The stupid and dangerous policies of the lefty governments of Europe (they’re all on the left, including those who call themselves conservative), to encourage massive Muslim immigration and then privilege the immigrants over the indigenous populations, has unsurprisingly provoked the rise of extremely illiberal factions. Some of them speak of war. Here’s an example from France.

Just as the bankrupt EU (with any luck) is about to self-destruct, some thick Norwegians decide to give it a Nobel Prize.

There’s nothing unusual about the Prize being awarded to the Least Deserving. They gave it to the Grandfather of Contemporary Political Terrorism, Yasser Arafat. They gave it (instead of a more suitable Chicken Little prize not yet instituted) to the climate-threat hoaxster, Al Gore. They gave it to Barack Obama for doing nothing at all.

This is from an editorial in the IBD:

This year’s Peace Prize goes to the EU for its “successful struggle for peace and reconciliation and for democracy and human rights.” This isn’t the committee’s worst choice. But it’s one of them.

Barack Obama, Al Gore, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Yasser Arafat and Mikhail Gorbachev were all worse choices.

So picking the EU, which is having a hard time holding itself together, isn’t the most asinine decision the committee has made. But it could have done better.

If transforming most of Europe “from a continent of wars to a continent of peace” is the standard, the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize should have gone to the United States. This country has been more effective at keeping peace in Europe than any other entity.

America has had a strong military presence in Europe since World War II. The U.S. has subsidized European security with troops on the ground, jets in the air and trillions spent.

With money that would have otherwise been used for defense freed up for other purposes, Western European nations set about building their now-bankrupt welfare states. While America bought guns for Europe, Europe bought butter for itself. …

The five-member Nobel Peace Prize Committee, based in Oslo, has itself become a joke. Maybe it’s time to give the Nobel Peace Prize responsibilities to a less frivolous group.

… from bitter experience, warns against the Democrats’ socialist policies:

More US embassies were attacked today by Muslim mobs.

Muslim leaders deliberately stoked up the flames of riot on 9/11 and again today. They needed a pretext and by a stroke of luck they found one in a movie. It was sent as a gift to the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, through the Egyptian media, by a brainless American member of the minority it is persecuting, Coptic Christians. (Will not the Copts in Egypt pay dearly for it?) Others of the group made the film – and maliciously alleged that it was made by Jews.

This is from (Glenn Beck’s) The Blaze:

Protests in the Middle East that are being blamed on an anti-Islamic and anti-Muhammad film continue to rage. And as details unfold about the shadowy figures behind the film, the plot thickens. This morning, The Blaze provided more details about Steve Klein, a man who served as a spokesman for the film. And last night, we learned more about Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the filmmaker involved who has a criminal past.

Now, information is coming out about the man who is said to have intentionally translated and sent the video to Egyptian media, thus allegedly sparking a portion of the outrage. Since the initial violent reaction to the video emerged on September 11, many have wondered how the film came to the attention of Middle Eastern media and citizens, alike.

Religion News Service (RNS) is reporting that Morris Sadek, an Egyptian-born Coptic Christian, translated the movie into Arabic and sent it to Egyptian journalists. He also allegedly promoted it on his web site and through social media, the outlet reports. RNS has more about his background:

Morris Sadek describes himself as a human rights attorney and president of a small group called the National American Coptic Assembly, based in Chantilly, Va. Sadek says on his website that he is a member of the Egyptian and District of Columbia bar associations who has “defended major human rights cases” …

But fellow Copts depict Sadek as a fringe figure and publicity hound whose Islamophobic invectives disrupt Copts’ quest for equal rights in Egypt.

The film is very badly made and acted, but at least it denigrates Islam. And neither its quality nor intention are important. Everyone in America is free to make a good or bad film with any intention whatsoever. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula the film-maker, Steve Klein the “spokesman for the film”, and Morris Sadek who translated the dialogue into Arabic and sent the thing to Egyptian journalists are very small fry indeed in the drama of chaos and destruction that is unfolding.

It is the use of the film by Islamic leaders to arouse Muslim mobs to riot, burn, wreck, assault and murder that is evil. Those leaders are guilty of the havoc, the fire and the spilt blood, but they could only do what they’re doing because the present American leadership prepared the way for them.

