Euro-Centric

In my recent posting on Malta, I mentioned Libya’s colourful Colonel Gaddafi, who is declining to cooperate with the EU to stem the flow of African migrants that pass through his country en route to Europe.

But Gaddafi has now promised to pull up his metaphorical socks. On 31 August, standing beside a doubtless nonplussed Silvio Berlusconi while on another visit to Italy, he warned hyperbolically:

Tomorrow Europe might no longer be European and even black as there are millions who want to come in. We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasion.

But the Colonel’s motives are not entirely disinterested. In return for his assistance in avoiding this eventuality, he wants the EU to pay Libya an annual stipend of 5 billion Euros. One Italian opposition MP observed accurately that Gaddafi was “demanding Mafia-style protection money.”

It is a jocular suggestion from a notorious japester, and the EU would never give one of Africa’s most prosperous countries such vast amounts. And yet although the amount demanded by Gaddafi is preposterous, the concept cannot be ruled out. Such is the angst surrounding immigration that Brussels may well be willing to bribe proxies to do its political dirty work.

The EU border agency Frontex has already concluded agreements or conducted joint operations with emigrant-exporting countries like Colombia, Ecuador, Turkey, Nigeria, Brazil, Cape Verde, Kosovo, Gambia and Iraq, some of which have involved payments in cash or kind. Libya is a much more important transit-point than some of these, and Europe besides covets Libyan oil. If anti-immigration political pressure continues to build across Europe, Brussels might eventually conclude that it makes sense to make some kind of payment to encourage Tripoli to curb the sub-Saharan tsunami, and so prevent the EU’s teeming legalistic and political pests from getting their expensive claws into all these toothsome new clients.

Yet even if Gaddafi were to enter into some financial arrangement, and even if he were in earnest (both large “Ifs”) Libya’s desert border is utterly unsealable. A much more effective and much cheaper strategy would be to beef up Frontex’s relatively modest annual operating revenue of 83 million Euros, and give the agency the resources it needs to patrol the continent’s straggling coastline and hundreds of air and land entry points.

But the best and cheapest strategy of all would be for national parliaments to retain or reclaim their powers over immigration, the Schengen Agreement to be scrapped, and a lorry-load of ludicrous legislation to be consigned to a large ceremonial bonfire in the Grand Markt in Brussels. We can but dream.

From The Local (Berlin),

The party wanted to pay the channel 1.5 million kronor ($201,240) to run the ad. The half-minute advert shows a race in which an elderly woman with a walker is chased by a group of burqa-clad women pushing prams with a slogan promising to safeguard pension funding at the expense of immigration.

As an alarm-like sound plays in the background, a voiceover says, "All politics are about priorities - now you have a choice."

The clip promotes the Sweden Democrats' demand that, like other parties, pensioners' taxes be cut to the same levels of wage earners. However, they claim their plans would be funded by reducing immigration.

"We decided not to broadcast it," Gunnar Gidefeldt, communications director for TV4, told AFP.

Swedish law on freedom of expression prohibits messages that contain hate grounded on race and religion, said Gidefeldt.

"In this case, it is against religion," he said.

According to party press secretary Erik Almqvist, the ad does not violate Swedish law. The party has screened the clip for lawyers, who said that it does not break the law against inciting racial hatred.

"The conflict we see as a result of mass immigration is not related to the person's origin, but rather a conflict of values, as far as we can see," said Almqvist in reference to the burqa-clad women in the video.

TV4 CEO Jan Scherman disagreed.

"The film is contrary to the democracy clause in the Radio and Television Act and also against democracy clauses which the Sweden Democrats, among others, have adopted for the equality of all people, regardless of whether it is the European Convention or the UN Charter," he said.

"The film is also against the constitution act on freedom of speech that prohibits hate speech," Scherman added.

Is it a case of "hate speech" or "hate facts"? Milton Friedman noted that one can have a welfare state or one can have mass immigration, but one can't have both. Not exactly true. One can have both, though in such a case, group conflict becomes inevitable.    

On 17 July, the Guardian newspaper published a 12 page graphic comic entitled “The Unwanted,” written by Joe Sacco, a Maltese citizen who presently lives in Oregon. “The Unwanted,” which can be read here, purports to describe the cultural, political and logistical problems being caused in Malta by large-scale illegal immigration from Africa.

Sacco’s parents were socialists, and emigrated to Australia in the 1960s to escape the influence of the Catholic church -- a hugely powerful institution in Malta, where abortion and divorce are still illegal. The parental antinomianism appears to have rubbed off on their son, because his views tend towards the conventionally leftwing, with other graphic offerings to his name about the travails of Bosnia and Gaza.

