Judge Stephen C. Robinson

The Washington Post explains it. It ‘s all about race.

The court-ordered election that allowed [some] residents of one New York town to flip the lever six times for one candidate – and produced a Hispanic winner – could expand to other towns where minorities complain their voices aren’t being heard. …

The unusual election was imposed on Port Chester after a federal judge determined that Hispanics were being treated unfairly.

The 2010 Census is expected to show large increases in Latino populations and lawsuits alleging discrimination are likely to increase, said Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, a nonprofit election research and reform group.

“The country’s been changing in a lot of places, with minority growth in exurbs and commuter cities, and there will be a realization that those minorities can’t elect candidates of choice,” Richie said.

That will leave minority groups, federal prosecutors and municipalities looking for ways to keep elections from violating the federal Voting Rights Act, which protects minorities’ constitutional right to equal protection under the law.

In Port Chester, trustees had been elected two at a time every two years, with conventional at-large voting. Most voters were white, and there were always six white trustees even though Hispanics made up half the population and nearly a quarter of the voters. Judge Stephen Robinson concluded the system violated U.S. law by diluting Hispanics’ votes.

The standard remedy was to break a municipality into districts, with one district including many from the minority, thereby increasing the chances for a candidate backed by the minority group. The Justice Department proposed that solution for Port Chester.

But the village of about 30,000 objected to districts. It suggested instead a system called cumulative voting. All six trustees would be elected at once and the voters could apportion their six votes as they wished – all six to one candidate, one each to six candidates or any combination.

The system, which has been used in Alabama, Illinois, South Dakota and Texas, allows a political minority to gain representation if it organizes behind specific candidates. Judge Robinson went for it, and cumulative voting was used for the first time in a New York municipality.

And surely not the last time. Obviously this idea has legs. It could become a peaceful caring way of disenfranchising despised classes and races, such as white males, Jews, Republicans, Tea Partiers, conservatives, individualists, soldiers, libertarians, anti-feminists, capitalists, free-marketeers, patriots, the rich, Iraq war approvers, habitual Rush Limbaugh listeners, global warming skeptics, big business executives, bankers, SUV drivers, fatties, Mormons, smokers, tobacconists, hunters, non-recyclers, furriers, gun-owners …

Note: This post needs correction. Please see comments by Malachi and Jillian Becker.

What is the point of government statistics if they’re not reflecting the truth?

It seems that various ruses are being practiced to make unemployment figures look less bad.

Why? Does the floundering Obama administration really imagine it can deceive the nation about unemployment?

It can only make a difference to the shortage of jobs by changing its disastrous economic policies, not with monkey business like these pathetic little tricks described by John Crudele and taken from his report in the New York Post:

Each month Census gives Labor a figure on the number of workers it has hired. That figure goes into the closely followed monthly employment report Labor provides. For the past two months the hiring by Census has made up a good portion of the new jobs.

Labor doesn’t check the Census hiring figure or whether the jobs are actually new or recycled. It considers a new job to have been created if someone is hired to work at least one hour a month.

One hour! A month! So, if a worker is terminated after only one hour and another is hired in her place, then a second new job can apparently be reported to Labor. …

Here’s a note from a Census worker … :

“John: I am [was] on my fourth rehire with the 2010 Census.

“I have been hired, trained for a week, given a few hours of work, then laid off. So my unemployed self now counts for four new jobs.

“I have been paid more to train all four times than I have been paid to actually produce results. These are my tax dollars and your tax dollars at work.

“A few months ago I was trained for three days and offered five hours of work counting the homeless. Now, I am knocking (on) doors trying to find the people that have not returned their Census forms. …”

And here’s another:

“John: I worked for (Census) and I was paid $18.75 (an hour) …

“I worked for about six weeks or so and I picked the hours I wanted to work. I was checking the work of others. While I was classifying addresses, another junior supervisor was checking my work.

“In short, we had a ‘checkers checking checkers’ quality control. I was eventually let go and was told all the work was finished when, in fact, other people were being trained for the same assignment(s).

“I was re-hired about eight months later and was informed that I would have to go through one week of additional training.

“On the third day of training, I got sick and visited my doctor. I called my supervisor and asked how I can make up the class. She informed me that I was ‘terminated.’ She elaborated that she had to terminate three other people for being five minutes late to class.

“I did get two days’ pay and I am sure the ‘late people’ got paid also. I think you would concur that this is an expensive way to attempt to control sickness plus lateness. …

I have found it interesting that if someone works one hour, they are included in the labor statistics as a new job being full. …”

There’s more – read it all.

On Thursday May 6, 2010, a general election will be held in Britain. It’s likely that the Conservative Party will win with a small majority.

It will make little difference who wins and who governs. None of the parties has a policy that can save Britain from its deepening economic crisis or from its future as a predominantly Muslim country under sharia law.

