The BBC reports:

Next month the Dutch parliament is expected to approve a ban on halal and kosher methods of slaughtering animals for food.

Those who proposed the ban say it is simply an issue of animal welfare, but it received strong support from the right-wing Freedom Party.

Many see it as a violation of their religious freedom, and among the Jewish community it is a worrying echo of a similar ban brought in by Hitler.

One of the Muslims interviewed moaned that the Dutch desire Muslims to be Muslims at home, but not in society. I think that is correct. And, what is more, I venture that many would also define 'home' as 'not in the Netherlands'—meaning, overseas, far away, where the Muslims came from originally and ought to have remained.

It is disappointing that the Nethelands' chief Rabbi, Benjamin Jacobs, hauls in Hitler and the Holocaust to bolster his complaint (see video in the BBC report). Could he not have voiced his displeasure without doing that?

Be that as it may, this ban on halal butchery shows what is still possible to achieve in contemporary politics, despite the state-sponsored policies of immigration and multiculturalism.

Animal welfare has preoccupied both the liberals and traditionalists, and because this common ground exists, it has been possible for anti-immigration politicians to use arguments processable by their opponents to slow down the damage caused… by their opponents.

This is not the only example of how the very ideology of the Left can be turned against them—with Leftists' approval.

Another has been criticism of Israel's human rights record, which has resulted in academic boycotts of Israel. Although progress on that front has been somewhat slow.

Yet another should be opposition to the debt racket ran by the banksters of Goldman Sachs and their ilk. There have been screams of disgust from both extremes of the political spectrum, but no tactical coalition has been formed in order to achieve fundamental reform in this area.

I bears noting, however, that policies or practices that indirectly exclude non-European immigrants and their descendants are, from the point of view of tactical politics, not entirely reliable, and ought to be formulated with care.

In December 2005, for example, Soulidarieta, a charity group with alleged links to Identity Bloc, began distributing pork soup to the needy at locations close to soup kitchens. Alsace Solidarity launched a similar initiative in Strasbourg a few weeks later. The traditional soup was designated 'Identity Soup' by its chefs.

Within less than two months officials banned the handouts in Strasbourg and the police closed down offending soup kitchens Paris. This, at the urging of an anti-racism group, the rather Orwellian Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples, whose lobbyists urged the then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to impose a country-wide ban.

Strasbourg's mayor, alerted to the racial subtext, pontificated: 'Schemes with racial subtexts must be denounced'.

The weakness of this scheme was that the Left does not care about traditional cuisine or traditional anything, the way that they think they care about things like animal welfare and human rights. Thus, although the anti-racists' complaint was eventually rejected in the courts, it was easy initially to impose a ban. 

It seems it has been less easy to argue against banning halal butchery, even if there is a racial subtext, when animal welfare is concerned. Note that a supporter of the Dutch ban is Marianne Thieme's Party for Animals, a party that for modern standards is considered to be of the 'centre-Left'.

Perhaps there are lessons for identity politicians here.

In the desperate war for the soul of the West, we witness another atrocity. And this time the perpetrator was neither a Bolshevik nor a disciple of Mahomet. Last week Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian, gunned down 68 unarmed Labor Party youth activists on an island camp outside Oslo after bombing government offices (where eight died). The deed, he announced, had been wrought in the name of traditional Europe. Breivik’s massacre seems designed to inflict maximum damage to the European cause, but at this point it looks to be the well-planned and executed work of a dedicated madman.

Breivik claims to have acted on behalf of Christendom, and so appropriated its heroes and imagery in his propaganda. In this we uncover the tragedy of his recourse to murder, as well as an element of the diabolical. Speaking on the inversion of symbols, the great French traditionalist René Guenon would warn:

“It sometimes so happens that people who imagine that they are fighting the devil, whatever their particular notion of the devil may be, are thus turned, without any suspicion of the fact on their part, into his best servants!”

From time to time I encounter the slogan ‘worse is better’ within dissidents on the Right. To me this has always sounded as a rationalisation, a mantra intended by the user to help him cope with loss, defeat, inaction, and helplessness. The reason is that, for worse to really be better, there would need to be a credible alternative to the existing system already in place, needing only the critical mass that would be made available by a collapsing system. And as at present a genuine alternative exists mostly in theory, and only very incipiently in practice, with credibility outside its cultural ghetto yet to be earned, for as long as that is the case, worse for us can only mean worse.

