Parts of Britain already belong to Islam. No action is being taken by the government to preserve the British nation. The United Kingdom is going the way of the Kingdom of Sweden.

The liberal left likes to hold Sweden up as a model socialist state, proving that socialism can work.

They could not be more wrong.

Sweden is a country wrecked by political correctness and Muslim immigration, and made so wretched by its own folly that it’s committing national suicide.

This is from Front Page, by Bruce Bawer:

Sweden is self-destructing, and more and more people are writing about it – but, with very few exceptions, still not in the mainstream Swedish media, where denial continues to reign supreme. Indeed, even as concerned observers abroad (especially in neighboring Denmark and Norway, where the elites still look to their larger neighbor as a multicultural role model while many, if not most, ordinary householders view it as a cautionary example) are sounding the alarm about the fallout of Swedish immigration policies, Sweden’s own mainstream media – and the rest of its cultural establishment – are laboring overtime to silence the truth-tellers and keep the rabble from openly questioning the wisdom of their betters. …

One rare recent exception to the Swedish media’s see-no-evil approach to immigration and its consequences was a fascinating map, published last month in the newspaper Sydsvenskan, showing the relative levels of danger in the various neighborhoods of Malmö, the city that is regarded by many cogent observers as the ninth circle of the Scandinavian inferno.

Meanwhile, as I say, the admonitory essays keep coming. One example: “Sweden’s Race to the Bottom,” a bracingly frank piece that appeared on December 4 on the website of Jyllands-Posten, Denmark’s biggest newspaper. The author, Morten Uhrskov Jensen, didn’t mince words. His opening sentence: “Sweden has chosen to break down.” Jensen went on to outline the steady slide in the quality of education in Swedish primary schools over the last decade or so, as detailed in a recent PISA study, and to link that decline to what Jensen bluntly called the country’s “insane immigration policy.” Sweden, warned Jensen, “will have to pay a very high price for its experiment with permitting excessive immigration from dysfunctional states.” He placed special blame on the media …

Five days later, Jyllands-Posten offered another grim report, this one entitled “A Land of Ghosts and Shadows.” In it, Danish author Mikael Javling recounted the repercussions of a recent advertisement in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter. The ad was for a book – its title might best be translated as The Immigration Cover-Up – that quietly but devastatingly lays bare the suicidal folly of Sweden’s immigration regime. It’s a remarkably comprehensive work, providing an informative overview of such topics as asylum smuggling, immigration and crime, sharia law, the costs of immigration, censorship of Islam critics, the wielding of the word “racism” as a weapon, the treachery of such pro-immigration authors as Stefan Jonsson and Mattias Gardell, and feminist fecklesness in the face of Muslim patriarchy. Privately printed by the authors, Karl-Olav Arnstberg (an ethnologist) and Gunnar Sandelin (a former reporter for Swedish television), after they failed to secure a publisher, the book, Javling wrote, can justifiably be described as a piece of “underground literature” which, like Solzhenitsyn in the USSR, is being read “only behind closed curtains.”

The Dagens Nyheter ad for The Immigration Cover-Up was a rare exception to the Swedish media’s systematic exclusion of alternate views. According to Javling, the newspaper’s editors put Arnstberg and Sandelin through several rewrites, forcing them to tone down their language and make the ad as innocuous as possible, before they finally agreed to print the thing. Nonetheless, anodyne though it was, it thoroughly enraged the crème de la crème of the Swedish left, who gathered in Stockholm to protest what one of them denounced, in a fiery speech, as “racist propaganda” and to demand that the editors of Dagens Nyheter make a public show of contrition. (All this in response to a nearly 400-page scholarly tome that – crammed with statistics and footnotes – is every bit as dry and dispassionate as the left’s reaction was hot-headed and hysterical.) Jalving didn’t hide his disgust: calling the PC profs, pols, and pressmen at the demo “spoiled little children in suits,” he contrasted them with the majority of Swedes, whom he characterized as “seasoned and lucid Vikings” who’ve “had enough of the elites’ lies and careerism.” I hope he’s right, but I wonder how long these Vikings plan to wait before actually doing anything to try to pull their country back from the precipice.

