The management of savagery 574
Islam’s renewed campaign against our civilization is inspired, directed, and carried out by the Muslim Brotherhood and the groups it has spawned.
Barack Hussein Obama, astoundingly elected President of the United States in 2008, did what he could to empower the Brotherhood, insisting that the organization, banned in Egypt, have pride of place in the audience of his first address abroad as president, in Cairo. He did his utmost to support the Brotherhood when revolution brought it to power in Egypt, and objected furiously when it was overthrown. He went so far as to appoint Muslim Brotherhood personnel as his advisers. The disastrous US policy towards the Middle East, causing war, civil war, displacements of millions, the catastrophic flooding of Europe by Muslim migrants, the death by drowning of thousands in the Mediterranean, the enslavement and mass murder of Christians and Yazidis, is the manifest result of their advice.
What a conjuring act it has been for Obama – to use his power to help the Muslim Brotherhood attain its ends at the same time as having to seem to be the chief guardian of Western civilization and liberty!
The two theorists on whose writings the Muslim Brotherhood was founded were Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb. ISIS, al-Qaeda, their terrorist activities in Europe and America, all spring from the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that Obama protected, promoted, indulged, and abetted.
Writing in the Guardian, Robert Manne – emeritus professor of politics and vice-chancellor’s fellow at La Trobe University in Melbourne – explains how the Muslim Brotherhood and its “Qutbism” launched the jihad that is being waged against us. We quote his article in part:
During the period of my research, the Islamic State published in several languages, including English, a quarterly online magazine called Dabiq. …
In Dabiq, no theme was more important than the Islamic State’s desire to destroy those it regarded as its historical and current enemies – especially the Shia Muslims, the Rafida; their Syrian cousins, the Alawites or Nusayris; the fallen apostate peoples, the Yazidis and the Druze; the Christian west, the “Crusaders”; and the eternal enemy of the Muslims, the Jews. Despite its intellectual sophistication, each issue of Dabiq contained eschatological articles, concerning, for example, the nature of the Dajjal (the Rafida equivalent of the Antichrist) or the coming battles at the End of Days, from whose prophesied battleground, the town of Dabiq, the magazine took its name.
The magazine had several regular features. Each issue provided details of the military triumphs of the Islamic State and its affiliates, including both the planned operations and the lone-wolf attacks on its Crusader enemies in the west. (It was, however, conspicuously silent about the setbacks.) Each issue contained gruesome photos of the enemies it had dispatched – the beheaded western or Japanese hostages, the immolated Jordanian pilot, and dozens showing the corpses of the captured enemy troops and of the Shias, Alawites or Yazidis it had slaughtered.
Each issue told the story of the noble mujahideen “martyrs”, under the rubric Among the Believers Are Men. In a regular column called From Our Sisters, questions concerning women were discussed – the benefits of polygyny; the merits of sexual slavery; and the mothers’ indispensable role in providing a suitable education for the “lion cubs” – the next generation of soldiers. One of Dabiq’s preoccupations was the horror of life in the infidel (kuffar) societies of the west and the religious obligation of Muslims around the world to undertake migration to the Islamic State (hijrah) now that the caliphate had been established. …
Dabiq contained a regular feature it called In the Words of the Enemy. Here, special pleasure was taken in the comments of leading US generals, politicians or journalists expressing anxiety about the growing strength of the Islamic State and the danger it posed.
The pages of Dabiq express a remarkably consistent and internally coherent ideology, no less consistent and coherent than the Marxism–Leninism of the Soviet Union during the era of Stalin; more consistent and coherent, in my view, than the ideology of Nazism. As one can assume that Dabiq represents the official world-view of the Islamic State, it is surprising how little it has been analyzed by specialist scholars. It has been my primary source for an understanding of the mind of the current leadership of the Islamic State. …
The ideology of the Islamic State is founded upon the prison writings of the revolutionary Egyptian Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb, in particular some sections of his commentary In the Shade of the Qur’an, but most importantly his late visionary work Milestones, published in 1964.
Qutb argued that the entire world, including the supposedly Muslim states, had fallen into a time of pre-Islamic ignorance, jahiliyya, or pagan darkness. He called upon the small number of true Muslims to form a revolutionary vanguard to restore the light of Islam to the world. …
So powerful was Qutb’s vision that several scholars have termed the ideology that provided the foundation of the Islamic State “Qutbism”. …
The first answer to the question about what was to be done by those who hoped to implement Qutb’s vision came a decade and a half after the master’s death, with The Neglected Duty, the underground revolutionary working paper of an Egyptian electrical engineer, Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj. Faraj called upon Muslims to fulfil their religious obligation of jihad – which he, like Qutb, interpreted as violent struggle in the service of God – and to lay the foundation of a truly Islamic state. His favoured method was assassination of the most important contemporary enemy of the Muslims, the apostate “Pharaoh”, a clear reference to the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat.
Faraj regarded the “near enemy”, the Egyptian state, as a more strategically significant target than the “far enemy”, the Crusader Americans and the Zionist Jews. In 1981 Faraj’s group succeeded in their plot to kill Sadat. As a consequence, Faraj’s life, like Qutb’s, ended on the gallows. His pamphlet nonetheless represented the beginning of a 20-year era during which Egyptian jihadi revolutionaries, under the spell of Qutb’s prison writings, conducted a prolonged, bloody and ultimately unsuccessful revolutionary struggle against the “near enemy” – with plots to assassinate the apostate leaders, the taghut; to stage military coups; to incite popular uprisings.
A more influential answer to the question of what was to be done to implement the Qutbist vision was provided shortly after Faraj’s death by the Palestinian Islamic scholar Abdullah Azzam. After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Azzam moved to Peshawar and established an office for the organisation of Arabs who had journeyed to Afghanistan to support the local jihadi fighters, the mujahideen.
In remarkably eloquent speeches, in the articles of his magazine, al-Jihad, and especially in two of his short books, Defence of the Muslim Lands and Join the Caravan, Azzam called upon Muslims across the globe to defend their nation, the umma, which was now under direct threat. Azzam insisted that defence of the umma through jihad, in the face of the infidel invader, was not a collective but an individual duty for each Muslim, as obligatory as one of the five pillars of the faith, such as praying and fasting. Azzam was assassinated in 1989, nobody knows for certain by whom. But by the time of his death, he had convinced a generation of revolutionary Muslims that the Afghan and Arab mujahideen had been responsible, through God’s grace and through their glorious martyrs’ deaths, for crippling the military might of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Moreover, he saw in the triumphant struggles of the mujahideen in Afghanistan a portent of a worldwide Islamic revival – in the jahili Muslim lands of the present; in his homeland, Palestine, and all other Muslim lands that had been conquered by the Crusaders; eventually across the entire globe.
In Afghanistan, Azzam had worked for a time with a wealthy Saudi of Yemeni background, Osama bin Laden. …
Having absorbed both Qutb’s vision and Azzam’s triumphalism and ambition … in 1988 Bin Laden created in Afghanistan an organisation he called al-Qaeda, which was eventually to become the first global army of jihadis.
In 1996, upon his return to Afghanistan, Bin Laden set his sights on the destruction of the only remaining superpower, the United States. In his view, the US was under the control of the Jews. It had been responsible for inflicting upon the Muslims the cruellest wound, the creation of a Jewish state at the very heart of the umma. It was also the indispensable patron and protector of the taghut regimes throughout the supposedly Muslim world. Perhaps worst of all, since 1990, by invitation from the Saudi royal family after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the US had occupied the land of the two holiest cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina. In 1998 al-Qaeda called upon the mujahideen to kill Americans and Jews.