“The Unwanted” does make some effort to understand the concerns of the native Maltese. Nevertheless, the overall impression is one of finger-wagging at the smallest member state of the European Union, which it joined in 2004 at the instigation of the humorously-entitled Nationalist Party, led by Lawrence Gonzi, who has been Prime Minister since 2004 (he was narrowly re-elected in March 2008). Sacco’s comic is the least annoying in a long line of denunciatory Guardian features, all of which bear typically didactic titles like “Voyage to Compassion,” “Malta’s Mash of Civilizations,” and “Hysteria is no answer to the plight of refugees.”

The easily outraged denounce Malta regularly, for its Catholic mores, its Euroscepticism, its habit of slaughtering song birds (this offends me too), and worst of all its attitude towards the thousands of African migrants aiming for mainland Europe who end up landing on Malta, or being rescued by trawlers and taken to the archipelago. Here they stay for up to 18 months in legal limbo, killing time in overcrowded detention centres while lawyers, civil servants and politicians from Valletta to Brussels wrangle about their “right” to be there and who should take responsibility for them.

At around 122 square miles, Malta is one-fifth the size of Greater London and has a population of 409,000 (UN figures, although the real figure is probably nearer 413,000). The archipelago is rocky and barren, and the economy is heavily dependent on tourism and machinery exports.

The islands have been occupied by Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, the French and the British, and there are ruined temples which are over 8,000 years old. Although the Arabs were only present on the islands for around 200 years, the Maltese language is derived mostly from Arabic (although it is written in Latin script, the only Semitic language for which this is true), and their erstwhile occupation is also evident in the local food, music and the physiognomies of some of the local people.

The architectural ambience, however, is baroque, while it is one of the most strongly Christian countries in the world. It was the home between 1530 and 1798 of the crusading Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem, whose emblem is the eight-pointed Maltese Cross (the emblem actually derives from the Italian town of Salerno, because the founders of the Hospital of St John came from there). The Order, which had been expelled by the Muslims first from Jerusalem and then Rhodes, was given the island by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V of Spain, who demanded in return a nominal fee of a single falcon (this pleasing vignette is referred to in the classic Humphrey Bogart film, The Maltese Falcon). The Knights have been described as the “first embryonic council of Europe.” Some idea of the reality of this may be gauged by examining the 28 Grand Masters of the Order of St John between 1530 and 1798 (when the Order was suppressed by Napoleon). Twelve were French, eight Aragonese, four Italian, three Portuguese and one German. (The Order is now based in London, with its headquarters in a medieval gatehouse in fashionable Clerkenwell.) The militant order which was once tasked with defending holy sites is now reduced to providing first aid at football matches -- a useful but inglorious task, perhaps emblematic of mainstream Christianity.

In 1565, under the command of Jean de la Vallette (in whose honor the elegant city of Valletta is named), approximately 9,000 defenders legendarily resisted an Ottoman invasion force of around 48,000 (firing an estimated 135,000 cannonballs) for more than four months. This was a military turning point, and built up momentum for the momentous victory at Lepanto just six years afterwards.

Malta endured an equally terrible siege when Axis forces trying to cut Britain’s Suez lifeline besieged the island effectively from June 1940 until April 1942. For the islanders’ heroism during that period, the country was presented with the George Cross by King George VI, and this is still emblazoned on the state flag, even though Malta became independent in 1964.

So notwithstanding its Arabic trace elements, Malta is deeply rooted in the European mainstream -- and all the more conscious of its cultural identity because of its historical vulnerability and vicissitudes. It is this awareness, no doubt, which led a majority of electors to take the difficult decision to join the EU. Like the inhabitants of many other small European countries, they probably see membership as guaranteeing future security.

With such resonant traditions to draw upon, it is ironic that there is no serious political resistance to the immigration wave, although this is probably because it is a relatively recent phenomenon.

In 2003, 502 African migrants arrived on the islands. In 2005, it was 1,800 -- in 2006 1,780 -- in 2007, 1,800 -- and around 1,700 in both 2008 and 2009. So far this year, there has been a 3.3 percent decrease in the numbers, probably reflecting would-be migrants’ consciousness that even Europe is not immune to recession. Others have died trying to make the crossing; Malta was much criticized when 53 migrants drowned in Maltese waters in May 2007, and again when 80 or so drowned in August 2008.