The events that are shaking the pillars of the world would have happened anyway, because Obama and his administration have over and over again by actions and by words, from his first speech abroad as president in Cairo in 2009 to Hillary Clinton’s speech yesterday, impressed on Muslims the world over that they have been injured by America. And this despite the fact that Islam initiated war on America and is relentlessly pursuing it.

There could be no stronger reason to impeach and severely punish a president of the United States. It almost certainly won’t happen, but it should.

The great Mark Steyn talks about his book “America Alone”, his prediction that Europe will be dominated by Muslims, and the reluctance of some Muslims to debate with him.

Video from PJ Media

A brave stand against the dhimmification of the West, using the law.

We applaud the effort, and the 13 successes in stopping mosques being built. But we are sorry to say that in our deeply pessimistic view …

Like a finger in a breaking dyke, it will not keep the tide of Islam out.

Too little, too late.

Gavin Boby talks about his campaign.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To break the silence. A risky project!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This post is about “the false and dangerous morality of pity”

The quoted words are those of Bret Stephens, deputy editorial page editor and foreign-affairs columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He delivered a speech at Commentary’s annual dinner on June 4 at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City, from which these  extracts, from an adaptation of the speech at the Commentary website, are taken:

On the fourth of June, 1967, there were excellent reasons to side with Israel. It was a democracy besieged and assaulted by tyrannies. Its maritime rights had been violated by Egypt’s closure of the Straits of Tiran; international law was on its side. It had compelling reasons to believe it was under mortal threat. It made no territorial demands on its neighbors, much less call for their destruction. It was a net contributor, scientifically and culturally, to the march of civilization. Simply put, the Israelis were the good guys.

Yet the reason usually cited for sympathizing with Israel that fourth of June is that it was the underdog — the proverbial 98-pound weakling versus its big bullying neighbors. And this was true, albeit only partially true, because Israel quickly demonstrated that it wasn’t such a weakling after all.

And from the moment Israel won that war, thus securing its survival, it lost the sympathy of the world. We know that some newspapers had prepared Crocodile-tear editorials regretting the demise of a short-lived state of Israel. To feel for Jews suffering flattered the “feelers”; to feel for Jews triumphant did not.

It is to this deplorable weakness, this eroticism of the ego, that Christian morality and “social justice” advocacy – which means the entire ideology of the Left – pander.

Bret Stephens reasons:

But it’s hard to make a defensible case for siding with the underdog based on underdog-status alone. Was Saddam Hussein hiding in his spider hole a better man than he was in his palaces? Were the allies in 1945 less deserving of victory than they were in 1942? Was Israel’s cause less right on June 12, right after the war, than it had been on June 4? These are the kind of nonsense propositions you are bound to wind up with if you make moral judgments based on underdog – or overdog – status alone.

The instinct to side with the underdog arises, at least in part, from the guilty pleasure of pity — the feeling of superiority that the sensation of pity almost automatically confers. Pity, it turns out, is not a form of sympathy, or empathy, or a genuinely humane concern for the misfortunes of others. On the contrary, pity is really a form of self-congratulation, an act of condescension, a sublimated type of narcissism. Little wonder, then, that the politics of pity should thrive in … our culture of narcissism.

Consider the ways these politics plays out in our lives today. Remember that headline in Le Monde from September 12, 2001—“Nous Sommes Tous Américains”—“We Are All Americans”? Le Monde’s editorial pity lasted just so long as the wreckage of the Twin Towers smoldered in the ground, and then it was straight back to bashing the hyperpuissance. Or take the condemnation of the United States, by outfits such as Amnesty International, for the killing of Osama bin Laden. Poor Osama, defenseless before those marauding SEALs!

Yet nowhere do the politics of pity play out more vividly than when it comes to the Palestinians. How is it that, at least on the left, the Palestinians have become the new Chosen People? Part of the answer surely lies in the fact that Palestinians, uniquely, are the perceived victims of the Jewish state, and therefore another vehicle for castigating Jews. If you believe that Jews can do no right, you’re probably disposed to think that Palestinians can do no wrong — especially when they are attacking Jews.

But that’s not the whole answer. People who really aren’t anti-Semites or knee-jerk enemies of Israel nonetheless are disposed to make all kinds of allowances for Palestinians that can only be explained by the politics of pity. How many billions in international aid have been given to the Palestinians, and what percentage of those monies has been squandered or stolen? How often have Palestinians made atrocious political choices without ever paying a price for them in terms of international regard?