An iteration of the ‘worse is better’ mantra was recently enunciated in connection with the United States presidential elections of 2012, which the incumbent, Barack Obama, intends to fight against an as yet unspecified Republican candidate. It was argued that, in the light of Obama’s record to date and of precedent established by previous presidential second terms, an Obama win would be immensely beneficial. The assumption is that Obama will further discredit himself with a large-enough majority of voters, and that his discredit will infect the mainstream political establishment, causing voters to seek alternatives outside of this establishment. It was further argued that a Republican win would create the illusion of progress among the ill-informed, while only delaying, and ultimately opening the way, for further evil from the hard Left.

While the latter argument is correct, the former one relies on fallacies.

When I was finishing The Real National Interest (TRNI), it became clear that a follow-up article would be needed; because there is a complimentary aspect of state policy; common to all nations of the West, whose justification isn't entirely clear from the ethnocentric perspective referred to in the original article.

It might be useful to first restate the hypothesis posited in TRNI: That American Near- and Middle-East policy is logical and comprehensible when viewed from the perspective of its actual purpose: to destroy or marginalize potential threats to the state of Israel. These threats being other nation-states or coalitions thereof. And that “terrorists” are not only not a threat to Israel (or any other state)—they are to a large extent useful catalysts for the aggrandizement of state power. Thus the goal of American policy in this region is to destroy nation-states; and if the dissolution of a given state actually results in the propagation of terrorist activity—all the better.

When a modern, secular state such as Iraq is replaced by a largely anarchistic, proto-feudal and unstable pastiche of clashing religions and ethnicities, sharing nothing in common but a tendency towards religious fundamentalism and intolerance for “the other”, the region (one can no longer refer to it as a state in any meaningful sense) loses the capacity to act outwardly—to project a common will to power—and instead becomes consumed by internal conflicts that feed upon themselves, and that are relatively easy for external forces to influence, inflame, and maintain.

And when readers of the original article suggest that “hand[ing] Egypt over to the Muslim Brotherhood” is a failure of US foreign policy, they are precisely missing the point. In fact, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism is one of the greatest boons of our adventures over there. People need to consider what Islamic fundamentalism actually is: It is not only a retrograde religion—it is cultural and civilizational retrogression! Islamic fundamentalism creates societies of unemployable men and ignorant and civically “invisible” women, who are collectively incapable of maintaining, much less producing, the level of technological development necessary to create a functioning, modern state. Indeed, Islamic fundamentalism is the indoctrination of teeming masses into a societal model taken en bloc from the first millennium AD.

In Western countries, boys and girls go to school and learn things like math, biology, physics, chemistry, history, and their language. One can argue convincingly about the pathetic state of education in many western countries—but the intent is as described. In Muslim countries dominated by fundamentalists, boys go to madrasas and learn how to recite the Koran forwards and backwards by heart. Girls . . . well, girls get to stay at home and be quiet and out of sight—OR ELSE. The extent to which reciting the Koran can help put a man on the moon (or more to the point—design and build a modern, main battle tank capable of taking on, say, the Merkava) is unknown to me, but I have a feeling it's rather limited.

So in conclusion, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism is an effective means of transforming what might otherwise be a temporary state of political disarray into a permanent state of 6^th century, ineffectual feudalism. That these teeming masses are at times inclined to strap dynamite to their chests and blow up stuff in a futile expression of their inability to accomplish anything on a meaningful, political level is icing on the cake.

This leads me to the larger point about the state policy exhibited throughout the West: wholesale immigration of various, culture enrichers—many of them Muslim. People are often incredulous when they note the current degree of anti-Semitism prevalent in these new arrivals—and they ask the logical question of whether or not this immigration isn't mortally dangerous for the Jewish populations of the countries being culturally enriched. The suggestion being that the Jewish community—by supporting (as they unquestionably have) wholesale Islamic immigration into western countries—is actually engaging in an insane and ultimately self-defeating policy. I do not believe this is the case, and indeed, I think that this policy meshes well with the Zionist project of Greater Israel (which is being facilitated by the foreign policy that was the subject of TRNI). There are three aspects that characterize the successful nature of this external political project—the transformation of the West into a multicultural soup comprised in no small part of Islamic ingredients:

Firstly, there is the “secular” political benefit of destroying ethnic homogeneity of Western states. This being the ability of a group exhibiting high intelligence, an ingroup/outgroup moral code, a strong sense of self, and the willingness to act in its own interests, to control a motley collection of other groups that are lacking one or more of the same characteristics. In order to affect this transformation, one makes use of the materials that are available. Since France is a long swim—even for a Mexican—one turns to France's southern “neighbors” . . . making use of a little, good ole collective guilt over colonialism in the process. Indeed, one can already see this playing off of various parties taking place in Europe – where Jewish, crypto-Jewish, or philo-Semitic politicians like Geert Wilders co-opt nativist movements in a fashion that remains beneficial to Jewish interests, while Leftish Jewish groups join hands with Muslim organizations to condemn European racism.

