Today we have posted the last essay, number 18, in the series by Jillian Becker titled The Darkness of This World. 

Find it in full under Pages in our margin.

Here is part of it:

18

Conclusion

America the Last Best Hope?

A multitude of enlightened Europeans cultivated reason, and built a culture that was innovative, prosperous, powerful, and humane. Other Europeans wanted to destroy all that, and succeeded. Rebels from and against the prosperous educated classes – philosophers and poets, artists and politicians – taught generations to intoxicate themselves with fantasies of destruction, spoliation, and atrocity that could, and at times did, inspire real events of vast horror, suffering, and death. From each of them Europe seemed to recover for a while. But at the time of this writing, the rebels have triumphed. The dark vision prevails. Europe is rotten. Multitudes of Europeans, seeing nothing in their culture worth preserving and no point in its survival, reluctant even to beget children, are yielding to immigrating hordes of aliens from the Third World who lust for conquest and are governed by laws devised in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula in the Dark Ages.

So must the greatness of Europe be altogether lost? Surely not! Surely in the states of America, united on Enlightenment principles of liberty, reason, tolerance, and participatory government, European civilization will be preserved and enhanced? There where every citizen is free to pursue his own happiness, to hold property securely, to have his say in a government of limited powers, the United States will continue to prosper and advance? America, it is said, is a forward-looking “can do” society – innovative, prosperous, powerful and humane. “The last best hope of earth.” [As President Lincoln said of his country in a message to Congress on 1 December, 1862.]

And for a while yet it may continue to be so. But the seed of the evil flowers of the culture – Marxism, political sadism, and most potently poisonous of all, the political philosophies of the New Left – have found as fertile soil in America as in Europe.

The mainly bourgeois “anti-bourgeois” terrorist groups that rose with the “sixty-eight” protest movement in America, did evil just as intentionally as their European counterparts. And went in for the same posturing and frivolity. The US was at war in Vietnam, and the anti-draft demonstrations on university campuses gave a serious aspect to the American rebellion, but the war and the draft were pretexts rather reasons for it, as two leaders of the young radicals, Peter Collier and David Horowitz, confessed years later in their book – the best I have found on the subject – Destructive Generation: “The war in Vietnam was a gift of chance that allowed radical leaders to convince others of a need for a social apocalypse and of the necessity for their destructive strategies.”

These authors, long since cured of the romantic radicalism of their youth, look back   and “wince” at the “homemade hankerings for Armageddon”. The Sixties, they write, was a time of “monumental idealism”, when “dewy-eyed young people in the throes of a moral passion … sought only to remake the world”. They would do this by destroying “the evil empire of ‘Amerika’” and freeing “the captive peoples of the world”. It was a time, they say, “when innocence quickly became cynical “ and “when a gang of ghetto thugs like the Black Panthers might be anointed as political visionaries”.

The Black Panthers and many of the “dewy-eyed” rebels intended to do what they fully recognized as evil in pursuit of their ideals. For instance, a man known as J. J. – a member of the white middle-class group that became the terrorist organization called Weatherman and later Weather Underground – was notable for “his [drug augmented] high energy, his nonstop, almost demonic chatter, his ability to carry listeners with him by the sheer force of his words rather than their depth”. And J. J.’s idea “was not to create a perfect state operating by the clockwork principles of Marxist law but to promote a chaos that would cripple America and ultimately cast it into a receivership that would be administered by the morally superior Third World. Unafraid to pursue his theme to its logical end, J. J. would add that people shouldn’t expect the revolution to achieve a Kingdom of Freedom ; more likely, it would produce a Dark Ages.” J. J. “[laid] out the ‘White Devil’ theory of world history. ‘We’re against everything that’s “good and decent” in honky America. … We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmares!’”

As in West Germany, France and Italy, the terrorist bombers of America demanded their rights under the law that they broke, mocked, and abominated. “Despite their incessant complaints of police brutality, Sixties radicals lived for the most part in a no-fault system, demanding their constitutional rights at the same time as they were abusing and denouncing the Constitution. They knew they had the option, which many of them ultimately used, of diving back into the System [and their comfy bourgeois lives] when they tired of being extrinsic. (For this reason New Leftism, although discredited in politics, continues to thrive in the ‘academic work’ of former radicals who returned for postgraduate degrees to the universities they had earlier tried to destroy.) It was an example of the cynicism that marked the decade – counting on the fact that America was exactly the sort of flexible and forgiving society they were condemning it for failing to be.”

The evil was done not only to shock their bourgeois parents, as their drugs, promiscuous sex, and bombs were meant to do and did, but for a very much higher good, of course. The very much higher good: “social justice”; “ending oppression” in the forms of “ racism”, “sexism”, “homophobia”, “classism”, “imperialism”, “colonialism”; all of which required the destruction of “the capitalist system”.

Most of them did not, however, describe themselves as Communists. Without reading the works of Marx, or of Marxists, Trotskyites, or New Left political philosophers, they all – in harmony with their European counterparts – looked forward to a political apocalypse; a revolution that they considered themselves to be hastening, that would change everything and replace the earthly Hell of oppression and social injustice with a Heaven of … something yet to be defined.

Collier and Horowitz write of   “the decade’s transcendental conviction that there was something apocalyptic lurking behind the veil of the ordinary, and that just a little more pressure was needed to pierce the last remaining membrane – of civility, bourgeois consciousness, corporate liberalism, sexual uptightness, or whatever else prevented us all from breaking through to the other side”. And: “Again it was that hunger to reach the apocalypse just beyond, the essential act that would make them real revolutionaries.” And “the Weatherpeople, like all parvenus, spent considerable time working on a genealogy that would connect them with noble [sic] forbears: Russian narodniki and European anarchists, Cuban fidelistas and Vietnamese guerrillas.”

A work of fiction that impressively conveys the real evil of the 60s rebels is American Pastoral by Philip Roth. A percipient discussion of it and the issues it raised was published in Commentary magazine by Carol Iannone. I summarize the plot and quote her most illuminating comments relevant to my theme:

An only child – cheerful, affectionate, charming as a little girl – of a business man who in his youth had been an athlete and a Marine, and his beauty queen wife, grows up to be “overtaken by the 60s”, sets a bomb in a post office and kills a local doctor. She goes underground and kills three more people in another bombing.

“In his manly way” (Carol Iannone writes) the father “ tries to see where his own responsibility lies for what has happened to his much loved daughter … only to be forced again and again to confront the blazing chaotic irrationality of it all. What he cannot understand … is her hatred of America. ‘How could she “hate” this country when she had no conception of this country? How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the “rotten system” that had given her own family every opportunity to succeed? To revile her “capitalist” parents as though their wealth were the product of anything other than the unstinting industry of three generations …’”

“The 60s, in brief, are not just about the bomber young and their war with ‘Amerika’; in the 60s, ‘the indigenous American berserk’, have entered the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, touching everything and everyone with their ‘mockery of human integrity, every ethical obligation destroyed’.”

It entered the academies, and through them the mind of the nation, until the counter-culture has become The Culture. Collier and Horowitz write: “[N]owhere is the entrenchment of the Sixties mentality more complete or more destructive than in the university. That the Left should now dominate the academy involves a savage irony, of course. It was only after failing in their intent to burn down the university in the Sixties that radicals decided to get on the tenure track in the Seventies. Unimpeded in their long march through these institutions by fair-minded centrists of the sort they themselves now refuse to hire, these Leftists have brought a postmodern Dark Age to higher education – “deconstructing” objective truths to pave the way for chic academic nihilism: creating a curriculum of contempt for American history and culture; and transforming many classrooms into chambers of inquisition and indoctrination.”

The demonic achievements of the rebels were crowned by the election, in 2008, to the presidency of the United States of one of their own: Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a 60s counter-culturist mother and an African father who was both a Communist and a Muslim; and was associated eventually in the son’s mind with “colonial and imperial oppression” of his ancestral land, Kenya, when it was under British rule.