The reason Palestinians don’t have to earn global sympathy by showing themselves worthy of it is that they are the perceived underdogs and are therefore automatically entitled to the benefit of every doubt. And it is because “caring” for the Palestinians flatters the vanity of their sympathizers. I don’t think the world really loves the Palestinians. But … it does “love to love” them. Being pro-Palestinian, as that term is typically used, is not a testament to compassion. It is, more often than not, an act of self-love. It’s moral onanism.

Competing for the title of who is the most pitiable is shameful. Competing for the title of who is the more pitying is despicable. 

Bret Stephens warns mistaken friends of Israel from entering the pity-stakes:

In recent years, friends of Israel, and many Israelis as well, have sought to reengage the world’s affections by trying to portray Israel as the real underdog — in other words, to enter a contest of victimhood with the Palestinians.

Israel was not founded to serve as another vehicle for showcasing Jewish victimhood, but for ending it.

Right, right, right!

In order for one to deal effectively with the world, whether as individual or statesman, it is necessary to know the world as it is. It is a world full of danger, evil, and cruelty. Sentimentalizing it into something other than it is, pretending that human nature is “fundamentally good”, or can be changed by ideology, is to make a dumb mistake. Every human being suffers, and every human being inflicts suffering. The moral thing to do is to try not to harm others – a hard, if not impossible, task. 

Bret Stephens looks at what is happening in the world now with clear sight:

The world as we would wish it to be is not a world in which Syria is bleeding, the Chinese are increasing the rate of annual military spending by a double-digit percentage, the Arab Spring is turning to an Islamist winter, Europe is imploding economically, and Iran is brazening its way to a nuclear bomb. That world is the real world, and it is the world the rest of us inhabit: the world of the concrete fact, the world of the worsening circumstance. It is the world in which decisions are made harder, not easier, by delay, in which delay increases the chances of failure, and of death.

It is a world choked with pity, yet pitiless.

The whole speech as it appears in Commentary is well worth reading.

We are witnessing a seismic shift in global affairs. The shake-up is a perfect storm of political, demographic and technological change that will soon make the world as we have known it for the last 30 years almost unrecognizable.

Those attention-gripping words open an article by Victor Davis Hanson at Townhall:

Since the mid-1980s there have been a number of accepted global constants. The European Union was assumed to have evolved beyond the nation-state as it ended the cycle of militarism and renounced free-market capitalism. With its strong euro, soft power and nonaligned foreign policy, the EU was praised as a utopian sort of foil to the overarmed U.S. with its ailing dollar. …

The Arab Middle East for the last 40 years seemed to be the world’s cockpit, as its huge petroleum reserves brought in trillions of dollars from an oil-depleted West, along with political concessions. Petrodollars fed global terrorism. Oil-poor Israel had little clout with Europe. In general, the West ignored any human-rights concerns involving the region’s oil-rich dictatorships, monarchies and theocracies, as well as their aid to Islamic terrorists.

Conventional wisdom also assumed that an indebted U.S. was in permanent decline, a cash-rich China in ascendency. …

But none of that conventional wisdom now seems very wise — largely because of a number of technological breakthroughs and equally unforeseen political upheavals.

The eurozone is unraveling. An aging, shrinking population and a socialist welfare state lead to serfdom, not utopia. …

The Arab Middle East is now in a free fall. Tyrants in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen were ousted, while one in Syria totters. But while the world hoped secular democrats would follow in their wake, more likely we are witnessing the emergence of one-election Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood. The region will be mired in turmoil whether these upheavals turn out to be like the hijacked Iranian revolution that ended in theocracy, or the Turkish democratic model that is insidiously becoming Islamist.

Horizontal drilling and fracking have made oil shale and tar sands rich sources of oil and natural gas, so much so that the United States may prove to possess the largest store of fossil fuel reserves in the world — in theory, with enough gas, oil and coal soon never to need any imported Middle Eastern energy again. “Peak oil” is suddenly an anachronism. Widespread American use of cheap natural gas will do more to clean the planet than thousands of Solyndras.