Here is an address I delivered at a conference of Conservatives in London in 2008. The figures were accurate then according to each country’s published statistics, and they haven’t changed significantly.

My prognosis for Britain and Europe is profoundly depressing. I wish it could be otherwise.

*

The people of Europe are dying out. In that sense it could be said that Europe is coming to an end. The continent is entering a new phase of its history and is already being called by a new name: Eurabia.

Here are the facts and figures:

The birth-rate by which a population is merely stabilized, not increased however slightly, is 2.1 births per woman.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some European figures:

Austria 1.3

Britain 1.77

Czech Republic 2

France 1.9

Germany 1.37

Greece 1.29

Italy 1.2

Ireland 1.87

Netherlands 1.73

Norway 1.81

Poland 2

Russia 1

Spain 1.1

Sweden 1.75

These are all declining populations. Some are declining more steeply than others. Russia’s population will be halved in 50 years, while Poland’s half-life will take a little longer.

It’s hard to imagine what if anything could halt the decline. A sudden explosion of births, with most women of child-bearing age having numerous children in the next couple of decades? Too late. A mass return of European descendants from the New World to the ancestral lands? Yes, but as unlikely to happen as a miracle.

What is actually happening to swell the numbers is an accelerating growth of the Muslim immigrant populations. In Britain today the average age of the non-Muslim population is 41, the average age of the Muslim population is 28. This order of difference is typical of all West European countries. In all of them, furthermore, the Muslim birth-rate is higher than the native birth-rate. It means they have not long to wait for their Muslim majorities. Europe is being Islamized, to become in all likelihood a Muslim-dominated continent by the end of the century [revised estimate – by the middle of the century]. We can now see – we can hardly miss seeing – the change in our cities. Though it seems to have come upon us suddenly, it has been growing for decades. It is about 20 years since the Islamic Foundation issued a declaration from Leicester that the Islamic movement is ‘an organized struggle to change the existing society into an Islamic society based on the Koran’.

Realistically we must confront the demise of our political power and reconcile ourselves to a loss of liberty, because, barring a miracle, Islam will not transform itself into a force for the protection of individual freedom. By no stretch of the imagination can Muslim law, sharia, be described as liberal.

Here are a few examples of it: Women must obey their husbands who should beat them if they do not. Women must cover their heads and figures in public. Thieves must have hands and feet cut off; adulterers are to be stoned to death; unmarried fornicators lashed with 100 stripes; homosexuals burnt, stoned, or dropped from a height; apostates killed. Criticism of the Prophet Mohammed is apostasy. Non-Muslims must convert to Islam, or be killed, or, if Christian or Jewish, may pay a tax called the jizya and so be suffered to live, not as citizens but as dhimmi, subjugated and abased persons forced to submit to numerous laws which mark and preserve their inferior status.

We could cling to a hope that sharia law will not be imposed on our grandchildren, or that if it is, it will be in some modified form. We may surmise that Muslims born and brought up here will be influenced by our values and modes of thought to the extent that they themselves come to prefer our common law to sharia. For this to happen they would have to be thoroughly secularized en masse. In such a development lies our best chance of remaining free. But how probable is it? We can only read the existing signs and they do not inspire optimism.

To some degree young Muslim men in Britain are already secularized. In English cities they can be as enthusiastic Saturday-night bingers and brawlers as their native English counterparts, the Islamic ban on drinking alcohol notwithstanding. But they are inclined to adhere to Islamic customs, as in marriage for example, expecting their wives to remain in a traditionally subservient role. Importantly, the imams still have power to influence the communities, and it is largely because Muslim communities have been established in geographical enclaves that their power remains strong.

Successive British governments have failed to integrate Muslim immigrants. They have preferred, in accordance with the ill-thought-out ideology of ‘multiculturalism’, to permit and even approve the establishment of ethnic enclaves. Yet these are ghettoes of a kind, and the policy itself is, in effect, segregationist, or what might be called apartheid-lite. It has meant that there are areas into which the police are reluctant to enter, so that ‘honour killings’, forced marriages, child marriages, wife beatings and burnings, separation according to gender in schools and offices, are often – no one knows how often – practised with impunity.

Then there are the madrassas. Some 700 [many more now in 2010 – JB] of these religious schools have been established in Britain, at least a few of them with tax-payers’ money. They teach fundamentalist doctrine, including the complete subjugation of women, and the waging of jihad, holy war.

We are often told that Islam means ‘peace’, but it does not. It means ‘submission’. We are told it is a ‘religion of peace’, but it was spread by the sword. Our experience of it in recent years has been traumatic. What Islam has shown us of itself is that it is murderous, destructive, cruel and terrifying, bringing death and agony to many places in the world, including New York, Madrid, and here to us in London.

