Euro-Centric

I'm ambivalent about Widers; however, this sounds like an entirely positive development: 

An anti-Muslim populist in the Netherlands is forming an international alliance to spread his message across the west in an attempt to ban immigration from Islamic countries, among other goals.

Geert Wilders, leader of the Freedom party, told the Associated Press that he would launch the movement late this year, initially in five countries: the US, Canada, Britain, France and Germany.

"The message, 'stop Islam, defend freedom', is a message that's not only important for the Netherlands but for the whole free Western world," Wilders said at the Dutch parliament.

Among the group's aims will be outlawing immigration from Islamic countries to the west and a ban on Islamic sharia law. Starting as a grassroots movement, he hopes it eventually will produce its own lawmakers or influence other legislators.

With all due respect to Mr. Trifkovic, if his latest piece on Islam was written by somebody of Jewish descent 90 percent of the commentators would’ve been telling the author that he was being hyperbolic and to fight his own battles.

I'm no fan of Muslim immigration. In fact, I think that best case scenario most European countries will have a significant Muslim minority hostile to their societies forever.

But here in this country -- and Trifkovic doesn’t seem to differentiate between the U.S. and Europe -- of a Muslim population of six million or so, there have been at most 50 arrests for terrorism in the last decade (most of which are probably fake). Considering U.S. support for Israel, the sanctions on Iraq and Iran and the bombings of Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Yemen, American Muslims have behaved with incredible restraint. For comparison’s sake, and to see what a real problem population looks like, know that one in three black males can expect to spend time behind bars over his lifetime as can six percent of whites.

As I’ve written elsewhere,

And those ringing the warning bells of a “creeping Sharia” are even more moronic. Of 535 members of the US Congress, there is one Muslim and he supports homosexual marriage.  There are no Muslim governors, no Senators, no major media personalities, not even (probably) any Muslim police chiefs or mayors!

So there is no Muslim threat in America, from the position of either terrorism or a building up of institutional power. This couldn’t have been predicted beforehand, of course, so Muslim immigration was a bad idea from the start.  But the West’s problem is non-whites and enforced diversity, not Islam qua Islam, as the case of North American Muslims shows.

Trifkovic actually goes as far as calling for a “ban” on Islam if it doesn’t reform itself to his standards.  In this, he should know that he’s more fanatical than Osama bin Laden, who would let Christians live and practice their religion in Muslim lands.  Would he like to ban the Islam of Muslims indigenous to Europe like that practiced by Albanians and Bosnians, too? Or perhaps have the EU or NATO supervise each mosque to see if it’s sufficiently progressive, as they determined at what point the Serbs were badly enough behaved to be bombed?

We get the ominous warning,

If that loss is not reversed, the game is over anyway -- proving yet again that where God retreats, Allah advances.

I’m sure a man as intelligent and as educated on religious and cultural matters as the distinguished author knows that Allah is the Arabic word for God, a name which Middle Eastern Christians have been ascribing to their deity before the faith became that of Europe.  Literally, what the above statement says is “where God retreats, God advances.” If he’s speaking metaphorically, then we can interpret this as a linguistic point: Trifkovic worries that Arabic will replace the native European languages. But then again not all Europeans speak English. It would’ve made more sense to say “when God/Dieu/Gott retreats, Allah advances.”  Whatever the case may be, language differences with the new migrants is the least of Europe’s troubles.

The author states

America gave whole-hearted support to the worst nation on earth: Saudi Arabia, a veritable hotbed of raw barbarity that makes Kim Jong Il look eminently clubable.

This could only have been written by somebody who either knows nothing about North Korea or thinks sexual promiscuity is the only true freedom, in which case the author would have much in common with Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the tyrants from Brave New World, and Larry Auster (when it’s convenient for his ethnic interests.)  In Saudi Arabia, there’s no death penalty for using cell phones, the economy is freer than most other places in the world (it is in 65 on the Index of Economic Freedom, just behind France, compared to 179th, or last for the Hermit Kingdom), foreign TV shows and the Internet aren’t banned (though censored), citizens can leave the country and come back and there are no concentration camps filled with families of government enemies. Even Christians are better off in Saudi Arabia. Once again, aside from the issue of sex it’s hard to see in what way the Saudi Kingdom is within the same universe of totalitarianism as North Korea.