If the United States utilizes its resources, then its present pathologies — massive budget and trade deficits, mounting debt, strategic vulnerability — will start to subside. These new breakthroughs in petroleum engineering are largely American phenomena, reminding us that there is still something exceptional in the American experience that periodically offers the world cutting-edge technologies and protocols — such as those pioneered by Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Starbucks and Walmart.

In comparison, China is not only resource-poor but politically impoverished. For decades we were told that Chinese totalitarianism, when mixed with laissez-faire capitalism, led to sparkling airports and bullet trains, while a litigious and indulgent America settled for a run-down LAX and creaking Amtrak relics. But the truth is that the Los Angeles airport will probably sooner look modern than the Chinese will hold open elections amid a transparent society — given that free markets did not make China democratic, only more contradictory.

Even more surreal, tiny oil-poor Israel, thanks to vast new offshore finds, has been reinvented as a potential energy giant in the Middle East. Such petrodollars will change Israel as they did the Persian Gulf countries, but with one major difference. Unlike Dubai or Kuwait, Israel is democratic, economically diverse, socially stable and technologically sophisticated, suggesting the sudden windfall will not warp Israel in the manner it has traditional Arab autocracies, but instead become a force multiplier of an already dynamic society. Will Europe still snub Israel when it has as much oil, gas and money as an OPEC member in the Persian Gulf?

Good, good – but Islam is still waging jihad and spreading sharia law; and the UN still exists; and Iran is still becoming a nuclear power; and Obama is still occupying the Oval Office.

The incessant drumbeat of anti-Semitism— often rooted in anti-Zionist prejudice against Israel and all who publicly identify with the Jewish state and Jewish identity — throughout Europe is inciting violence that can no longer be ignored. The problem here is not just al-Qaeda sympathizers such as the Toulouse shooter or the importation of Jew-hatred from the Middle East that have taken root among French Muslims. It is the way that such views have melded with attacks from intellectuals on Zionism, Israel and its supporters in such a way as to dignify the sordid hatred flung at Jews on the streets of Europe. There is a long and dishonorable history of anti-Semitism in France, but what we are witnessing now is an updated version of traditional bias that is casting a shadow over the future of the Jewish community there. … It is difficult to envision much of a future for Jews in Europe. – Jonathan S. Tobin at Commentary-Contentions, July 6, 2012

In recent weeks, I have heard those who have cast doubt on Iran’s intentions. They said that when Iran’s leaders declare that they will wipe Israel off the map, they really mean something else in Persian. It would be interesting to hear what they think of the Iranian Chief-of-Staff’s remarks yesterday: ‘Iran is committed to the complete destruction of Israel.’ This is clear and simple. Iran’s goals are clear. It wants to annihilate Israel and is developing nuclear weapons to realize this goal. Iran threatens Israel, peace and the entire world. Against this malicious intention, the world’s leading countries must show determination, not weakness. – Benyamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, 21 May, 2012

In pursuit of a world without nuclear weapons, the president finalizes plans to decimate our nuclear deterrent and reduce our warhead count beyond even treaty commitments … with the goal “in the longer term, of eliminating nuclear weapons”. This plan stems from a Nuclear Posture Review conducted by an administration committed to a world without nuclear weapons, particularly American ones, based on two fraudulent conclusions, one that Cold War weapons are no longer needed in a post-Cold War world, and the weapons, not the tyrants who would use them against us, are the real threat.  – From an IBD editorial, July 6, 2012

Lord Dannatt, the former head of the Army, has described as “risky” plans to reduce the service to its smallest size since the Napoleonic wars. – From the Telegraph, July 7, 2012

The following is from Omnipotent Government by Ludwig von Mises, 1944, re-published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. It is subsection 5 of Chapter VIII, Anti-Semitism and Racism: Anti-Semitism as a Factor in International Politics. 

(Ludwig von Mises, free-market economist of the Austrian School, was one of the most eminent classical liberal thinkers of the last century.)

It was a very strange constellation of political forces that turned anti-Semitism into an important factor in world affairs.

In the years after the first World War Marxism swept triumphantly over the Anglo-Saxon countries. Public opinion in Great Britain came under the spell of the neo-Marxian doctrines on imperialism, according to which wars are fought only for the sake of the selfish class interests of capital. The intellectuals and the parties of the Left felt rather ashamed of England’s participation in the World War. They were convinced that it was both morally unfair and politically unwise to oblige Germany to pay reparations and to restrict its armaments. They were firmly resolved never again to let Great Britain fight a war. They purposely shut their eyes to every unpleasant fact that could weaken their naïve confidence in the omnipotence of the League of Nations. They overrated the efficacy of sanctions and of such measures as outlawing war by the Briand-Kellogg Pact. They favored for their country a policy of disarmament which rendered the British Empire almost defenseless within a world indefatigably preparing for new wars.