The total numbers of immigrants are small, amounting to only around 3 percent of the total population, but in such a tiny and relatively poor country the impact is enormous. As a 2008 report from the Maltese think-tank Today Public Policy Institute (TPPI) expresses it,

Relative to population size, this equates to around 1.72 million immigrants arriving in France or the UK, 2.35 million in Germany, 1.6 million in Italy and about 1.15 million in Spain…on a per capita basis Malta has thus experienced one of the largest -- if not the largest -- influx of undocumented immigrants among EU countries over recent years.

“The Unwanted” spends much energy denouncing Norman Lowell, who has a party called, ambitiously or fancifully, depending on your perspective, Imperium Europa. He is presently serving a two year suspended sentence for inciting racial hatred and insulting the president. Lowell is denounced as a “far rightist,” and, to be fair, Lowell features lightning-flash logos and admiring references to Mein Kampf scattered in amongst such un-Hitlerian policy commitments as freedom of expression and gay rights. Lowell has stood several times in national and European elections, but third parties in Malta always score derisory votes.

A more down-to-earth party, National Action (Azzjoni Nazzjonali) was founded in 2007 by a businessman and former Nationalist Party MP named Josie Muscat, but after failing to win any seats in 2008 despite a strong anti-immigration platform, in April 2010 the party voted to transform itself into

an organisation that promotes and disseminates conservative values.

Since then, there has been silence, and now there does not appear to be even a website for AN, so perhaps nothing more will come of this.

The TPPI report complains:

The emergence of overtly xenophobic movements and parties has been a complete novelty in Malta’s political landscape. Moreover, and somewhat more worrying, there has been a rise in attacks against organizations and individuals working to protect the rights of immigrants, or against people denouncing racism… A recent study on xenophobic attitudes among the Maltese population has also revealed some disturbing results.

According to a survey conducted in 2005, 95% of respondents had no objections to having a European neighbour, while an almost equally high number were unwilling to live next to Arabs (93%), Africans (90%) or Jews (89%). Moreover, more than 75% of respondents said they would not give shelter to refugees.

The TPPI notes with some sympathy the difficulties faced by Maltese fishermen, who often come across migrants miles from land, drifting in unseaworthy boats. The fishermen

“usually avoid coming too close to a boat carrying 20 to 30 migrants, as they fear being overpowered. Moreover, if they alert the authorities, these can take several hours to arrive on the spot, meaning that the fishermen’s day of work is lost without compensation … as Maltese fishermen themselves readily admit, in most cases when they come across irregular migrants at sea, they simply “put the engine on full thrust.”

The report complains plaintively of the lack of Libyan cooperation, as if Muammar Gaddafi were a rational man. Yet Libya does have a strategic interest in halting the flow, because it is a major transit point, and it too has a large (almost one million) and much-resented illegal immigrant population from black Africa. (On a recent visit to Italy, the colourful Colonel disconcerted journalists by declaring that most “asylum-seekers” from Africa were fraudulent.)

More to the point, the TPPI bemoans the EU’s border agency Frontex’s unwillingness or inability to augment the miniscule Maltese defence forces. At present, there are three Maltese patrol boats, two German helicopters and a launch to patrol a sea-area the size of Great Britain. Even Italy will not send assistance, although many of the Africans who land on Malta end up in Italy, and although the nearby Italian island of Lampedusa (best known as the hereditary fiefdom of Giovanni Tomasi de Lampedusa, author of The Leopard) is likewise a magnet for illegal immigration. However, the Italian Navy already has a major job patrolling Italy’s Adriatic coast, which is also targeted by people-traffickers. With the present budgetary constraints, and the all-party dogma that mass immigration is intrinsically good and its opponents intrinsically evil, in the short term the chances of Frontex being beefed up look slim.

So the report concludes by recommending the cheaper strategy that is always resorted to by today’s politicians, to make the natives feel guilty for wishing to preserve the country they love:

Efforts should be made… to implement a sustained information exercise in the media…Such a campaign needs to air regularly.

What this amounts to is that the Maltese are to be lectured for wishing to remain Maltese -- and they will be expected to pay for their sensitivity lessons. Not only this, but they will also be hectored, because along with largesse from Brussels come rafts of bland-sounding but draconian laws about race relations, religious discrimination, equality, and human rights designed to undermine all assumptions and usher in an unwanted, untested and un-European “Europe.” The effects of these laws -- like the laws on abortion and divorce -- are yet to be visited upon the unwitting islanders, who may find this insidious enemy harder to resist than Ottoman or German soldiers.

