Friday, July 07, 2006

Follow-up: Another Euro-Myth Bites the Dust

In a recent post we discussed the relative safety of living in gun-toting America vs. dwelling in the ancient cities of Europe. The consensus was that while crime in the U.S. was lower, murder rates were higher. All those guns, you know.

Well, just to liven things up a bit, Paul Belien sent an email to disabuse us of that notion: the EU is beginning to pass the US in the murder and mayhem department. From Living Dangerously in Brussels, the following statistics:

Murder and manslaughter in the U.S.: 16,137 cases in 2004 (5.5 per 100,000 inhabitants).

Percent change compared to 2003: -2.4

Murder and manslaughter (moord en doodslag) in Belgium: 959 cases in 2004 (9.1 per 100,000 inhabitants).

Percent change compared to 2003: +11.12


Do yourself a favor and read his essay, Europe Must Find its Roots in America:

…History never repeats itself, and yet similarities are often so striking that in a way there is nothing new under the sun. In the 17th and 18th centuries North America was colonised by freedom loving people who brought the political institutions and traditions from Europe to a new continent across the sea. Many of them had left Europe because they wanted the freedom to live according to their own conscience instead of the conscience of the centralist absolutist rulers of the new age that was sweeping across Europe from the 16th century onwards. Their traditions were rooted in the decentralised traditions of the late Middle Ages and the Aristotelian philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Europe’s Middle Ages had been characterised by an absence of central power, while man was bound to multiple legal systems: the legal order of his city, that of the land, that of his guild, that of the church. There was not one monopolistic ruler, as in China or in the Muslim world, but many, which guaranteed greater freedom for the individual. The philosophy of Aquinas, moreover, was centered on the individual. God had called man to be free from sin, but in order to be free from sin he had to be virtuous, and in order for virtue to have any value it had to be voluntary, implying that the virtuous man had to be free in every aspect of his life including, as Aquinas’ followers later pointed out, his economic activities.

Hence the paradox came about that the civil society developing in the new continent was in a sense older than the new Modern Age of the absolutist monarchs governing Europe. When the Americans rebelled in 1776 they rebelled against absolutism in order to keep their old freedoms. Theirs was a conservative revolution. Europe had its own series of revolutions from 1789 onwards, but these were revolutions of a different sort. They toppled the ruling absolutists to replace them by absolutists of an even extremer form: totalitarians. These were not satisfied with controlling their subjects’ political and economic lives but also wished to control their minds and souls, i.e. to become their god.

[…]

American society is a society whose culture and view of mankind resembles that of the old mediaeval Europe from which it organically evolved. It puts man before the state because it accepts that man should come to God as a free being. Europe, having lived through the perversions of the Modern Age, has absorbed much of the absolutist and totalitarian spirit….

Read the whole thing, especially the beginning, where Mr. Belien points out how Ireland saved civilization during the Dark Ages. Ahem. His points about Americans’ understanding of economic functions read as though they were from one of Starling David Hunter‘s classroom lectures.

10 comments:

X said...

Rather than europe in general, America more resembles pre-norman england and scandanavia - especially... Denmark. Funny that. The nordic legal system rested first on the primacy of the individual's rights and responsiblities and went from there. And even post-norman england retained most of that individualism, despite the imposition of frankish beurocracy - ie the domesday book. Because those normans, as you may know, were originaly from somewhere around southern sweden or norway.

The continent - specifically France - was always more geared toward the autocracy of the master/slave relationship between the rulers and the villein, which is probably why it produced so many autocratic revolutions.

Zonka said...

I echo the views of archonix, there is a vast difference between the Mediteranean types and the Northern Europeans!

For comparison the Danish figures for Murder and Manslaughter are:

2003: 39 cases (0.72 per 100,000 inhabitants)
2004: 42 cases (0.77 per 100,000 inhabitants)
(Source Danmarks Statestik)

And the number of cases have been more or less the same since 1990 (though there were a peak in 1996-98 with 60-76 murders/manslaghter cases per year)

X said...

One other thing: most violent deaths in sweden and norway are self-inflicted. It's a side-effect of the über-socialism those countries have placed themselves under, I think. Though the long winders might have something to do with it... it's almost like they've lost the will to live.

Anonymous said...

On thin ice and at the risk of being labeled, I offer:

Some years ago, when the US was being bashed as the most gun-violent first-world country, I looked at FBI crime statistics (probably from the Farmers Alamanac.) I saw that if one took away black-crime particularly black-on-black crime, our murder rates were comparable to other first world countries.

Since that time, I believe North African and Carribbean immigration into Europe has significantly increased.

Some would blame "grinding poverty," I prefer to blame "plain old immorality."

Anonymous said...

I also blame the failure of the Church in the face of a burgeoning liberalism.

I am not surprised that suicides would increase in such a society.

In Russet Shadows said...

Whit, you are dead right. It is very impolitic to say so, but the violent black crime rate is exceptionally high. Of this crime, nearly all of it is directed at black victims. That is the unspoken war that's going on in America's larger cities every day. Of course, what happens when this is brought up? The usual cries of racism spew forth, which put pressure on the criminal justice system to allow the criminals free, which continues the problem. So liberals let the black community self-destruct as a way of getting rid of them. It's so predictable and so sad.

Frank said...

I don't know why there is such a reluctance to talk about the elephant in the room. Its multiracial immigration. Duh.

To some extant the PC argument that its "multiculturalism" is true, but where race comes into it is the assimilation factor, which appears to be virtually nil when the hegemonic society is caucasian and the new immigrants are not. It seems to work the other way around too. I think everyone knows that anyway and tends to use "culture" as a euphemism for "race" lest they get accused of the new heresy: "racism".