The day after Jalving’s piece appeared, Expressen, the Swedish daily, ran a story announcing that its editors had hooked up with a Swedish research group, imaginatively named Researchgruppen, to perform a serious, in-depth investigation. Of what? Muslim terrorist cells? Of course not. In good Swedish-media fashion, the goal of Expressen‘s probe was to unearth and expose the names of the readers of three alternative online news sources, Avpixlat, Fria Tider, and Exponerat. I call these sites “alternative” because they run the sorts of stories – about things like, oh, Muslim terrorist cells – that mainstream Swedish media won’t touch. But Expressen doesn’t call them “alternative.” It calls them “hate sites.” (I’ve seen hate sites, and though I haven’t done a thorough study of these three sites, the material I’ve read on them from time to time is no more hateful than the typical article at Front Page or PJ Media.) Anyway, Researchgruppen managed to figure out the e-mail addresses of no fewer than 6200 people who had left “hateful comments” at the three “hate sites” – and then managed to figure out whom those addresses belonged to and proceeded to gather “personal data” on them, which, Expressen promised, would be served up in future articles.

Among the individuals exposed by Expressen as a participant in the discussions on these three sites was Anders Dahlberg, a member of both the National Guard and the Sweden Democrat Party. He lives in the southern town of Skåne and is currently running for a local political office. Researchgruppen identified him as the author of a number of anonymous comments at the Avpixlat site. The one Expressen singled out for opprobrium was his suggestion that it might be impossible to end Sweden’s multicultural society without the use of force, and that ethnic Swedes might want to arm themselves in preparation for that eventuality. Members of the Swedish elite rushed to express their revulsion at this contemptible sentiment – none of them, of course, pausing to ask whether Dahlberg’s statement is, in fact, more or less contemptible than the roles they themselves have played in the ongoing erasure of the nation that he’s plainly determined to save.

Then, this past Tuesday evening, somebody threw a bomb into the mail slot of Dahlberg’s home. The explosion caused the front door to fly off its hinges and across the living room. Although Dahlberg, his wife, and their children were all home at the time, nobody was hurt. The news of the attack was followed hard upon by a report that Dahlberg had been stripped of his position in the military. “What he has written is not consistent with the values of the Ministry of Defense,” said an armed forces spokesman.

So it goes. On Thursday evening, in reaction to a clash in Stockholm between neo-Nazis and “anti-racists,” thousands of citizens of Uppsala, Gothenberg, and Malmö took to the streets in yet another iteration of that favorite Scandinavian pastime, the torchlight procession against racism. …

Stockholm anti-racists plan a Sunday demo. Perusing images of the Thursday evening processions, which showed the pious multicultural multitudes flaunting yet again their proud refusal to test their common ideology against reality, I couldn’t help pondering the melancholy question: are they really unaware that they’re marching their country into oblivion, or are they consciously embracing extinction in the belief that even self-slaughter is preferable to being called a racist?

Even by Religion of Peace standards it was an unusually bloody weekend, with nearly 300 people massacred by Holy Warriors in suicide attacks in Yemen, a funeral in Iraq [at least 70 killed including children], the shopping mall in Kenya [at least 62 killed including many children, 175 injured], and a double bombing at a church in Pakistan [more than 80 killed]. – from The Religion of Peace.

More than 500 civilians killed by the forces of Islam. And nothing is being done to oppose them.

It is not a clash of civilizations, as is often said: it is a clash of civilization with barbarism. But either civilization has not yet woken up to that reality, or it is conniving at its own destruction.

One story of the massacre in the Kenya shopping mall is of the barbarian warriors entering a children’s shoe shop, demanding that the children trying on shoes recite “the Shahada” – a tribal chant about their nasty god, set down as the opening lines of the Koran – and shooting dead those who could not. Bullets in the little bodies. They were not Muslims so they had no right to live, according to the creed of the Muslim barbarians.