The battle-scarred walls of Valletta still stand strong and beautiful in the sun, but all the postern gates have been thrown open.

Ethnic Germans lack "sensitivty" with the Gastarbeiter.

I maintain a sort of spiritual kinship with the heathen invaders who picked through the ruins of the Roman Empire. These were men who stood in wonder at what had been accomplished by the people who came before them. I generally feel as if I am a sort of barbarian wandering through the ruins of a lost civilization my own self. I look at the beautiful art deco buildings in Berkeley and I know nobody will ever build anything like that in Berkeley again.  I look at the stupendous accomplishment of the American space program which put men on the moon. Does anyone believe we'll do that again in our lifetimes? I certainly don't: I think space exploration is finished. Has there been any great work of art or literature in the last 50 years? Please clue me in if there has been, because nobody has told me about it.

Consider Kenneth Clark's documentary on Western Civilization, made in response to the events of 1968. Could we make such a thing today? I don't think we can. It was partially designed to sell color televisions to the upper middle class people who could afford them in those days. Do you think a documentary telling the story of Western Civilization could sell anything to modern upper middle class people now? I don't think you could sell a stick of chewing gum with such an idea today; not unless there were some groveling shoveled into it -perhaps spiced by some sado-masochistic sneering at the very idea that Western people ever had a civilization worth preserving.

I don't even know if there are living people like Sir Kenneth Clark who could make such a documentary any longer. A wise and gentle boffin like Sir Kenneth couldn't possibly say such things any longer; he probably couldn't even think such thoughts any longer. Singing the praises of Western Civilization is now considered an act of cultural war, rather than a natural thing to do. You'd have to be some kind of thick-necked thug or barbarian wandering in the ruins of a forgotten civilization to notice that Kenneth Clark was a far better man than ignorant weasels such as modern documentarian Ken Burns.

The loss of such men is probably irretrievable. There may never again be Western men so cultured and gentle, yet also wise and well connected with the realities of what people really are. Men like this simply can't exist in the same world with ... "Lady Gaga" or whatever the latest cultural atrocity is. There are certainly intellectuals who believe the same things as Kenneth Clark; some of whom may even be as knowledgeable as him. However, they can no longer have Kenneth Clark's gentle and civilized character. A modern Sir Kenneth Clark would be ruthlessly assaulted on all sides by disgusting countercultural monsters. People would howl at him and hound him, and burn his effigy until he  turned his beautiful documentary into something bland and inoffensive and wretchedly brittle and multicultural. Either that or the modern Sir Kenneth Clark would become ... less gentle and civilized. Certainly he would be portrayed as half-mad or evil, as the media portrays anyone who displays the slightest affection for traditional Western civilization.

 In my blacker moments, I wonder if Western Civilization didn't actually fall some time in the 1970s. Certainly, looking around me, it appears we've been invaded by barbarians. It is good to keep his closing words in mind when faced with the doleful state of modern civilization, lest we all fall into despair.

At this point I reveal myself in my true colours, as a stick-in-the-mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole, I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves. I also hold one or two beliefs that are more difficult to put shortly. For example, I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people’s feelings by satisfying our own egos. ... Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible. . . . Western civilization has been a series of rebirths. Surely this should give us confidence in ourselves....

It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilization. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.

Amazing that such a simple Guardian phrase can strike such dread into the heart -- “Tony Benn and 73 others.” It sounds as though some cloning experiment has gone terribly, terribly wrong -- as if the people behind Frankenstein foods have diversified into Frankenstein fools.

There is also a picture of an avuncular-looking man smoking a pipe. It is of course none other than that alleged national treasure, Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn, former 2nd Viscount Stansgate -- whose name and style make him sound like a cross between a plate, a flowerpot man, a chocolate biscuit, and a sluice. But he is nothing so useful, nor is he as cuddlesome as his pipe suggests.

Benn is the descendant of non-conformist Liberal MPs whose family money came from the furniture industry -- which may explain why Tone became a Cabinet minister. A crucial influence was his mother, who told the gullible lad that the Bible was a sort of proto-Das Kapital, in which the prophets were always right and the kings always wrong. This gross over-simplification has shaped a whole career, during which the self-described “Free Radical” has been free to be mostly wrong, and even when he is right then invariably for the wrong reasons. There are few irresponsible ideas Tony has not embraced, or tediously “radical” causes he has not rushed to defend in his strange slurping tones, armed only with his anorak and that prophetic pipe -- and of course the whole weight of postwar history.