I long ago lost all fear of the word...call me racist till the cows come home; it makes not one whit of difference to the truth.

It would seem, and I'm working on this project now, that multiracial assimilation CAN work, and has worked, but only on an extremely limited basis. What the neo-liberal elites have done, with the best of intentions as usual, is open the floodgates, allowing critical masses of racial units to build up, to the point that self-supporting ghettoization is well under way. Apparently the last thing they are going to do is admit the mistake. At this point how can they? Oops.

Islam is only the immediate issue. What happens to the north American western seaboard when the war with China comes along in a decade or two?

I don't see how it is possible to fix the problem at this point. Not short of a bloodbath.

X said...

At the risk of sounding like a clich'e, some of my best friends are black. I don't think it's race that causes the problem so much as sheer volume and lack of discipline. Unfettered immigration always causes problems. See, in the early 1950s we imported, for want of a better word, a lot of cheap labour from the carribbean, enough to get our economy functioning again after the losses from world war 2. that worked. They assimiliated well, and they had enough in common with our culture to fit in easillery as soon as they arrived. Then in the late 60s 70s there was a wave of immigration from india, and hong kong, which also worked because it was fairly limited and, again, they were culturally influenced by us already. The fact that they were hindus might have helped too... of course, in the mid 80s we started getting immigrants from nigeria and other african countries, where the culture was less similar, and from pakistan and bangladesh, south asia, central afica and other such places. At this point our immigration controls were being handed over to the EC - later to be the EU - and immigration turned from a trickle to a flood, to coin a phrase.

By then we were getting people who wanted the benefit of our society without necessarily having to live by our rules, not realising that the rules are the props that held our society up in the first place. The multicultural idea first appeared in the 70s, and went on growing through the 80s, encouraging all these immigrants and not leaving enough time for each wave to assimilate itself.

There was a man not so long ago, bit of an egomaniac by all accounts, but nevertheless with the right ideas, who proclaimed the followingL: you can have multireligious, multiethnic, multiracial and everything works, but if you introduce multicultural it all falls apart. A culture is the definition of what a nation is; culture is whether you put your garbage out for collection in a bin or throw it over the back wall, whether you have one wife or half a dozen, whether you allow genital cutting or make it illegal. Culture and law define each other, so if you start allowing more than one culture, people start to say "why can't I do it this way? It's my culture" and you get the police saying "we can't arrest this man for this murder, it's their culture".

There are areas in some cities in the UK that have almost exclusively bangladeshi populations, and in these areas, until very recently, the bins were never filled. Their culture was to simply toss rubbish over the garden wall in to the back alley, where it would be picked over by the poorest of their society. In bangladesh it allows people to survive when they have nothing. Here, it just makes a stinky mess, and so our culture is to put it in to bins and bury it.

For a nation to survive, people must abide by its culture, or law and order starts to break down. It could be made up of equal quarters anglo-protestant, gujaratii indian, mongolian horsemen and serengeti plainsmen but as long as they all stick to the common culture it'll survive.

Of course, it would be remis of me to point out that the culture most likely to remain stable is the sort of anglo-saxon protestant culture we have in the anglosphere...

Frank said...

Archonix, if you are speaking to me, I did point out that limited multiracial immigration can and has worked...to some extent:

"It would seem, and I'm working on this project now, that multiracial assimilation CAN work, and has worked, but only on an extremely limited basis..."

Having said that, one has to notice that whereas Irish, eastern Europeans, and various diverse Caucasian groups have, despite very different original cultures, become part of the dominant anglo-saxon culture in North America, the Chinese, despite having been here longer than many already assimilated groups, have not integrated to the same extent as other Caucasians.

In cities which formerly had "Little Italys" or "Irish neighbourhoods" and so on, those neighbourhoods have long ago assimilated to the point of disappearance, but I don't know of a single large NA city which doesn't have a very distinct "Chinatown".

This is not to say that Chinatowns are a bad thing...in fact they are quaint and quite in keeping with the propaganda put about by the multicult idiots in celebration of "diversity" and "vibrancy". More importantly, a small Chinatown, even after well over a 100 years of non-assimilation, was until recently essentially harmless by virtue of its relative inconsequence.

But, as you recognize, when the floodgates have been opened to the extent that they have over the past few decades, we are well past the point of no return.

We cannot legislate assimilation even if the elites (I hate using that word...its so marginalizing) were inclined to admit past mistakes and do so. We cannot stop Muslims or Bangladeshis or South American headhunters from self-ghettoizing, which is precisely what is happening.

And the critical masses are now beginning to appear, with numbers significant enough to be taken seriously. Various non-caucasian ethnic groups are beginning to use the pluralistic ethos of our society to argue for changes in it. Changes which will fundamentally change the nature of the west.

There is another issue which will become increasingly detrimental to the survival of the west...foreign policy. Imagine the situation in Vancouver, well on its way to becoming predominantly Chinese, or San Fransisco, if tensions arise between the west and China, as they almost certainly will. We have already seen the problems a much smaller Arab population can do in response to wars against Arab states.

Finally, there is strength in homogeniety that is lost forever in the west. This flies in the fact of the unsubstantiated propaganda we have heard for decades, claiming that "diversity" strengthens a society, but it is true nonetheless. All sorts of ridiculous slogans and analogies abound about how societies "stagnate" without infusions of new populations, and while it may be true of gene pools, it most certainly isn't of societies. One need only look at homogenous and proudly "racist" societies like Japan and china to see the fallacy of that.

Anyway, as I said...I'm working on this project, but I don't want to let it all out now lol...

X said...

I was speaking in more general terms rather than at you. I didn't mean to sound like I was getting at you or anything like that, so sorry if I did. :)