both bad for the subject population. By filling the critical posts in the Ottoman Empire with boys who had been selected on the basis of their intrinsic merit, and not on their family connection, the Empire was automatically creating a meritocracy — if a boy was tough, courageous, intelligent, and fanatically loyal, he was able to work his way up the Ottoman hierarchy; indeed, as we have seen, he become a member of the ruling elite, despite having the formal title of being the sultan’s slave. The Ottoman Empire was both strengthening itself through acquiring these alpha boys, and weakening its subject population by taking their best and brightest. Thanks to the institution of devçirme, the more ‘fit’ Christian boys who would be most likely to be the agents of rebellion against the Empire become the fanatical Muslim warriors who were used to suppress whatever troubles the less ‘fit’ Christian boys left behind were able to cause.”
Now that the entire Western world is under attack by Islamic Jihad, we would do well to listen to those who know the frontlines, such as Serge Trifkovic in his book Defeating Jihad.
The wars in the Balkans all the way into the 21st century are a direct result of the legacy of Turkish Muslim brutality. So why does nobody demand that the Turks apologize in public for their massacres and oppression? They should pay reparations to their former subjects, starting with the Armenians, who suffered a Jihad genocide less than a century ago, and continuing with the Serbs, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Croatians and others who have suffered hundreds of years of abuse and exploitation at their hands.
We can continue with all those European countries that have suffered attacks and enslavement by North African Barbary pirates for more than a thousand years. These nations should now demand public apologies and substantial financial reparations from Arabs and Turks. If these countries lack the funds to pay, we should hold the Islamic world collectively responsible and demand compensation from the rich members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference such as Saudi Arabia. While we are at it, why not demand compensation to all victims of Jihad, from the Jews who have been expelled from the Middle East to the Indians, who have died in the tens of millions for a thousand years or more?
Part 3 will appear tomorrow (October 29th, 2008).
1 comment:
Fjordman is an engaged and passionate writer who has his finger on the pulse of Europe's slide into dhimmitude. Unfortunately, for the sake of being treated as seriously as he might, his writing is polemical rather than carefully argued and substantiated. This is not to say this opinions are wrong - they may well be right - but that his claims are often made flippantly without recourse to data to back them. Fjordman's writing is punctuated with large but interesting quotes from other sources, which is fine, but the quotes often make the point he is trying to make more eloquently. His writingseems at time to be reduced to superficial commentary between ideas from others, giving the impression that if he has any ideas of his own it is to be found between the lines.
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