It is commonly said of Communism (as also, incidentally, of Christianity): “You can’t say it hasn’t worked because it has never really been tried.” The idea is that only rogues and sadists have led Communist revolutions and ruled Communist countries, but if that really nice Communist that everyone knows in private life were to implement his ideas, then – voila! – Utopia.

Sometimes one of the Communist faithful will speak of Alexander Dubcek as an example of a man who could have headed a Communist government that would have made Czechoslovakia happy if he had not been stopped by the wrongly-led USSR.

Question: Can any collective, any serfdom, ever make for human happiness?

Our answer: No.

Vladimir Tismaneanu, professor of politics at the University of Maryland gives his answer to the question in an article at Front Page. Here it is, almost in full:

In August 1968, the Warsaw Pact tanks and half a million-strong military killed the Prague Spring. It was not simply the end of a daring political experiment, but also a gigantic defeat for the dreams of reconciling communism and democracy. Marxist revisionism, the utopian endeavor to rediscover the presumably forgotten thesaurus of left-wing radicalism, suffered a terrible blow. In the words of a Polish dissident, “We then realized that there was no socialism with a human face, but only totalitarianism with broken teeth.”

Even Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher who in the 1950s had been silent (to put it mildly) about the Gulag, lambasted the invasion as “the socialism which came in from the cold.” It was the Leninist communism of barbed wire, fear, suspicion and lies. Stalin, as famous East European dissidents showed, was Lenin’s most faithful heir. He was also the most successful disciple. Post-Stalin Soviet leaders refused to allow for genuine democratization, remained faithful to the original one-party autocracy.

A joke of those times captured this continuity: “What are Brezhnev eyebrows? Stalin’s mustache at a higher level.”

The leader of the Prague Spring was Alexander Dubcek, a Moscow-trained communist apparatchik with reformist propensities. Elected Communist Party leader in January 1968, he launched an ambitious renewal program. In a few months, many Stalinist institutions lost their power. Censorship was disbanded, intellectuals were excited, civil society returned. Warsaw Pact leaders, headed by the sclerotic Leonid Brezhnev, panicked. Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu supported Dubcek not because of solidarity with the attempt to humanize socialism, but rather as a way to challenge Soviet imperialist claims.

Adopted in April 1968, the “Action Program” of the Czechoslovak communists pledged to put an end to repressive policies and engage the party in a genuine dialogue with the citizens. One its main authors, Zdenek Mlynar, had studied law in Moscow in the early 1950s. He shared a dormitory room with a young Soviet student, an arduous Komsomol militant named Mikhail Gorbachev. They became close friends. Years later, Gorbachev would resume the Prague Spring agenda hoping against hope that democratic communism could somehow be accomplished.

In June, writer Ludvik Vaculik issued a document that entered history as “The Two Thousand Words” manifesto. The Soviets and their allies went ballistic. The Manifesto was an unmitigated, outspoken, unambiguous call for political pluralism. Millions supported it expecting a multi-party system to emerge soon. As events unfolded in breathtaking speed, the neo-Stalinists East European despots acted pre-emptively and crushed the Prague Spring. Dubcek and his comrades were arrested, transported to Moscow and forced to sign a humiliating capitulation. A few months later, Dubcek was expelled from the communist party.

A new freeze followed under the name “normalization.” It was the normalcy of jails, denunciations, terror. …  Opposition activists were harassed, besmirched, jailed. They acted heroically in spite of the most unpropitious circumstances. Among them, critical intellectuals like Vaclav Havel who argued in favor of the power of the powerless.

Then in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow. In his belief that communism included such a humanistic dimension and his insistence that Stalin had been a vicious traitor to the original Marxist and Leninist messages, Gorbachev was part of a long tradition within the communist chapels. Students of Marxism refer to the attempt to turn such beliefs into policy as revisionism.

Of course, Gorbachev was not the first celebrated revisionist. Before him, attempts had been made by others to reconcile socialism with democracy and to jettison the repressive features of the system as distortions of an intrinsically healthy order. Consider Imre Nagy*, Hungary’s premier during the 1956 revolution, executed in 1958, and then Alexander Dubcek. Both Nagy and Dubcek failed because Soviet intervention crushed their experiments and dashed hopes of renovating socialism from within. But when Gorbachev came to power in March 1985 and announced his program of renewal, there was no foreign force to threaten the great shaker in the Kremlin. The seeds of the negation of the old order were planted in the empire’s innermost sanctum.

What have been the main illusions of Nagy, Dubcek, Gorbachev and other revisionists?

First, that the Communist Party, as the initiator of reforms, should preserve a central role during their implementation.

Second, that there was a middle way between the conservation of Stalinist structures and their complete disbandment.

Third, that a compromise of sorts could be reached with the exponents of the old regime.

And fourth, that the population at large was ready to enthusiastically espouse the revisionist program and endorse the new leaders in the frantic search for modernization. The revisionists naively believed in their popular mandate.

But this logic was basically flawed. The system could not tolerate structural changes and secreted antibodies. In the case of the Soviet Union, instead of foreign intervention, Gorbachev was faced with the morose inertia of the bureaucratic colossus. His exhortations increasingly fell on deaf ears, as economic performance failed to improve. The work ethos was plagued by apathy and indifference.

Were Dubcek and Gorbachev true believers? In a sense yes, because only a true believer would have engaged in such destructive action while hoping that there was enough loyalty to the system among its subjects to keep the regime alive.

The crushing of the Prague Spring was justified as defense of socialist internationalism. In fact, Marxist internationalism was nothing but hollow, ludicrous rhetoric, a facade for Soviet imperialism, ethical dereliction, civic paralysis, and bureaucratic domination. …

It demonstrated a truth that East Europeans had been long familiar with: There is no communism with a human face.

*We have doubts that Imre Nagy would have tried very hard to “reconcile socialism with democracy and to jettison the repressive features of the system as distortions of an intrinsically healthy order”, but every other point in the Professor’s expert demolition of the starry-eyed argument for a kinder gentler Communism supports our own convictions.

What we insist on calling “immigration” from the Third World to Western European countries like Britain is a historically new phenomenon, for which a case can be made that other, more appropriate terms should be used — like “colonization” and “invasion.”