In Trifkovic’s conclusion, that more Europeans may convert to Islam as time goes by and the religion gains power, I actually think he may be right.  But most of them would be converting from Secular Humanism, not anything that can be called Christianity.  It would be a mistake to believe that whites would be Muslims in the same way Pakistanis or Saudis are; the faith would be molded to conform with the biological characteristics of its adopters, or “Europeanized” as Christianity was in the first place.  I don’t know what a Swedish Islam would look like, but it probably wouldn’t be half as ugly as the feminist-communist dystopia that the country is today.  The culture of that Nordic state repulses me a lot more than that of, say, Turkey.  Not that I advocate a European mass conversion -- such an event would have unforeseen consequences beyond what any mortal could predict -- though I could imagine a situation where a Muslim Europe was the least of all evils.

One thing we may consider: from the perspective of white survival, Islam may be the best bet. What would be lost to miscegenation would be more than made up for in higher birthrates. Whether a European Islam would have higher or lower rates of immigration is harder to say. Whites may sympathize with their new Arab and North African cousins, or they may become like other Muslim countries, i.e. restrictionists. Once again, too many variables to make solid predictions. We must have a realistic picture of the Muslim people though and not turn the abstraction "Islam" into some sort of Satanic prototype we expect people to conform to. 

If we are going to reject this scenario, and stick it out with Christianity no matter how much it's failed or try for a revival of Paganism, we have to understand that the hostile minority in the heart of Europe is there to stay. The BNP used to favor repartition. Imagine how much money it would take to convince your average Pakistani or African immigrant (or one who was born in the West and doesn't even speak the language of his ancestors) to go back to his country of origin, multiply it by the number of non-whites and you would easily see that such schemes are impractical for all countries but those maintaining the largest white majorities (you think entitlement programs are expensive!). Genocide should be off the table; the same with regards to crazy ideas like banning Islam or the Koran which would lead to civil war and be incompatible with civilized society.  What options are left? I have no good answers, and neither does anyone else.

Like Communism, Islam relies on a domestic fifth column -- the Allah-worshiping Rosenbergs, Philbys, Blunts, and Hisses -- to subvert the civilized world. It also relies on an army of fellow-travelers, the latter-day Sartres and Shaws in the ivory towers, on “liberal academics and opinion-makers" -- as the late Sam Francis once put it -- who "sympathize with Islam partly because it is a leading historical rival of the Western civilization they hate” and partly because they long for a romanticized and sanitized Muslim past that substitutes for the authentic Western and Christian roots they have rejected.

Those roots must be defended, in the full knowledge that those who subscribe to Islam and its civilization are aliens, regardless of their clothes, their professions or their places of residence. They sense Western weakness and expect that if Islam supplies the only old religious tradition left standing 50 years hence, it may attract mass conversion. That would indeed be the end of the West, its final surrender to the spirit masterfully depicted by Jean Raspail in the preface to the 1985 French edition of his Camp of Saints:

The West is empty, even if it has not yet become really aware of it. An extraordinarily inventive civilization, surely the only one capable of meeting the challenges of the third millennium, the West has no soul left. At every level -- nations, race, cultures as well as individuals -- it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles.

The story that Raspail tells is rooted in a “onstrous cancer implanted in the Western conscience.” One word, "Srebrenica," embodies it perfectly. Its roots are in the loss of Faith, and in the arrogant doctrine -- rampant in “the West” for three past centuries now -- that man can solve the dilemma of his existence by his unaided intellect alone.

If that loss is not reversed, the game is over anyway -- proving yet again that where God retreats, Allah advances.

Before 1914, both the West and the Muslim world could define themselves against each other in a cultural sense. What secularism has done, since replacing Christianity as the guiding light of “the West,” is to cast aside any idea of a Christian social, geographic, and cultural space that should be protected. Islam, “extreme” or “moderate,” has not softened, however. The consequences will be very serious unless Muslims are either “westernized” -- that is to say, made as willing as Christians to see their religion first relativized, then mocked, and its commandments misrepresented or ignored -- or else Christianized, which of course cannot happen unless there is a belated, massive, and unexpected recovery of Western spiritual and moral strength.

As things stand now, the West faces two clear alternatives: defense, or submission and acceptance of sacred Arab places as its own. The latter is the visceral preference of the Western elite class, and "Srebrenica" is its totem.