One of the signatories of Bin Laden’s fatwa was the most influential Egyptian Qutbist revolutionary of the past 20 years, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In mid-2001 Zawahiri led a part of his group, al-Jihad, into al-Qaeda. Their union was consummated with a double conversion. Zawahiri adopted Bin Laden’s concentration on the far enemy. For his part, Bin Laden adopted the tactic that Zawahiri and other Egyptian Islamist revolutionaries had long embraced: suicide bombings, or what the Qutbists now called “martyrdom operations” – a vital tactic in technologically unequal, asymmetrical warfare. The first fruit of their union was 9/11, the attack on the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon.
By this time, Zawahiri was responsible, most comprehensively in his 2001 memoir, Knights under the Prophet’s Banner, for systematising the political ideology founded on the vision of Sayyid Qutb.
The ideology had not yet reached its latest and perhaps final destination. One consequence of 9/11 was the March 2003 US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. As it happened, one leader of the Sunni resistance was a Jordanian revolutionary jihadi, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had established his own training camp in Afghanistan in 1999 at Herat and then, after the US invasion of Afghanistan and attack on the Taliban, had moved to Iraq via Iran in preparation for the generally anticipated US invasion.
Zarqawi was responsible for adding several new elements to the political ideology inspired by Qutb and systematised by Zawahiri. Zarqawi injected into its heart a sectarian and exterminatory hatred of the Shia.
Drawing upon the strategic theory of Abu Bakr Naji, the author of The Management of Savagery, and the theology of a jihadi scholar, Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir, the author of a work most commonly known as The Jurisprudence of Blood, Zarqawi extended vastly the purpose, the method and the permissible scope of killing. He conducted public beheadings of hostages. He greatly expanded the role of suicide bombings, with increasingly callous theological justifications, targeting not only the occupation forces and their Iraqi allies but also innocent Shia civilians and politically unfriendly Sunnis, earning for himself the well-deserved title of “the sheikh of the slaughterers”.
Before Zarqawi, the creation of an Islamic State, and even more the re-establishment of the caliphate, had been distant dreams of the Qutbists. With Zarqawi they became pressing items of a current political agenda. Before Zarqawi, too, the thought of the Qutbists had been largely unaffected by the eschatological or apocalyptic undercurrents of Sunni Islam. Under Zarqawi these began to rise to the surface. Zarqawi was killed in 2006. Nonetheless, his two successors, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who was killed in 2010, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the first caliph of the Islamic State, embraced fully and even extended the anti-Shia sectarianism, the strategic and jurisprudential savagery, the immediate Islamic state-building ambition, and the apocalyptic dimension that Zarqawi had injected into the political ideology that had grown from the vision of Qutb.
A supporter of the Islamic State, thought to be the Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye, captured with admirable precision in a single sentence its ideological genealogy: “The Islamic State was drafted by Sayyid Qutb, taught by Abdullah Azzam, globalised by Osama bin Laden, transferred to reality by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and implemented by al-Baghdadis: Abu Omar and Abu Bakr.”
The good news is that the days when the Muslim Brotherhood could bask in the patronage of an American government are coming to an end. President-elect Trump has said that he will ban it.
The revolution has begun 261
… and the rulers quake in their palaces.
The great economist and political philosopher Thomas Sowell was not an admirer of Donald Trump, but is obviously hugely relieved that he has beaten Hillary Clinton in the presidential election.
He it was who described the ruling class everywhere in the Western world – the men and women who believe themselves entitled to govern, to impose their will on the people, because they know what’s best for them – as “the anointed“.
They are generally alluded to as “the elites”. He accepts the term, and writes at Townhall:
A Hillary Clinton victory would have meant a third consecutive administration dedicated to dismantling the institutions that have kept America free, and imposing instead the social vision of the smug elites.
That could have been the ultimate catastrophe – not just for our time, but for generations yet unborn.
In one sense, Donald Trump’s victory was a unique American event. But, in a larger sense, it represents the biggest backlash among many elsewhere, against smug elites in Western nations, where increasing numbers of ordinary people are showing their anger at where those elites are leading their countries.
There, as here, mindlessly flinging the doors open to peoples from societies whose fundamental values clash with those of the countries they enter, has been a hallmark of arrogant blindness and disregard of negative consequences suffered by ordinary people – consequences from which the elites themselves are insulated.
Nor is this the only issue on which the blindness of elites has set the stage for a political backlash. The anti-law enforcement fetish among the insulated elites has even more tragically sacrificed the safety of the general public. This too has been common on both sides of the Atlantic.
Riots in London, Manchester and other cities in England in 2011 were incredibly similar to 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri, 2015 riots in Baltimore and other American cities.
The fact that the rioters in England were mostly white, while those in America were mostly black, gives the lie to the facile excuse that such riots are due to racial oppression, rather than being a result of appeasing mobs and restricting the police.
Nor is the election of Donald Trump likely to lead the elites to having second thoughts about the prevailing dogmas of their groupthink.
Right. As yet the elites have learnt nothing from the landslide electoral victory of a man who opposes their continuing rule.
They are not going down quietly. Protesting every inch of the way, down they go anyway.
Judith Bergman writes at Gatestone:
“A world is collapsing before our eyes,” tweeted the French ambassador to the United States, Gerard Araud, as it became clear that Donald Trump had won the US presidential election. Although he later apparently deleted the tweet, the sentiment expressed in his tweet encapsulates the attitude of the majority of the European political establishment.
Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international broadcaster, described the reaction to Trump’s victory across Germany’s political spectrum as “shock and uncertainty”. Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen described Trump’s win as a “heavy shock”. German Justice Minister Heiko Maas tweeted: “The world won’t end, but things will get more crazy.”
Green party leader Cem Özdemir called Trump’s election a “break with the tradition that the West stands for liberal values”.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s deputy chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, said:
“Trump is the trailblazer of a new authoritarian and chauvinist international movement. … They want a rollback to the bad old times in which women belonged by the stove or in bed, gays in jail and unions at best at the side table. And he who doesn’t keep his mouth shut gets publicly bashed.”
In a fine touch of irony, EU Commissioner Guenther Oettinger, who recently referred to the Chinese as “slanty eyed”, told Deutschlandfunk radio that the U.S. election was a “warning” for Germany: “Things are getting simplified, black or white, good or bad, right or wrong. You can ask simple questions, but one should not give simple answers.”
In France, the media reaction was summed up by the left-leaning newspaper, Libération:
“Trumpocalypse… Shock… The world’s leading power is from now on in the hands of the far-right. Fifty percent of Americans voted in all conscience for a racist, lying, sexist, vulgar, hateful candidate.”
Critics omitted, however, the runaway lawlessness, divisiveness and corruption that American voters declined to reinstate.
President François Hollande described Trump’s victory as marking the start of “a period of uncertainty”. Previously, Hollande had said that Trump made him “want to retch”.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, one of the most powerful men in Europe, told students at a conference in Luxembourg, “We will need to teach the president-elect what Europe is and how it works.” He also claimed that, “The election of Trump poses the risk of upsetting intercontinental relations in their foundation and in their structure.” …
Chancellor Angela Merkel herself offered to work closely with Trump only “on the basis that shared values, such as democracy, freedom, respect for the rule of law and people’s race, religion and gender are respected” – the overbearing implication being that Trump cannot be expected to respect these concepts.