We ourselves have not yet been so bold as to call the influx of Muslims into Europe an invasion, but we quote from an article by Enza Ferreri:

The definition of “colony”, from which the word “colonization” is derived, is: a) a body of people living in a new territory but maintaining ties with their homeland or b) a number of people coming from the same country, sharing the same ethnic origin or speaking the same language, who reside in a foreign country or city, or a particular section of it.

Either could apply to the people coming to live in Europe from Asia and Africa.

By far the most of whom are Muslims.

In reference to colonization, dictionaries add “relating to the developing world”, but this is only because colonization primarily occurred there in the past. Word meanings have to change to adapt to the new historic realities.

Similarly, the expressions “native” and “indigenous” previously referred to the original inhabitants of non-European continents, whereas now they are used to describe Germans, French, British, Swedes, Dutch and so on.

In white-dominated South Africa it used to be fairly polite to call the blacks “natives”. Then it became more polite to call them “Africans” –  fittingly, as the indigenous whites continued to call themselves “Europeans”. But when new generations of whites began to claim that they too were Africans, it became proper to say “black Africans” or simply “blacks”. Among the taboo words in polite society was “kaffir”. It was the equivalent of “the n word” in America, deeply affronting to the blacks.What few South Africans of any color or ethnicity knew was that it derives from from the Arabic word “kafir” meaning a non-Muslim (therefore an inferior). Now all South Africans except Muslims are “kafirs”, which must really pinch the nerves of white racists, if any such still dare to exist in the new South Africa. Now too the Europeans are being called “natives”, and increasingly, as the Muslim populations increase, also “kafirs”.

“Invasion” has three main meanings: a) the act of invading, especially the entrance of an armed force into a territory to conquer; b) a large-scale onset of something injurious or harmful, such as a disease; c) an intrusion or encroachment, an incursion by a large number of people or things into a place or sphere of activity.

It is the last meaning that applies to what is happening to the countries of Europe.

One could describe the development in even more humiliating terms.

Even “ethnic cleansing” could be used, since local populations are being replaced by different ethnic groups.

Doesn’t “ethnic cleansing” have to be intentional on the part of the “cleansers”? The possible cleansers of Europe do not have that power – yet.

Anyway, the replacement is true. Not yet of whole nations – that will come in time –  but of many local populations. If in the Muslim-dominated enclaves and “no-go” areas the replacement is not already total, it almost certainly will be in another year or two.

The biggest cities, the capitals of Europe, are slipping away from the nations that built them.

London, for instance, is no longer a white-British-majority city, although mainstream media like the BBC and London’s own paper, the Evening Standard, barely mention it, to say nothing of the city mayor Boris Johnson. …

The proportion of white British Londoners fell drastically from 60 percent in 2001 to 44.9 per cent in 2011, partly due to the arrival of so many foreign nationals and partly to a mass exodus of white Britons.

And the exodus is largely caused by the influx.

David Goodhart, director of Demos, writes in The Financial Times:

Over the decade between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, the number of white British Londoners fell by more than 600,000 (17 per cent). That is about three times the fall over the previous census period, 1991 to 2001. …

Six hundred thousand is a big city disappearing in just 10 years. …

What the large-scale influx of foreigners to Europe can no longer be called is “immigration”. Immigration is what you have when, for example, small groups of French go to live in Britain or the British in Spain.

What distinguishes invasion from immigration are three things: the volume of people involved in the movement, the span of time and frequency of these movements — the same number of people moving to live in a country over 4 years as opposed to 400 years — and the kind of people, in particular how similar or alien to the natives they are, and how easily or improbably they’ll integrate.

The sheer numbers of people who have come to live in the UK in the last few decades have negatively affected the indigenous population’s quality of life in a serious, profound way, even assuming that those people were all law-abiding, upright citizens, which they are not.

The natives feel the new order when it affects jobs by increasing competition for them; when it strains the already over-stretched social services of the welfare state; and when it slows down the pace at which indigenous school children can learn in the state schools since they are forced to wait for the children of the colonists to master the language. It may not be long before all children will be taught in the colonist’s tongues, and after that it is more than possible (on historical precedent) that the natives will be forbidden to use their own language at all.

The invasions have also affected the health of the natives. In Britain, for instance, the incidence of tuberculosis is “constantly rising largely due to immigration”.

A classic example [of an adverse effect] is the current housing shortage. The UK is suffering its worst housing crisis in modern history. Two or more household units cram into one dwelling, and young people, not being able to afford to move out, live with their parents. … [And] one of the main causes [of high and ever rising prices] is the high number of immigrants increasing the demand for dwellings …

Most immigrants rent, rather than buy, a property in the first 5-10 years since their arrival, which inevitably increases rental prices for everyone, including the indigenous people.

Social housing is also in limited supply. Therefore, the immigrant population that takes a share of it deprives the natives. The percentages [of native and foreign occupiers] are roughly the same: 17 percent of British live in council-rented accommodations, 18 percent of foreigners do.

Although the natives are still a large majority. How large is disputed. (Are the locally-born children of immigrants to be classed as foreign or indigenous?) Guesses range between ratios of 89-11 and 80-20 percent. But the Muslims are breeding much faster than the natives. The fertility-rate of the natives is well below the 2.1 needed to sustain their numbers. And no government will stop the immigration.

The failure of the native populations of Europe to have enough children to carry their nations into the future may have the same cause as their failure to resist the quiet invasions of their countries.

What can it be called but a death-wish?

The US is at war. Not with “terror”, which is absurd. Not even with “terrorism”, which is almost as absurd. But with Islam. Which doesn’t mean that we regard every Muslim in the world as an enemy. We are under attack by Muslims who are fighting the jihad, directly or indirectly, as the ideology of Islam requires every Muslim to do.

We need to recognize this, and declare it to be the case. And we need also to recognize our enemy in Islam’s ally – the Left.

We call it World War IV. (World War III was the “Cold War”.)

Michael Ledeen is of much the same opinion. Though he defines the enemy more narrowly as “radical Islamists” and “radical leftists”.

He writes at PJ Media:

It’s hard to get our minds around the dimensions of the slaughter underway in the Middle East and Africa, and harder still to see that the battlefields of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria and Mali are pieces in a global war in which we are targeted. For the most part, the deep thinkers zero in on the single battlefields. What if anything should we do about the big fight in Egypt? Should we assist the Syrian opposition? What to do in Lebanon or Jordan? Should we respond positively to the Iraqi government’s request for security assistance? Is anyone thinking hard about Tunisia, likely to be the scene of the next explosions?