Secondly, Jews have historically gotten along fairly well with their Semitic cousins. They did well for themselves oppressing the Visigoths in Spain, while acting as agents for their Moorish masters. Sure, there's some bad blood between them right now over the whole Palestinian thing, but that won't last. My personal theory in this regard is that the Zionists figure that giving Europe to Islam is a small price to pay for securing their Biblical homeland in its entirety. If the Jews in Europe are frightened by near-term anti-Semitism, all the better. They're having trouble convincing them to make Aliyah in its absence. And after a century or so, they'll be able to move back to what's left of Paris and enjoy the pleasure of manipulating the various, competing ethnies in the former, romantic capital of the world via petty politics, corruption, and manufactured intrigue.

Thirdly, the infusion of Islamic populations—and Islamic fundamentalism as described above—is part of the dysgenic process by which the populace of the Western world will be transformed into a permanently manageable herd. The Germany of 1933 was an unpleasant lesson (as was the Spanish Reconquista and subsequent Inquisition) of precisely what happens when one visits too much abuse on a homogenous and intelligent host population. Point #1 above deals with the whole “homogenous” part. The second part of this, final solution is to reduce the level of intelligence and knowledge of the host population to the point that it is no longer capable of engendering effective resistance. A friend of mine used to refer to this as the “São Paulo Model”. I used to scoff at it. I'm not so sure anymore. Certainly, the dumbing-down of education and culture is unquestionably useful in making the citizens of Western countries manageable and manipulable. This is a goal that is beneficial not only to alien powers. Limiting access to education is a tool used often and historically to control certain populations; women in Islamic countries being a useful example. But overwhelming intelligent populations with sub-intelligent ones seems like a logical extension of this—and a permanent one at that. No need to worry about controlling “evil” books and ideas when there's no one willing or capable of reading or thinking them.

Some might suggest that this is all too conspiratorial. But it doesn't have to be a “conspiracy” in the sense of an entire ethnic group getting together in auntie Ruth's basement to make plans that they put secretly into motion. More likely, it's an organic movement in a common and commonly beneficial direction, of a people united in their perception of self as “the oppressed outsider”. Some might also suggest that the Jewish community might feel unhappy or disappointed by the end product of these machinations. Aren't they happier within a French France or an English England than they will be in these countries, once the demographic time-bombs they've helped build explode? Maybe. But one of the greatest failures of Western man has been his ridiculous tendency to project his sentiments and sensibilities on others. The idea that the Negro (or the Japanese, or the Indian, and so forth) is just like him—but in a different, physical wrapper—is pathetic and fundamentally wrong. Is it not logical, in fact, that a people who are themselves products of thousands of years of history in crowded, chaotic, multi-ethnic cities would be more at home in such an environment than in the quiet, orderly, homogenous, “boring” communities that we Europeans find most comforting?

It is fitting that the initial phase of the U.S. attack on Libya was overshadowed in the media by college basketball finals, popularly and quite appropriately known as March Madness. Wars, akin to dated sitcom reruns, have no hope for ratings share considering the competition. And a company like Sony won’t pay to advertise its new Playstation game Kill Zone 3 during scripted and predictable news of another desert intervention. Perhaps the press should have just phoned in coverage of the action by playing clips from the films G.I. Jane and The American President, both depicting a conflict with Tripoli. The public would doubtless be comforted that Commander-in-Chief Michael Douglas has sent Demi Moore and her fellow-SEALs to teach the Libyans a lesson in democracy.

Our absurd fantasy state reflects the approach of a monstrous reality- a world empire, declaring itself the embodiment of universal good, moves to subjugate any points of opposition to its rule. From this chaos emerges a counterfeit order, and before us appears a premonition of Yeats’ rough beast, “with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun”.

The January 24^th terrorist bombing at Domodedovo Airport in Moscow serves as a reminder of why Russia throughout its history has dwelt in a state of mobilization. The vast spaces of the Eurasian heartland have concealed a wide array of adversaries, from Poland’s Winged Hussars and the Grande Armée to Turkic nomads and rebellious Caucasian mountaineers. War is a reality that manifests itself here with depressing regularity, and it has been firmly impressed in the Russian historical memory. From fields of battle to the dark recesses of the soul, Russia more than other cultures is defined by struggle.