President Obama acceded to the White House with all his ideological baggage intact: the credo of the New Left plus admiration of Islam. And this at a time when Islam was becoming the main enemy of the Western world, practicing terrorism on a large scale, waging open warfare in the Middle East, and launching a migrant invasion of Europe that European governments allowed, encouraged, and all too willingly submitted to. Obama’s policies facilitated the European calamity, and he took steps to help Islamic Iran, which constantly reiterates its intention to destroy America and conquer the non-Muslim world, to become a nuclear power. He has lowered America in the eyes of the world. He and his minions treat the Constitution with contempt.

In the universities the counter-culture has become the orthodoxy. A majority of instructors indoctrinate students rather than educate them, teaching them what to think rather than how to think. Some Leftist representatives in Congress have passed a resolution to curb free speech. And the spirit of free enterprise, which made America rich and mighty, has been all but crushed by tyrannical regulation. Wealth has been taken from those who have earned it and given to those who have not. In short, the New Left has triumphed – though without attaining its heaven on earth.

Can the harm it has done be undone? At present the dark stream of unreason flows strongly. The resistance to it should be the vigorous self-interest inherent in human nature, the desire in most of us to succeed; and the lure of science, technology, all they give us for the betterment of our lives. Only as long as free personal endeavor and innovation continue to characterize America, will there be hope – if not the last, certainly the best – for our splendid civilization to survive in this, our only world.

Some Europeans can see that their doom is approaching ever faster and becoming ever more certain.

Among them are some who wish it were not so.

But even after people have been massacred in the capital of France by Muslims, the politicians who opened the doors of Europe to the Muslim invaders insist on keeping them open.

One journalist is angry about it and says so.

We quote an article by Leo McKinstry at the Express online:

SEVERAL millennia were required to build European civilisation but its impending destruction has been the work of just a few years, carried out by a cadre of irresponsible, unpatriotic and deluded politicians led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Dressing up their vandalism as compassion and their cowardice as moral superiority, these leaders have created an immigration crisis so profound that the very existence of our European culture and heritage is under mortal threat.

The tragic paradox of the obsession with free movement and the abolition of national identities is that Europe in any meaningful sense will probably cease to exist this century.

As the social revolution accelerates traditional values of democracy, freedom and solidarity will be replaced by conflict, sectarianism, oppression and intolerance.

Increasingly Islamified, barbaric and poverty-stricken, Europe will become indistinguishable from large swathes of North Africa and the Middle East.

Even the stupendously high levels of mass immigration over the past two decades are now dwarfed by the colossal flood of new arrivals that has occurred since the early summer when Merkel made her woefully illconceived pledge that ­Germany would welcome anyone claiming to be a refugee.

She may have thought that the open-door policy would provide a counter to Germany’s appalling record of aggression since the 1860s but in reality by wrecking Europe’s social fabric she has added to the long catalogue of Teutonic crimes.

It is thanks mainly to her that so many African, Asian and Middle-Eastern migrants are coming to our shores. In October alone a record 218,000 of them crossed the Mediterranean, more than the entire total for 2014.

Absurdly some metropolitan elitists complain that Britain has failed to join in this demographic upheaval since our Government has said that we will only take 20,000 refugees from Syria over the next five years.

This ignores the crucial fact that the current annual immigration rate is officially more than 630,000-a-year, with most of the new settlers hailing from outside the EU. How many more are Britain and Europe expected to take?

The potential influx is almost limitless. The United Nations says that globally there are at least 60 million people classified as refugees while more than 1.2 billion live in dire poverty. But the numbers are already proving catastrophic.

A mood of fear hangs over disintegrating Europe. …

Ultra-liberal pro-immigration Sweden has seen some Muslim neighbourhoods in its cities turned into no-go areas, while Malmö has one of the highest rates of rape in the world.

The fraught scenes of chaos in Eastern Europe are replicated at points on the British border, such as Calais, where the vast 6,000-strong migrant camp descends into even greater squalor and tension.

But 95 per cent of the squatters there are not refugees but are tough, fit young men mainly from Africa who have no right to be in Europe at all. If our politicians had any guts they would close down the camp and deport its freeloading residents.

But instead the British taxpayer is being asked to fork out £3.6million a year for improvements at the camp, which will only attract more. The same tensions can be seen at a British RAF base in Cyprus, where a group of migrants are being given shelter and food after landing on the island.

Instead of showing any gratitude some have created disturbances and burnt their tents, hardly the behaviour of people genuinely fleeing persecution. “We want to go to England,” said one, displaying a spirit of petulant entitlement.

It is clear that Europe is now unable to cope. The Greek island of Lesbos has run out of burial space, while tiny Slovenia has 13,000 migrants passing through its borders every day, also setting fire to tents.

Even Germany is struggling. There have been mass brawls at several migrant reception centres and in a chilling echo of the country’s totalitarian past the German authorities are seizing property to provide accommodation for the arrivals.

In one startling symbol of how European society is being overwhelmed the village of Sumte in the north-east is about to see its population increase by 700 per cent through the import of 750 asylum seekers.

As winter approaches and the weather worsens the migrant crisis is set to escalate. A new wave of sentimentality will be unleashed by much of the media, peddling manipulative images of the suffering of the refugees.

Eager to parade their humanitarian credentials politicians will open the doors even further and impose even greater burdens on European taxpayers. So the cycle of decline will gather momentum.

None of us ever voted for our demise.

But without any democratic mandate that is what the politicians have inflicted. One nurse in Germany, who is being evicted from her Nieheim flat so it can be used for migrants, told a reporter last month: “I find it impossible to understand how the city can treat me like this.”

Her experience could be a metaphor for the peoples of Europe.

The scale of this political treachery is almost incomprehensible.

Almost? How can it be understood at all? Why have recent generations of European leaders invited hostile barbarians into their countries to replace their own populations?

Do they reflect and respond to a suicidal mood among most Europeans? A geno-suicidal mood it could be called.

The reluctance of Europeans to have children suggests that geno-suicide is – at least half consciously – intended.

But why, having attained through time and struggle such an unprecedented height of prosperous civilization, do the European peoples want to give up their happy way of life, see all they have built destroyed, and let their tribes die out?

… its declarations of war.

The West does not want to listen.

This must-be-watched video was published in June, 2014, by MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute).

After the jihad attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, will the West start listening? (We doubt it.)

Mumin Salih, an apostate from Islam who lives in Britain, comments accurately, at Islam Watch, on the jihad and Europe’s capitulation:

The West has committed suicide; the lethal pill was swallowed by the post war generation of Europeans. The so called “baby boomers” inherited treasures of wealth, culture, freedom and unsurpassed civilization, earned by their fathers and grandfathers. The rich inheritance didn’t come cheaply but at the cost of millions of lives that were sacrificed by the previous generations. All the baby boomers needed to do was to enjoy those treasures and pass them on to the next generations; a task they could have done effortlessly, but they didn’t. The result is what we see today, a Europe [of] nations ashamed of their culture, identity and history.

And Obama would have America follow Europe’s lead into self-destruction.

At the time of this writing, 129 people are known to have been killed today, Friday November 13, 2015, in co-ordinated terrorist attacks in France. [Update Sunday 11/15/2015: 132 killed.]

The attacks by IS/ISIS/ISIL on six crowded public places in Paris must have taken a lot of organizing. There must have been a few hundred operatives involved in the plot and an immense amount of “chatter” about it on cell phones and the social media for weeks and probably months beforehand. And yet the French police caught not a whiff of it? Not a whisper on the wind?

The attacks are an intelligence failure of monstrous proportions. Or was there monstrous corruption? Always a possibility.