It could not be otherwise, since our government, our universities, our news organizations and our think tanks are all primarily organized to deal with countries, and our analysts, policy makers and military strategists inevitably think inside those boxes.

We don’t have an assistant secretary of defense for global strategy. (Actually we do, his name is Andrew Marshall, he’s a sprightly genius of 92 years, and he runs a largely ignored corner of the Pentagon called “Net Assessment”). But we do have one for the Near East and South Asia. And there’s hardly a professor in America who is talking about the fundamental change in the nature of global affairs in which we are enmeshed, the paradigm shift from the post-World War II world dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, to … we know not what.

So there’s a global war, we’re the main target of the aggressors, and our leaders don’t see it and therefore have no idea how to win it.

Any serious attempt to understand what’s going on has to begin by banning the word “stability”, much beloved of diplomats and self-proclaimed strategists.

Yes. What is the point of wanting stability in or between tyrannies? How long should we want them to last?

If anything is fairly certain about our world, it’s that there is no stability, and there isn’t going to be any. Right now, the driving forces are those aimed at destroying the old order, and their targets (the old regimes, very much including the United States) have until recently showed little taste to engage as if their survival depended on it. But things are changing, as always.

The war is easily described: there is a global alliance of radical leftists and radical Islamists, supported by a group of countries that includes Russia, at least some Chinese leaders, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. The radicals include the Sunni and Shi’ite terrorist organizations and leftist groups …

Their objective is the destruction of the West, above all, of the United States.

The alliance of Islam and the Left is very strange. The Left champions women, sexual and ethnic minorities, condemned criminals, thin people, the planet, and promiscuous copulation. Islam is an ideology concerned centrally with the subjugation of women. It hangs homosexuals; massacres blacks in Africa even if they’re Muslims; tortures prisoners; and has issued no fatwa against the fat. Its only aim for the planet is to put it under a caliphate. It punishes non-virgin brides and stones adulterers to death.

If the alliance is victorious and overcomes liberty, which of the allies will have its way?

What if they win? Some of them want to create a (Sunni or Shi’ite) caliphate, others want Castro- or Kim-style communist dictatorships. …

For the present, Islam is pre-occupied with internecine wars.

War is foggy, and alliances are often very unstable, especially at moments when the whole world is up for grabs. Look at Egypt, for example. At one level, it’s a sectarian fight: the “secular” military vs. the “Islamist” Muslim Brotherhood. So nobody should be surprised when the Brothers burn churches and murder Christians. But the top military dog, General Sisi, has some pretty impressive Islamist credentials. Indeed, his elevation at the time of the Brothers’ purge of Mubarak’s generals was frequently attributed to his close ties to the Brotherhood.

I don’t think anyone nowadays would call him a friend of the Brothers. So what happened? Did he go secular all of a sudden? Was his “Islamism” a trick from the get-go? Or is “Islamism” less monolithic than some suppose? A Saudi of my acquaintance showed up in Cairo a few days ago with a bunch of checks, some currently cashable, others postdated over the next twelve months, all hand-delivered to Sisi and his guys. Their advice to the Egyptian military is to mercilessly crush the Brothers, and their advice will likely be adopted, both because the junta knows that death awaits them if they lose (2 Egyptian major generals and 2 brigadier generals, along with many colonels, have been assassinated by the Brothers in the current spasm), and because only the Saudis can foot the huge bill facing Egypt just to provide the basics for the people. Most of whom, to the evident surprise of Western leaders and journalists, seem inclined to support the junta. (Neighborhood militias have taken on the Brothers throughout the country, for example).

So we’ve got an indubitably Islamist regime – the Saudi Wahhabis – supporting a military junta whose leader is famously Islamist against the infamously Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Yes, they may well all yearn for the destruction of the infidel West (although the junta impiously pockets our dollars), but for the moment the struggle for power trumps the power of the faith.

In Egypt the internecine war is not even between Sunnis and Shiites, but between Sunnis and Sunnis. (Christian casualties are collateral damage.)

Notice that this bloody confrontation [in Egypt] has nothing to do with the celebrated Sunni-Shi’ite war that is so often invoked to “explain” current events. It’s all happening within Sunni Egypt (although the Shi’ite Iranians are certainly meddling – surprise! – on behalf of the very Sunni Brothers). And there are plenty of “foreign fighters”, just as there were in Iraq, just as there are in Afghanistan: in the last 8 days, according to usually reliable sources in Cairo, 253 Uzbeks, 21 Yemenis, 40 Afghans and 11 Turkmens have been arrested, along with 126 Hamas operatives, who bring weapons and train pro-Brotherhood Egyptians. …

Maybe the Middle East is now the scene of a war between Islamists and ex-Islamists, or between pious Muslims and not-so-pious ones, or even between Muslims and ex-Muslims. In this context, we should ban the use of the word “moderate” along with “stability”…

We’re all for that.

Move on to Syria.

You’ve got Bashar Assad on top in a neighborhood of Damascus, supported by Iran and Russia, fighting against a variety of insurgents including al-Qaeda units, Salafists, former members of Assad’s military, and the usual mob of adventurous souls, including Americans and Europeans, who believe they are waging jihad in the name of Allah.

Assad is actually a figurehead; the real capital of Syria is in an office of the Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. A leader of the Syrian opposition made this clear, saying that Hezbollah and Iran were the real powers in Syria, and there’s plenty of evidence for his assertion, including dead Hezbollahis and Quds Forcers.

So al-Qaeda’s fighting Iran in Syria, right? That fits nicely into the Sunni vs. Shi’ite meme … But wait: our very own Treasury Department, which is as good as we’ve got when it comes to deciphering the crazy quilt network of global terrorism, told us in no uncertain terms a couple of years ago that there was a secret deal between AQ and the mullahs. Moreover, the tidal wave of terrorism that has crashed on Iraq is universally termed a resurgence of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has been Iranian-sponsored since Day One . … [So there is] an Iranian (Shi’ite)-sponsored (Sunni) al-Qaeda assault against (Shi’ite) Iraq, and right next door an Iranian-assisted (Sunni) al-Qaeda, alongside other (mostly Sunni) foreign and domestic fighters against a (kinda Shi’ite) regime under the control of (totally Shi’ite) Tehran. …

Let’s get outside these little boxes and look at the big board.