Just how hysterical European political leaders’ reaction has been to Trump was manifested in the fact that they felt compelled to hold an informal “crisis meeting” – some diplomats called it a “panic dinner” – on Sunday evening, to deal with the “shock” of the presidential election. “We would never have had a similar dinner if Hillary Clinton had been elected. It shows just how much we’re panicking,” said a diplomat from one of the smaller EU states.
Not everyone is “panicking”. UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson rejected the invitation and told his colleagues to end their “collective whinge-o-rama” about the U.S. election result.
There is indeed an unmistakable infantility about the reactions of European political elites to the election of the new US president, which are reminiscent of a young child lashing out after being denied candy.
More significantly, the reactions reveal an overbearing disrespect for the American people’s free and democratic choice of a leader.
Most important, however, is that the arrogant claim to the moral high ground by European elites has no basis in reality. It simply is not true that, as Merkel claimed, freedom and democracy, rule of law and respect for people’s race, religion and gender are at the foreground of European policies.
In fact, there is something deeply ironic about Angela Merkel mentioning freedom, the rule of law and so on. In fact, freedom, respect for the rule of law, and people’s race, religion and gender have never been less respected and protected in Germany during the post-WWII era than under Merkel. German authorities have completely failed to protect women, Christians and others from the chaos unleashed by the mass, unvetted, immigration of mainly Muslim migrants from Africa and the Middle East. The rule of law is anything but “respected” in Germany, where large pockets of Muslims live in parallel societies, or no-go zones, where police are too afraid to enter, where the residents impose their own rules, such as polygamy, and where committing social benefits fraud is rampant while German authorities turn a knowing blind eye.
This pattern repeats itself endlessly in other European countries. In Britain, the police and social workers have turned a blind eye for years to Muslim gangs grooming, prostituting, and raping young white British teenagers in cities such as Oxford, Birmingham, Rochdale and Rotherham. How is that for “respect for the rule of law” and human rights?
There is no freedom, or respect for gender in Swedish women being told not to go out after dark, or German women being told to follow a “code of conduct” because local police authorities can no longer protect them from sexual assault.
There is no respect for [freedom of] religion on a continent where authorities have been unable to stem a tidal wave of anti-Semitism or to protect Christians who flee from the Middle East to Europe, only to experience similar persecution from local or migrant Muslims.
There is no respect for freedom and democracy on a continent where citizens, such as the politician Geert Wilders, are arrested and prosecuted by national authorities in a court of law for speaking their minds freely about topics that the authorities do not find it expedient to debate in public.
In fact, European leaders could learn from Donald Trump about democracy, freedom, respect for the rule of law and people’s race, religion and gender. But they won’t. They are too indoctrinated by their own propaganda about him, and refuse to find out what sort of a man he really is or what principles he really stands for.
What will teach them the salutary lessons they need to and don’t want to learn, is the rising anger among their own peoples.
It is probable, and certainly highly desirable, that the victory of Donald Trump and his voters will set an example, inspire emulation, throughout Europe and the whole of the Western world.
The revolution has begun.
Already the world begins to change 185
The corrective effects of Donald Trump’s victory on the wider world have started.
The first thing it is doing is striking fear into the hearts of those who need to be made to fear.
Who are they? They are the Powers that rule us.
They are Leftist intellectuals. They are commonly referred to as “the elites”. Thomas Sowell calls them “the Annointed”. Donald Trump calls them “the Establishment”.
They have silenced the voice of the people by creating the undemocratic European Union. They do their utmost to impose their orthodoxy by suppressing freedom of speech.
Most of the press and the mainstream media are their lackeys.
And now, inspired by the British exit from the EU by popular vote, and even more by the triumph of Donald Trump, the suppressed are emboldened to speak out, to protest, to challenge the power of Their power.
They know it, they fear it, and they admit that they fear it.
Reuters, one of the leading media lackeys, “reports” the parties and organizations that pose the threat – without recognizing that some of them are corrective movements. The word “populist“ is applied to all of them, and considered enough to condemn all of them. But in this article the groups cited make a very mixed bag. All they have in common is that they threaten the monopoly of power that the Establishment now holds.
Back in May, when Donald’s Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election seemed the remotest of possibilities, a senior European official took to Twitter before a G7 summit in Tokyo to warn of a “horror scenario“.
Imagine, mused the official, if instead of Barack Obama, Francois Hollande, David Cameron and Matteo Renzi, next year’s meeting of the club of rich nations included Trump, Marine Le Pen, Boris Johnson and Beppe Grillo.
A month after Martin Selmayr, the head of European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s cabinet made the comment, Britain shocked the world by voting to leave the European Union. Cameron stepped down as prime minister and Johnson – the former London mayor who helped swing Britons behind Brexit – became foreign minister.
Now, with Trump’s triumph over his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, the populist tsunami that seemed outlandish a few months ago is becoming reality, and the consequences for Europe’s own political landscape are potentially huge.
In 2017, voters in the Netherlands, France and Germany – and possibly in Italy and Britain too – will vote in elections that could be colored by the triumphs of Trump and Brexit, and the toxic politics that drove those campaigns.
The lessons will not be lost on continental Europe’s populist parties, who hailed Trump’s victory on Wednesday as a body blow for the political mainstream.
“Toxic politics”? “Toxic” because they are “populist”. “Populist” simply means “of the people”. But the Establishment and its media lackeys use it to imply the will of a rabble, a frenzied mob, driven by foaming irrational hate to do violence for no reason but a sheer lust for destruction – the very thing Leftist mobs do so often under the banners of, for instance, the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Politics will never be the same,” said Geert Wilders of the far-right Dutch Freedom Party. “What happened in America can happen in Europe and the Netherlands as well.”
Geert Wilders’s party “far right”? Read his latest speech here. He is proud of the Dutch tradition of freedom, tolerance, impartial justice. He is a patriot, a defender of the nation-state of Holland. That does not make him a Nazi, which is what Reuters, and all those for whom Reuters speaks, mean to imply by the label “far right”.
French National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen was similarly ebullient. “Today the United States, tomorrow France,” Le Pen, the father of the party’s leader Marine Le Pen, tweeted.
Aligning Marine Le Pen with her father Jean-Marie Le Pen is again an attempt to apply the “far right” or “Nazi” smear. She did take over the leadership of the originally neo-Nazi Front National from her father, but changed it into a tolerant conservative party, expelling members who held pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic views.
Daniela Schwarzer, director of research at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), said Trump’s bare-fisted tactics against his opponents and the media provided a model for populist European parties that have exercised comparative restraint on a continent that still remembers World War Two.
Again the implied smear: Trump “with his bare-fisted tactics” is corrupting the people of Europe hitherto restrained from active “populist” political action -“restrained” because they “remember World War Two” – ie. they have an impulse to be Nazis, and now are likely to break out in full Nazi form, inspired to it by Trump. Implication: Trump is a Nazi.
“The broken taboos, the extent of political conflict, the aggression that we’ve seen from Trump, this can widen the scope of what becomes thinkable in our own political culture,” Schwarzer said.
The “taboos” are those imposed by the Establishment. They are the locks on the lips of the people. That is the suppression of free speech.
Eyes on Austria next:
Early next month, Austrians will vote in a presidential election that could see Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party become the first far-right head of state to be freely elected in western Europe since 1945.