But at the same time the same people were asking the British government and the League to check the aspirations of the “dynamic” powers and to safeguard with every means—short of war—the independence of the weaker nations. They indulged in strong language against Japan and against Italy; but they practically encouraged, by their opposition to armaments and their unconditional pacifism, the imperialistic policies of these countries. They were instrumental in Great Britain’s rejecting Secretary Stimson’s proposals to stop Japan’s expansion in China. They frustrated the Hoare-Laval plan, which would have left at least a part of Abyssinia independent; but they did not lift a finger when Italy occupied the whole country. They did not change their policy when Hitler seized power and immediately began to prepare for the wars which were meant to make Germany paramount first on the European continent and later in the whole world. Theirs was an ostrich policy in the face of the most serious situation that Britain ever had to encounter.

The parties of the Right did not differ in principle from those of the Left. They were only more moderate in their utterances and eager to find a rational pretext for the policy of inactivity and indolence in which the Left acquiesced lightheartedly and without a thought of the future. They consoled themselves with the hope that Germany did not plan to attack France but only to fight Soviet Russia. It was all wishful thinking, refusing to take account of Hitler’s schemes as exposed in Mein Kampf. The Left became furious. Our reactionaries, they shouted, are aiding Hitler because they are putting their class interests over the welfare of the nation. Yet the encouragement which Hitler got from England came not so much from the anti-Soviet feelings of some members of the upper classes as from the state of British armament, for which the Left was even more responsible than the Right. The only way to stop Hitler would have been to spend large sums for rearmament and to return to conscription. The whole British nation, not only the aristocracy, was strongly opposed to such measures. Under these conditions it was not unreasonable that a small group of lords and rich commoners should try to improve relations between the two countries. It was, of course, a plan without prospect of success. The Nazis could not be dissuaded for their aims by comforting speeches from socially prominent Englishmen. British popular repugnance to armaments and conscription was an important factor in the Nazi plans, but the sympathies of a dozen lords were not. It was no secret that Great Britain would be unable, right at the outbreak of a new war, to send an expeditionary force of seven divisions to France as it did in 1914; that the Royal Air Force was numerically much inferior to the German Air Force; or that even the British Navy was less formidable than in the years 1914–18. …

The problem which Great Britain had to face was simply this: is it in the interest of the nation to permit Germany to conquer the whole European continent? It was Hitler’s great plan to keep England neutral at all costs, until the conquest of France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Ukraine should be completed. Should Great Britain render him this service? Whoever answered this question in the negative must not talk but act. But the British politicians buried their heads in the sand.

Given the state of British public opinion, France should have understood that it was isolated and must meet the Nazi danger by itself. The French know little about the German mentality and German political conditions. Yet when Hitler seized power every French politician should have realized that the main point in his plans was the annihilation of France. Of course the French parties of the Left shared the prejudices, illusions, and errors of the British Left. But there was in France an influential nationalist group which had always mistrusted Germany and favored an energetic anti-German policy. If the French nationalists in 1933 and the years following had seriously advocated measures to prevent German rearmament, they would have had the support of the whole nation with the exception of the intransigent communists. Germany had already started to rearm under the Weimar Republic. Nevertheless in 1933 it was not ready for a war with France, nor for some years thereafter. It would have been forced either to yield to a French threat or to wage a war without prospect of success. At that time it was still possible to stop the Nazis with threats. And even had war resulted, France would have been strong enough to win.

But then something amazing and unexpected happened. Those nationalists who for more than sixty years had been fanatically anti-German, who had scorned everything German, and who had always demanded an energetic policy against the Weimar Republic changed their minds overnight. Those who had disparaged as Jewish all endeavors to improve Franco-German relations, who had attacked as Jewish machinations the Dawes and Young plans and the Locarno agreement, and who had held the League suspect as a Jewish institution suddenly began to sympathize with the Nazis. They refused to recognize the fact that Hitler was eager to destroy France once and for all. Hitler, they hinted, is less a foe of France than of the Jews; as an old warrior he sympathizes with his French fellow warriors. They belittled German rearmament. Besides, they said, Hitler rearms only in order to fight Jewish Bolshevism. Nazism is Europe’s shield against the assault of World Jewry and its foremost representative, Bolshevism. The Jews are eager to push France into a war against the Nazis. But France is wise enough not to pull any chestnuts out of the fire for the Jews. France will not bleed for the Jews.