Conquest of the rest of the world by Islam is ordained by its holy book, the Koran. There it is written that the highest duty of the ‘true believer’ is to wage war against infidel lands – such as ours – until they become part of the realm of Islam and their populations are converted. Every Muslim must participate in the war. Those who do not actively fight must assist those who do in whatever ways they can. Refusal is punishable by mutilation or death.

‘O you who believe! Fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find hardness in you’ (sura 9.123). ‘Those who fight Islam should be murdered or crucified or their hands and feet should be cut off on opposite sides’ (sura 5.33). ‘Let those who fight in the way of Allah, who sell this world’s life for the hereafter; and whoever fights in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, We shall grant him a mighty reward’ (sura 4.74).

This last injunction with its promise of reward fully authorizes suicide bombing. It is the standing order for such atrocities as those of 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in London.

We have heard from imams and sheikhs that other injunctions abrogate these; or that we must not take them literally. But the important point for us is that there are Muslims who obey them literally. We can hardly avoid noticing, belatedly but plainly at last, that not only are we being colonized by Islam, but at the same time we are being subjected to jihad.

The violence can only get worse, the attacks more destructive, possibly obliterating millions. The President of the Islamic State of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claiming to be divinely inspired, is threatening to unleash nuclear war. He has the capability of producing nuclear warheads, and Western Europe, we are told, is within range of his missiles. The nuclear bomb is the greatest boon for furthering jihad that has come into Islam’s possession in all the fourteen hundred years of its history. Can we doubt that he will use it?

Jillian Becker    May 3, 2010

Books I recommend:

Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Regnery, Washington D.C., 2006)

Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (Doubleday, New York, 2006)

Oriana Fallaci, The Rage and the Pride (Rizzoli, New York, 2002), The Force of Reason (Rizzoli, New York, 2006)

Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Cranbury, New Jersey, 2005)

Melanie Phillips, Londonistan (Gibson Square, London, 2006)

We were lucky to have Fox News to tell us what the left-slanted mainstream media concealed, and to bring us opinion from both the right and the left. Fox News was “fair, balanced, and unafraid” as they claimed and continue to claim.

But is the claim still justified?

Not if we are to judge by their treatment of the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who is on trial in Holland for expressing an opinion, well supported by facts, on the horrific ideology of Islam.

Here are three articles which together, in sequence, tell the sorry story:

The first is by David Swindle at Front Page:

Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier featured a segment tonight [March 8, 2010] on Dutch politician Geert Wilders’s blasphemy trial in the Netherlands.

The segment featured these descriptors of Wilders:

“A man who inspires fierce emotions.”

“Anger on the streets of London. The object of the demonstration was a recent visit by Far-Right Dutch politician Geert Wilders.”

“His Anti-Muslim rhetoric makes him a target of critics.”

“Wilders says Muslim head scarves should be banned, he’s branded the Muslim prophet Muhammed a pedophile and likened the Muslim Koran to Mein Kampf.”

“Far-Right”?

The “Far-Right” label is meant to smear Wilders by trying to associate him with racist European political parties like the BNP [British National Party] that actually warrant the label.

“Anti-Muslim”? Try Anti-Islam. Wilders’ film Fitna exposes how Islam’s first victims are always Muslims. [A link is provided to the film.]

Finally, the report cites three examples of Wilders’ allegedly extreme, “Far-Right” views. While whether head scarves should be banned is a matter of opinion, the last two points — Muhammad’s pedophilia and the Koran’s racist and genocidal injunctions are points of fact.

Later on Special Report they featured a panel in response to the story in which host Jim Angle questioned Charles Krauthammer [whom we greatly respect and admire, and usually, but not this time, agree with – JB], Bill Kristol [whom we respect, and often, but not this time, agree with], and A.B. Stoddard. Krauthammer said that Wilders was wrong about Islam — that the Dutch politician did not see a difference between Islam and Islamism.  So those who follow “Islam” ignore passages of the Koran and those who follow “Islamism” actually do what the book tells them to do? Is that right, Charles? Just want to make sure I’m up to speed on the preferred Orwellianisms on the Politically Correct Right.

Stoddard’s comments — she said that Wilders saw no difference between terrorist Muslims and non-violent Muslims — indicate that it’s likely that her first exposure to Wilders was the segment. And Kristol? He dismissed Wilders as a “demagogue.”

This is supposed to be the “conservative” network here and they are unable to present a single panelists who will support Wilders.