The Austrian Freedom Party was founded by a Nazi, an erstwhile SS officer, but moved away from its Nazi roots. It formed an alliance, temporarily , with the Social Democratic Party. What does it stand for? Pretty well everything. It is a “liberal” party, a “social welfare” party, but it favors “privatization” and low taxes. It has been described as “right-wing populist”, “national conservative”, and “national liberal”. It calls itself libertarian, and holds individual freedom as one of its highest principles. It is strongly anti-establishment and against Muslim immigration into Austria.
Now to Italy:
On the same day, a constitutional reform referendum on which Prime Minister Renzi has staked his future could upset the political order in Italy, pushing Grillo’s left-wing 5-Star movement closer to the reins of power.
So here’s a rebel movement against the Establishment that even Reuters cannot smear with the label “far right”. It calls itself a “left-wing” movement. But it also calls itself “populist”, “anti-establishment”, “anti-globalist”, and against the undemocratic European Union. One thing it also believes in that puts it decidedly on the left, is Environmentalism.
“An epoch has gone up in flames,” Grillo said. “The real demagogues are the press, intellectuals, who are anchored to a world that no longer exists.”
He dares to say it!
On to Poland and Hungary, where the Muslim invasion is not welcomed by their governments. That alone, of course, in the eyes of the Establishment makes them “right-wing”. Yes, they are nationalists, and nationalism now, in the age of the EU, of the Establishment’s preference for “open borders” and globalization, is the very essence of “Far Rightism”.
Right-wing nationalists are already running governments in Poland and Hungary.
But that’s Eastern Europe, where they are inclined to be more nationalist because of their years under the heel of International Communism, aka the Soviet Union.
In Western Europe, the likelihood of a Trump figure taking power seems remote for now.
Because –
In Europe’s parliamentary democracies, traditional parties from the right and left have set aside historical rivalries, banding together to keep out the populists.
Banding together, as in certain ways Republicans and Democrats have been doing for the last eight years in Washington, D.C., to safeguard their power. They are the Establishment in America against which Trump is leading a movement of the people.
But the lesson from the Brexit vote is that parties do not have to be in government to shape the political debate, said Tina Fordham, chief global political analyst at Citi. She cited the anti-EU UK Independence Party which has just one seat in the Westminster parliament.
“UKIP did poorly in the last election but had a huge amount influence over the political dynamic in Britain,” Fordham said. “The combination of the Brexit campaign and Trump have absolutely changed the way campaigns are run.”
UKIP leader Nigel Farage hailed Trump’s victory on Wednesday as a “supersized Brexit”.
As new political movements emerge, traditional parties will find it increasingly difficult to form coalitions and hold them together.
Now a look at Spain:
In Spain, incumbent Mariano Rajoy was returned to power last week but only after two inconclusive elections in which voters fled his conservatives and their traditional rival on the left, the Socialists, for two new parties, Podemos and Ciudadanos.
Podemos is a left-wing party, and Cuidadanos a “liberal-progressive, postnationalist” party – so also left-wing. Their inclusion in an article about the fear of the European Establishment is because they too are “populist”.
After 10 months of political limbo, Rajoy finds himself atop a minority government that is expected to struggle to pass laws, implement reforms and plug holes in Spain’s public finances.
The virus of political fragility could spread next year from Spain to the Netherlands, where Wilders’s Freedom Party is neck-and-neck in opinion polls with Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s liberals.
That was a bad segue. What is happening in the Netherlands is not, and will not be, a result of anything that is happening in Spain. But Reuters is now taking a wide view over Western Europe.
For Rutte to stay in power after the election in March, he may be forced to consider novel, less-stable coalition options with an array of smaller parties, including the Greens.
In Europe, the Greens are a mainstream movement, forming mainstream political parties.
In France, which has a presidential system, the chances of Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, emerging victorious are seen as slim.
The odds-on favorite to win the presidential election next spring is Alain Juppe, a 71-year-old centrist with extensive experience in government who has tapped into a yearning for responsible leadership after a decade of disappointment from Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy.
But in a sign of Le Pen’s strength, polls show she will win more support than any other politician in the first round of the election. Even if she loses the second round run-off, as polls suggest, her performance is likely to be seen as a watershed moment for continental Europe’s far-right.
It could give her a powerful platform from which to fight the reforms that Juppe and his conservative rivals for the presidency are promising.
In Germany, where voters go to the polls next autumn, far-right parties have struggled to gain a foothold in the post-war era because of the dark history of the Nazis, but that too is changing.
The trick of the Left to label Nazism a “right-wing” movement continues to stick. The Nazis were of course National Socialists. Their rivals for power were the International Socialists – the Communists. (Then Nazi Germany made a pact with Communist Russia. Both invaded Poland. Later the two totalitarian Socialist countries fought each other.)
Reuters does not mention PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West). It was started in Dresden in October 2014, and now is not only a significant force in Germany, but has branches in other European countries, including Britain. It is a nationalist movement, and it is, above all, against the Islamic invasion of Europe, so of course the press always labels it “far right”. The report deals with another movement, as strongly against Muslim immigration, which participates in elections as a political party:
Just three years old, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), has become a force at the national level, unsettling Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives, who have been punished in a series of regional votes because of her welcoming policy toward refugees.
The AfD is specifically against Muslim immigration. The Left does not like to mention the word “Muslim”.
Merkel could announce as early as next month that she plans to run for a fourth term, and if she does run, current polls suggest she would win.
But she would do so as a diminished figure in a country that is perhaps more divided than at any time in the post-war era. Even Merkel’s conservative sister party, the Bavarian Christian Social Union, has refused to endorse her.
So all over Europe there are populist movements rising against the undemocratic Leftist Islam-favoring Establishment. They dare to be opposed to big government, statism, collectivism, redistribution, open borders, world government, mass Muslim immigration, a globalized economy, and the elitist class that dictates the direction of the world towards those goals, and for which the retention and augmentation of their own power is the only thing that genuinely matters to them.
The populist movements have been timid or “restrained”. But now that America has voted for a populist leader, they will swell in number, become more demanding, perhaps appeal to a majority of voters, perhaps take power as ruling government parties. And they will defy the “taboos”. They will bare their knuckles. They will speak freely, even against Islam. They may go so far as to withdraw their countries from the EU; close borders; stop and even reverse the tide of Islamic immigration; resist globalization.
They may overthrow the Establishment, chuck the corrupt Clinton-type cabals out.
They really are much to be feared.
They are the hope of the West.
November 8: day of triumph or disaster for the Muslim Brotherhood 1
As far as Islam is concerned, Barack Obama is a Muslim because his father was a Muslim. We don’t think Obama is religious (though for many years he attended the church of Jeremiah Wright who called for the damnation of America), but we couldn’t help noticing that he is strongly sympathetic to Islam. In addition to helping Iran become a nuclear power, he has given significant help to the Muslim Brotherhood to advance its agenda of world conquest.
Nonie Darwish writes at Gatestone:
The goals of U.S. President Barack Obama in the Middle East ended the rule of most of the “secular” Arab leaders in the area. …
The goals of the Muslim Brotherhood happened to be in tune with Obama’s goals in the Middle East. Obama’s first major presidential speech took place in Cairo before a large number of Islamic sheikhs and members of the Muslim Brotherhood. They were empowered and given legitimacy by Obama. A scorned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak did not attend; thus, with the blessing of the United States, the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Egypt was begun. Today, ordinary Egyptians link the ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood directly to the Obama administration. Cairo was about to become the capital of the new Islamic Caliphate if Egyptians had not, after a year, come out in the millions to stop it. …
After Egypt took down the Muslim Brotherhood, the goal of establishing the Islamic Caliphate in Egypt simply moved to Syria, the only Arab nation where a secular Muslim leader had survived the Arab Spring.