There’s an alliance plotting against us, bound together by two radical views of the world that share a profound, fundamental hatred of us. If they win, it’s hell to pay, because then we will be attacked directly and often, and we will be faced with only two options, winning or losing.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that they’re divided, and slaughtering each other. And it’s not always possible for us to sort out what “each other” even means. But one thing is quite clear, and I know it’s an unpopular idea, but it’s a true fact: they’re not an awesome force.

That is true. And because they are not militarily a match for the US, Michael Ledeen thinks they will fail.

The radical left has failed everywhere, and so have the radical Islamists. Both claim to have history (and/or the Almighty) on their side, but they go right on failing. The left is now pretty much in the garbage bin of history (you can hire Gorbachev for your next annual meeting if you can afford his speaking fee), and the “Muslim world” – sorry to be so blunt – is a fossilized remnant of a failed civilization. Look at the shambles in Iran, look at the colossal mess the Brothers unleashed on a once-great nation.

So we’ve got opportunities, lots of them. We’ve already passed up many: failing to support the Iranian people against the evil regime that is the central source of terror against us and our would-be friends, failing to support Mubarak against the Brothers, failing to quickly support the opposition to Assad at the outset, before the enterprise got buried under a heap of jihadi manure, and so forth. OK, we’re human, we’re led, if that’s the right verb, very badly, by ideologues who think we [Americans] are the root cause of most of the world’s problems. Which is the same thing our enemies believe …

Just think of the consequences of a free Iran: the fall of the Syrian regime, a devastating blow to Hezbollah, the Revolutionary Guards, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Bad news for the Brothers. A kick in the solar plexus of the nasty lefties in South America…

Think globally. Act as if you understood it. On our side, confound it.

Excellent advice. But omitted from the reckoning is the “stealth jihad”. Islam’s advance by immigration, taking over regions within Western countries, imposing sharia wherever they can, infiltrating governments, disseminating their propaganda surreptitiously through the public schools with false accounts of Islam and its history in prescribed books.

And is the left “in the garbage can of history”? Our view is that the USSR was defeated in the Cold War, but Communism was not. It is crowing its triumph in almost every Western university. It’s purring in the public schools. It colors many a ruling from a judge’s bench. It holds the mass media in thrall. It beats its dreary drum and sounds its infuriating trumpet in the United Nations. And it has a protégé of its acolyte Frank Marshall Davis, a member of its New Party, a disciple of its prophet Saul Alinsky presiding over the United States.

Which side, so far, is winning?

We do not think that Obama wants to appease the Muslim Brotherhood. We think he wants to encourage and promote that evil organization. Wants to, and does. He admits its members as advisers into US government departments. He continues to try to restore them to power in Egypt when clearly a majority of Egyptians want them gone. He had helped them get into power there in the first place.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the creator of Hamas, so no doubt he wants Hamas to be victorious too – and that means against Israel. It is also the parent of al-Qaeda, and Obama is helping al-Quaeda “rebels” win in Syria by arming them. Sure he finally let bin Laden get bumped off. Sure he lets drones kill other al-Qaeda leaders. Doing all that is excellent cover for pursuing his chosen mission – helping the Muslim Brotherhood win worldwide.

But the Muslim Brotherhood must not win. It would be an excellent thing if the Egyptian military were to crush the Brotherhood there where the monster was born, destroy it utterly, once and for all.

On this we are of one mind with Daniel Greenfield, who writes at Front Page:

Like all terrorist organizations, the Muslim Brotherhood has only one commodity to trade in. Blood.

In the war of ideas for the future of Egypt, the Brotherhood had nothing to offer but the blood of its followers and victims. It has no new ideas. It has no record of accomplishments. It has no vision for the future …

The outcome of any interaction with the Brotherhood could have been predicted from its motto; “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” 

In the streets of Egyptian cities, Muslim Brotherhood activists achieved their highest hope. They died in their Jihad against the liberal opposition and the military, fighting against human rights for women and Christians, against multi-party rule, freedom of speech, museums, libraries and the future in the way that the armies of Allah have died for over a thousand years.

Some died trying to kill Egyptian soldiers and police officers. Others were killed by their own people in order to maximize the death toll and spread shock and horror through the international community. …

An old Arab tactic that – exploiting the conscience of others. And it goes on working!

For the wealthy titans of the Brotherhood, their followers are pawns to be disposed of, human shields for their political ambitions. The Muslim Brotherhood spent their blood generously during the clashes with Egyptian police the same way that Hamas and Hezbollah spill the blood of their own people.

What it bought with their blood is the outrage of the world. Terrorist organizations are one-trick ponies. They unleash horrifying violence, blame it on the brutality of the authorities and wait for the world to step in and apply pressure on whatever government they are trying to overthrow. …

The Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders followed the oldest traditions of Islam by offering their followers paradise and atonement in exchange for unleashing their darkest passions. That the unleashing should have ended in hundreds of deaths is not at all unprecedented in the many wars and conflicts of Islam.

What any normal person would consider a massacre, the Muslim Brotherhood considers an opportunity.

The Muslim Brotherhood used the blood of its followers as currency to buy international outrage that will be used to pressure Egypt into releasing Brotherhood leaders like Morsi and and Khairat el-Shater. It wanted the clashes to be as ugly and bloody as possible. It wanted to outrage the world because it knew that was the speediest way of getting its leaders out of their prison cells and back into power.

These murderous tactics would be useless if the United States and Europe weren’t full of useful idiots and fellow travelers, in and out of the media, gasping at the carnage and demanding an immediate halt to the violence.

There is only one way to halt the violence and that is to crush the Muslim Brotherhood. …

The calls for Brotherhood participation in an Egyptian government are senseless insanity. Is there room for a movement that seeks nothing but death in the ranks of any government? Should murderous madness on such a scale really be the currency that purchases power? …

Western governments fear escalation in Egypt. And that fear is the secret weapon of every terrorist group. The terrorist groups always escalate, spending their currency of blood cheaply to break the will of their enemies. The only way to break that cycle is to out-escalate them by showing that their currency of blood is worthless because the people and governments they are terrorizing will not be bent under its terrible weight.

Wars aren’t won through de-escalation, but through escalation. America lost in Afghanistan because it wasn’t willing to fight harder and bloodier than the Taliban. The Egyptian government has shown that it is willing to match the Muslim Brotherhood’s ruthlessness without backing down.

To reward the courage of the Egyptian soldiers and police who fought the Muslim Brotherhood in the streets by forcing their government to stand down and surrender to the terrorists who nearly turned Egypt into a second Iran is an unmitigated crime.