Most reports agree that it is a group belonging to the Somalian terrorist organization al-Shabaab, affiliated with al-Qaeda, that carried out the massacre of shoppers and their children in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Among them are five Muslims from America, one from Canada, one from Finland, and one from Sweden. At the time of this writing there are still gunmen in the building on the loose, and they may be holding hostages.

Of the five from America, three are from Minnesota, and they – Daniel Greenfield reports at Front Page  –

… were the subject of a propaganda recruitment video released by the organization Thursday. Titled The Path to Paradise: From the Twin Cities to the Land of Two Migrations, the nearly 40-minute post allegedly details the travels of Dahir Gure, Muhammad Al-Amriki and Mohamud Hassan to Somalia over 2007 and 2008.

In one segment, Al-Amriki, born Troy Kastigar, likened his experiences to being at an amusement park.

“If you guys only knew how much fun we have over here, this is the real Disneyland,” he said. “You need to come here and join us, and take pleasure in this fun.”

“Need a country? Take ours. It’s okay, we’re dying anyway.”

Who can help laughing? Though of course it’s really very sad when a whole nation goes mad. Even if it’s the Swedes.

We quote from an hilarious – but true – article by that admirable writer on Scandinavian scandals, Bruce Bawer:

Another week, another jaw-dropping development in Sweden. A couple of weeks ago it was the cockamamie “hijab solidarity” campaign, in which non-Muslim women all over the country donned head coverings in tribute to a Muslim woman who claimed a man had yanked hers off. This week, the eyebrow-raising news is that Sweden is offering instant permanent residency to any and all Syrian refugees who apply. These newly minted residents, moreover, will be entitled to bring over their spouses and kids. The reasoning behind this new policy is that the situation in Syria is extremely dangerous right now and not likely to improve anytime soon. …

Before this new policy was announced, the number of Syrians seeking asylum in Sweden was over 1000 a month. But now? The sky’s the limit. Think about it: Syria’s population is 22.5 million, of which about 5000 are fleeing the country every day. More than two million Syrians have fled their country since the civil war began, and there’s no sign of that number abating. As for Sweden, its population is 9.5 million, of which about 1.5 million are foreign-born and about 2.5 million have foreign backgrounds. Earlier this year, Swedish Migration Minister Tobias Billström called current immigration levels “unsustainable” – only to be quickly shut down by Integration Minister Erik Ullenhag, who assured all and sundry that Sweden had no plans to tighten its immigration rules.

What Syrian wouldn’t take Sweden up on such an offer? It means not only a residency card but also an elaborate benefits package including free money, housing, health care, day care – you name it.

Before this week Sweden’s immigration policy was already suicidal; it’s hard not to see the new policy as an effort to turn slow-motion self-slaughter into something more like a leap off a cliff. The sheer numbers aside, how many of the newcomers will be members of Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and so on? …

It will not be long before civil war will break out between the Sunnis and Shias. Maybe the last of the Swedes will realize what they’ve done just before their nation becomes extinct as collateral damage. But will they care? Won’t they die with their hearts full of joy, and their eyes full of tears of gratification, as they watch those wonderful Syrians doing their thing as comfortably and confidently as if they were still at home?

When I read about the new policy, my first thought was that surely there must be somebody in Sweden who’s standing up and shouting: “Stop! Are we all crazy?” So I looked at the editorial pages of a few Swedish newspapers. Nope. The editors of Aftonbladet, for example, complained that Sweden hadn’t gone far enough, and lamented the fact that the rest of Europe wasn’t joining in. Noting that European countries have taken in about 40,000 Syrians, the editors complained that this wasn’t nearly sufficient. “We have built,” they complained, “a ‘Fortress Europe’.”

Yes, “Fortress Europe.” Pause for a moment to take that one in. Over the last couple of generations, Western Europe has welcomed immigrants from the Muslim world on a scale such as the world has never seen. The continent has been transformed in ways that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. Yet in the view of Aftonbladet‘s editors – and, rest assured, of the Swedish establishment generally – Europe has behaved like a fortress. Summed up in these two words, these twin trochees – “Fortress Europe” – is the very madness of Sweden.