ISIS  – the Islamic State – is of course primarily responsible for the deaths, injuries, and terror. But the French government – which like the German government, the Swedish government and all the other European governments have let in and are letting in millions of Muslims – must be held responsible for preparing the conditions that ISIS takes advantage of to spread its savage war.

There will certainly be more such attacks in Europe.

And in America?

Shortly before the hour when the attacks in Paris began, President Obama ridiculously declared that ISIS was “contained”.

He also continues to maintain that the Islamic State “has nothing to do with Islam”. So clearly, in the blind and stupid stakes, Obama keeps up with the front runners.

However, according to Judicial Watch, “the FBI has nearly 1000 active ISIS probes inside the US”. If that is so, they are doing a lot better than the French police.

ISIS will act in America. It is just possible that they will find it more difficult than in Europe. But not very difficult. Not when Obama is importing tens of thousands of Muslim “refugees” from the Middle East, unvetted and unvettable. And not when any terrorist can cross the southern border illegally, be met by a bus, and be driven to a welcome center where he can start collecting cash and goods.

And getting busy on his cellphone to organize the murder of Americans.

Let’s start with a quotation from the New York Times – not an organ we often go to for support of our arguments:

SUMTE, Germany — This bucolic, one-street settlement of handsome redbrick farmhouses may for the moment have many more cows than people, but next week it will become one of the fastest growing places in Europe. Not that anyone in Sumte is very excited about it. In early October, the district government informed Sumte’s mayor, Christian Fabel, by email that his village of 102 people just over the border in what was once Communist East Germany would take in 1,000 asylum seekers.

His wife, the mayor said, assured him it must be a hoax. “It certainly can’t be true” that such a small, isolated place would be asked to accommodate nearly 10 times as many migrants as it had residents, she told him. “She thought it was a joke,” he said.

But it was not. Sumte has become a showcase of the extreme pressures bearing down on Germany …

What is happening in Sumte is just one small instance of what is happening all over Germany.

Muslim immigration into the European states had been going on for decades, sending crime rates up, and draining national treasuries as welfare support was lavishly granted to the newcomers. The Muslims were not expected to become Europeans. They were not required to learn the language of the people they settled among. They could have their own law courts and enforce their own laws, which were not only different from those of the host countries, but entirely incompatible with them. They formed states within the states. And it was the native populations who were expected to adapt to the values and customs of the foreigners.

This strange development in European history was called “multiculturalism”.

At last, in October 2010,  one European leader – the one whose voice carried most weight in the European Union –  the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, dared to say that it was not good for her country. Addressing an audience of her own party, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she declared that the multiculturalist project had “utterly failed”.  “The concept,” she said, “that we are now living side by side and are happy about it does not work.” Immigrants should integrate and adopt Germany’s culture and values.

That statement should have resounded through the continent. It should have launched a change of policy throughout the EU. The mass immigration of Muslims should have stopped.

But none of those things happened.

And a few years later, in 2015, Angela Merkel changed her mind, reversed her judgment.

It is largely due to Chancellor Angela Merkel that a huge tidal wave of Muslims is now flooding over Europe.

The immigrants are now called “refugees”, and though they come from many miserable Islamic countries in Asia and Africa, the pretense is that they are victims of the warring factions in Syria.

Again just one leader of a European nation can clearly see the Muslim invasion for what it is, as he tries to keep it out of his country. This time it is the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, who dares to speak out in defense of European civilization.

We quote from Gatestone, where Soeren Kern writes:

Speaking at an October 22 [2015]  gathering of the European People’s Party in Madrid, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán warned of the consequences of Merkel’s immigration policies. He said:

We are in deep trouble. The migration crisis has the potential to destabilize governments, countries and the whole European continent. … What we have been facing is not a refugee crisis. This is a migratory movement composed of economic migrants, refugees and also foreign fighters. …

I also want to underline that there is an unlimited source of supply of people, after Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Africa is now also on the move. The dimension and the volume of the danger is well above our expectations. …

Neither the German, Austrian nor the Hungarian way of life is a basic right of all people on the Earth. It is only a right of those ones who have contributed to it. Europe is not able to accept everyone who wants a better life. ….

We cannot avoid speaking about the quality of our democracies.

Democracies, he reminds them, in which freedom of speech has long been an essential value; and a value the media have exploited and betrayed by trying to hide the truth about the invasion rather than revealing it to the public.

Is it freedom of information and speech when the media usually show women and children [as “refugees”], while 70% of the migrants are young men and they look like an army? How could it happen that our people feel that their opinion is not being taken into consideration? And we have to address the question of whether our people want what has been happening. Did we get authorization from them to allow millions of migrants to enter our continent? … No, distinguished delegates, we did not.

He puts the blame squarely on “the European left” – though Merkel’s government is a conservative coalition, and other conservative governments have acquiesced in the policy of admitting unlimited numbers of the “refugees”:

We cannot hide the fact that the European left has a clear agenda. They are supportive of migration. They actually import future leftist voters to Europe hiding behind [the excuse of] humanism. It is an old trick but I do not understand why we have to accept it. They consider registration and protection of borders as bureaucratic, nationalist and against human rights. They have a dream about the politically constructed world societywithout religious traditions, without borders, without nations. They attack core values of our European identity: family, nation, subsidiarity and responsibility.”

To all of which Chancellor Angela Merkel remains purposefully deaf.

Most of the invaders want to go to Germany. And Merkel wants them to be warmly welcomed there.

According to the president of the Bavarian Association of Municipalities, Uwe Brandl, Germany is now on track to have “20 million Muslims by 2020”. The surge in Germany’s Muslim population represents a demographic shift of epic proportions, one that will change the face of Germany forever, “but we are just standing by, watching it happen”. 

Addressing an expo in Nuremburg on October 14, Brandl warned that untrammeled migration will entail heavy costs for German taxpayers and may also lead to social unrest. He said:

A four-member refugee family receives up to 1,200 euros per month in transfer payments. Plus accommodation and meals. Now go to an unemployed German family man who has worked maybe 30 years, and now with his family receives only marginally more. These people are asking us whether we politicians really see this as fair and just.

Brandl said this also applies to the electronic health card, which provides asylum seekers with the same benefits as Germans who have paid into the health insurance system for many years. To criticize this as unfair has “nothing to do with racism or right-wing extremism”.

“Racism” and “right-wing extremism” are what any protestor against the invasion is accused of, as we’ll demonstrate below.

Brandl’s concerns are echoed in a leaked intelligence document, which warns that the influx of more than one million migrants from the Muslim world this year will lead to increasing political instability in Germany.

The document – portions of which were published by Die Welt on October 25 – reveals growing alarm within the highest echelons of Germany’s intelligence and security apparatus about the consequences of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door immigration policy.

The so-called non-paper (the author of the document remains anonymous) warns that the “integration of hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants will be impossible given the large numbers involved and the already-existing Muslim parallel societies in Germany”. The document adds:

We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law. German security agencies are unable to deal with these imported security problems, and the resulting reactions from the German population.

An unidentified high-ranking security official told Die Welt:

The high influx of people from other parts of the world will lead to the instability of our country. By allowing this mass migration, we are producing extremists. Mainstream society is radicalizing because the majority does not want migration, which is being forced by the political elites. In the future, many Germans will turn away from the constitutional state.

But to all this Merkel still remains deaf.

And most of the German media try to keep all such warnings from the public.

Why? Why is Merkel doing this? What changed her mind? Why is she – a conservative – being helped to destroy Germany by the left-leaning media?

It is from Spiegel Online that we get an answer, and a very telling answer it is.

The article begins:

Even as an image of a Germany taking great pains to welcome hundreds of thousands of refugees has bolstered the country’s image abroad … [Our emphasis]

So the important news magazine Spiegel (once the German eqivalent of Time magazine, deliberately designed to resemble it, and now still flourishing when its model has long since grown specter-thin and almost died), assumes, and delights in its assumption, that by letting in the Muslim hordes it is bolstering Germany’s image abroad.