Promoting Islam also seems to have been a major factor in Obama’s equation for America. Before Obama started to implement his promise to “change America as we know it”, he first had to change the Middle East as they knew it. Many of the changes over which he presided were in harmony with the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Its motto is:
Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.
But while the Muslim brotherhood has been made illegal in Egypt, the Obama administration still refuses to label the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.
Under Obama, Islam became untouchable, not open to any kind of criticism. He even claimed that “Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed suit, and hosted several closed-door conferences in Washington and London on “Defamation of Religion”, to suppress free speech and internationally criminalize any criticism of Islam with fines and prison.
Even in a recent debate, Clinton stated, “Islam was always part of American history — even since the Revolutionary War.”
She would rather blame terrorism on free speech than on the violent tenets of Islam.
Only a person from the Middle East could understand the immense value of such a gift to the goals of Islamic jihadists in America.
It is unfortunate that many Americans apparently still do not know that Islamists rewrite history in order to claim that any land they wish to conquer was originally Islamic or founded by Muslims – even though historically Islam did not exist until the seventh century, hundreds of years after Judaism and Christianity.
Today, Muslims have re-written their history books to claim that Muslims originally built the ancient Jewish Biblical sites, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has bowed to the wishes of Qatar and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – a bloc of 56 Islamic nations plus “Palestine” – to back up this fiction. UNESCO recently passed resolutions obscenely declaring ancient Jewish Biblical monuments – such as Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, home of the great ancient Jewish Temples – Islamic sites.
Which country will be next?
This escalating subversion should be reason enough for all Western democratic countries permanently to part company with the United Nations. Its history of corruption is neither new nor surprising, or that it is run anti-democratic “club of dictators” whose interests are opposite to ours.
Jihadists today are stating that they also have a claim over Italy, Greece, and Spain — and now America. Obama and Hillary Clinton actually just solidified such claims for future Muslim history books about who actually built America.
Americans have a choice: they can either keep on empowering Islam, and helping extremist Muslims infiltrate into the American system – even as there is a resolution in the House of Representatives to shut down all criticism of Islam – or they can end the gamble of the current administration, which seems bent on changing America forever by allowing the worldwide empowerment of Islam. They can continue the Islamist “Arab Spring” revolution to change “America as we know it” or preserve the freedoms of the American republic.
It has recently become clear through WikiLeaks that the American system is indeed rigged and that Washington DC has turned into a swamp; or more accurately an “Arab Spring” swamp.
Egypt, on a much smaller scale, had to face such a choice in 2012-13, between life under the values of the Muslim Brotherhood or a life under a sliver of hope for a democracy, which Islam, under its laws, can never allow.
Both Egyptians and the West sorely need to understand that Islamic law, sharia, does not permit anything other than an Islamic government under the rule of Islamic law. Consequently, only military force can stand against sharia tyranny. The Muslim Brotherhood had proven once again that the only way out of Islamic theocracies is through military dictatorships.
A head-on collision over the future of America is underway. Many Americans still do not understand the magnitude of what is at stake, but many Islamists do: they are lying in wait, hoping to return to their budding.
If Hillary Clinton were to become president of the US (unbearable thought!), the process of Islamizing the world – by all and any means including violence – would continue and intensify. Her election would be a triumph for jihadists everywhere, and in particular for the Muslim Brotherhood. Her Middle East policy as US Secretary of State was the Muslim Brotherhood’s policy. That would not change if her power became even greater.
If Donald Trump becomes president, there is a good chance that the process will be slowed, possibly halted. At least for a few years. The Muslim Brothers will be flushed out of the White House. Hillary’s close aide and adviser, Huma Abedin – whose family is a pillar of the Muslim Brotherhood – will exit the political stage with the Clintons. (And ideally go to prison with Hillary.) It is possible that the frightful wars in the Middle East will die down; that Iran will even at this late hour be prevented from making nukes; that ISIS and Boko Haram will be crushed; and Islam’s invasion of the West turned back.
“Shut-up!” the Democrats explain 136
This insightful essay by Malcolm MacKinnon, retired Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, was forwarded to us by our reader and commenter Cogito.
We quote it in full with permission of the author:
Unlike conservatives, progressives will stick with their side even when they profoundly disagree, or more likely appear to disagree with that side on core issues. Witness progressive Kirsten Powers who recently wrote a book (The Silencing) that was heavily critical of the progressive onslaught on speech freedom. Shortly after that book was published she left FNC and went to work for the Clinton News Network (world headquarters of Newspeak) [aka CNN] where she professes daily her undying loyalty to Hillary Clinton who, in turn, is a dedicated opponent of the First Amendment.
And if gentile progressives are tied at the hip to the Dem Party, just consider the case of Jewish progressives. They will support the Dems with big money and big votes even when the progressive party is anti Jew and anti Israel. Take the case of Bill Maher. A few months back Breitbart News could hardly hide its jubilation when Bill Maher sternly criticized “liberals” for their undying support of Islam, and that in so doing – in Maher’s words – they are in violation of their own most deeply held principles of equality.
Fast forward six months and we have two candidates running for the presidency: Progressive Hillary Clinton and conservative Donald Trump.
Hillary has has made no bones about it that she wants the First Amendment changed to reflect and protect progressive interests, and apparently this is just fine with Kirsten Powers. Progressives have gone to extraordinary lengths to paint Trump as an enemy of the First Amendment but this is the classic case of “the pot calling the kettle black”. The greatest threat to speech today comes from political correctness which is the attack arm of progressivism, used to silence critics of progressive policies. It’s worth recounting that political correctness is a term born under communist regimes where it was used by dissidents but also by party die hards and apparatchik to depict the absolute authority of the Party to dictate reality. Now, reality may profoundly disagreed with the party’s version but this disconnect can never be stated. Dissidents were of course appalled while apparatchiks by way of resignation had to deal with the bureaucratic problems created by the Orwellian lie. The point is that it’s progressives in today’s world who champion political correctness and it’s only natural that Hillary Clinton heads that charge. When Trump says that illegal immigration brings with it crime and drugs he’s told in no uncertain terms that he can’t say this. What Trump states may be true, says the progressive apparatchik when you’r not listening, but you can’t say it because when you start presenting reality as it exists, instead of the reality proposed by the Party, that’s a threat to our power and we won’t allow it!
As for Trump, he isn’t an apparatchik he’s a dissident. He will state reality as it exists despite the howls of protest those that promote party lines. And for stating reality as it exists Trump is called a “racist” much in the same way that communist dissidents were called “bourgeois reactionaries” or “enemies of the people.”
What’s a bourgeois reactionary?
“Someone who’s winning an argument with a communist.”
“What’s a racist?”
“Someone who’s winning an argument with a progressive.”
Like the dissident, Donald Trump presents reality as we apprehend it. He makes no bones about his distaste of political correctness and has attacked it at every turn which is why progressives evince such a visceral loathing towards him; for without the “battering ram” of political correctness (Lenin writes on using the proletariat as a battering ram), modern progressivism would be cut off at the knees. Thus it’s the Donald who’s the friend of open expression, of telling people what the world is really like, rather than hewing to the party line backed by progressives die hards and apparatchiks.