Aftonbladet‘s editors called on Sweden to pressure other EU countries to copy the new policy, and proposed that it make a more active effort to bring Syrians to its shores, namely by plucking them up at refugee camps in Syria and shipping them to Sweden from there. …

Their counterparts at Sydsvenskan concurred, calling on other EU countries to follow Sweden’s lead. Dagen‘s editors, calling the new policy an “excellent decision,” hoped it would set a good example for other countries and that “generosity” would continue to characterize Sweden’s approach to the refugee issue. And at Dagens Nyheter, columnist Eric Helmerson also gave the new policy a thumbs-up. “When your neighbors’ house is on fire,” he argued, “you open your door to them.” He, too, lamented the lack of “solidarity” (as he put it) that other EU members were exhibiting: “It’s scandalous that so many wealthy, peaceful countries are looking away from people in the most severe distress.” He singled out for special criticism certain Swedish municipalities that have hesitated to take in more refugees – partly because of the high cost of maintaining refugees, and partly because of the crime and other social problems that they bring with them. While acknowledging that such difficulties exist, Helmerson insisted that “it is deeply cynical to assume that the problems are insoluble and thus shirk responsibility and compassion.”

Ah, compassion. It ‘s what Socialism is supposed to be all about.

Columnist Ivar Arpi at Svenska Dagbladet joined in the applause for the new policy, calling it “irreproachable.” Striking an unexpected realistic note, however, he pointed out that Sweden’s municipalities just don’t have enough housing or the financial resources to take care of newcomers properly. Plus a fact, the Swedish job market is just plain terrible, with sky-high levels of unemployment, especially among the foreign-born.

How, then, does Sweden expect to pay to house and feed all these refugees? An article that appeared a couple of weeks ago provided an answer. The headline was blunt: “Malmö takes from the old and the sick and gives to immigrants.” The thrust of the report was that the city of Malmö, desperate to find a way to cover its ever-rising expenditures on immigrants (it spends $15 million a year on mother-tongue schooling alone), has proposed severe cuts in outlays for sick and elderly native Swedes.

What? Where’s compassion gone? We could swear it was here a moment ago!

Remember that we’re talking here about a country where the chief justification for high taxes is a generous welfare system that provides a safety net for the unemployed, the ill, and the elderly. Swedes are brought up to view themselves as partners in a covenant with the state: pay your way when you’re able to, and you’ll be taken care of when and if you aren’t. Yet in Malmö, thanks to the soaring costs associated with immigration, the local government can no longer keep its end of the deal.

Consequently, it has proposed that nursing-home fees be raised significantly; that free meals in nursing homes be phased out, forcing residents to cover their own food costs; that senior citizens who until now have been receiving free home care be forced to pay for it; that the elderly poor, who now receive discounts on various health-care services based on their income, be compelled to shell out the full price; and that old people who aren’t ambulatory, and thus can’t make it to a clinic, be charged extra for house calls. As for old people who simply don’t have the money to pay for food, shelter, or vital medical treatment, they’ll be forced to “abase themselves before municipal officials by asking to be exempt from the fees.”

Meanwhile, the Swedish government has ordered that illegal immigrants be given free medical and dental care.

Seen from abroad, it’s very clear where all this is leading. Why can’t the Swedes see it themselves?

In the religion of the  Norsemen, unlike most others, Evil was predicted to win the battle that ends the world.

The Norse Prophecies derive from the ancient myth of The Ragnarok which translates, from old Norse to English, roughly as “The Final Destiny of the Gods” or “Twilight of the Gods”. An important part of the Norse Mythological Canon, the Ragnarok describes an epic battle at the end of time or World cycle, between the Gods themselves and between men on the Earth. During the course of events there are a number of various natural disasters, earthquakes and sea surges over the dry land. Mountains topple, the air and the oceans are sprayed with poison, fire and flame ravage the land and then the World is submerged in water. At the end, the World Tree Yggdrasil is destroyed, the Gods Odin, Freya, Loki, Thor etc. are no more and all of humankind perishes also. So the World cycle ends.