The next is by John L. Work, also at Front Page:

Following the gang hatchet job on Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders by two separate FOX News crews a few nights ago, FOX pulled down all the video footage from the internet – like it never happened. Well, it did happen. Jim Angle, Glenn Beck [who we think is doing a great job exposing the Obama administration and is a splendid entertainer] Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and A.B Stoddard all did the dirty work during two different shows. …

First, let’s look at Beck’s six minute interview with Wilders from February of 2009. Beck warmly welcomed Wilders and gave him plenty of air-time. Wilders presented his case for the noble cause of resistance to the growing Islamic repression of free speech in The Netherlands. Beck treated Wilders like the hero he is.

A year later it is impossible to reconcile Beck’s posture and position in 2009 with his attack on Wilders this week – unless one allows for the possibility that Beck is now being influenced by powers above him at FOX News. [A link is provided to Beck’s 2009 interview with Wilders.]

Now for this week’s piece, in which Beck labeled Wilders a fascist [Another link is provided.]:

Let’s analyze the evidence:

Wilders, himself, has not changed since the first Beck interview – not his speech, not his positions, and not his beliefs. What has changed immensely is his stature in The Netherlands. He is much more powerful now than he was when he first appeared on Beck’s show in 2009. In fact, it is entirely within the realm of possibility that Wilders could become Prime Minister.

Now, FOX News is astonishingly trying to destroy Wilders. Ignoramus, demagogue and fascist are pretty nasty labels to lay on anyone. Beck was not recognizable this week from his demeanor and position with Wilders in 2009.

Other than Muslims throughout the world, who would be unhappy with Wilders’ rise to power and prominence in The Netherlands? Who stands to gain from stopping the most prominent and eloquent defender of Western Civilization in Europe? Who stands to gain from having Wilders’ reputation hacked to pieces by a major American news outlet? You can figure this out. [Another link is provided.]

A whole lot has changed at FOX News, folks.

This last link leads to our third source, an article by Diana West:

It was pile-on time at Fox News tonight as Glenn Beck, Charles Krauthammer, a gal whose name I missed [update — A.B. Stoddard] and Bill Kristol all branded Geert Wilders beyond the pale tonight.

Beck classified Geert as a fascist.

Krauthammer said Geert didn’t know the difference between Islam and Islamism — never mind that according to Krauthammer’s idea of Islamic scholarship, neither did Mohammed.

[Stoddard] said she agreed with Imam Krauthammer and added that if people like this (Geert) are elected to lead Holland it will suffer the consequences.

Kristol called Geert a demagogue.

In other words, a stomach-turning display.

Fact is, this anti-Geert pundit solidarity will only delight Newscorp [owners of Fox] stakeholder Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. That’s because it is Wilders in the Netherlands who stands as the unexpectedly strong spearhead of resistance to the Islamization of Europe and the wider West. As a scion of the most powerful sharia dictatorship in the world, Prince Talal doesn’t like that. How fortunate for him that Fox News doesn’t like it, either.

Is the world entering a post-American era? Will the 21st century be dominated by some other power, or several others?

In the splendid speech that John Bolton delivered at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2010, he said of Obama, “He is the first post-American president.”

In Obama’s eyes, American superpower status is already over. The decline is happening. There’s no reason to regret it, and it would be pointless and unnecessary to try to halt or reverse it. Obama is content to let America be a nation among the nations, no different in any important respect, and certainly no better. “He sees American decline as a kind of natural phenomenon,” Bolton said.

In Bolton’s own view, however, America is still exceptional and still the one and only superpower. If its status as such is under threat, that threat proceeds from Obama himself, who, almost casually – not caring very much, as John Bolton remarked, about foreign and national security policy – is himself weakening it.

What Obama does care about is domestic policy. To achieve his redistributionist goals he has put America into crushing debt; and being determined, it seems, to turn America into a European-style socialist state, he can only make the debt vaster and heavier. That alone weakens America.

China is America’s chief creditor, but that does not mean China is now a second superpower. A China growing in wealth and confidence, and becoming an increasingly significant world actor, may pose an economic threat to America but is not, or not yet, a rival world power. Militarily it is far from a match. Militarily, America is still far and away the most powerful nation.

But there again, if Obama has his way, it won’t be for much longer. He has, in Bolton’s words, an “incredibly naïve idea” that if the US would get rid of its own nuclear weapons, other countries would give up theirs; those that do not have them but want them – such as Iran and North Korea – would abandon their intense efforts to obtain them; and the world would live at peace forever after. This belief or ambition represents, as John Bolton put it, “a pretty deep-seated strain in the left wing of the Democratic Party.” Obama will soon negotiate an arms control agreement with Russia by which he will undertake substantially to reduce America’s nuclear capability. America will not develop new nuclear weapons, or arms in outer space, or even keep its existing arsenal battle-ready by testing for safety and reliability. It is as if America had no enemies; as if America were not under attack; as if 9/11 had never happened; and as if Iran and North Korea would not drop nuclear bombs on America and its allies if they could do it and get away with it.