And so the carnage persists into our brave new twenty-first century; this time a suicide bomber killed 35 innocents during the hours of Monday-morning travel. The attack was most likely carried out by a cell of the Caucasus Emirate, a jihadist umbrella organization. It was calculated to further destabilize the republics of the North Caucasus and possibly drive inter-ethnic tensions in Russia’s major cities to a breaking point. Retribution, as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin remarked, will be inevitable. But in calibrating a response, the Kremlin is placed in an extraordinarily difficult position, as it must attend to a situation that could quickly spin out of control.

The University of Athens, in the heart of the city, is a building of great emotional significance to Greeks. It was built in 1837 during the reign of King Otto (1815-1867), to celebrate Greece’s liberation from almost four centuries (1453-1821) of Turkish occupation and oppression.

Designed by the Danish architect Christian Hansen, it has an imposing Ionic portico of great beauty and simplicity. The Austrian painter Carl Rahl (1812-1865) executed a large patriotic composition inside the portico representing the regeneration of arts and sciences under Otto. In front of the gateway are statues of two national heroes—the Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory V, hanged by the Turks on Easter Day in 1821, and the poet-martyr Rigas Ferraios, strangled in Belgrade in 1798 on the orders of the Ottomans. At the top of the external staircase is a statue of the Greek-French scholar Adamantios Korais (1746-1833, whose linguistic work bolstered Greek self-awareness), in the garden a statue of the British statesman William Gladstone and nearby a pillar in memory of the young students who died during the liberation struggles.

But on 16 November, this iconic setting was marred by a strikingly incongruous sight, as over 1,000 Muslims held public prayers inside the portico on the first day of the Muslim festival of Eid.

The prayer was organized by the Muslim Union of Greece, and had to be held under the protection of no fewer than 7,000 police officers. In other parts of the city, such as Attica Square, there were counter-demonstrations by outraged local residents, who threw eggs and yoghurt and shouted anti-Islamic slogans, while far-right groups waved Greek flags and played heavy metal and underground Greek songs at high volume in an attempt to drown out the imams.

It was the second time in recent months that the Muslim Union of Greece had organized a public prayer in central Athens to highlight their campaign to build a mosque. Athens may be the only capital in Europe without an official mosque, although there are many unofficial mosques in private apartments. The PASOK (Socialist) government has now promised to build a mosque in a former naval base in the western suburbs, at an estimated cost of 10-16 million Euros—at a time when the financial austerity programme has reduced the average family income by 20-30%.

The strong public antipathy towards Islam is based largely on bitter folk-memories of Ottoman rule. The Ottomans prohibited the teaching of Greek and Greek history and forcibly converted churches to mosques—which meant that the Orthodox Church was the only institution capable of being a focus for Greek national identity, through the use of Greek in the liturgy and its small-scale schooling efforts. Many clergymen were executed in Turkish reprisals whenever Greeks disobeyed orders or revolted. But the most serious disability was the janissary levy—whereby Christian families in the Balkans were required to deliver to the Ottoman authorities a proportion of their most intelligent and handsome male children to serve as elite troops, after forcible conversion to Islam. On top of these painful memories, hostility to Islamic immigration is driven by the knowledge that many Muslims now in Greece are illegal immigrants.

The flow of illegals started just 10-15 years ago. Before then, Greece had been one of the most homogeneous countries in Europe. It is now estimated that Greece has an illegal immigrant population of between 1.2 and 2 millions, with over 120,000 illegals arriving in 2010 alone (Washington Post, 11 Nov 2010). The government has admitted it cannot single-handedly guard the European Union’s southern flank.

Initially, problems caused by immigration were confined to the Aegean islands where most immigrants first landed, but now the problems have moved to the capital. The centre of Athens has recently experienced street battles involving rival ethnic gangs, often involved in dealing drugs, from Afghanistan, Iraq and various African countries. The police have often clashed with African and Afghan illegals, who have been aided by local Left-wing militants. According to Ahmed Mowias, coordinator of the Greek Migrants Forum, newly arrived refugees are being exploited by rackets run by Nigerians, Moroccans, and Algerians who have become established during the last decade.

The growing presence of immigrants, particularly Muslims, has become one of the main causes of public controversy, especially as most come via the old enemy Turkey (which does not require visas for nationals of many other Muslim countries, including Iran, Algeria and Morocco). Serving and former officials have even suggested that it is an act of Turkish state policy to flood Greece with illegal immigrants as a sort of ‘asymmetrical weapon’ (www.defencenet.gr has several articles—in Greek—on the subject). Turkey refuses to take back anyone who has been smuggled through its territory, unless that individual is a citizen of a state with which it has a land border—thus excluding the majority of African and Southeast Asian migrants shuttled through the country.