The end begins?

We take these extracts from a speech to be found in full at Front Page. It was delivered by Ingrid Carlqvist, founder of Sweden’s Free Press Society, at the 2012 International Conference for Free Speech and Human Rights held in Brussels on July 9, 2012.

Ladies and gentlemen. My name is Ingrid Carlqvist and I was born in Sweden in 1960, when the Social Democrats were gonna rule forever and ever and our country was the nicest and safest and most progressed in the world. Now I live in Absurdistan – a country that has the highest figure of reported rapes in the world, hundreds of so called “exclusion areas” where people live outside the Swedish society and with newspapers that hide all these horrible facts [from] the people. …

When I grew up our prime minister was Tage Erlander, a Social Democrat. In 1965 he said in parliament, after violent race riots in America:

“We Swedes live in a so infinitely happier situation. The population in our country is homogeneous, not just according to race but also in many other aspects.”

Now I live in a nation that is not homogeneous in any respect. Olof Palme that came after him decided that homogeneous was a bad thing and opened up our borders for people from all over the world. And from right to left the politicians told us that there was no such thing as a Swedish culture, no Swedish traditions worth mentioning and that we Swedes should be grateful that so many people with REAL culture and REAL traditions came to us.

Mona Sahlin, a later leader of the Social Democrats, said in an interview [in] 2002 with the magazine Euroturk, when asked what Swedish culture is:

I’ve often had that question, but I can’t think of what Swedish culture is. I think that is what makes us Swedes so envious of immigrants. You have a culture, an identity, something that ties you together. What do we have? We have Midsummer’s Eve and such corny things.

She also said: The Swedes must integrate into the new Sweden. The old Sweden is not coming back.

In this New Sweden we have more reported rapes than any other country in the European Union, according to a study by professor Liz Kelly from England. More than 5 000 rapes or attempted rapes were reported in 2008 (last year it was more than 6 000). In 2010 another study reported that just one country in the world has more rapes than Sweden, and that is Lesotho in South Africa. For every 100,000 inhabitants Lesotho has 92 reported rapes, Sweden has 53, The United States 29, Norway 20 and Denmark 7.

In 1990 the authorities counted 3 exclusion areas in Sweden, suburbs where mostly immigrants live, where very few have a job to go to, almost all of them live by welfare and the children don’t pass their exams. In 2002 they counted 128 exclusion areas. In 2006 we had 156 and then they stopped counting. In some cities, like Malmö where I live, a third of all inhabitants live in an exclusion area.

What sort of immigrants would those be? What sort of people now dominate Malmö?

Interesting that she doesn’t say. It’s highly likely that if she did, she would be prosecuted, condemned, fined, even jailed.

What did Tage Erlander mean when he said that the Swedish population was homogeneous, not just according to race but also in many other aspects? I think he meant things like norms, values, culture and traditions. A feeling of fellowship. That we all, in the Old Sweden, had a similar view of what a good society is and how we solve conflicts. He KNEW what the Swedish culture was all about, in contrast to Mona Sahlin.

In the New Sweden we need armed police officers at our hospitals because rivalling families fight each other in the hospital rooms. They gun each other down in open streets and they rob and beat old people up. The crime rate grows by the minute, but the Swedish politicians and journalists tell us that it has absolutely nothing to do with immigration. The fact that our prisons are full of foreign people is just a coincidence or is explained by socio-economic factors.

For many years I was a journalist in the mainstream media. But I was always a bit of a troublemaker, always suspicious of what people said was THE TRUTH. When everybody ran in one direction, I turned around in the other direction to see what was there.

In January 2011 something happened to make me loose my last hope about Swedish journalists. I was the vice chairman of The Society of Publicists in Malmö and had invited the Danish journalist Mikael Jalving to talk about his coming book “Absolute Sweden – a Journey in the Country of Silence.” One day the chairman phoned me and said: We must cancel Mikael Jalving because he is going to talk at a meeting arranged by a newspaper called National Today.