Islam should not be blamed for being what it is, nor should its adherents be condemned for maintaining their traditions. We should not "hate" it, nor ban it, if it reforms itself to the standards of a civilized, that is, non-Muslim society. If it does not happen -- and miracles are always possible -- it should be banned, of course. The Kuran’s exhortations to the believers to annihilate the non-believers, to confiscate their land and property, to take their women and enslave their children are clear and unambiguous, and the fruits have been ghastly. In the present state of Western weakness, such Muslim firmness may appear attractive to the legions of cynical nihilists and lead further millions to the conclusion that we should all become Muslims, since our goose is cooked anyway, spiritually and demographically.

Those of us who do not cherish that prospect should at least demand that our rulers present that option fairly and squarely. To pretend, as the ruling elite does, that Islam is “a religion of peace,” rather like Episcopalianism, is stupid or deeply dishonest.

Islam might have been made much less threatening if the West had not conciliated or sponsored its most threatening exponents. Islam was exposed to a devastating collapse in credibility within the Arab world itself in the middle of the twentieth century. The forces of secularity were very strong indeed. But America opposed them at every turn because they were socialist or communist or simply not “in the national interest.” America gave whole-hearted support to the worst nation on earth: Saudi Arabia, a veritable hotbed of raw barbarity that makes Kim Jong Il look eminently clubable. As the economies of real states falter and haltr, the Saudi petrodollars are poured into establishing violent fanaticism as the big alternative.

“As a man thinketh, so is he.” The real problem of the Muslim world is not that of natural resources or political systems. Ernest Renan, who started his study of Islam by praising its ability to manifest “what was divine in human nature,” ended it -- a quarter of a century and three long tours of the Muslim world later -- by concluding that “Muslims are the first victims of Islam” and that, therefore, “to liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him.”

Islam is a collective psychosis seeking to become global, and any attempt to abet such madness is to become part of the madness oneself. The purveyors of "Srbrenica" are worse than criminal: they are mistaken.

Many of the Muslims who come to live in the West must daily shake their heads in amazement, unable to believe how stupid Westerners are to not only give away their wealth and paradise, but actually persecute the few who dare object. Said Muslims come here as conquerors, and our political leaders, instead of defending the interests of the people they were elected to represent, provide them with every conceivable aid to expedite the conquest. True, even the traitorous Labour government of Tony Blair found it within itself to jail or deport some of the most notorious cases; but such action, when it has been taken at all, always came late, was limited in scope, and struck one as cosmetic and expedient in character: the deeper problem – government sponsorship of foolish immigration policies, political correctness, and multiculturalism, which began and encouraged the progressive Islamisation of our society – remained untreated, and is still in fact consciously and willfully compounded through its promotion, financing, legalisation, and court enforcement, year after year after year. It is no wonder these would-be Muslim conquerors hold us in contempt.

It was really only a matter of time before Righteous Black Rage was used as a defense in a rape trial.  

I have two new podcasts up at AltRight Radio that are of interest to "Euro-centrists." The first is an interview with Jan Lievens, a politician and former youth coordinator with the Flemish independence party, the Vlaams Belang. The second is with AltRight contributor Derek Turner, with whom I discuss political happenings across the continent as well as the difficulty of forming an alliance between Europe's various traditionalist and anti-Eurabia parties, which have identical enemies and yet which can't ever seem to ever get along. 

Europeans have their own version of George W. Bush.

José Maria Aznar, former prime minister of Spain, published an opinion article with the London Times Thursday saying the world must support Israel because "if it goes down, we all go down".

Aznar, who has joined the 'Friends of Israel' campaign to which David Trimble, a foreign observer taking part in Israel's flotilla raid probe, also belongs, calls on Europe to refuse to put up with cries to eliminate Israel as part of global Christian-Jewish cooperation.

"Anger over Gaza is a distraction. We cannot forget that Israel is the West’s best ally in a turbulent region," Aznar writes of the IDF's calamitous raid on a flotilla bound for Gaza on May 31. 

Actually, Egypt, Turkey and Jordan are by far better allies than Israel.  None of these countries has ever launched an attack killing dozens of Americans, planned to get the US involved in a foreign war by bombing Western interests or had agents caught in a major spy ring.  As a matter of fact, not even Iran or Syria has done those things.