The Spiegel article is chiefly concerned with accusing any individual or group  expressing opposition to Merkel’s policy, of being guilty of  “racism”, “xenophobia”,  and “right-wing extremism”, even finding shreds of evidence (for instance among comments on certain blogs) that such opposition is an incipient revival of Nazism.

As more and more Germans express their fear, disgust, anger, whether emotionally or rationally, the Spiegel can only see them as in the grip of pitiless, inhumane, even cruel impulses, which might negate the claim Germany now feels entitled to make on the world’s admiration of it as a compassionate nation.

This reaction to the Islamic invasion – not the invasion itself – is what the Spiegel sees as the problem:

… it has also been accompanied by a wave of hatred that cannot be played down.

At the center of this second, disturbing narrative is Patriots against the Islamization of the West, or Pegida, a xenophobic grassroots movement that has manifested itself with demonstrations each Monday mostly in Dresden in the east, but also in other parts of Germany. But Pegida is only one part of a much larger problem …

Germany these days, it seems, is a place where people feel entirely uninhibited about expressing their hatred and xenophobia. Images from around the country show a level of brutalization that hasn’t been witnessed for some time, and attest to primitive instincts long believed to have been relegated to the past in Germany. The examples are as myriad as they are shocking, and include … the mock gallows for Angela Merkel and her deputy Sigmar Gabriel carried by a demonstrator at a Pegida rally in Dresden on Oct. 12,  [and] the abuse shouted at the German chancellor when she visited a refugee hostel in Heidenau near Dresden in August, where she was called a “slut” and other insults, [and] the placards held aloft by demonstrators on the first anniversary of the Pegida rallies listing the supposed “enemies of the German state” – Merkel, Gabriel and their “accomplices”. …

So the Spiegel sees the “myriad” protests. But so what, it implies, if they are spontaneous expressions by ever-growing numbers of Germans against the invasion of their country by a very dark force? The popular will is evil, it echoes Germany’s evil past, it cannot be allowed.

As the authorities will not listen to popular protest, some Germans are resorting to violence against the invaders:

There have been more than twice as many attacks on refugee hostels during the first nine months of this year as in the whole of 2014.

So now the rising tide of protest – called by the Spiegel a “rising tide of hatred” – is at last getting the attention of the politicians:

The rising tide of hatred is now reaching the politicians many hold responsible for the perceived chaos besetting Germany.

Those evil protestors “perceive” chaos. The implication is that chaos is not really there – the Spiegel denying it even as it describes it.

The national headquarters of Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union party in Berlin fields thousands of hate mails every week. As the architect of the “we can do it” policy of allowing masses of refugees into the country, Chancellor Merkel is their primary target. …

The article includes many individual examples of expression of protest, or “hate”, aimed at the policy and those who are responsible for it. It all amounts to a a spreading, deepening resistance of very large number of Germans. But to the Spiegel it has no legitimacy. It is wrong.

The hatred comes in many forms. It’s expressed on the streets and on the Internet. Sometimes it’s loud. Other times it’s unspoken. It eminates from every class and every section of society. According to studies conducted by Andreas Zick, the respected head of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence at the University of Bielefeld, who has been researching German prejudices against different groups for many years, almost 50 percent of Germans harbor misanthropic views. Zick warns of a shift in norms that will be difficult to get back under control.

So it is prejudice. And there has been “a shift in norms”. No recognition that the normal has been changed radically.

How does the Spiegel think the politicians in this so-called democracy should respond? By changing the policy that “almost 50 per cent” of Germans don’t like? Absolutely not.

Politicians need to find a way of dealing with rampant hatred. Dialogue and compromise – the bedrock of Germany’s culture of debate – no longer appear to be working at the moment. It’s hard to get through to people who have been consumed with a hysterical degree of hatred.

Hatred for which the Spiegel, and Merkel, and the Left can see absolutely no good reason!

Rather than heed the voice of the people, get the security agencies on the job. Revive the Stasi. Or import the Saudi Arabian idea of a Moral Police Force.

The country’s security agencies also need to take a decisive stance. Are they once again being too slow in monitoring and clamping down on this new radical scene?

Because you see, it is just like the rise of Nazism all over again.

And so it is. But the Nazi-like thinking is not on the part of the protestors – it is on the part of Spiegel, Merkel, and the Left.

Happily, there is a sign of some moral health in the German states, in that not all the forces of law and order look at what’s happening in the same way:

In most states, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency is not keeping tabs on Pegida. Theoretically, however, police and public prosecutors do have the tools to take action to squash troublemakers. …

Even as the organized far-right is exploiting public unease about the refugee crisis and frustrated citizens are venting their anger in hate mails, the authorities’ response has been astonishingly weak. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière might describe Pegida’s leaders as “hard-core right-wing extremists” but the domestic intelligence service he oversees states that it isn’t even monitoring the movement — so far, it says, there has been insufficient reason to do so.

Gordian Meyer-Plath, president of the Saxony branch of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, also seems reluctant to take on the increasingly radical movement. “We’re not watching it,” he says, because the argument that it is harmless has so far prevailed. Its organizers distanced themselves from violence, for example. “People held up pictures of Merkel in an SA uniform at the demonstrations,” says Meyer-Plath. “Real neo-Nazis would never do that.” So far, he maintains, it’s a “populist far-right movement rooted in anger but not a threat to German’s freedom and democracy.”

“We cannot label every anti-asylum-seeker protest as being far-right,” he says.

So sense is prevailing in places where it counts.

But not everywhere. The Spiegel is happy to find that in some of the states the intelligence services share its view:

But intelligence services in other states beg to differ. Pegida movements in Duisburg, Düsseldorf and Thuringia are officially being watched, with authorities concluding that the majority of organizers and speakers belong to the far-right scene.

And now comes the most revealing paragraph in the whole article. Revealing of the mental acrobatics the Left has to put itself through in order to find some evidence in the real world for its preferred version of reality:

The authorities were even stymied by the blog Politically Incorrect, deciding that although it propagates anti-Islamic and often racist propaganda, “it does not use typical far-right argumentation” – as the authorities put it in response to an inquiry from the Left Party. The authors of the blog have so far managed to out-manoeuver the authorities by using two simple tricks. Firstly, its stance is overtly pro-American and pro-Israeli, which appears to confuse the German bureaucrats, who assume that to be a neo-Nazi is to be anti-Semitic. Secondly, the most egregious expressions of vitriol appear in the comments, for which the blog’s authors cannot be held responsible.

So there is a blog, encouragingly called Politically Incorrect (PI), which is anti-Islamic, and pro-Israeli, and pro-American – views that are “typically far-right” in the Spiegel’s view. And according to the Spiegel, it says it is pro-American and pro-Israel, not because it is, but only as a trick, to throw dust in the eyes of the Spiegel-Merkel School of Pro-Islam Thought. These bloggers are disguising their neo-Nazism by pretending not to be anti-Semitic so they will cunningly deceive the naive bureaucrats into believing they are not neo-Nazi!

For the Left, all opposition to the Muslim mass immigration must be neo-Nazi.

These wicked pro-America and pro-Israel bloggers have been under surveillance for a couple of years now:

In 2013, the Bavarian intelligence service became the first to start observing PI, a move prompted by the blog’s industrious Munich chapter, headed up by the rabidly anti-Islamic Michael Stürzenberger, a frequent speaker at Pegida rallies. …

To be anti-Islam is to be rabid. Mad like a rabid dog. What sane person can possibly find cause to take an unfavorable view of Islam?

To the Spiegel’s regret, even some politicians close to Merkel are beginning to sense that her policy of opening the door to unlimited numbers of Muslims might have its down side.