It didn’t matter to him, or to anyone else on the board of this society for journalists that Jalving was going to talk about his book. If he went to that meeting he would be infected by nationalist ideas and probably he would become a Nazi. …

That’s the way it works in the New Sweden, the country I call Absurdistan. The country of silence.

I was furious and left the board of that society. That led to my being invited to The Danish Free Press Society to talk about the strange country of Sweden and that led to my founding of The Swedish Free Press Society.

That is how Lars Hedegaard* and I found each other. But we didn’t settle for running one Free Press Society each; since we both have a solid background as journalists we decided to start a newspaper. …

To break the silence. A risky project!

It will be called Dispatch International “because our vision is that this newspaper will become worldwide one day.”

Dispatch will be printed in two versions – one Danish and one Swedish – but all the stories are the same. And on the internet you will be able to read our stories in English and German as well. We will write about politics in our countries and in the world. We will write about all those things that mainstream media have been hiding for so many years now. We will distinguish between news stories and commentaries and the tone will be subdued. We will let the facts talk, the facts that mainstream journalists hide from people.

And at last she comes to speak the almost forbidden words:

In Sweden NOBODY talks about immigration problems, the death of the multiculti project or the Islamisation/Arabisation of Europe. If you do, you will immediately be called a racist, an Islamophobe or a Nazi. That is what I have been called since I founded the Free Press Society in Sweden.

She concludes by asking for support for International International, by taking a subscription or becoming a shareholder or just donating money. If you do, she says –

You will take me one step closer to home. To the Sweden that once was, the Sweden I want back.

We sympathize with her optimism, and admire her project, but we do not believe she will ever have back the Sweden that once was.

* Lars Hedegaard, President of the Danish Free Press Society, brought to trial for “racism”, because he said that Muslim men maltreat women. See our posts: The new heresy, January 11, 2011; Protecting Islam from criticism, December 18, 22011; The most important struggle of our time, April 16, 2012; The last days of Europe, June 9, 2012.

David Solway, whose insights often impress us, has today done us the honor of linking to one of our posts in a new article of his.

The article is at Front Page, titled Is the U.S. Too Big to Fail? Here’s a part of it (but read it all). The link to our post, Speaking of Secession, [April 7, 2010] comes with the words “parting of ways” in the third paragraph:

The Bridge Mix of social, political and economic programs—redistribution of wealth, a bloated bureaucracy, reduction of military power, amnesty for illegals, toleration of inimical communities, government takeover of the marketplace, ideology supplanting pragmatics—adopted by the American liberal-left and rapidly being put in place by the current administration are hurtling the nation toward its moment of truth when it will have to decide whether it survives as the United States of America or devolves into something that, until just a few years ago, would have been almost unimaginable.

Often what seems to be inconceivable is only the prelude to what may well become unavoidable. And in the case of America such a scenario is all too possible. For America has only three options looming before it in a rapidly foreclosing future. The best case scenario is that, assuming a concerned citizenry, the growing Tea Party movement, a return to strict budgetary rectitude and a revival of the wisdom of the Constitution and the Founders, the United States may weather the storm of social and political dismemberment it is presently undergoing and recover its essence as a constitutional republic. To accomplish this aim, however, the policies of the Obama administration must be resisted at every turn. What Henry David Thoreau wrote in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience in 1848 has a proleptic ring to it and is truer today than it ever was: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

On the other hand the calamity of disintegration, as happened to the Soviet Union not so long ago, is a deeply troubling likelihood. The drive toward secession or what is called “disunion” along red state/blue state lines appears to be acquiring strength by the day. It is in the air. The threat of dissolution cannot be wished away or conveniently ignored. Whether such a parting of ways can be achieved peaceably and rationally or would entail violence and bloodshed remains an open question. But what resembles a bitter marriage between cultural incompatibles, the statist Left and the conservative Right, who have nothing to say to one another and disagree on just about everything, makes an eventual divorce by no means unthinkable. The clash between a pervasive scavenger mentality of collective entitlement and the ancestral belief in the values of personal initiative and individual responsibility cannot, it increasingly appears, be resolved amicably.