Furthermore, with the rest of the dreaming Left both at home and internationally, he aspires to another vision of a new earth: one that is not only sweetly irenic but held forcibly in union by a supreme governing authority. Those proposals for world taxes that we hear of; the intricate business of trading in carbon indulgences in the name of saving the earth from being consumed by fire or ice; international treaty regulations that would result in banning the private ownership of guns – all these are measures to realize the tremendous objective of “world governance”. It would mean the end of American independence, the end of national sovereignty. It would mean that the Revolution was lost, as Bolton said.

In a sense it would be the end of America, because America is an idea of liberty. And it is an idea that the world needs. Its loss would be a colossal disaster, a tragedy for the whole human race.

Can America be saved?

In his book titled The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria asserts that “America is closing down”, but allows that it “won’t be demoted from its superpower position in the foreseeable future” because “it’s not that the United States has been doing badly over the last two decades. It’s that, all of a sudden, everyone else is playing the game.”

America can “remain a vital, vibrant economy, at the forefront of the next revolutions in science, technology and industry, as long as it can embrace and adjust to the challenges confronting it”.

“The challenges” come from other nations, now rising, which he groups together as “the rest”.

China is the first of them because it is becoming an economic giant. The 21st century, he considers, may be the Chinese century.

What if [China ] quietly positions itself as the alternative to a hectoring and arrogant America? How will America cope with such a scenario – a kind of Cold War, but this time with a vibrant market economy, a nation that is not showing a hopeless model of state socialism, or squandering its power in pointless military interventions? This is a new challenge for the United States, one it has not tackled before, and for which it is largely unprepared.

Next in line is India. Poorer but democratic, India is “the ally”. Then come Brazil and Chile (plausibly); South Africa (less plausibly); and (implausibly) Russia. (Russia is a demographic basket case.)

Ironically, Zakaria says, these nations are rising because they learnt from America:

For sixty years, American politicians and diplomats have traveled around the world pushing countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. … We counseled them to be unafraid of change and learn the secrets of our success. And it worked: the natives have gotten good at capitalism.

America, then, has not been a malign power, or not always. In Roosevelt’s day other countries believed that “America’s mammoth power was not to be feared”. It was after it had won the Cold War, when it became the only superpower, that it began to go to the bad. “Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has walked the world like a colossus, unrivaled and unchecked”, and this “has made Washington arrogant, careless, and lazy.” Furthermore, he tell us, “people round the world worry about living in a world in which one country has so much power.”

To relieve that worry, America “must reduce its weaponry and work towards a non-nuclear world.” It is hypocritical for the US to insist that other countries should not have nuclear weapons while it is hoarding a nuclear arsenal of its own. By giving them up it would “gain credibility”, an end he apparently considers so desirable that it would be worth risking the nation’s very survival to achieve it.

The summer of 2002, Zakaria says, was “the high water-mark of unipolarity”. The world felt sympathy for America after 9/11. America went to war in Afghanistan, which was not good but not too bad. But then it invaded Iraq, which was very bad, and the world’s sympathy dried up. America was being too “unilateral”, too “imperial and imperious”.

George W Bush and “the nefarious neoconservative conspiracy” antagonized the world. He and his conspirators “disdained treaties, multilateral organizations, international public opinion, and anything that suggested a conciliatory approach to world politics.”

So the world’s dislike, contempt, and fear of America were justified, or at least understandable, in the light of the foreign policies of the “arrogant” Bush administration. Zakaria even claims that the animosity filled the Republicans – already full of “chest-thumping machismo” – with pride.

He asks:

Can Washington adjust and adapt to a world in which others have moved up? Can it respond to shift in economic and political power? … Can Washington truly embrace a world with a diversity of voices and viewpoints? Can it thrive in a world it cannot dominate?

The advice he gives to “Washington” for success in adjusting, adapting, responding, embracing, and thriving is to be conciliatory, apologetic. It must listen more; proclaim universal values”, but “phrase its positions carefully”; be like the chair of a board gently guiding a group of independent directors. America must “learn from the rest”. The president must meet more non-government people, have smaller entourages, rely more on diplomacy. Consultation, cooperation, compromise are the key words. He objects to such accomodations being called appeasement. Consult and cooperate, he urges, with Russia, and with “multilateral institutions” such as the UN, NATO, AFRICOM, OAS, and the International Criminal Court. (Even internally, the US legal system “should take note of transnational standards”.)