But now, as if a different writer were taking over at this point in the article, a new picture emerges:

After months of attacking critics of Merkel’s immigration policies as right-wing xenophobes, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier conceded that the migration crisis risks tearing German society apart. In a joint essay published by Der Spiegel, the two wrote: “We cannot indefinitely absorb and integrate more than one million refugees each year.”

One million! Each year! That’s a small number?

Bavarian Finance Minister Markus Söder said: “We need to be clear that there must be limits and quotas for immigration — we cannot save the whole world. The refugee influx will not be stopped unless we secure our borders and send a clear signal that not everyone can come to Germany.”

Former Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich described Merkel’s immigration policy as an “unprecedented political blunder” that will have “devastating long-term consequences”. He said the job of politics is to think beyond the present and make decisions for the future. In view of the massive flows of migrants into Germany without any police checks, Friedrich concluded: “We have lost control.” He added:

It is totally irresponsible that tens of thousands of people are flowing into the country uncontrolled and unregistered, and we can only unreliably estimate exactly how many of them are Islamic State fighters or Islamist sleepers. I am convinced that no other country in the world would be so naive and starry-eyed to expose itself to such a risk.

Except perhaps the US under Obama.

CDU lawmaker Michael Stübgen said: “The disagreement [with Merkel] is fundamental. Our capacities are exhausted and there is concern that the system will implode if we do not regain control of our borders. But the chancellor disagrees and so the conflict is unsolved.”

On October 21, more than 200 mayors in North-Rhine Westphalia signed an open letter to Merkel, in which they warned they were no longer capable of taking in any more migrants. The letter states:

We are seriously concerned for our country and the cities and towns we represent. The reason: the massive and mostly uncontrolled flow of migrants to Germany and our cities and towns. All available housing possibilities are exhausted, including tents and shipping containers. Managing the migrant shelters is so time intensive that our personnel can no longer attend to other municipal responsibilities.” …

So is Merkel defeated? Has she blown it? Is her time over?

In an October 26 column for the Financial Times, titled The End of the Merkel Era is Within Sight, Gideon Rachman wrote:

The refugee crisis that has broken over Germany is likely to spell the end of the Merkel era. With the country in line to receive more than a million asylum-seekers this year alone, public anxiety is mounting — and so is criticism of Ms. Merkel, from within her own party. Some of her close political allies acknowledge that it is now distinctly possible that the chancellor will have to leave office, before the next general election in 2017. Even if she sees out a full term, the notion of a fourth Merkel administration, widely discussed a few months ago, now seems improbable… The trouble is that Ms. Merkel’s government has clearly lost control of the situation. German officials publicly endorse the chancellor’s declaration that “We can do this'”. But there is panic just beneath the surface: costs are mounting, social services are creaking, Ms. Merkel’s poll ratings are falling and far-right violence is on the rise.

So, although this journalist records that the voters will probably reject Merkel’s re-election because she has done this catastrophic thing to Germany, the violent reaction is still to be called “far-right”.

As the placid surface of German society is disturbed, so arguments about the positive economic and demographic impact of immigration are losing their impact. Instead, fears about the long-term social and political effect of taking in so many newcomers — particularly from the imploding Middle East — are gaining ground. Meanwhile, refugees are still heading into Germany — at a rate of around 10,000 a day. (By contrast, Britain is volunteering to accept 20,000 Syrian refugees over four years.)…

Some voters seem to have concluded that Mutti [“Mummy” – Merkel’s affectionate nickname] has gone mad — flinging open Germany’s borders to the wretched of the earth...

The refugee crisis marks a turning point. The decade after Ms. Merkel first came to power in 2005 now looks like a blessed period for Germany, in which the country was able to enjoy peace, prosperity and international respect, while keeping the troubles of the world at a safe distance. That golden era is now over.

Merkel has made her case for opening the floodgates of Germany  – and of Europe – to a hostile and destructive force on the grounds of “humanitarian concern”. (The leftist British newspaper The Guardian sets out the case here.)

Let’s assume they really are refugees. And let’s accept that what European leaders like Merkel want to do is extend humanitarian assistance to them. Is there no other way of doing that than by letting them come and live in Europe?

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in his Madrid speech: ” Our moral responsibility is to give back these people their homes and their countries. It can’t be our objective to provide them with a new European life. Right to human dignity and security are basic rights [so] we have to help them to get back their own lives with dignity and we have to send them back to their own countries.”

But that idea made no impression on Angela Merkel. “Humanitarian concern” is plainly her motive. She has given no other reason. Her need to do this would not be satisfied by returning the “refugees” to their countries of origin. She needs to do far more than help them regain “dignity and security”. She needs to embrace them, take them into Germany, and lavish loving care on them.

The Spiegel (the “Mirror”) reflects this need when it claims that letting in the Muslim masses is good for “the country’s image abroad”.

Why should a need to show “humanitaran concern” with such hospitality override all other considerations?

Why should a German leader need to show, as a paramount cause, that her country is humane?

Do we need to ask? Germany was a prime mover in the wildly unrealistic scheme of creating a united Europe, and the reason why was its need to dissolve its guilt for the Holocaust by becoming part of a larger entity. And it seems that a fog of guilt or shame still hangs over the German psyche. Or over the psyches of many Germans.

Show the world how compassionate we really are. Wipe out the stain of the Holocaust. Import millions of “refugees” from the Third World, and maybe we will at last be forgiven – or forgive ourselves – for  having massacred our Jewish citizens and attempted genocide throughout Europe. Is that what is moving Angela Merkel?

But what Merkel and Spiegel and all the rest of the bien pensants who are putting on their haloes may not have intended, may not have let themselves foresee, is that their self-serving action must destroy Germany.

And Europe – its union of nations and the nations themselves.

But if national suicide is a just penance for Germany, is it just  – you might ask – that Germany should destroy the rest of Europe too?

And we might reply: Well, didn’t most of the rest of Europe collaborate with them in their genocide?

Now we do not think that Europe should destroy itself because it became too morally atrocious to deserve to survive.

But there are those who are murmuring that the great goddess Nemesis – in whom of course we do not believe – seems to be of a different opinion.

“It’s time for the people of Europe to claim asylum from the European Union,” Pat Condell says at the end of this video in which he talks about the Muslim invasion of Europe.

Islam is invading Europe and will conquer it without firing a shot.

European political leaders not only refuse to resist the Islamization of their countries, increasingly they positively encourage it. Add to this a high Muslim fertility rate and a very low rate among indigenous Europeans, and you may be certain Muslims will become a majority on the continent in this century unless something – civil war, perhaps – interrupts the processes already set in motion.

From Gatestone, by Guy Millière:

The flow of illegal migrants does not stop. They land on the Greek islands along the Turkish coast. They still try to get into Hungary, despite a razor wire fence and mobilized army. Their destination is Germany or Scandinavia, sometimes France or the UK. Some of them still arrive from Libya. Since the beginning of January, more than 620,000 have arrived by sea alone. There will undoubtedly be many more: a leaked secret document estimates that by the end of December, there might be 1.5 million.

Journalists in Western Europe continue to depict them as “refugees” fleeing war in Syria. The description is false. According to statistics released by the European Union, only twenty-five percent of them come from Syria; the true number is probably lower. The Syrian government sells passports and birth certificates at affordable prices. The vast majority of migrants come from other countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Nigeria.

Many do not seem to have left in a hurry. Many bring new high-end smartphones and large sums of cash, ten or twenty thousand euros, sometimes more. Many have no passports, no ID, and refuse to give fingerprints.

Whenever people flee to survive, the men come with whole families: women, children, elders. Here, instead, more than 75% of those who arrive are men under 50; few are women, children or elders.

As Christians are now the main targets of Islamists (the Jews fled or were forced out decades ago), the people escaping the war in Syria should be largely composed of Christians. But Christians are a small minority among those who arrive, and they often hide that they are Christians.

