For the Record: Once More With Feeling

Evidently Charles Johnson is at it once more, gnawing the ropes that chain his mind to whatever delusions he needs to believe. Most of what he says is long past anything that could be termed “thinking”. Charles doesn’t think, he reaches his conclusions via the vastness of his hatreds and suspicions.

Thus do his irrational rants extrude themselves, so much baloney out of a meat grinder which ends up pasted in his blog. As Pascal said, the heart has its reasons that Reason knows not of. Black as his heart may be, it is indeed the locus of Johnson’s ideas. His atrophied faculty of Reason (a symptom he shares with much of the Left to which he has returned) is not often involved in what he says.

I am told that one of his obsessions is Pamela Geller. That’s understandable, given what he lost in the fight he picked with her. At one point, back before his irrationality was impossible to miss, Pamela attempted to reach some kind of détente with Charles. She was basing her efforts on his previous writings. But her information, like ours, was founded on what we knew of Little Green Footballs before Johnson was ‘turned’ — probably by black psy ops in Europe. This retooling of LGF was an event noticed by very few, though James Lewis sussed it out early (a point to which I will return, below).

These days Atlas Shrugs reaches a formidable audience, while LGF continues its twirling downward spiral. His self-destruction has become obvious to all… the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine indeed.

Today, Pamela Geller frontally attacks Johnson’s Leftist “smear-by-association” tactics, taking aim at the baseless lies of his charges:

Libelblogger Charles Johnson is claiming that the Norway shooter is a “Pamela Geller fan,” and that he is actually Fjordman, whose articles I have published here at Atlas on occasion. He has persisted in this even though Fjordman is online tonight and clearly not under arrest. This shows how desperate Johnson is, and how low he will sink. In reality, the shooter is not Fjordman. I have met Fjordman, I know his identity, and he is not Anders Breivik. This is just a sinister attempt to tar all anti-jihadists with responsibility for this man’s heinous actions.

The Jihadis took credit for it. Who would take credit for such barbarity and carnage? And yet this goes without comment. But there is no compunction in associating me with a mass murderer based on one referring link three years ago. McVeigh watched CNN when he lost it over Waco, so I guess CNN is a terrorist org?

But this is war. And the left is vicious, amoral and depraved. They mean to win, and that is the only way they know how.

As for the Johnson, he is a very sick man. Let’s hope he doesn’t hurt himself.

In a thousand words, Atlas Shrugs brings down this doddering fool. I would dissent only from her final sentence, because he has “hurt himself”, over and over again. These self-inflicted wounds don’t deserve our pity and normally they wouldn’t deserve our notice, but what she has said here needed saying. For the record.

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Back in November 2007, when LGF was doing its best to decimate the fledgling Counterjihad group (it was never a monolithic movement), he was a Big Deal with lots of traffic and credibility. So big that when he began tarring smaller bloggers with his lies (“libel” indeed) we asked the American Big Blogs for help. All of us asked. We assembled a complete refutation of his charges and sent it to the influential ‘conservative’ or right wing bloggers. Only one replied, and was obviously too nervous about the consequences to help us. None of the rest answered us by so much as a “don’t want to get involved’ email.

To this day we don’t know why they decided to stay “uninvolved”, but their silence still remains astounding. As I’ve said repeatedly, only Michelle Malkin continued to link to our posts. To the rest, it was as though we didn’t exist. Shunning is a powerful weapon and I’m here to tell you that the Right uses it every bit as effectively as the Left does. Sadly, the new media ain’t so different from the old media after all.

Soon even Pajamas Media shoved us out. We were on our own… except for our loyal readers and the people in Europe who told us how important it was to keep the Gates open.

Meanwhile, in the month following LGF’s treachery, James Lewis wrote an eye-opening essay for American Thinker. He laid out his suspicions about what had transpired, and his ideas fit Occam’s Razor very well. Even the title of his essay fit:

Political Black Ops in Belgium?

Then he proceeded to lay out the reasons this “minor war…in the conservative blogosphere…smell(ed) suspicious”:

Brussels Journal, edited by Paul Belien and others, reads like a solid, sensible conservative website, one of the best in Europe. It has a lot of smart people who don’t go along with the PC Commissars in the capital of the new EU, Brussels. They make a very good case for being skeptical about the ruling class over there. Brussels Journal has never seemed out of line to me.

Editor Paul Belien is a defender of the “Counter-jihad” movement in Belgium, which has been subjected to police beatings when they attempted to conduct a peaceful demonstration. Belien is warning that the Left in Europe is using immigrant Islamic votes to expand its power dramatically, leading to a Left-Islamist alliance that he believes will control Europe in the coming years. Sounds familiar? A Democrat amnesty for 12 million illegals, anyone?

All that seems important and credible enough. But now Charles Johnson, of Little Green Footballs fame, has gotten into a fight with Paul Belien. Forgetting the who-said-what-when minutiae, the question raised by Charles is whether Paul Belien is defending people who are tainted with racist or totalitarian ideas. In particular, the question is whether Paul Belien is too close to the Vlaams Belang party, which is accused of having racist or neo-Nazi associations. LGF is a very good site, and Charles Johnson is understandably passionate about keeping his reputation spotless.

So now we get into a classical hall of mirrors, of claim and counter-claim, and maybe even spy and counter-spy. Because it’s a good guess that the overheated Belgian political scene is full of mudslinging, disinformation, planted stories, and psyops.