Fortunately, it is unlikely that the Muslim Brotherhood will be restored to power in Egypt. We hope it will become impossible.

Islamists have to eat? We don’t see the necessity.

The following quotation comes from a characteristically well-informed and interesting article by Spengler (David P. Goldman). It was published about a year ago, while the Muslim Brotherhood was in power in Egypt, and its leader Mohamed Morsi was president.

The Obama administration is so deeply invested in the notion that the Muslim Brotherhood embodies the future of Islamic democracy that the imagination strains to identify a circumstance that might persuade the White House to abandon its support for the new Egyptian regime. …

Why, then, would President Morsi bite the hand that is trying to feed it? His undisguised contempt for American perceptions and neglect of diplomats’ security are a profound embarrassment to the White House …  Morsi has made it harder, if not outright impossible, for Obama to deliver the proffered aid package, which Egypt desperately requires.

The answer well may be that no one can govern Egypt. Even Islamists have to eat. Since the fall of Mubarak the country’s foreign exchange reserves have fallen from $35 billion to $15 billion, but less than $7 billion of that sum constitutes liquid and spendable cash-less than two months’ worth of imports.

He goes on to explain, with facts and figures, that Egypt was in dire economic straits. “Roughly half the population subsists on less than $2 a day.” It is even poorer now.

The dissonance between the reality on the ground in Egypt and Washington’s narrative has already become grating. In the coming weeks it is likely to become intolerable.

The Egyptian military, led by the defense minister General Abdul Fatah al-Sisi , declared Morsi unseated on 3 July 2013 and imprisoned him. Yesterday they attacked encampments of Morsi protesters. Over 500 dead and over 3,000 wounded have so far been reported.

Yesterday, Spengler wrote at PJ Media:

I do not have anything new to say about Egypt; I said it all a year ago and more. Failure is an option in Egypt. The denouement is inevitable and therefore of minor analytic interest. But I should like to ask a question:

Suppose the German military had overthrown the democratically-elected leader of Germany and massacred his loyal followers, say, in 1936? The world, presumably, would have condemned the blatant use of force against an elected leader even if, hypothetically, a third of the German population already had taken to the streets to demand Hitler’s ouster.

He is supposing that “the world” is mourning with the Muslim Brotherhood because of Morsi’s supporters being slaughtered. We very much doubt that “the world” is shedding a single tear, while we’re sure that the Obama administration is shedding many (figuratively speaking).

Then Spengler says:

The Muslim Brothers are Nazis bearing a crescent rather than a swastika. 

And with that we wholly agree.

In the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, a useful reminder is to read once again Paul Berman’s 2007 New Republic essay and his 2010 book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, which expanded it. Archivists have brought to light the wartime German Foreign Ministry broadcasts that created modern Islamist ideology and in particular its ferocious Jew-hatred.

Here again we have an objection to make. The Jew-hating broadcasts happened for sure, but Islam did not need the Nazis’ advice to begin hating the Jews. The Koran insists upon it.

… Here is one citation from Berman’s essay worth pondering:

There is nothing especially novel or bizarre in noticing that al-Banna displayed an eager interest in the aesthetic cult of death.

Al-Banna was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

… [He] came up with a double phrase about the importance of death as a goal of jihad—“the art of death” (fann al-mawt) and “death is art” (al-mawt fann). This phrase became … a famous part of al-Banna’s legacy.

The Spengler’s quotation from Berman goes on to include quotations  from “the classic history of the Muslim Brotherhood, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, by Richard P. Mitchell, which appeared in 1969″.

Stringing together his own paraphrases with al-Banna’s words, Mitchell wrote: “The Qur’an has commanded people to love death more than life” (which, I might add, is a phrase that we have heard more than once in terrorist statements during the last few years, for instance in the videotape that was made by the Islamist group that attacked Madrid in 2004). And al-Banna continued, in Mitchell’s presentation: “Unless the philosophy of the Qur’an on death replaces the love of life which has consumed Muslims, they will reach naught. Victory can only come with the mastery of the art of death.” 

Spengler writes and quotes all this to explain why the Muslim Brotherhood deserves no tears. And about that we again wholly agree with him.

But it also needs to be pointed out that al-Banna was plainly talking nonsense – could not have thought through what he was propounding. (Logic is against the ideology of Islam.) Even if he really believed in that paradise that Islam promises Muslims (or at least male Muslims), as an instruction to all Muslims it makes no sense at all to make death the goal of jihad, to “love death more than life”. Why strive for Islam’s domination over the whole world if it is better that all Muslims die rather than live? Why fight the jihad? Why try to survive? Why eat? 

Morsi would not have saved Egypt from starvation. The princes of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States may do so by subsidizing the regime of the military. But if the Muslim Brothers die, whether from bullets or hunger, who but Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry will regret their departure to that sky brothel of the Prophet’s lewd imagination?

Here is Sam Harris on Christian morality. (The video shows part of a 2012 debate he had with Professor William Lane Craig, a Christian apologist.)

Last week, two Jewish girls from London, volunteer teachers at a Christian school in Zanzibar, were attacked with acid by Muslims. Why? Religious hatred.

The two men – one of them (?) now arrested is a Muslim preacher – did it passing by on a motorcycle as the girls walked along the road.

The pictures are from the Mail Online.

Kirstie Trup and Katie Gee, both 18, of Hampstead, north London, had acid thrown at their faces and bodies by Muslim attackers on the island of Zanzibar

This is from AINA, the Assyrian International News Agency. It is written by Farid Ghadry, a Muslim whom we applaud:

I indict Islam.

Yes, I indict it for ignoring the terror against two innocent British teens in Zanzibar who were doused with acid. I do not give a damn what the reasons were and what justification those bastard Islamists had to change permanently the good lives of two innocent young teens who were there to help Muslims in the first place.

What is Holy about Ramadan when the Muslim bastards in Zanzibar use it to commit the unholiest of acts?

I am really, really angry.

Where are our Muslim leaders to speak out against such terror and to commit, once and for all, to its eradication?

Where is the King of Saudi Arabia, or the President of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation? Cooperation on what? With the OIC’s silence, how could not anyone interpret “Cooperation” to mean to cooperate to disfigure the innocent?

Where is the Grand Imam of al-Azhar University, or the Arab League, or Ayatollah Khamenei, or the millions of other religious Muslim leaders?