Those who enter Europe are almost all Muslims, and behave as some Muslims often do in the Muslim world: they harass Christians and attack women. In reception centers, harassing Christians and attacking women are workaday incidents. European women and girls who live near reception centers are advised to take care and cover up. Rapes, assaults, stabbings and other crimes are on the rise.

Western European political leaders could tell the truth and act accordingly. They do not. They talk of “solidarity”,  “humanitarian duty”, “compassion”. From the beginning, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said that illegal migrants were welcome: she seemed to change her mind for a moment, but quickly slid back. In France, President François Hollande says the same things as Angela Merkel.

After the heartbreaking image of a dead child being carried on a Turkish beach was published, thousands of Germans and French initially spoke the same way as their leaders. Their enthusiasm seems to have faded fast.

The people of Central Europe were not enthusiastic from the beginning. Their leaders seem to share the feelings of their populations. None spoke as explicitly as Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary. He said out loud what many of his countrymen seemed to think.

Orbán decribed the “massive and brutal” entry of the migrants into his country as an “invasion”, and  said that “a country has the right to decide who is allowed to enter its territory, and to guard its borders”. He also dared to point out that the invaders are from a “different culture”, and that Islamic values “might not be compatible” with European values.

To which Western European leaders reacted with predictable (and surely irrational or even insane) fury.

Western European political leaders harshly condemned his remarks and the attitude of Central Europe in general. They decided to take a hard line approach, including: forcing recalcitrant countries to welcome immigrants, setting up mandatory quotas that define how many immigrants each EU country must receive, and threatening those countries that declined to obey. Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament, said that Europe was built in a spirit of “burden sharing”, and that EU breakup was a risk that could not be excluded.

An acute division, in fact, is emerging between the leaders of Western Europe and the leaders of Central Europe. Another division is growing between the populations of Western Europe and their leaders. …

Any criticism of Islam in Europe is treated as a form of racism, and “Islamophobia” is considered a crime or a sign of mental illness.

Islam … is creating increasingly distressing problems that are almost never brought to light. Muslim criminality across Europe is high. Consequently, the percentage of Muslims in prisons in Europe is high. In France, which has the largest Muslim population in Europe, the prison population is 70% Muslim. Many European prisons have become recruitment centers for future jihadis.

Muslim riots may occur for any reason: police upholding the law, a Soccer League celebration, or in support of a cause.

Populations of Western Europe increasingly think that … their leaders speak and act as if they have no awareness of what is happening.

Central European leaders and their people, who have directly experienced authoritarian rule, seem to be thinking that entering the European Union was a huge mistake. When the Soviet Union collapsed, they became members of the EU to join what was called then the “free world”.  They do not seem willing to be subjected again to coercive decisions made by outsiders.

After living under the Soviet yoke, they preserved their desire for freedom and self-government, and evidently will not now agree to give them up. They know what submission to Islam could mean. Bulgaria and Romania were occupied by the Ottoman Empire until 1878. Hungary was under the boot of Ottoman rule for more than a hundred and fifty years (1541-1699).

Polls show that a majority of Muslims living in Europe want the application of sharia law and clearly reject any idea of assimilation.

Hundreds of thousands of Muslims living in Europe have joined fundamentalist Islamic organizations. Thousands have joined jihadist movements and are now fighting in Syria or Yemen. Many have returned and are ready to act against Europe.

Illegal Muslim migrants are likely to join the Muslims already living in Europe; and they will remain Muslim. They will live on social benefits until the bankruptcy of welfare states. They will reside in the “no-go zones,” and the “no-go zones” will continue to grow. Their occupants come from countries where Christians and women are mistreated; in Europe, they are already mistreating Christians and women.

They come from countries where Western civilization is despised and where hatred of Jews is inescapable — and this remains so among Muslims already living in Europe. For more than two decades, almost all assaults against Jews in Europe were committed by Muslims. …

A project to overwhelm Europe by a huge wave of migration was described by the Islamic State in documents discovered this February. It is hard to rule out that the Islamic State plays a role in what is happening. Turkish authorities are ignoring the massive departures taking place from their coast. If they really wanted the current process to stop, they could stop it. That is clearly not what they do. The Islamic State could not survive without Turkish help. Daily flights on Turkish Airlines bring illegal migrants to Istanbul; they continue unhindered to Europe. …

In all 28 countries of the European Union, birth rates are low and the population is aging. People under thirty account for only 16% of the population, or 80 million people. In the 22 Arab countries, plus Turkey and Iran, people under thirty account for 70% of the population, or 350 million people.

Jews are fleeing Europe in increasing numbers. “Native” Europeans are starting to flee as well.

In 1972, in his book The Camp of the Saints, French writer Jean Raspail described flooding Europe with Muslim migrants crossing the Mediterranean. At the time, the book was a work of fiction. Today, it is reality.

Obama is the man who shakes hands with himself.

Amir Taheri writes at Gatestone:

Sometime this week, President Obama is scheduled to sign an executive order to meet the Oct. 15 “adoption day” he has set for the nuclear deal he says he has made with Iran. According to the president’s timetable the next step would be “the start day of implementation”, fixed for Dec. 15.

But as things now stand, Obama may end up being the only person in the world to sign his much-wanted deal, in effect making a treaty with himself.

The Iranians have signed nothing and have no plans for doing so.

The so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has not even been discussed at the Islamic Republic’s Council of Ministers. Nor has the Tehran government bothered to even provide an official Persian translation of the 159-page text.

The Islamic Majlis, the ersatz parliament, is examining an unofficial text and is due to express its views at an unspecified date in a document “running into more than 1,000 pages”, according to Mohsen Zakani, who heads the “examining committee”.

“The changes we seek would require substantial rewriting of the text,” he adds enigmatically.

Nor have Britain, China, Germany, France and Russia, who were involved in the so-called P5+1 talks that produced the JCPOA, deemed it necessary to provide the Obama “deal” with any legal basis of their own. Obama’s partners have simply decided that the deal he is promoting is really about lifting sanctions against Iran and nothing else. So they have started doing just that without bothering about JCPOA’s other provisions.

Britain has lifted the ban on 22 Iranian banks and companies blacklisted because of alleged involvement in deals linked to the nuclear issue.

German trade with Iran has risen by 33 percent, making it the Islamic Republic’s third-largest partner after China.

China has signed preliminary accords to help Iran build five more nuclear reactors.

Russia has started delivering S300 anti-aircraft missile systems and is engaged in talks to sell Sukhoi planes to the Islamic Republic.

France has sent its foreign minister and a 100-man delegation to negotiate big business deals, including projects to double Iran’s crude oil exports.

Indian trade with Iran has risen by 17 percent, and New Delhi is negotiating massive investment in a rail-and-sea hub in the Iranian port of Chah-Bahar on the Gulf of Oman.

With help from Austrian, Turkish and United Arab Emirates banks, the many banking restrictions imposed on Iran because of its nuclear program have been pushed aside.

“The structures of sanctions built over decades is crumbling,” boasts Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

Meanwhile, the nuclear project is and shall remain “fully intact,” says the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Akbar Salehi. “We have started working on a process of nuclear fusion that will be cutting-edge technology for the next 50 years,” he adds.

Even before Obama’s “implementation day”, the mullahs are receiving an average of $400 million a month, no big sum, but enough to ease the regime’s cash-flow problems and increase pay for its repressive forces by around 21 percent. …

The mullahs see the “deal” as a means with which Obama would oppose any suggestion of trying to curb Iran.

“Obama won’t do anything that might jeopardize the deal,” says Ziba Kalam, a Rouhani adviser. “This is his biggest, if not only, foreign policy success.”