The federal government has been “too narrow-minded” about terrorism. When bin Laden got America to “come racing out to fight” him (in response to 9/11) this was “over-reaction.”  Zakaria’s advice: “take it on the chin” and “bounce back”. The government must stop thinking of terrorism as a national security issue, and think of it as criminal activity carried out by “small groups of misfits”. Although Democrats were on the whole “more sensible” about terrorism, both parties, he says, spoke “in language entirely designed for a domestic audience with no concern for the poisonous effect it has everywhere else.” His solution is better airport control round the world. The more urgent problem in his view is that American Muslims have become victims of over-reaction to terrorist attacks. Instead of being “questioned, harassed, and detained” they should, he urges, “be enlisted in the effort to understand the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism.”

Zakaria does not consider himself anti-American. He does not even see himself as a man of the left. He reiterates that he is a free marketeer. It is because America became “suspicious of free markets”, he says, that partly explains its “closing down”.

He wrote his book before the economic crisis. He saw a globalized economy bringing about an increasingly prosperous world in which the poorest nations were rising strongly enough for him to declare that “the world is swimming in capital”, and “there really isn’t a Third World any more “. But even then the dollar was sliding, and America was showing signs of being “enfeebled”.

At a military-political level America still dominates the world, but the larger structure of unipolarity – economic, financial, cultural – is weakening… every year it becomes weaker and other nations and actors grow in strength.

For all its military might, its chest-thumping phase is over and now it is “cowering in fear”. It must, he says, “recover its confidence.” ‘It must stop being “a nation consumed by anxiety”, with a tendency to “hunker down”, unreasonably “worried about unreal threats” such as terrorism, and rogue nations like North Korea and Iran. (Iran, he explains, has good reason to fear the United States, with its armies on two of its borders. It’s only to be expected that Iran would try to arm itself with nuclear bombs and missile delivery systems. He does not explain why America should not fear this as a real threat.)

He is certain about what America needs to do to propitiate and serve the world it has alienated. It should ‘‘build broad rules by which the world will be bound’’, rather than pursue “narrow interests”.

What the world really wants from America is … that it affirm its own ideals. That role, as the country that will define universal ideals, remains one that only America can play.

We know Obama has read Zakaria’s book, or at least looked into it, because there is a photograph of him holding it, one finger marking his place. Obama is doing much that Zakaria advises in foreign affairs. But that’s less likely to be because the writer has impressed the president with his arguments than because they have both drunk from the same ideological well.

Obama’s foreign policy lets us see if Zakaria’s theory works. So far it has not.

So is America’s decline beyond all remedy?

It’s a relief to turn from Zakaria’s dull and weakly reasoned book with its uncongenial credo to an article titled The Seductions of Decline (February 2, 2010) by brilliantly witty and insightful Mark Steyn. If America believes it is in decline, he says, it will be. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The view that America has been too arrogant a power; that it is not and should not be exceptional; that humility and apology are required of it; that only endlessly patient negotiation in a spirit of compromise will improve foreign relations and dissuade states like North Korea and Iran from acquiring nuclear arms; that Islamic terrorism should be treated as crime and not as the jihad its perpetrators declare it to be; that Russia should be consulted on, say, the deployment of American missile defense; and that the US should reduce its nuclear arsenal and work towards a non-nuclear world – will bring about the decline.

National decline is psychological – and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline.

His answer to the question “is America set for decline?” is yes, because of the policies of Obama and the Democrats, which arise from their acceptance of decline.

Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: Unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the American economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet.

American decline, he says, “will be steeper, faster and more devastating than Britain’s – and something far closer to Rome’s.” It will not be like France’s, or Austria’s.

Why did decline prove so pleasant in Europe? Because it was cushioned by American power. The United States is such a perversely non-imperial power that it garrisons not ramshackle colonies but its wealthiest “allies”, from Germany to Japan. For most of its members, “the free world” has been a free ride.

And after “Washington’s retreat from la gloire” as hegemon of the world, when America “becomes Europe in its domestic disposition and geopolitical decline, then who will be America?”

Of the many competing schools of declinism, perhaps the most gleeful are those who salivate over the rise of China. For years, Sinophiles have been penning orgasmic fantasies of mid-century when China will bestride the world and America will be consigned to the garbage heap of history. It will never happen: As I’ve been saying for years, China has profound structural problems. It will get old before it gets rich.

Not China then. Russia?

The demographic deformation of Tsar Putin’s new empire is even more severe than Beijing’s. Russia is a global power only to the extent of the mischief it can make on its acceleration into a death spiral.

Not Russia. How about the Caliphate that the terrorist war is being fought to establish?

Even if every dimestore jihadist’s dreams came true, almost by definition an Islamic imperium will be in decline from Day One.

So what might the post-American world look like? Mark Steyn’s answer is deeply depressing:

The most likely future is not a world under a new order but a world with no order – in which pipsqueak states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest nations, from New Zealand to Norway, are unable to defend their own borders and are forced to adjust to the post-American era as they can. Yet, in such a geopolitical scene, the United States will still remain the most inviting target – first, because it’s big, and secondly, because, as Britain knows, the durbar moves on but imperial resentments linger long after imperial grandeur.