Where is Erdogan of Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood? Why are they silent in the face of such atrocities committed in the name of Islam?

Where are all our collective Muslim voices to indict these senseless acts not even animals in a jungle are capable of?

Islam has become synonymous with terror and the target of justifiable and global contempt. The religion I was born into, and which shelters 1.3 billion people, has turned into a weapon of global destruction against the other 5.7 billion people who do not adhere to Muslim principles.

Islam no longer exists for Islam. Islam exists today to destroy non-Muslims.

I indict all of Islam because the religion that is supposed to support the needy and the helpless has become a cult of terror against the self-sufficient and the enterprising.

I indict all the silent Muslim leaders for their weakness. With their silence, they are feeding these acts of barbarism to define Islam.

I indict them for all the acts of terror committed in the past against thousands upon thousands of innocent people.

I am really, really angry at all the Imams, the Grand Muftis, the Sheikhs, the Mawlawis, the Ayatollahs, the Emirs, the Kings, the Princes, and whatever titles they embrace.

At the end, if they do not indict these acts publicly and couragousely all of them share in the savagery of Zanzibar. That is their legacy.

The Muslim leaders in the OIC and the Arab League must awaken from their slumber by committing serious funds to re-educate our youth and to rid the world of the cancer within, instead of remaining silent or accommodating the evil source of Islamic terror.

It is obvious political correctness and generous aid by the West is not making a difference.

In fact, Western countries have donated hundreds of billions of Dollars in foreign aid to Muslim countries, and we Muslims pay back the West by dousing their children, who came to help our poor and disfranchised, with acid. It is truly sickening.

Something must change. The West must change course to help us find our way, the hard way. This status quo cannot go on.

If you want to help Islam, then it is time to tie your help with what our leaders do or say, and not by how much intelligence they deliver.

Otherwise, stop buying our oil and gas. Let us perish in our own waste. Maybe, then, our leaders will speak out and cooperate with the West based on equality and not based on them forcing Islam upon the rest of the world.

Enough is enough. I am really, really angry.

May those British teens, and all who were injured by Islamic terror in the past, find peace and happiness. May they, and their families, forgive us for not speaking loudly enough.

Horrified as we are by what the Muslim attackers did to the girls, and much as we pity them, we declare they were foolish and wrong to go to Zanzibar to “help the poor and disenfranchised”.

Knowing that a plea to All Mankind to give up the lethal stupidity of religion would be whistling down the wind, we plead instead (no doubt quite as uselessly) only with philanthropists, do-gooders, altruists: Give up your moral vanity. Stop stroking and primping your egos by inflicting your benevolence on other people. 

Yesterday we discussed the dying out of the indigenous European peoples as their numbers halve with each generation. We asked why they are letting this happen, why fewer and fewer children are being born. We argued that it is hard to make a case that Socialism as an economic system is responsible for the death of Europe, or that materialism is responsible for it, or that the lost influence of the old-time religions account for it. But today we argue that Socialism as an ideology may have a lot to do with it.

*

As far as we can discover, the idea that a person should care less for himself than for anybody and everybody else, was introduced into history by the author of Christianity, St Paul.* It is not an injunction of Judaism, which does require its followers to “love [respect?] your neighbor as yourself” but not more than yourself. It has no precedent in Greek philosophy, nor in any of the Far Eastern religions which are intensely concerned with personal benefit. None of them are moral religions. True, Buddhism teaches tolerance, but in order to do yourself good, to help you personally on your way to bliss.

Christianity might seem to do that when it promises heaven to those who do good works. But “redemption” by good works was not St Paul’s idea. It was introduced into the Catholic faith later. St Paul taught that only the grace of Christ Jesus could save you. (And that was Luther’s and Calvin’s doctrine too.) So you must do good works, put others before and above yourself without expecting any reward on earth or in heaven. You must  accept that your life is to be hard, and that your afterlife may be even worse. But at least for the afterlife there is hope. Heaven is the aim. If you attain it, whether by grace or good works, there – only there – you as an individual being will find joy. This life is not to be valued.

It is a ruinous idea. It can mean, if taken to heart, that you should not strive for happiness, or even survival. It can mean that every time you supply a want of your own, however basic and essential – food, clothing, protection, information, healing – you will feel self-reproach. As total selflessness is impossible, it’s a recipe for failure and consequent shame, guilt, self-contempt, even self- hatred. It is against not just human but animal nature, since if  you do not eat and protect yourself you will not survive. If human beings were not innately selfish the race would have died out long ago. Indeed, it would never have arisen.

Christians might say that it’s okay, of course, to see to your own survival needs. Some might even grant you the moral right to supply them amply – just so long as you are also attentive to the needs of others. You only have to consider them more than yourself – liberal Christians might tell you – when that choice inescapably presents itself.

No doubt, in the everyday life of Christians, the injunction to care more for others than for yourself is honored more in the breach than the observance. But the principle remains. It is the essence of Christian morality.

Over some centuries it became the ideal of multitudes and persisted for generations. What follows logically from it? Nobody is judged according to his individual merits. Everyone is more important than you are not because of what he is or does, but simply because he is part of the mass.

To think like that is to think sociologically. And from the notion that the individual is of less account than the mass arises another: that the individual is of no account at all, and only the mass, the “community”, matters.

But the mass, the community, has no identity. It has no personhood. It has no aspirations. Where only the many matter, nobody matters.

The spread of Christianity had a lot to do with the fall of the Christianized Roman Empire. Just how much is voluminously debated. At the very least, the Christian doctrines of universal love and not resisting evil mitigated against vigorous defense when enemies struck. And for a thousand years, from the time Rome fell in the late fifth century, Christianity with its impossible injunctions and its terrors of Hell lay heavy on the peoples of Europe.

As the dominant ideology, Christianity faded with the fading power of the Church. The Renaissance and then the Enlightenment shifted the center of human concern from heaven back to earth. Once again, as in pre-Christian times, the proper business of men was with men. This life mattered again. The individual mattered again.

But the Idea – that terrible, misery-making, destructive idea that you must sacrifice yourself for the rest – did not completely fade away. It changed its host. It became the central idea of Socialism.

Socialism is the child of Christianity. Yes: the secular religion of Socialism, though it has no God, no heaven, is – in its DNA so to speak – Christian. As an ideology it received its central Idea from Christianity: the Idea that only the mass, the many, the community matters, not the individual and his personal life.