Aznar says the real threat to the region is extreme Islamism, "which sees Israel’s destruction as the fulfillment of its religious destiny and, simultaneously in the case of Iran, as an expression of its ambitions for regional hegemony".

"Both phenomena are threats that affect not only Israel, but also the wider West and the world at large," he adds.

Aznar concludes by saying that Israel is the West's first line of defense against the chaos set to erupt in the Middle East, and therefore must be protected.

How does one say “We fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” in Spanish?

Is there any stupider argument than the first line of defense one?  This is an immigration issue, not a 19th century land war.  Muslims settlers are legally flying into Western airports and the politicians who facilitate this act as if the only way to Europe is to march through the Levant!  Hold the line Judea!

Perhaps they mean this metaphorically.  Something like “Muslims will be emboldened if they destroy Israel.” But even this is nonsensical.  What act of “appeasement” with regards to Israel lost parts of the Netherlands, Sweden and France to Islam?  

If Aznar was really concerned about Islamization, he could’ve spoken up against Muslim immigration when he was Prime Minister.  In fact, he didn’t and went ahead with European integration.  The only time he bucked the globalist consensus was when he joined Bush’s war on Iraq.  If men this stupid are the defenders of the European peoples and their cultures, we are truly in trouble. 

Please, spare me the talk about the “West” and what we must do to defend it coming from those who are destroying it by mistaking bad metaphors for reality.  We need to ask ourselves why today a “conservative” is one who invokes the “West” when he means Israel and Europe and an "extremist" is one who invokes the “West” when he means Europe only.

As Srdja Trifkovic has already recorded on this site, Geert Wilders has continued his remarkable political progress with better-than-expected results in the Dutch general election of 9th June. His Partij Voor Vrijheid (PVV) increased its number of seats in the Dutch parliament from 9 to 24. An election fought ostensibly on the economy and Afghanistan clearly had an important if sotto voce immigration angle.

Dutch politics are complex, and getting more complex as the comfortable postwar consensus breaks down irretrievably. As the Guardian’s Ian Traynor noted on 10 June, “The election… revealed a political spectrum fragmented as seldom before and thoroughly polarized.”

In an echo of the bitter 16th century struggles against the Duke of Alva’s tercios (see Motley’s 1856 classic The Rise of the Dutch Republic or Edward Grierson’s excellent 1969 The Fatal Inheritance), Holland has always had important divisions between the largely Protestant north and the largely Catholic south, with a more secular, mercantile urban middle class acting as counterbalance. In recent decades, this urban and now post-Christian majority has dominated, with couldn’t-care-less views on everything from sexual morality and drugs to immigration, first from former imperial possessions and then from anywhere, into one of the world’s most densely-populated countries. This set the scene for the rise and sanguinary fall of Pim Fortuyn and now the rise of Wilders (who lives under permanent police protection to avoid sharing the fate of his political predecessor).

Where can I hide until they think it’s all over? There must be somewhere where I can be sheltered from the shouting, insulated from inarticulate punditry, blissfully unaware of other people’s metatarsals and the progress of a leather sphere moving between 22 men about whom I know nothing and care rather less. But even if I decide, Trappistically, not to look at TV, listen to radio, surf the web, or open a newspaper between now and whenever the pestiferous thing limps to its inevitably inglorious end, sadly I will be unable entirely to ignore the World Cup.

The year-round football season is bad enough, with its 24/7 coverage of some of the world’s least interesting and least attractive people (and their harridan WAGs) interfering with important matters. But whenever World Cups come round (and the gaps between them feel like they’re getting shorter), most of the few remaining outposts of rationality succumb straightaway to footie frenzy -- gossiping, groaning, marveling, moaning, diagnosing and deciding how some Italian bloke should deploy 11 other blokes on a soccer pitch thousands of miles away, as if it mattered.

England is suddenly abloom with men, too often shirtless, who feel constrained to brandish Chinese-made St. George’s flags (the only kind of “patriotism” these helots are permitted) while they glug Danish lager and periodically arise from Chinese-made, popcorn-plastered DFS sofas to do Mexican waves -- that is, when they are not apostrophizing the blind ref, or the mistakes of Rooney or Ferdinand or somebody else who has spent much of his life musing on his metatarsals and endeavoring to remember the salient fact that he is engaged in a game of two halves.