Thus history repeats itself almost four years later, only this time the target of the LGF Tar Machine is Fjordman. Not a politician, not a famous person — Fjordman is simply a scholar deeply read in history. As an observer of the passing scene and a man dedicated to the preservation of Western culture (and of his own small country’s identity), Fjordman has become The Enemy to those who want to destroy sovereignty in the name of some vision of utopian global justice. We know how scared those in power are of those who speak the truth against this pernicious Lie.

Mr. Lewis’ essay goes on to describe the possible outcome of attacks like those at LGF. He outlines the situation in Brussels and in Europe generally:

Europe is still traumatized by its Nazi past, and the Nazis were not limited to Germany. They had sympathizers in every European country.

So it’s not impossible that the governing elites are sending agents provocateurs into the ranks of the Flemish Interest party, to parade around in Nazi drag and make nice with White Power sleazoids in the US.

That’s how J. Edgar Hoover hoovered up the Ku Klux Klan during the civil rights era. He infiltrated the Klan until every other guy in white sheets was an FBI plant. But it’s easy to slip from being an undercover cop into actually provoking acts of racist violence. That’s how undercover agents might prove they are doing their jobs.

He says of Germany:

In Europe there is much greater fear about neo-Nazis, for understandable reasons. Americans, if they think about them at all, tend to see them as clowns and weirdos, but the Germans see a potential SS goose-stepping into power. You can bet that the German government infiltrates their neo-Nazis.

And after reading up on Vlaams Belang, he concludes it is compatible with “the GOP platform”. Of course Charles Johnson, in his reversion to the Left, would say the same thing, but with an entirely different intent. Ignored by the Bigs in the GOP, Charles has all the hallmarks of a spurned lover.

Lewis reminds us of the inherent problem in choosing “sides”:

So whom do you believe? The trouble is that anywhere you look in Europe you can find smelly associations. The French themselves were by no means clean of Nazi associations sixty years ago, just as famous French intellectuals like Sartre were proud to be associated with good old mass-murdering Stalin and Mao. Socialist President Francois Mitterrand started his political career as a fascist. The whole European governing class has a very bad case of the guilts, and a lot of them deserve it.

The French-speaking elite in Belgium probably believes that they are the only ones standing between civilization and a Nazi revival. That is a common belief in all the European elites. It is one of the major arguments for the European Union, which is hardly an model of democratic governance. The elected members of the EU don’t govern, and the governing elites are not elected. The sneering elites tend to look upon ordinary people as racists. In fact the inconvenient truth is that the Nazis recruited very successfully from the elites themselves.

Yes indeed. In fact this inconvenient truth is responsible for the contortions you see in Europe by the ruling elite. Psychiatrists would call it projection.

Lewis warns Americans to be careful about taking things at face value:

I visited Belgium several years ago, and just happened to see a TV news program featuring some spokesfolks for Vlaams Belang. They looked like extras from the Star Wars bar scene; if they ever lost their jobs in Belgium they could go straight to Central Casting. There’s always a need in show business for bad guys who really look like bad guys. It was amazing. I can’t imagine a real political party parading those people on TV. Imagine if the Republican Party of Mississippi had spokespeople straight out of Deliverance? Would they be for real?

In Europe the electronic media tend to be government-owned, like the BBC (and we know how fair-minded they are). European governments in their turn are mostly owned by parties of the Left. We know that those people are not afraid to use dirty tricks to stay in power. London’s socialist mayor does not mind appealing to blatant anti-Semitism to get Pakistani votes. Jacques Chirac stands legally accused today for using dirty tricks against the new president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. The BBC has admitted to smuggling in its own undercover “journalists” to sniff out racism at a Conservative Party meeting. Nice people.

The average person in Europe isn’t fooled, but he has to work very hard to discover the reality behind the government version of Truth, ladled out in carefully controlled sound-bites. Where do you go to read real unrevised history when all the official channels have taken their lesson plans from 20th Century totalitarians?

Lewis gives his bottom line, five years ago. It hasn’t changed:

Bottom line:

The conservative blogosphere is not immune to disinformation ops. If the American Left can’t knock out conservative talk radio with the Fairness Doctrine, they have enough billionaires who are happy to sponsor dirty tricks to split the conservative movement. “Black PR” is quite likely to happen during the coming election. Keep an eye out for it.

It is therefore at least possible that Charles Johnson has been taken in by disinformation. It’s easy to fall for suspicious information on the web. I would guess that Paul Belien and the writers for Brussels Journal are really decent people. They are constantly smeared by the Belgian Left, which is practically a proof of their personal probity. But they have some unfinished business.

There is a reasonable answer to this mess, which is to ask that Caesar’s wife be above suspicion. After American Labor was penetrated by Communist agents in the 1930s and 40s, the AFL-CIO expelled unions that didn’t clean up their act. That was an act of public clarification — it engendered real trust in pro-American union leaders like George Meany and Ronald Reagan, who began his political career as president of the Screen Actors Guild.

One reason why the American Left is in such bad shape today is that they no longer bother to clean out their totalitarians. Conservatives are doing well today in part because William Buckley and others drew a sharp line against racists decades ago. Conservatives today are delighted to see Clarence Thomas and Bobby Jindal achieving high office, not just because they are good people, but also because their success declares to the world who we really are.

I would only demur regarding his final paragraph, here:

So it may be sensible to ask conservatives elsewhere to prove their good intentions, just as we need to demand that the Democrats throw out their totalitarians.

Mr. Lewis, you sussed out the reasons for part of Charles Johnson’s attacks. However, there is no way to “prove good intentions”. None. Nada. We have learned the uselessness of “proofs” in the face of opponents who argue in bad faith. Their intention is never to “open a dialogue’, it is to destroy anyone who steps out of their multi-culti box.

You cannot prove a negative. Don’t even try.