The third possibility is that America under the stewardship of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party will become an impoverished, socialist, Muslim-friendly country, much like the United Kingdom today or Sweden tomorrow, with devastating consequences for the majority of its citizens. As David Horowitz remarks of the U.S., “its constitutional order is threatened by a political left whose values remain socialist and whose agendas are subversive.” Such is the fundamental transformation promised by the Democratic candidate five days before his election: the intent to legislate outcome at the expense of input, to ensure a syndicalist homogeneity of status among the population while installing a privileged managerial class in the seats of power, and ultimately to transform America’s most industrious entrepreneurial sector into over-taxed and over-regulated obsolescence. Where have we seen this before?

These, then, are the three alternatives between which America will have to choose: recovery, dissolution, socialism. Regarding the latter two, to cite Aeschylus …,  it’s “either way, ruin.” Clearly, the moment of decision is not far down the road. Even a one-term administration for Barack Obama and his cohorts may be sufficient to wreak irreparable damage; a two-term presidency would probably spell the end of the noble and unique American experiment in republican democracy. For there can be little question that Barack Obama and the Democratic ascendancy together form the single greatest disaster to befall the United States in the modern era. If the country does not right itself sooner rather than later, it will find itself broken down the middle or wake up one day to discover that it is now nothing more than another socialist or quasi-Marxist Republic, which is a republic in name only.

Thoreau is on the mark again. Deploring the effects of a “wordy” and ever-compliant Congress which had “not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and freedom” and which was devoid of “talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufactures,” he argues that without the “seasonable experience…of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations.” And we remember, too, that the United States was a much smaller political entity in 1848 than it is in 2010.

Now is not the time to take refuge in the smug conviction of indestructibility. America is not too big to fail and it may well be too big not to fail. But one thing is undeniable. As it approaches the eleventh hour, its survival depends on a determined and informed citizen “army” of genuine patriots capable of restoring the practical ideal of limited government  …

We agree wholly with the opinion we quote here, though the author does not seem to believe as we do that Obama does not want America to be free. He is a collectivist, a redistributionist, a socialist. To reduce individual freedom, to replace the free market with centralized control of the economy, to expand government is what he is about.

From the Washington Times:

Consider our recent economic policy. In late 2008, the specter of a financial meltdown triggered dangerous decisions under President Bush. He approved an unprecedented intervention in the financial sector – the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program – which actually fed the crisis. Instead of changing course, President Obama not only doubled down on those decisions, but went even further, in the belief that only bigger government can “lift us from a recession this deep and severe.” …

In December, the U.S. economy lost an additional 85,000 jobs. Despite all the bailouts and stimulus spending, the economy shed 3.4 million net jobs in 2009. But while employment has shrunk, the federal deficit has ballooned. One year after Mr. Obama took office, the deficit has grown to $1.4 trillion. His 10-year budget will add $13 trillion to the national debt by 2019. …

The bad news is that the United States is falling behind. The 2010 Index of Economic Freedom, released Wednesday, finds that the U.S. experienced the most precipitous drop in economic freedom among the world’s top 20 economies (as measured by the gross domestic product). The decline was steep enough to tumble the U.S. from the ranks of truly “free” economies. We are now numbered among the ranks of the “mostly free” – the same as Botswana, Belgium and Sweden. Canada now stands as the sole beacon of economic freedom in North America, getting a higher score on the economic-freedom Index than the United States.

On the index’s 100-point scale of economic freedom, the U.S. fell 2.7 points. Canada’s score dropped, too, but only one-tenth of a point. Meanwhile, countries such as Germany, France, Poland, Japan, South Korea, Mexico and Indonesia managed to maintain or even improve their scores, despite the economic crisis.