Let’s pause and contemplate that for a moment! This farce of a deal, this green light to one of the most  oppressive regimes on earth to go ahead and become a nuclear power, is  – Obama’s “biggest, if  not only, foreign policy SUCCESS”!  

More follows on this success:

If there have been changes in Tehran’s behavior they have been for the worse. Iran has teamed up with Russia to keep Bashar al-Assad in power in Syria, mocking Obama’s “Assad must go” rhetoric. More importantly, Iran has built its direct military presence in Syria to 7,000 men.

Tehran has also pressured Iraqi Premier Haidar al-Abadi’s weak government to distance itself from Washington and join a dubious coalition with Iran, Russia and Syria.

Certain that Obama is paralyzed by his fear of undermining the non-existent “deal” the mullahs have intensified their backing for Houthi rebels in Yemen. Last week a delegation was in Tehran with a long shopping list for arms.

In Lebanon, the mullahs have toughened their stance on choosing the country’s next president.

And in Bahrain, Tehran is working on a plan to “ensure an early victory” of the Shiite revolution in the archipelago.

Confident that Obama is determined to abandon traditional allies of the United States, Tehran has also heightened propaganda war against Saudi Arabia, now openly calling for the overthrow of the monarchy there.

The mullahs are also heightening contacts with Palestinian groups in the hope of unleashing a new “Intifada.”

They have done so. (See yesterday’s post, immediately below.)

“Palestine is thirsty for a third Intifada,” Supreme Guide Khamenei’s mouthpiece Kayhan said in an editorial last Thursday. “It is the duty of every Muslim to help start it as soon as possible.”

Obama’s hopes of engaging Iran on other issues were dashed last week when Khamenei declared “any dialogue with the American Great Satan” to be “forbidden”.

“We have no need of America” his adviser Ali-Akbar Velayati added later. “Iran is the region’s big power in its own right.”

Obama had hoped that by sucking up to the mullahs he would at least persuade them to moderate their “hate-America campaign”.

“Death to America” slogans, adorning official buildings in Tehran have been painted afresh along with US flags, painted at the entrance of offices so that they could be trampled underfoot.

None of the US citizens still held hostages in Iran has been released, and one, Washington Post stringer Jason Rezai, is branded as “head of a spy ring “in Tehran. Paralyzed by his fear of undermining the non-existent deal, Obama doesn’t even call for their release.

Government-sponsored anti-American nationwide events are announced for November, anniversary of the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran.

The annual “End of America” week-long conference is planned for February and is to focus on “African-American victims of US police” and the possibility of “self-determination for blacks.”

Iran is inciting rebellion and treason among Americans.

According to official sources “families of Black American victims” and a number of “black American revolutionaries” have been invited.

Inside Iran, Obama’s “moderate partners” have doubled the number of executions and political prisoners. Last week they crushed marches by teachers calling for release of their leaders. Hundreds of trade unionists have been arrested and a new “anti-insurrection” brigade paraded in Tehran to terrorize possible protestors.

The Obama deal may end up as the biggest diplomatic scam in recent history.

Today we have posted essay number 16, The Orgiasts (One), in the series by Jillian Becker titled The Darkness of This World (Part 3). (Find it under Pages in our margin.)

Here is part of it.

16

The Orgiasts (One)

Peter Weibel (1944- ): Riot as Art

Otto Mühl (1925-2013): Crime as Art

When the tumult and the shouting of the “sixty-eighters” died down in Western Europe, and the terrorists were dealt with by the law courts, and the shallow ideas of the New Left had crystallized into an orthodoxy as “political correctness”, the shocking of the bourgeois – the chief impetus of the movement – was carried on for years in “Action Art”.

In Austria, which claimed to be its home, the political dimension of Action Art (Aktionismus) was inspired by the satirical “happenings” which anarchist groups performed as part of the sixty-eight fun-revolutionary protests.

Though at first the movement was just as dedicated to the defiance and denigration of the civil authorities as the student protests, Austrian Aktionismus actually came to be sponsored for a time by the state. By the late 1970s, exhibitions of Action Art were funded by the government, and even opened ceremoniously by ministers of culture. The artists were celebrities: acclaimed by the media, honored in the universities, given awards and generous grants. Many Austrians were proud of them.

But at the start, when the artists first performed their obscene acts, and painfully assaulted their audiences, they were arrested. Even then they were not held for long. There was an outcry from the progressive intelligentsia: “This is ART. Couldn’t the official barbarians understand that?” The official barbarians hung their heads in shame. This was an age when almost anything was allowed to ART. Criminal violence it may be, but it may not count as crime when it was ART.

In the summer of 1968, a group of Austrian Actionists toured Germany – Munich, Essen, Cologne – with a repertoire of performances in support of the student rebellion. They appeared in sports-halls and amphitheaters “before audiences of 2,000 and more”. They built a water cannon “with extra strong pressure” to turn on to the audience. One of them, Peter Weibel, explained to me (some years later):”The idea of the gathering was rebelling for Vietnam, and the audience had come to demonstrate that they were in solidarity with the Vietnamese who were suffering from American aggression. We believed that solidarity only counts if you are suffering too. But there the audience was,  just sitting and not suffering at all. They were there to protest for Vietnam, but they were eating, drinking, doing nothing but waiting to be entertained, exhibiting the typical schizophrenic condition of this society. So we turned water on them.”

The audience did not accept the assault passively, not even for the sake of Art or Vietnam. They threw bottles back at the artists, and then the artists whipped them.

“But first I hurt myself. I worked with fire. Before turning the water on them or whipping them I burnt my own arm. I put chemicals on my skin and set fire to it. This was to show that I earned the right to make them suffer by suffering myself. It was saying to them, ‘Look, I’m in pain so I have the right to be taken seriously.’ In Cologne I had to go to hospital afterwards, and there they didn’t believe me that this was an art action. They called the police and the police thought I had been experimenting with explosives. But my intention was to make rituals. No masochism was intended. While I was burning I was smiling all the time, to say, ‘Look, you can trust me, I won’t lose my nerve.’ ”

He had to work hard on his whipping technique because, he said, “I used a very long whip and I couldn’t make it move fast enough at first, and people in the audience used to catch hold of it and pull me towards them, or jerk it out of my hands, until I learnt how to do it properly so that I cut their faces before they could do anything. The end was always a riot. The police came to stop it, we were arrested, and then we were fined. But that was part of the Action. ‘WAR, ART, RIOT’ the show was called. It was a campaign. Like a military campaign, only with Art.”

In that same momentous summer, one of the founders of the Action Art movement, Otto Mühl, along with other Actionists, put on a performance in the auditorium of the University of Vienna titled ART AND REVOLUTION. They announced that it was for the victims of the Vietnam war. Mühl described it to me as “pissing, shitting, beating, and masturbating while singing hymns”. He and the other artists were arrested and imprisoned.

By the later 1970s, Mühl had stopped giving public performances, preferring to concentrate on “self-expression psychoanalysis and therapy through sexual activity and all other natural functions”. His theories on psychotherapy, he said, were “derived from those of Wilhelm Reich – and also of course from Sigmund Freud, our Viennese Urvater of psychoanalysis.”

Otto Mühl had founded two communes: one in Vienna, and one on a farm, Friedrichshof, in the Burgenland near the border with Hungary (which was then, and for another two decades, under an oppressive Communist regime obedient to the Kremlin). He named the country commune “The European Center of the Action-Analysis (AA) Organization of Conscious Life-Praxis”. Followers of his movement formed “branches” in Berlin, Hamburg, Kiel, Bremen, Oslo, Geneva, and Paris. At the start of his campaign Mühl visualized a “world commune organization, a global society made up of communes”, all of them following the pattern set at Friedrichshof, for the better health and happiness of mankind. In 1976, membership of his organization peaked at a little over 500.