Christians may deny it – do deny it – but the Christian Idea is the Socialist Idea. We frequently read Christian apologetics claiming that Christianity created “the individual”, and by doing so made Europe great. Europe’s greatness, however, only began – for the second time since the fall of the Roman Empire – with the dispersal of the darkness that Christianity had spread over it. But then Socialism was born, and came into its inheritance. In its turn it became the dominant ideology of Europe.

Because the mass has no identity, no personhood, no aims or aspirations, Socialism is as anti-human as its mother. While its  goal is not beyond and above the earth, it is in the equally abstract, equally unknown, equally phantasmagorical Future.

Now the Europeans are dying out. Multitudes of them care nothing for their national culture and history. Some positively hate all that, and are happy to let Muslims take over their countries and govern them under a different, ancient, cruel law.

Can their death as a mass, as communities, be the end result of Christianity-Socialism? If they are no longer deceived that paradise awaits them either on or above this earth, for what should they live? Are the nations dying out simply because people can see no reason why they should go on existing?

* For the many substantiating quotations from the letters of St Paul, and the source references, see our post Tread on me: the making of Christian morality, December 22, 2011.

Jillian Becker   August 12, 2013

In a Townhall article today, David Stokes comments on a Time magazine cover story titled  “The Child Free Life: When Having It All Means Not Having Children.”  The theme is interesting to us – the scarcity of children in most of the First World, particularly in Europe.

The author recalls a speech President Theodore Roosevelt gave in France:

Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that chief of blessings for any nations is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that the man and women shall be father and mother of healthy children so that the [human] race shall increase and not decrease. If that is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to the deliberate and willful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thralldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done.

That’s right. Theodore Roosevelt told the French that they needed to keep having babies.

At the time of Roosevelt’s speech, France was a major world power. Today—not so much.

And he ascribes a reason for the numerical decline of the French nation:

There is enough blame for such decline in global influence to go around, but the increased secularism of Europe, with its penchant for socialized everything, has certainly played a role.

By “secularism” David Stokes clearly means the increasing absence of religious belief in states that have long – if not always – been secular. It  is the absence or fading of religious belief that he blames (at least in part) for the dying out of Western nations.

Now more than 100 years later, there is an even greater threat to their cherished way of life. If only the French today would rediscover Teddy’s advice and reverse the birthrate trend—they might have a fighting chance. But such is the mindset of secularism, it is all about self and “fulfillment.” Issues of family, not to mention progeny are secondary, if thought about at all. Marriage is deferred—even eschewed. Children are planned—or better, planned around. And over time the birth rate in Europe has fallen far short of what is needed to keep up with the various demands of the future. In other words, the nations are aging. There are fewer children, yet more grandparents—a trend that will continue and accelerate.

All he says about the trend is true, but is he right about the cause?

He goes on, factually correct:

It takes a fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman to keep a nation’s population stable. The United States is drifting away from that. Canada has a rate of 1.48 and Europe as a whole weighs in at 1.38. What this means is that the money will run out, with not enough wage-earners at the bottom to support an older generation’s “entitlements.”

But even beyond that, the situation in France also reminds us of the opportunistic threat of Islamism. It is just a matter of time before critical mass is reached and formerly great bastions of democratic republicanism morph into caliphates. In the United Kingdom the Muslim population is growing 10 times faster than the rest of society. In fact, all across Western Europe it’s the same. The cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam are on track to have Muslim majority populations in a decade or two. A T-shirt that can be seen on occasion in Stockholm reads: “2030—Then We Take Over.”

And he concludes:

A few years ago, Britain’s chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, decried Europe’s falling birthrate, blaming it on “a culture of consumerism and instant gratification”. 

“Europe is dying,” he said, “we are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.”

The Rabbi was right, and so was Teddy.

Was the Rabbi right?

Why are the indigenous peoples of Europe and other parts of the First World dying out?

Why are the Europeans willing to let the Muslims take over their countries?

Is it because of socialism? 

On the one hand it can be argued that socialism discourages you from having children because the state – you believe  – will look after you in your old age. It will care for you if you fall ill. It will make it easy for you to house and feed yourself because, if you don’t want to work, it will give you money. No need for more wage-earners in the family.

And there is a strong streak of anti-human life in the ideology of the far left. Among environmentalists in particular. They say that there are too many people on the planet  – and angrily deny that the numbers are declining. Some even want there to be no people on the earth at all. They maintain that the absence of human beings would be better for shrimps and reptiles.

On the other hand, the socialist welfare state pays people to have children. In America, for instance, millions of women can have children without having a husband or wage-earner to help keep them because with every baby they get more money from the state. And the state also pays for the children’s education.

But then again, socialist economics don’t work. Sooner or later socialism brings an economy to disaster. Is it anticipation of dire poverty that keeps people from breeding? About half the voters in most western countries regularly vote for socialism, so that can’t be a compelling reason.

All this considered, the argument that socialism is to blame for the suicide of the West is not convincing. It may account for an eventual death by inanition, but not for the slow suicide.

Is it because of “consumerism”?

Perhaps. But what proof is there? Do anecdotes about individuals and couples saying they prefer to use their money for a high standard of living – cars, travel and so on – rather than on raising children, prove the case? Not unless they reflect the decisions of a majority, and who has collected and counted them?

By “consumerism” (the preferred term now for what they used to call “materialism” or “conspicuous consumption”) its critics mean comfortable living, good cars, travel and so on. In other words, they ascribe the fall in the birth-rate to prosperity.

Did prosperous people in past times not have children, or choose to have only a few? Not as far as we know. In Victorian times most families, rich as well as poor, were large. And since those who owned much had much to pass on and keep in the family, wealth may have positively stimulated reproduction.

But of course in the days when wealthy families were large, parents had servants to look after their children. Most people now, even if they can afford live-in servants, do not have them. So perhaps it’s not so much the desire for more luxurious living but the desire not to be “tied down” by children. Having to stay in with them at night. Not being able to go on holiday when you choose because of their school schedule. Not being able easily to part from their other parent when you’re sick of him or her.