The United Nations, Amnesty International and some British and German media have criticized Greece for its allegedly poor treatment of asylum-seekers, but the truth is that the Greek authorities simply do not have the resources to deal with what is fast becoming a crisis.

According to the magazine Epikaira (18 November 2010), government departments are also increasingly concerned by the prospect of a serious uprising by radical Muslims assisted by other foreigners and anarchists—which latter group seems to enjoy privileged status, perhaps because many senior PASOK members were anarchists in their youth.

As might be expected, the Greek Left takes an indulgent view of immigration, and some MPs have demanded cynically that the government grant illegal immigrants citizenship simply so they can vote in elections.

But there is also resistance from senior churchmen, like Bishop Anthimos of Thessaloniki (Salonica), and a few politicians from the conservative opposition party New Democracy and the populist LAOS (People’s Orthodox Rally). New Democracy leader Antonis Samaras has promised that when he comes into power he will block any amnesty attempts—presumably because the vast majority of the migrants vote for PASOK.

There is also an increasingly effective think-tank of academics, editors and politicians, called the Ion Dragoumis Foundation (named after a celebrated late 19^th/early 20^th century campaigner against both the Turks and Bulgars) led by physics professor Christos Goudis of Patras University.

Hellas has survived numerous enemies over the centuries, but this time the enemy is not financial collapse (Greece has been bankrupt four times within the last 160 years), not even the subjugation of an ‘independent’ state to a European bureaucracy. This time the enemy is inside the gates, and supported by almost the whole weight of the establishment. The Greeks will have to rediscover long-hidden strengths in order to achieve a much-needed national Katharsis.

In the last few months of 2010, the United States has intensified its air campaign over the Pashtun tribal lands that lie astride a mountainous and poorly defined Afghan-Pakistan border. In the course of 102 days, 58 strikes against Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives (as well as a high but unknown number of innocents) were carried out by the Air Force and CIA’s fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Jihadists and civilians alike are incinerated by Hellfire missiles without much notice from the media, and American soldiers and marines who fall in combat can expect little better. Yet one death connected to the war in the Hindu Kush certainly did garner attention in Washington: that of Richard Holbrooke, the Department of State’s Special Representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Holbrooke, responsible for diplomatic coordination of the ongoing conflict, died from a ruptured aorta on December 13^th. Since then the press and the Obama administration have unleashed torrents of praise for this “giant of American diplomacy”. But perhaps the most fitting tribute to the man has been the ever-expanding role of killer drones in the execution of policy, as reported from Pakistan’s northwest. Despite his earlier experiences in Vietnam, Richard Holbrooke came to believe firmly in redemption through coercive air power. In bombing there is progress; in bombing shall we find peace.

Dennis Mangan recently discussed in these vitual pages a new study which claims that Middle Eastern suicide bombers are more sad sacks than wild-eyed fanatics, driven towards their explosive final act not by Allah-ardor but simple world-weariness and clinical depression.

I'm sure that much will be said about these findings, and debates will be held about whether or not they bear up under scrutiny. What I find worth noting, however, is the extent to which post-modern Western notions inform and undergird all such attempts to understand a manifestation of a foreign, and in some ways pre-modern culture--one whose fundamental values diverge radically from ours.

In my novel Considering Suicide, the narrator contemplates the enemy in America's so-called "war on terror," an enemy with a new face, finding most notorious and recognizable expression in the anonymous, militant jihadi, who aims to die in a spectacular attack against the infidel and thus become a holy martyr. How do we comprehend such a phenomenon in the secular, hedonistic Western world, where death is most often viewed as an enormous calamity to be avoided for as long as one possibly can?

From View From the Right:

Daniel S. writes:

The Wikileaks releases have apparently revealed that Pope Benedict has been opposed to EU membership for Muslim Turkey. On the other hand, they reveal just how actively the U.S. has been in advocating EU membership for Turkey. What you and other more sober-minded conservatives have said about what the leaks reveal about the true nature of America is demonstrated again: we are not seeing in these cables a right-wing America, but an America pushing the objectives of Islamic hegemony and empowerment.

L[arry] A[uster] replies:

We might see this, but it's unlikely that liberals will see it. It is fundamental to the structure of their brains and the chemical balance of their neurotransmitters that Republicans are extreme right-wingers and that America is a right-wing country. For example, when you point out to liberals that GW Bush was an open borders proponent for brown immigrants and thus the very opposite of a right-winger and a white racist, they simply cannot take it in. It is like trying to teach English literature to a horse.