But nothing is inevitable, and Mark Steyn offers a last hope. Though “decline is the way to bet”, the only thing that will ensure it is “if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.”

When in 2008 a majority of the American electorate voted for Barack Obama to be president of the United States, it seemed that the deal had been made. But now Obama is failing, the Democratic majority is under threat, and the Tea Party movement is reclaiming the Revolution.

This could be another American century after all.

Jillian Becker   March 1, 2010

Socialism doesn’t work.

Mark Steyn explains the colossal shipwreck of Europe, and observes that the Democrats are hell-bent on steering America on to the same rocks.

Here’s part of what he writes:

For Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. Over 30 percent of German women are childless; among German university graduates, it’s over 40 percent. And for the ever-dwindling band of young Germans who make it out of the maternity ward there’s precious little reason to stick around. Why be the last handsome blond lederhosen-clad Aryan lad working the late shift at the beer garden in order to prop up singlehandedly entire retirement homes? And that’s before the EU decides to add the Greeks to your burdens. Germans, who retire at 67, are now expected to sustain the unsustainable 14 monthly payments per year of Greeks who retire at 58.

Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less-profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn’t pay. You’ll wind up bailing out, anyway. The problem is there are never enough of “the rich” to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they’ve run out of Greeks, so they’ll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick Americans with their defense tab. And, in America, Obama, Pelosi and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?

Melanie Phillips reveals in her column in the Spectator that Britain’s leftist Labour government plotted to bring huge numbers of Muslim immigrants into the country in order to transform its ethnic composition.

Here is what she writes:

Last October, I wrote about how Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter for various Labour Cabinet ministers, had blurted out the fact that the Labour government had engaged on a covert act of national sabotage by loosening immigration controls in order to change the ethnic makeup of the country and rub the right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. Neather subsequently tried to deny that this is what he had said, claiming he had been misrepresented by ‘excitable right-wing newspaper columnists’ by presenting his views in such a way that they were ‘twisted out of all recognition…into being a ‘plot’ to make Britain multicultural. There was no plot.’

Well, now we know there was indeed precisely such a plot. Neather had originally written that drafts of a government policy document were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was a paranoia about it reaching the media. Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled ‘RDS Occasional Paper no. 67’, ‘Migration: an economic and social analysis’ focused heavily on the labour market case. But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

The pressure group Migrationwatch has now obtained an early draft of that policy document. The chairman of Migrationwatch, Sir Andrew Green, writes in the Daily Mail, which carried the story, that this document shows there was indeed a conspiracy to change the make-up of the country. … The social objective of greatly increased diversity was entirely suppressed for fear of public reaction – especially from the white working class. These are the very people who are now paying the price for a decade of Labour deception.

A covert policy to subvert the makeup of the country and change its national identity, an abuse of democracy, a stupendous swindle of the British people — more, an act of collective treachery to the nation: an enormous story, you might think? You would be wrong. Other than in the Daily Mail, I cannot find any reference to this anywhere else. I wonder why.

While we fully accept and agree that the Labour Party dreamt of turning Britain into a multicultural utopia and took active steps to realize their terrible dream, we will follow this post with another (see above) to show that such a plot was hatched and implemented by all the West European states, under both leftist and conservative governments, in compliance with the demands of the Arab states.

In a must-read article, Mark Steyn writes in the National Review about the possibility of American decline, pointing out that it is a matter of choice, and that the Democrats now in power are offering that choice. Here are some paragraphs:

Permanence is an illusion – and you would be surprised at how fast mighty nations can be entirely transformed. But, more importantly, national decline is psychological – and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Within two generations, for example, the German people became just as obnoxiously pacifist as they once were obnoxiously militarist, and as avowedly “European” as they once were menacingly nationalist. Well, who can blame ‘em? You’d hardly be receptive to pitches for national greatness after half-a-century of Kaiser Bill, Weimar, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust.

But what are we to make of the British? They were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century; and they have been, in the scales of history, a force for good in the world. Even as their colonies advanced to independence, they retained the English language, and English legal system, not to mention cricket and all kinds of other cultural ties. Even in imperial retreat, there is no rational basis for late 20th century Britain’s conclusion that it had no future other than as an outlying province of a centralized Euro nanny state dominated by nations whose political, legal and cultural traditions are entirely alien to its own. The embrace of such an alien fate is a psychological condition, not an economic one.

Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California became the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: Unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the American economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet. But what will ensure it is if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.

Is that so hard to imagine? Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the “citizen” by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road To Serfdom is psychological: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought,” he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944. “It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel.