The impressive electoral breakthrough of the anti-Jihadist Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands is sending predictable shock waves through Europe. Its leader, Geert Wilders, wants a stake in government after his party came third with 24 seats, more than doubling its share in the 150 member national assembly. “Nobody in The Hague can bypass the PVV anymore,” he said. “The impossible has happened,” he went on, “the Netherlands chose more security, less crime, less immigration and less Islam.”

“Less Islam” is the key. Forget the currency crisis, social policy, welfare payments, and other nitty-gritty elements of most European elections. The biggest loser is Holland’s soon-to-be former Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, and his demise is long overdue. Six years ago, in a display of idiocy be expected from a supine Euro-Socialist, he rushed to declare -- in the immediate aftermath of the Jihadist murder of Theo van Gogh in an Amsterdam street -- that  “nothing is known about the motive” of the killer, and called on the nation “not to jump to far-reaching conclusions.” Balkenende also referred to van Gogh’s “outspoken opinions” -- hinting that he had it coming -- and added that it was “unacceptable if a difference of opinion led to this brutal murder.” Mijnheer Balkenende seemed to be implying that “this brutal murder” would have been deemed less “unacceptable” had it been caused not by “a difference of opinion” but by some more profound reason -- by the sense of pain and grievance in the Muslim community, perhaps, caused by the late filmmaker’s insensitive and inappropriate actions.

Balkenende’s defeat was also due to a host of other issues, but his undissenting dhimmitude is the key. His Islamophile inanities are no longer acceptable to a growing segment of Holland's electorate. The Old Continent is waking up, slowly, to the possibility that by 2050, Muslims will account for over a quarter of its young residents west of the Trieste-Stettin line. Millions of them already live in a parallel universe that has very little to do with the host country, toward which they have a disdainful and hostile attitude.

Today’s “United Europe,” epitomized by Balkenende and his fellow-bien-pensants in Brussels and most national chancelleries, does not create social and civilizational commonalities except on the basis of wholesale denial of old mores and disdain for inherited values. It creates the dreary sameness of multicultural “tolerance.” Their decrepitude breeds contempt and haughty arrogance on the other side: Tariq Ramadan thus calmly insists that Muslims in the West should conduct themselves as though they were already living in a Muslim-majority society and were exempt on that account from having to make concessions to the faith of the host-society. Muslims in Europe should feel entitled to live on their own terms, Ramadan says, while, “under the terms of Western liberal tolerance,” society as a whole should be “obliged to respect that choice.”

If such “respect” continues to be enforced by the elite class, by the end of this century there will be no “Europeans” as members of ethnic groups that share the same language, culture, history, and ancestors, and inhabit lands associated with their names. The shrinking native populations will be indoctrinated into believing -- or else simply forced into accepting -- that the demographic shift in favor of unassimilable and hostile aliens is a blessing that enriches their culturally deprived and morally unsustainable societies. The “liberal tolerance” and the accompanying “societal obligation” that Tariq Ramadan invokes are the tools of Western suicide. “No other race subscribes to these moral principles,” Jean Raspail wrote a generation ago, “because they are weapons of self-annihilation.”

The Dutch voters -- traditionally among the most liberal in Europe -- are waking up to the fact that those weapons need to be discarded, and the upholders of those deadly “principles” removed from all positions of power and influence, if their nation is to survive.

In 1938 Hilaire Belloc wondered, “Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Muhammadan world which will shake the dominion of Europeans -- still nominally Christian -- and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?” Seven decades later, the same traits of decrepitude are present in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Canada, and the United States, including both the primary cause, which is the loss of religious faith, and several secondary ones. Topping the list is elite hostility to all forms of solidarity of the majority population based on shared historical memories, ancestors, and common culture. The end result is the Westerners’ loss of the sense of propriety over their lands.

Widers is shaking an elite consensus that de facto open immigration, multiculturalism, and the existence of a large Muslim diaspora within the Western world are to be treated as a fixed and immutable fact. That consensus is flawed in logic, dogmatic in application, and disastrous in its results. The grand Gleichschaltung of nations, races, and cultures, which will mark the end of history, is not preordained. In Holland the fruits are all too visible. Gibbon could have had today’s Rotterdam in mind, when he wrote of Rome in decline, its masses morphing “into a vile and wretched populace.”

Wilders has shown that this crime can and must be stopped. The founders of the United States overthrew the colonial government for offenses far lighter than those of which the traitor class is guilty, on both sides of the Atlantic.