It was not the first time in French history that the nationalists put their anti-Semitism above their French patriotism. In the Dreyfus Affair they fought vigorously in order to let a treacherous officer quietly evade punishment while an innocent Jew languished in prison.

It has been said that the Nazis corrupted the French nationalists. Perhaps some French politicians really took bribes. But politically this was of little importance. The Reich would have wasted its funds. The anti Semitic newspapers and periodicals had a wide circulation; they did not need German subsidies. Hitler left the League; he annulled the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles; he occupied the demilitarized zone on the Rhine; he stirred anti-French tendencies in North Africa. The French nationalists for the most part criticized these acts only in order to put all the blame on their political adversaries in France: it was they who were guilty, because they had adopted a hostile attitude toward Nazism.

Then Hitler invaded Austria. Seven years earlier France had vigorously opposed the plan of an Austro German customs union. But now the French Government hurried to recognize the violent annexation of Austria. At Munich—in coöperation with Great Britain and Italy—it forced Czechoslovakia to yield to the German claims. All this met with the approval of the majority of the French nationalists. When Mussolini, instigated by Hitler, proclaimed the Italian aspirations for Savoy, Nice, Corsica, and Tunis, the nationalists’ objections were ventured timidly. No Demosthenes rose to warn the nation against Philip [of Macedon]. But if a new Demosthenes had presented himself the nationalists would have denounced him as the son of a rabbi or a nephew of Rothschild.

It is true that the French Left did not oppose the Nazis either, and in this respect they did not differ from their British friends. But that is no excuse for the nationalists. They were influential enough to induce an energetic anti Nazi policy in France. But for them every proposal seriously to resist Hitler was a form of Jewish treachery. …

Germany openly prepared a war for the total annihilation of France. There was no doubt about the intentions of the Nazis. Under such conditions the only policy appropriate would have been to frustrate Hitler’s plans at all costs. Whoever dragged in the Jews in discussing Franco-German relations forsook the cause of his nation. Whether Hitler was a friend or foe of the Jews was irrelevant. The existence of France was at stake. This alone had to be considered, not the desire of French shopkeepers or doctors to get rid of their Jewish competitors.

That France did not block Hitler’s endeavors in time, that it long neglected its military preparations, and that finally, when war could no longer be avoided, it was not ready to fight was the fault of anti-Semitism. The French anti-Semites served Hitler well. Without them the new war might have been avoided, or at least fought under much more favorable conditions.

When war came, it was stigmatized by the French Right as a war for the sake of the Jews and by the French communists as a war for the sake of capitalism. The unpopularity of the war paralyzed the hands of the military chiefs. It slowed down work in the armament factories. … Thus the unbelievable happened: France disavowed its past, branded the proudest memories of its history Jewish, and hailed the loss of its political independence as a national revolution and a regeneration of its true spirit.

Not alone in France but the world over anti-Semitism made propaganda for Nazism. Such was the detrimental effect of interventionism and its tendencies toward discrimination that a good many people became unable to appreciate problems of foreign policy from any viewpoint but that of their appetite for discrimination against successful competitors. The hope of being delivered from a Jewish competitor fascinated them while they forgot everything else, their nation’s independence, freedom, religion, civilization. … The secret weapon of Hitler is the anti Jewish inclinations of many millions of shopkeepers and grocers, of doctors and lawyers, professors and writers.

The present war would never have originated but for anti¬Semitism. Only anti-Semitism made it possible for the Nazis to restore the German people’s faith in the invincibility of its armed forces, and thus to drive Germany again into the policy of aggression and the struggle for hegemony. Only the anti-Semitic entanglement of a good deal of French public opinion prevented France from stopping Hitler when he could still be stopped without war. And it was anti-Semitism that helped the German armies find in every European country men ready to open the doors to them.

Mankind has paid a high price indeed for anti-Semitism.