When progressives cast Trump as an enemy of the First Amendment they are doing exactly what Marx recommended:
“Slander your class enemy with your own worst sins.”
Like Kirsten Powers, Bill Maher is another example of the progressive apparatchik. Maher is Jewish and recently said that he doesn’t care if Hillary is corrupt, he doesn’t care if she’s a criminal, and he doesn’t care if she murdered Jonbenet Ramsey, he will still vote for her: “Anything but Trump!” Further, Maher will vote for Hillary despite the fact that Maher has serious misgivings about Islam while Hillary, in the starkest of all possible contrarieties, is a stout defender of Islam and all its works. Hillary tells us that she will import hundreds of thousands undocumented Muslim refugees from the war torn Middle East, events that Hillary as Secretary of State helped cause with that precipitous withdrawal of America forces from Iraq, an untimely withdrawal that created a power vacuum into which a marauding ISIS marched.
As a progressive die hard, Hillary naturally toes the party line when it comes to Islam. Indeed she wrote the book on it. As such, her politically correct line is completely divorced from reality. Over and over she states that “terrorism has nothing to do with Islam” and “that Islam is religion of peace.” What’s going on here is that the ultimate source of such gross misrepresentations is political power, that Islam is a big financial supporter of progressivism, wedded to the fact that Muslims represent a solid voting block for progressive parties. Progressives ape their communist exemplar when imposing a version of things at odds with reality which has become the stock in trade of today’s progressives. Make no bones about it, they will go to the wall to defend their unreality.
Meanwhile dissident Trump will have none of it. He has told Christians, gays and women that he will be their protector from the Muslim threat, inasmuch as that is what Islam is all about: It’s a threat to democracy and equality. How do we know this? Because Islam tells us so! And not only does Islam tell us so, it acts on its convictions, the results of which are repeatedly manifest in the grossest scenes imaginable. Dissident Trump further tells us that he will either halt, or place insuperable roadblocks in the way of Muslim immigration.
As for the equally tawdry case of Bill Maher, stooge, flunky, apparatchik of the progressive party line – whatever! Maher can’t vote for Trump yet Trump, unlike Hillary, isn’t corrupt, he isn’t a criminal, he doesn’t murder little girls and he tells us the truth on Islam. None of these matters to Maher, who is, in the last resort, not opposed to the game plan of Islam but is, in actuality, one of the sponsors of it.
What to make of progressives like Kirsten Powers and Bill Maher who for a brief and fleeting moment raise voices of protest against the sacred cows of progressives, but who, in the long run, come back to the bosom of the party based on speech restriction and the unreality of Islam narrative? both – I might add – profoundly at odds with their previously held positions? One is almost tempted to think that Powers and Maher are following party orders to make “us” seem less illiberal than we really are on free speech, and to be not so manifestly stupid as we appear to be with our other worldly – nay “phantasmagorical” – depictions of Islam.
Speculation is one thing and reality another. In the end, Powers is actually not a defender of free speech but its enemy. Maher isn’t a critic of Islam but an apostle of Islam. Ominous here is the larger undertow, that speech suppression is ineluctably linked to selling implausible versions of the world. You can’t have the second without the first which is precisely why progressives will go to the wall on speech suppression because you can’t make concocted versions of reality stick, when you have dissidents like Trump with speech protection walking around telling people the truth.
Thus a word to the wise for conservatives: Don’t start celebrating next time you hear a progressive criticizing fellow progressives. Hence closer to home, when the Toronto Star criticizes the UN for refusing to certify Rebel Media for an upcoming UN conference on the climate, don’t start clapping your hands with glee that the other side has miraculously come around to your way of thinking as defender of free speech. Progressives care most about the power that comes with winning elections and if supporting freedom of expression here and there obtains that end, then they will say and do what it takes. When was the last time you heard the Toronto Star criticizing the University of Toronto for restricting the speech rights of Professor Jordan Peterson?
This is the progressive mantra on free expression: “We believe in free speech, BUT ….
Warning: Hillary Clinton may damage your life 1
A vote for Hillary is a vote for:
Corruption – it’s the Clinton way: graft, dishonesty, bribery, venality.
The Muslim Brotherhood – Huma Abedin, whose family is a pillar of the MB, will hold a powerful position in a Hillary Clinton presidency.
Terrorism – the entrance of hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern Muslim “refugees” will include al-Qaeda and ISIS operatives.
Racism – the anti-White movement in the universities, the “Black Lives Matter” anti-police campaign, the New Black Panthers and other non-white racist organizations will be funded and protected.
Redistribution – wealth will be taken from those who have earned it and allotted to those who have not in accordance with government whim.
Poverty – will ultimately result from redistribution policies.
Socialism/statism/collectivism – the aim of redistribution and the fulfillment of Hillary Clinton’s life-long commitment to far Left ideology.
Globalization – her expressed wish for “open borders” means the passing of the nation-state and a step towards world government. “Climate change” policies – also designed to attain that end – will be enforced.
Uncontrolled Immigration – on the scale now destroying Europe will result from the ”open borders” policy; immigrants will have instant enfranchisement.
One-party rule – immigrant enfranchisement, votes granted to convicted felons, and the banning of opposition parties will keep the Democratic Party in power permanently.
Stasi-style policing – essential to the maintenance of one-party rule.
Intolerance – a climate of fear will prevail.
End of free speech – her Stasi and her appointed judges will enforce the criminalization of critical speech.
Gun control – civilians will be disarmed.
Industrial-scale abortion – the killing of babies in the womb right up to the hour of their birth and even live-birth killing will be government-funded and encouraged.
Nationalized health care – including death panels will give government the power of decision over your health and survival.
Iranian nuclear armament – will be expedited.
Civil War? – Will Americans submit to all this without resistance?
Readers are invited to add their own prognostications.
The Jungle is in Europe 75
See Europe now.
Please DO NOT consider donating …
(Hat-tip Chauncey Tinker)
Tell them 122
*
Why was Obama, the Islam-loving communist, twice voted into the presidency of the capitalist, Islam-attacked, United States?
Why do most Americans “think” that Obama is doing a good job – though they know the economy is bad, millions are unemployed, businesses are overburdened with regulations, travelers are manhandled and humiliated at airports, an American ambassador was killed abroad with impunity, the Taliban is back in business in Afghanistan, the Middle East is in flames since Obama assisted the displacement of allied rulers with Islamic fundamentalists … and so on and on?
Why do millions of Americans “think” that economic equality is morally desirable?
Why are tens of millions content to live on state support without attempting to improve their standard of living by their own efforts?
Why do millions of university students in America admire intellectuals who hate America, such as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and make an icon out of the sadistic mass-murderer Che Guevara?
Why? Because they’ve been told to. They’ve been told that good people do and “think” these things. They want to be good. They believe what they’ve been taught.
The same answer applies to: Why Muslim women believe they must put up with being sexually mutilated and enslaved to men. Why multitudes the world over believe that there was a nation called Palestinians who were driven off their land by aggressive usurping Jews. Why Christians believe that a man who once lived and died lives on as one part of a three-part god. Why Muslims and Christians imagine that when you are dead you are still alive in another place. Why Jews believe that their benign and omnipotent God has some unknowable but just purpose in having six million of them enslaved, starved, tortured and murdered by Nazis.