Implied by the word “consumerism”  is another word: “capitalism”. Though not all who condemn consumerism may be aware that the one word is haunted by the other. As David Stokes’s column appears at Townhall, we may reasonably assume that he’s a conservative. American conservatives are not consciously against capitalism; they are against socialism, as we are. But too many of them are religious. Too many of them are Christians. It is Christian puritanism that inspires the strange prejudice  – if  not against prosperity as such, against the signs of it: high living standards, costly cars, expensive travel and so on. Only in theory, we observe. We confidently expect that most religious critics of “consumerism” have – or aspire to have – a high standard of living for themselves, own costly cars, and jet to their summer vacation on a cruise-ship or a multi-starred hotel. They are seldom in fact less materialistic or less self-indulgent than the “secularists” they scorn. And they are not against having children. The American fertility-rate – which is the measure of population stability, or increase, or decrease – has until very recently been stable while Europe’s declined.

But what of religion? Is its absence the cause we are looking for?

Is it because of “secularism”?

By “secularism” David Stokes clearly means the fading of religious belief in states that have long – if not always – been secular. And it is the absence or fading of religious belief that he blames for the dying out of Western nations.

Such is the mindset of secularism, it is all about self and “fulfillment.” 

Is there no self-fulfillment in having children? Don’t many feel that having a child is more self-fulfilling than anything else?

It does seem to be the case that fewer people are religious, or most people are less religious in Europe now. How did religion formerly keep the birth-rate up?

The mainly Catholic countries used to have  bigger families because birth control was forbidden by their Church. So perhaps now that the Roman Church has lost much of its power, more Catholics use contraception. But that explanation doesn’t affect the traditionally Protestant countries of northern Europe, and there too the indigenous  populations are shrinking. (And one thing Christians who bemoan the dearth of children seem to forget is that St Paul recommended celibacy. Marry if you must, he taught, but it is better to remain unmarried and chaste like him and Jesus Christ. Not a formula for re-populating Europe.)

The bible states that Jehovah enjoins the Jews to be fruitful, to multiply. And  Israel is one of the few Western countries where the population is increasing – although Israel is a secular state. Perhaps the old religious injunction continues to have a subliminal effect.

So if socialism is not the reason why the people of the West are ever more unwilling to have children, nor “consumerism”, nor “secularism” – what is?

We don’t know. Nobody does.

But if the suicide of the West means the loss of our civilization – which it very well may – it will be a great tragedy. One of the greatest tragedies of history.

Jillian Becker   August 11, 2013

This is from the Telegraph:

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

Before you say “Oh well, if it’s disabled …” please read on.

The article, entitled After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?, was written by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.

They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.”

“We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”

Note the “her”. If that was the only word you read in their manifesto of death, you’d know they were a pair of politically correct lefties.

As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense”.

Death – you must understand – is no damage at all to someone “becoming a person”.

The authors therefore concluded that “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled”.

They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed …

Note now the distance put between the condemners to death and the executioners. Just give the order, have it taken away to be done in, and think no more about it.

… if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that “only the 64 per cent of Down’s syndrome cases” in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing.

Once such children were born there was “no choice for the parents but to keep the child”, they wrote.“To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”

“When the state provides …” Sure, let the state provide for you, and you are its thing. It can do what it will with you and your child. If a family cannot afford to keep a child, there is the possibility of finding foster parents or would-be adopters, but if the state has the final say … bye-bye, baby!

Well, in such a society, one in which the individual is a thing belonging to the state, maybe it is best to have no babies.

Is death preferable to slavery? Discuss.

Then back to the Telegraph’s report on the ideology of Giubilini and Minerva:

They did not argue that some baby killings were more justifiable than others – their fundamental point was that, morally, there was no difference to abortion as already practised.

They preferred to use the phrase “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide” to “emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus”.

… Minerva was a research associate at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics until last June, when she moved to the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Melbourne University.

Ah, “practical ethics”. None of your airy-fairy theories about right and wrong. It’s what’s practical that counts. If you don’t like the baby, why keep it? If the state’s budget for babies is all used up, away with this one.

And “public ethics”. There’s a phrase to conjure with. A whole “public” can now be deemed to have a conscience, to think, to arrive at a justifiable conclusion. Such a public we need to meet! A many-bodied monster with one head.

What Melbourne University means, of course, is a bunch of academics deciding what is good for “the public”. We’d rather meet the monster than the academics. We might call it “God”, just for fun.

Giubilini … too has gone on to Melbourne … to the city’s Monash University.

Defending [his] decision [to republish the article] in a British Medical Journal blog, Professor Savulescu said that arguments in favour of killing newborns were “largely not new”. What Minerva and Giubilini did was apply these arguments “in consideration of maternal and family interests”.

And the interests of the state.

While accepting that many people would disagree with their arguments, he wrote: “The goal of the Journal of Medical Ethics is not to present the Truth or promote some one moral view. It is to present well reasoned argument based on widely accepted premises.”

“Well reasoned arguments”: If your baby is a bother to you (or the state), it’s okay to kill it.

“Widely accepted premises”: If your baby is a bother to you (or the state), it’s okay to kill it.

But wait. It’s not the child you should feel sorry for – it’s Minerva and Giubilini who need your compassionate concern. Apparently the authors – former associates of the good professor – have been receiving death threats provoked by the publication of their article.

The journal’s editor, [that same] Prof Julian Savulescu, director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, said the article’s authors had received death threats since publishing the article. He said those who made abusive and threatening posts about the study were “fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society”.

“The very values of a liberal society”. If you don’t think parents should be allowed by law to call the exterminators and have the baby collected for the gas oven or whatever, you are opposed to the very values of a liberal society. Good grief – don’t you understand that approving the extermination of unwanted babies is the very essence of  liberal values? The contemporary liberal society is defined by that approval. Tolerance and open-mindedness are defined by it. Community co-operation is defined by it. To be opposed to it is wildly abnormal. Only sociopaths and fanatics would go so far as to raise an objection.

[Professor Savulescu] added: “This “debate” has been an example of “witch ethics” – a group of people know who the witch is and seek to burn her. It is one of the most dangerous human tendencies we have. It leads to lynching and genocide. Rather than argue and engage, there is a drive to silence and, in the extreme, kill, based on their own moral certainty. That is not the sort of society we should live in.”

See – he’s against extremism. He’s against killing. He’s against people acting on their own moral certainty.

So no doubt are Minerva and Guibilini.

If you thought otherwise, you must be not just illiberal and fanatical, but unable to comprehend a simple text written in plain English.

Note: We dealt with the Giubilini and Minerva thesis when it was first published. See our post The Nazi ethics of the left, March 5, 2012.