He is therefore an in-demand pundit, a "Political Hero" to both the New Statesman and BBC Radio 4 listeners -- and even a folk festival performer. Some of his speeches have also been set to “ambient groove,” although the content is much more likely to guarantee ambience than groove.

The story among Paleos, Traditionalists, National Anarchists, White Nationalists, Far Rightist et al. is that they have a certain affection for what Sarah Palin represents -- that place in the heart known as the "Real America" -- but then generally loathe her policies: namely, war, statism, Christian-Zionism, Republican partisanship (particularly with regard to female “Pink Elephants”), and more war.

This has something to do with fact that Sarah was “discovered” and promoted by Bill Kristol, and put before the Republican White Christian base as a last ditch effort to elect the neocon’s savior. But it also has something to do with the fact that she doesn’t seem to have made up her mind up about much. Over the past decade, Sarah has embraced, among of things, Buchananism, the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, and Kenyan anti-witchcraft.

After dealing with Sarah for two years, it’s become hard for me to even imagine what it would be like to have an Aryan Fertility Goddess on the political scene who actually consistently promoted sound policies.

Denmark has got one in the person of Pia Kjærsgaard, the former homemaker who’s aiming to restrict all non-European immigration from her country.

The Bolton Patriot reports,

Denmark’s Danish People’s Party has announced its intention to call a complete halt to all Third World immigration into that country in a move which is bound to raise tensions within the Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) political group in the European Parliament.

The Dansk Folkeparti (DF), led by Pia Kjærsgaard, is the third largest political party in Denmark and while not part of the cabinet, maintains a close cooperation with the government parties on most issues.

In return for their parliamentary support, the DF has been able to influence government legislation designed to clamp down on immigration and “asylum seekers.”

Now the party appears to be on the brink of accepting that Third World immigration per se is destructive to Denmark.

On Tuesday, the party began its 2010 summer group meeting in Vejle, Jutland, where the new measure is under discussion. The policy is, according to the Danish media, a “continuation of the proposal the party made last month to toughen the 24-year rule for foreign spouses of Danes.”

Ht: National Policy Institute

On Friday the 29^th July 2010, I saw a BBC report of David Cameron’s tour of India. Several Indians, it seems, had demanded the return of the Koh-i-Noor Diamond. This has been property of the British Crown for the past century and a half, and now forms part of the Crown Jewels. To say that the inconvenience and humiliation of breaking up the Crown Jewels had not crossed the minds of those making the demand is to credit them with too little intelligence. The Diamond itself, we can have no doubt, was worth far less to these people than the joy of having humiliated their former masters. This was confirmed within the report by some relative of the famous Gandhi, who urged return of the Diamond as an act of “atonement” for our imperial past.

Mr. Cameron, I am glad to say, refused the demand. His refusal, however, was less firm than it should have been. He merely observed that return of the Diamond would set an unwelcome precedent. And so, having nothing more enjoyable to do with the five minutes of my time it took, I made my own response on the Libertarian Alliance Blog. It went thus:

Gross Indian Ingratitude
by Sean Gabb

So the Indian ruling class is asking for the Koh-i-Noor Diamond to be shipped off to them.

Some flatulent grandson of Gandhi is demanding the diamond as some kind of “atonement.”

Atonement for what? I ask.

I think the world would be a much better place if the wretched Gandhi had drunk a bad pint of his own urine c1910. But since he didn’t, the Indians might at least have the grace to thank us for having saved them from the barbarism in which we found them. But for us, they’d still be burning widows, and the country districts would still be swarming with Thugees. Thanks to us, they now have a space programme.

Yes, rather than asking for one diamond back, they should be grubbing about to see if they can find another one to send over. And, while doing that, they could put all those statues back up of Queen Victoria, and set up a few new ones of T.B. Macaulay.

Sadly, this posting has unaccountably vanished from the LA Blog, taking with it all the comments. But it provoked a firestorm of debate that has continued to burn on one of the supplemental postings that did survive. I drove several Indians into a frenzy, and got a stern ticking off from various self-appointed “libertarian purists.” In a private message to some of my friends, one of the Indians accused me of cowardice and dishonesty. Another of them, one Sudha Amit, has decided for the moment to call me an “imperialist racist pig” in the comment section of every other posting I make to the LA Blog. Since I presently have limited access to the Internet, I shall not see until tomorrow what the effect has been of calling her a “silly little woman.” If she has responded with better sense than I expect, I will confine myself to sneering at her bad English until she goes away.