They believe these things because they were taught them. All this was drummed into them. They were raised to know that that is how it ought to be.
Few if any ideas are easy to spread. To get an idea accepted by large numbers of people takes patience, persistence, conviction, tireless energy on the part of those who want to spread it. The idea need not make good sense, be reasonable, come with proofs that it will work as its advocates say it will. It doesn’t even have to appeal strongly to the emotions. It just needs to become what “everybody” accepts.
If you want your idea to prevail over others, this is what it takes. First the conviction that it is right and everyone should know it. Next, a decision to spread it. Then energy, persistence, patience – and eventually force.
What made Christianity catch on? It wasn’t the life-style – poor, austere, hard, humble. Even the promise of eternal life was not a reliable recommendation as anyone’s eternity could as easily be endless agony as endless bliss (it was and is a 50-50 tossup). The theology was so hard to make sense of that the Church itself to this day has not settled it. And the morality it demanded was against human nature. So what made it succeed? Energy, persistence, patience, indoctrination, force.
See how long it took. From the time St Paul invented “Jesus Christ” to the time the emperor of Rome (Constantine) accepted the new god and the doctrines that had accreted to him, thus making it fashionable to be Christian (just a few decades before force was applied and it became compulsory), nearly three hundred years had passed. Three hundred years of persistent, patient, energetic proselytizing. Even then, it was not securely implanted in the minds of the subjects. One Emperor – Julian – came along and actually tried to reverse the trend by suppressing Christianity and re-instating paganism. He didn’t have enough time. He died in battle, his successors went back to favoring Christianity, and the Emperor Theodosius decreed that Christianity was to be the religion of the state. With him the final phase of force arrived.
Marxist Communism took less time to get a real grip on the minds of multitudes. Means of communications had speeded up considerably between the 4th and the 19th centuries, but still it took half a century (if one arbitrarily dates it from the first publication of Marx’s Das Kapital in 1867 to the success of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917). And still the same method had to be employed: energetic, patient, persistent proselytizing. Much repetition was required. The fever of enthusiasm had to be caught by two generations of intellectuals before the infection became a pandemic. Then came force.
The creed must become the norm. So pervasive must the doctrine be that anybody who does not subscribe to it wholeheartedly will appear egregious; an oddball, a rebel, a danger to everyone else and even to himself. The orthodoxy must be accepted without question as good, so anyone who opposes it is ipso facto a bad person.
By the late 20th century communications had become even faster, so the New Left, rising in 1968, could achieve the peaks of power in Europe in less than thirty years, and in America in forty years. It started as a weak revolutionary movement which brought nothing good with it to Western Europe and America, but much that was bad: recreational drugs, AIDS, and terrorism as self-expression. New Leftists complained that they had too much freedom, too much choice, that tolerance of their politics was repressive. And this irrational case was widely accepted, even while, on the other side of the iron curtain, a young man burnt himself to death to protest against the lack of freedom, choice, and tolerance.
The New Left movement was ignorant, blind, puerile, unreasonable, sadistic – yet it became, it has become, the prevailing belief-system of the greater part of the Western world, and at present in almost all “free” countries the standard ideology (or religion) of the state, no matter what political party is in power. How?
The plan was made. The plan was put into execution. Gramsci supplied the phrase for the overall strategy: “The Long March through the Institutions”. It wasn’t enough that the New Leftists should protest, should threaten and carry out violent attacks, should shout and write and display their slogans. They must take over the institutions of power, everyone of them: the smallest citizens’ groupings – such as library committees – were not too small. But none were too big. Town councils had to be infiltrated and eventually dominated; then newspapers, radio and TV channels; boards of education very importantly; the schools, the universities; the civil service; the law courts; a major political party; then the country’s legislative body, and eventually the pinnacles of power, prime ministerships, presidencies. Police forces and the military were formidable challenges. The tactic was first to discredit them and pressure them from outside by means of public opinion guided by the converted press; then to infiltrate them; finally bend them from within to conform to the doctrine and advance the cause.
Meanwhile books, films, articles, lessons, lectures, systems of reward, prizes must all promote the cause. It took decades, but it succeeded. Even in America now there have been at least two generations raised on New Left doctrine through schools, universities, books, films, the press, and TV.
How otherwise could the free Western world, whose policies and armies opposed the oppressing, enslaving Communist Eastern world, have been successfully converted to the very doctrine that oppressed, enslaved, tortured and mass murdered? It didn’t take reason. It didn’t take persuasion. The idea was no more innately and manifestly true and good than the idea of Christianity. But as in the case of spreading Christianity, it took conviction, decision, planning, energy, persistence, repetition, and finally force.
Only Leftist doctrine – government control of the economy, government provision of welfare, confiscatory and punitive taxation – is politically correct now in America. Collectivist thinking is the norm. Good people vote left. (When, in 2008, a Californian woman came upon a stall set up on a main street to canvass votes for the Republican presidential candidate John McCain, she called the police, and was astonished to learn that to solicit public support for the anti-collectivist Republican Party was not illegal.) Again, as with Christianity, the allegiance to the doctrine has little or nothing to do with its ideas. Most adherents could not explain what the ideas are. But they know that good people find them good, that good people vote for them. And that is all they need to know. Who doesn’t want to think of himself as a good person?
But the question of how did this become the case has not been fully answered. There is another aspect to the story. In order for one doctrine to succeed, it is necessary for other, counter doctrines to fail. If the ancient world had had enough confidence in paganism, enough enthusiasm for it, hadn’t taken it for granted, hadn’t become bored with it, hadn’t ignored the Christian missionaries with their crazy talk, could the weird, obscure, muddled, sorrowful, other-worldly new religion of Christianity have prevailed?
And the success of Leftism now – would it have happened if the conservative Right had been paying attention? Remember that old saying that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance”? Well, the Right was not being vigilant. It didn’t bother to argue against political correctness. It disregarded the cynical shenanigans going on in the United Nations as if it were nothing but a zoo housing many clamorous beasts who were safely confined and could in no way threaten American life, liberty or happiness. If it was made to feel now and then the bullying, deceitful, sly, sometimes violent tactics of the Left, it shrugged them off. Conservatives went on being civil and preferring honesty when the world’s mood had changed to favoring lies and abuse. They put their confidence in the fact that America had been founded as the political embodiment of the idea of personal freedom; had demonstrated to the world – forever, they believed – that freedom brought prosperity and might and stunning innovation. They assumed that the rightness of individual liberty, the capitalist system, and government by the people had been established forever. So strong and free a country could afford to be tolerant. Let some wild, immature, misguided persons preach despotism (Communism, Socialism, Progressivism, Greenism, whatever), the system was strong enough to be hospitable to alien ideas, and to allow dissent or even rebellion. Tested, it would prove itself inviolable. It could not only withstand opposition, it could absorb it and dissolve it. No special effort was required. American history was on the side of those who would defend freedom and the constitution. The separation of powers would protect them. The free press would dilute propaganda. Open enquiry in the academies would ensure that all points of view were argued and the most rational, the most humane, would persuade serious scholars. But they were wrong.