The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, non-interference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.” Two-thirds of a century on, almost every item on the list has been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (40 per cent of people receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority” – the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something”, the cost to individual liberty be damned. American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That’s what happened in Britain…

One sympathizes with Americans weary of global responsibilities that they, unlike the European empires, never sought. The United States now spends more on its military than the next 40 or so nations combined. In research and development, it spends more than the rest of the planet put together. Yet in two rinky-dink no-account semi-colonial policing campaigns, it doesn’t feel like that, does it? A lot of bucks, but not much of a bang. You can understand why the entire left and an increasing chunk of the right would rather vote for a quiet life. But that’s not an option. The first victims of American retreat will be the many corners of the world that have benefitted from an unusually benign hegemon. But the consequences of retreat will come home, too. In a more dangerous world, American decline will be steeper, faster and more devastating than Britain’s – and something far closer to Rome’s.

In the modern era, the two halves of “the west” form a mirror image. “The Old World” has thousand-year old churches and medieval street plans and ancient hedgerows, but has been distressingly susceptible to every insane political fad from Communism to Fascism to European Union. “The New World” has a superficial novelty – you can have your macchiato tweeted directly to your iPod – but underneath the surface noise it has remained truer to older political ideas than “the Old World” ever has. Economic dynamism and political continuity seem far more central to America’s sense of itself than they are to most nations. Which is why it’s easier to contemplate Spain or Germany as a backwater than America. In a fundamental sense, an America in eclipse would no longer be America.

But, as Charles Krauthammer said recently, “decline is a choice.” The Democrats are offering it to the American people, and a certain proportion of them seem minded to accept. Enough to make decline inevitable? … In the words of [the seldom so insightful historian] Arnold Toynbee: “Civilizations die from suicide, not from murder.”

It looks very much as if the Conservative Party (the Tories) will be returned to power in this year’s general election under the leadership of David Cameron.

It will not be a big change. Such differences as there are between Cameron’s Conservatives and Brown’s (or Blair’s) New Labour socialists are small and few. The Conservative Party of today bears little resemblance to that of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.

Our British editor, Sam Westrop, has posted two articles in which he expresses his disappointment with the character and behavior of several people who may well be future leaders of the Conservative Party, not this year but in a few years from now.

While this is chiefly of interest to our British readers, it does give Americans a glimpse into what is happening in the political arena over there.

The only Party which could make a difference if it came to power is the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which wants above all to detach Britain from the undemocratic, politically-correct, incorrigibly collectivist European Union (EU), governed by ukase from Brussels. But although UKIP might win some seats in Parliament, it cannot hope to become  a governing majority.

The greatest threat to the nation is Islamization, but no political party is willing to tackle it, or even talk about it above a low murmur, except the British National Party (BNP), which is neo-Nazi (and not so very neo). The refusal of both the major parties, the Conservatives and New Labour, to formulate policies that might deal effectively with it, is driving many voters into the arms of the BNP.

The result is highly likely to be civil strife, violent and bloody.

Attention pro-choice euphemists, environmentalists who want to reduce population, and all ye whinging western feminists!

By Mark Steyn:

As readers may recall, I’ve been scoffing for years at theories of China as the 21st-century hyperpower. It has two huge structural defects — a) an aging population; and b) an ever more male population. This last is entirely owed to the Commies’ disastrous one-child policy which ensured the abortion of millions and millions of girl babies: A woman’s right to choose turns out in practice to be the right not to choose any women. Result: Millions and millions of young men who’ll never get a date. Not a recipe for social stability. A new report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences considers some of the issues:

According to the report, 24 million men reaching marriageable age by 2020 will never marry because of the sex imbalance. Think of it in these terms: what if the entire population of New York City or of Australia was never able to marry. Imagine the social implications in a city or nation that large where no one can marry. Imagine if that city or country is comprised solely of 24 million men; men with no homes to return to at night; men without the responsibilities of a family to keep them engaged in productive pursuits.

If that sounds like some futuristic dystopian thriller, there are more immediate problems:

While the number of baby girls being born has declined, the number of kidnappings and trafficking of young girls has risen. According to the National Population and Family Planning Commission — that’s right, the very organization responsible for the one-child family policy — abductions and trafficking of women and girls has become “rampant.”

Young girls are being kidnapped within China and also from neighboring countries (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand) by organized gangs who sell them to families with boys of a similar age. The girls will be raised by the families and given as brides to their sons as soon as they reach marriageable age. Others are shipped to brothels within China for a life as sex slaves.

In his schoolgirl paeans to totalitarianism, has the China-smitten Thomas Friedman of the New York Times ever addressed these structural defects? Or any of the ecopalyptic warm-mongers expressing barely concealed admiration for Beijing’s population-control measures?

And what a vast army China will have that will need to be put to use. To what use? Shouldn’t the leftist-pacifist  governments of the West be thinking about this?