Central to Mühl’s “praxis” was Selbstdarstellung, or “SD”, meaning self-expression, carried out in groups under a Self-Expression Leader whose aim was “to exorcise the small-family person” – der Kleinfamilienmensch – from the communard-patient. The process, Mühl maintained, was “Action Analytical Art”. His Selbstdarsteller had to become a performance artist. Before an audience of fellow communard-patients, he/she “wanders through childhood and corrects the damage that was done” to him/her. “The audience will be deeply moved when the patient recreates the scenes of his childhood damage, lets himself fall into a birth-experience and demonstrates the meaning of health as a new-born baby. From the re-enacted birth-experience – often accompanied by an enactment of ‘the killing of Mummy and Daddy’ – the final self emerges in the Selbstdarstellung, which is also called ‘dissolving the genital armoring’.” Beyond that, he’d explain, “lies not only cure but true liberation”; that is to say, an ability to experience “psychophysical orgasm” by which the patient/artist is liberated to enjoy “full sexual and social freedom”. The person has “found his/her identity in orgasm”.

What actually happened in the performance ending with a rebirth? What was Otto Mühl’s work as an artist-therapist? Simply sexual activity in public. “Free sexuality is an integral part of commune-society. The exclusive two-person relationship is a sickness of the small-family person” Mühl told me. (He also, in an unguarded moment, confided to me that he was “surprised to find that many of the male patient-artists developed impotence in the course of the treatment”.)

Although the achievement of personal liberation from authority was one of the chief aims of the therapy, the commune had strict rules. Both men and women, for instance, had to have their heads shorn of all hair and to dress in uniform trousers with a flap in front “to facilitate work” – namely, copulation-masturbation-therapy. The enterprise was dedicated to the defiance and destruction of “authoritarianism”, and the method was regulated in a sternly authoritarian manner.

It was a life-style of enforced asceticism, combined with extreme libertinism. All bodily functions were on display; the bathrooms and toilets had no doors. No member was allowed privacy, or money, or any personal property. “The commune rejects commercial and profit thinking.” On joining, a member made over all his property and wealth to the organization, including real estate and income from any source, even student grants. Members were discouraged from making contact with their “small family” (more commonly called, in English, the “nuclear family”) or anyone in the outside world, because “society predetermines their emotional misery, as if the world were ruled by an evil spirit”.

The communal life itself, according to Mühl, was “an art form”. So was every performance of “direct art actions”, which consisted of persons – often, if not always, drugged – performing sexual activities before the rest of the assembled group, “with objects, animals, excreta” and fellow communards of either sex and every imaginable erotic desire. Photographs of the actions were taken, collected, edited, and published in professionally printed and bound volumes.

Children were admitted to the Mühl communes with their mothers. Some were born in them. “Children”, Mühl said, “grow up in the commune without sexual repression, so they will be healthy and socially well adjusted. The sexual activity of the parent is not concealed because nobody is made to feel that it’s forbidden.”

But adjusted to what society? …

The practice of any conventional form of art was discouraged (though Mühl himself painted in a private studio standing apart from the main buildings of the commune). “It is enough that the commune life is itself an art-form,” he said.

And so, in his theory, was death: “killing people is an element of art to come.”

“to make art – you do not need a piano – detergent and jam and urine will do – art may slip into every material and out of every hole – everybody can do art if he can find the pepper – boycott the pigs controlling the mass media – do not buy newspapers or tv-sets or cinema tickets – blast the opera houses – from now on all there is will be presented directly, coitus, torture, medical operations, destruction of people and animals and other objects is the only theater worth seeing – the rest is nonsense! – the inner life will be reduced to bodily acts – religious and political pigs can only be stopped by brutal use of all means – pornography [contrary to other statements] is a suitable means for curing society of genital-panic – the elements of art to me are eating, drinking, shitting and pissing, fucking and killing people. – these are the hot irons of our times – murder as art.” …

Obama’s “war on coal” is actually, of course, his “war on capitalism”.

Stephen Moore writes at Investor’s Business Daily:

At the very moment President Obama has decided to shutter America’s coal industry in favor of much more expensive and less efficient “renewable energy”, coal use is surging across the globe.

A new study by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences detects an unmistakable “coal renaissance” under way that shows this mineral of fossilized carbon has again become “the most important source of energy-related emissions on the global scale“. 

Coal is expanding rapidly “not only in China and India but also across a broad range of developing countries — especially poor, fast-growing countries mainly in Asia”, the study finds.

Why is coal such a popular energy source now? The NAS study explains that many nations are attracted to “(relatively) low coal prices … to satisfy their energy needs”. It also finds “the share of coal in the energy mix indeed has grown faster for countries with higher economic growth”.

In sum, using coal is a stepping stone to prosperity. So much for it being a satanic energy source.

Hardly a day passes without evidence that coal is making a major comeback:

• Some 1,200 coal plants are planned across 59 countries, with about three-quarters in China and India, according to the World Resources Institute.
• Coal use around the world has grown about four times faster than renewables, according to the global energy monitoring publication BP Review of World Energy 2015.
• German coal “will remain a major, and probably the largest, fuel source for power generation for another decade and perhaps longer”, the Financial Times concludes.
• “The U.S. is dropping coal plants at an unprecedented rate, but still nowhere near as quickly as India is adding them,” Bloomberg Business reckons.

“By the end of this year, some 7.5% of the U.S. coal fleet will have disappeared … . But by 2020 India may have built about 2.5 times as much capacity as the U.S. is about to lose.”

Then, of course, there’s the world’s biggest coal addict by far — the People’s Republic of China. According to a 2014 report from Eric Lawson of Princeton University, a leading climate change apocalyptic on the left:

“The reality is that fossil fuels dominate China’s energy landscape, as they do in virtually every other country. And the focus on renewables also hides the fact that China’s reliance upon coal is predicted to keep growing.”

Lawson’s calculations of how coal use is growing in China are jaw-dropping. “From 2010 through 2013, (China) added half the coal generation of the entire U.S. At the peak, from 2005 through 2011, China added roughly two 600-megawatt coal plants a week for seven straight years. And according to U.S. government projections, China will add yet another U.S. worth of coal plants over the next 10 years, or the equivalent of a new 600-megawatt plant every 10 days for 10 years.”

All this underscores the foolishness and futility of the Obama climate-change regulations designed to drastically reduce coal production in the U.S.

The great excuse for the Left’s “war on coal” is that it’s burning adds CO2 to the atmosphere. And the Left has spread the dogma that CO2, the food of all green plants, is a pollutant, a “green house gas” which “causes global warming”.

But even assuming that to be true, as Stephen Moore apparently does …

As we use less [coal] and the rest of the world uses more, the impact on global temperatures will be very close to zero.

Coal production in the U.S. is much safer and less carbon-intensive (clean coal technologies have reduced pollutants by 30%) than coal from other nations. So Obama’s war on coal may make global warming worse.

Some might say this gesture by the Obama administration to cut off coal production in the U.S. is a useful first step to save the planet. Except this isn’t just a cheap sign of goodwill.

It’s a tremendously expensive gesture that will cost America hundreds of thousands of jobs, raise utility prices by as much as $1,000 per family and reduce GDP by as much half a percentage point a year when we are already barely growing. The poor will be hurt most.

What makes the Obama administration regulations doubly destructive is that the U.S. has more coal than any other nation.

With at least 300 years of supply at a value of trillions of dollars, we are truly the Saudi Arabia of coal.

To leave it in the ground would be like Obama telling Nebraska to stop growing corn, Idaho to stop growing potatoes and Silicon Valley to give up on the digital age.

Ironically, the president justifies his war on coal by arguing, “We must lead so that others will follow.” But outside of dreamland, the rest of the world has no intention of following Mr. Obama’s act of economic masochism.

Most nations value getting richer over getting greener — as well they should.

Given the sad state of our economy today, so should we.