In their complacency, conservatives did not even notice the Long March. They could not mark its stations of success. Even now there are deluded Republicans who have not absorbed the fact that most Americans like collectivism; that they don’t object to electoral fraud; that they accept a failing economy; that many would rather live on government handouts than become rich; that being rich has become a morally bad thing; that it’s okay for foreign powers to develop weapons that can kill vast numbers of Americans; that the press does not report what is happening in the world but only what it wants to happen; that courts of law are willing to prefer foreign law to the Constitution; that it doesn’t matter if American representatives abroad are attacked and murdered; that freedom has become a term worthy only of contempt; that American history is a trail of shame; that a cruel religion is being allowed to seep through the body politic, and is protected and advanced by the government itself.
But now millions of conservatives are waking up and are asking, how did this happen? It happened because people patiently, energetically, persistently planned it and made it happen.
What can we do about it, they ask themselves and each other.
What they have to do about it is change the minds of the people. First they must be sure that they want the free republic the founders established; that they want to maintain free markets; that they don’t want a welfare state; that they do want to preserve national defenses; that they want indoctrination in the schools to stop; that they want to forbid the application of foreign law; that they do not want to go on funding an institution – the UN – that consistently works against their interests. Then they must decide that their political philosophy is right, uniquely right, and must be implemented at any and all costs. Then they must start teaching it. With energy, persistence, patience and fiery enthusiasm. It will take time. But that is the only way. Teach, preach, argue, use every method that works. Give up the idea that it’s better to be gentlemanly than to sink to using the methods of the opposition; that if you do as they do you will have betrayed the very values that you are fighting for. They have made the fight low and dirty. Get down in the dirt and fight it.
How badly does the conservative right want to win power in America? How important is it to them that they should?
If it is important, tell the voters, tell the children that the free market is the only means of creating general prosperity, and why. Tell them that central planning of an economy cannot work, and why. Tell them why competition is good for everyone, producers and consumers alike.
Tell them what profit is and why it is essential for ensuring abundance.
Tell them that only where people are free can there be discovery and innovation, improvement in everyone’s daily life, better technology, the advance of civilization. Explain why. Show them the proofs of history.
Tell them the truth about life in the Third World. Not politically correct sentimental drivel, but the actual awful facts about life in most other countries.
Tell them why impartial judgment is the only means to justice; why all sane adult citizens must be treated equally by the law; why people must be judged by their actions, not their intentions or feelings.
Tell them why government should be kept small and its powers limited. Tell them what the essential tasks of government are: protection of the nation, of the individual, of liberty, of the rule of law itself. And why governments should not be allowed more power and money than it needs to fulfill its few essential functions.
Shout down the shouters. Tell Muslims what is wrong with their creed and why American secularism is better. Don’t allow them to build a protective wall around themselves to shut out criticism of their absurd and savage beliefs.
Tolerate only the tolerant and tolerable.
It will take time. Start now. Stop short of force. But tell them.
The highest treason 9
Is there any precedent in history for this?
Has any other head of state ever done what President Obama is doing to help empower an enemy?
Far from preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power, as he and Hillary Clinton glibly claim to the nation, Obama goes to extreme lengths to make sure that Iran WILL BE ARMED WITH NUCLEAR WARHEADS AND THE MISSILES TO DELIVER THEM.
Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:
As another part of the secret ransom deal with Iran, [Obama] lifted UN sanctions on Bank Sepah … [which is] owned and operated by Islamic terrorists.
Bank Sepah is an IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] bank. The IRGC, despite Obama’s denials, is an Islamic terror group with American blood on its hands. It is to Shiite Islam what ISIS is to Sunni Islam. And even the Democrats know it. …
[And it ] had been sanctioned for something bigger than terrorism … . It had helped Iran buy ballistic missile technology from North Korea.
Iran’s nuclear weapons program would only be halfway complete if it gets the bomb. It also needs missiles to be able to strike Israel, Europe and eventually America. That’s where North Korea and Bank Sepah come in. Bank Sepah helps keep Iran’s ballistic missile industry viable. By delisting it, Obama aided Iran’s ballistic missile program just as he had earlier aided its nuclear program.
Obama’s holistic approach to the Iranian bomb is to help the terror state assemble the physical components it needs to become a nuclear power. …
[He has claimed that] “every pathway to a nuclear weapon is now closed off.” … [But] under his deal, in 13 years Iran’s breakout time will, “have shrunk almost down to zero”. …
[A] secret document revealed earlier this year by the AP showed that Iran would be able to get its uranium enrichment in gear after 11 years and more than double its enrichment rate. What happens by the thirteenth year? Then Iran gets a blank check on centrifuges … [and] breakout time to the bomb drops from a year to six months. Or even less. Until it hits zero.
But Ernest Moniz, Obama’s sniveling Secretary of Energy, assured the AP that it wouldn’t be a problem because Iran would only be allowed to store 300 kilograms of low-enriched uranium.
He lied. …
Obama wanted to lift sanctions on Iran. But Iran was not in compliance with even his mostly worthless agreement. So Obama decided that it was time to help the terror state fake it.
Iran was only allowed to keep 300 kilograms of low-enriched uranium. Obama agreed to upgrade that amount to “unknown quantities”. How much is an “unknown quantity”? Like the rest of Iran’s nuclear program, we don’t know. Low-enriched uranium, even in unknown quantities, doesn’t sound that scary. Except that according to a former U.N. weapons inspector,it can be used to produce highly enriched uranium. And that’s how you go from zero to a mushroom cloud over your city.
And then there are the large hot cells that Iran was allowed to keep running.
Secretary of Energy Moniz didn’t just lie to the AP. Lying to the media is practically an Obama indoor sport. He told the same lie in his testimony to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Senators were assured that Iran would be allowed to keep “only 300 kilograms of low (3.67 percent) enriched uranium hexafluoride, and will not exceed this level for fifteen years”.
Iran didn’t have to wait 15 years to exceed that amount. Or even 15 minutes. Obama gave them a pass on it right out of the gate.
But Moniz wasn’t a rogue liar. He was telling the lie that he had been told to tell. …
Obama has lied about the Iran deal from the very beginning. And that’s not about to change.
The fairy godmother of Iran’s enrichment was Hillary Clinton. The “breakthrough” in the negotiations took place when she accepted some Iranian nuclear enrichment. And then it was just a matter of determining how much enrichment would take place officially and how much would take place unofficially that would be officially ignored or covered up by our own government.
That is how we got to the ticking atomic time bomb.
Obama hasn’t just turned a blind eye to Iran’s race to the bomb. He has empowered and enabled all elements of it from its nuclear program to its ballistic missile program. He has ensured that Iran would have the money, the manpower and the resources to become a nuclear power. He directed elements of our intelligence services and military to prevent Israel from striking Iran’s nuclear program. He even aided its core terrorist organization and its ballistic missile program.
This isn’t an error. It’s not cowardice. It’s treason.
A coldly calculated plan to turn Iran into a nuclear power is coming together. On the other end of it lies the horrifying death of millions.
Why would Obama and Hillary do such a horrifying thing? The American scientists and spies who helped the Soviet Union get the bomb believed that they were making the world a better place by limiting our ability to use nuclear weapons. Their treason almost led to the end of human life on earth.
The Iran deal is the second great wave of nuclear treason of the left. And the full truth is yet to be told.
What motive can Obama possibly have?
The only way to to guess the answer to is to look at what Iran is likely to do when it has its nukes.
Will Iran use them against America? The threat has been made.
Is Iran likely to use them against Israel? Iranian leaders have said repeatedly that they want to destroy Israel. (See here and here.)
So the harming of America and the destruction of Israel are Obama’s objectives?!
Is there any other possible explanation?