Why? In large measure, it’s because of the way Washington has exacerbated the financial and economic crisis since 2008. By June of last year, when we cut off data collection in order to begin our analysis, Washington’s interventionist policies had already caused a decline in seven of the 10 categories of economic freedom we measure. Particularly significant were declines in financial freedom, monetary freedom and property rights.

Conditions attached to large government bailouts of financial and automotive firms significantly undermined investors’ property rights. Additionally, politically influenced regulatory changes – such as the imposition of executive salary caps – have had perverse effects, discouraging entrepreneurship and job creation and slowing recovery. On top of this, we had massive stimulus spending that is leading to unprecedented deficits….

We are heading the wrong way. The index, co-published annually by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, has become a “leading indicator” of economic vitality, but other surveys also show that when economic freedom drops, falling opportunity and declining prosperity follow. Unless Washington takes steps to reverse the poor decisions it has made, Americans can expect a long and difficult time ahead.

The good news is that we’ve been here before, and we’ve turned things around before. There’s no reason we can’t do that again. Poll after poll demonstrates that the American people understand this, even if their politicians don’t. They clearly want Washington to gather up the political will to do things such as lowering taxes and reducing regulation and massive spending that feeds the federal debt. We need to unleash the power of the market to create jobs and to reclaim our competitive edge in the global economy. …

The less government intervenes in our lives and our economy, the freer and more prosperous we can become. The choices Mr. Obama takes in the future will determine whether America remains a land of opportunity and can reclaim its international reputation as “the land of the free.”

View the Index of Economic Freedom list here.

Here is part of a story from the Washington Post. (Note the PC use of ‘paramilitary’ instead of ‘terrorist’. By the up-side down values of the left, terrorists must be treated with respect.)

U.S. and European counterterrorism officials say a rising number of Western recruits — including Americans — are traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan to attend paramilitary training camps. The flow of recruits has continued unabated, officials said, in spite of an intensified campaign over the past year by the CIA to eliminate al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in drone missile attacks.

Since January, at least 30 recruits from Germany have traveled to Pakistan for training, according to German security sources. About 10 people — not necessarily the same individuals — have returned to Germany this year, fueling concerns that fresh plots are in the works against European targets.

“We think this is sufficient to show how serious the threat is,” said a senior German counterterrorism official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

German security services have been on high alert since last month, when groups affiliated with the Taliban and al-Qaeda issued several videos warning that an attack on German targets was imminent if the government did not bring home its forces from Afghanistan.

There are about 3,800 German troops in the country, the third-largest NATO contingent after those of the United States and Britain. German officials say Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders are trying to exploit domestic opposition in Germany to the war; surveys show that a majority of German voters favor a withdrawal of their soldiers.

The videos all featured German speakers who urged Muslims to travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan to join their cause.

“They’re doing such good business that they are dropping a new video every week or so,” said Ronald Sandee, a former Dutch military intelligence officer who serves as research director of the NEFA Foundation, a U.S. group that monitors terrorist networks. “If I were a young Muslim, I’d find them very convincing.”

Last week, German officials disclosed that a 10-member cell from Hamburg had left for Pakistan earlier this year. The cell is allegedly led by a German of Syrian descent but also includes ethnic Turks, German converts to Islam and one member with Afghan roots.

Other European countries are also struggling to keep their citizens from going to Pakistan for paramilitary training.

In August, Pakistani officials arrested a group of 12 foreigners headed to North Waziristan, a tribal region near the Afghan border where many of the camps are located. Among those arrested were four Swedes, including Mehdi Ghezali, a former inmate of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay …

They shouldn’t have been let into Europe, they shouldn’t have been given citizenship. European states should be glad to let them all go, including the converts who are of European descent. They should never be let back in again. It’s when they return that they are most dangerous, not when they stay in North Waziristan. The treacherous immigrants who seek terrorist training out there should have their families sent after them.

 Watch this video of a peaceful pro-Israel rally in Sweden, held with a permit, being broken up by the police because violent Muslims and pro-Muslims demonstrate against them, with no permit.