0 comment Monday, November 10, 2014 | admin
This story and a later one are interesting in a couple of ways. First, though, we all knew, those of us who care about these things, that this was a deliberate plan. We knew that it was being carried out contrary to the wishes of the people of the UK, just as the same kind of thing is going on here and in all Western countries. An excerpt:
Official figures to be published on Thursday will confirm that foreign immigration under Labour added more than three million to our population.
At the same time nearly one million British citizens voted with their feet, some saying that they were leaving because England was no longer a country that they recognised.
How could all this have happened in the teeth of public opposition? Even the Labour government�s own survey last February showed that 77 per cent of the public wanted immigration reduced, including 54 per cent of the ethnic communities, while 50 per cent of the public wanted it reduced 'by a lot�.
[...]
The strongest evidence for conspiracy comes from one of Labour�s own. Andrew Neather, a previously unheard-of speechwriter for Blair, Straw and Blunkett, popped up with an article in the Evening Standard in October 2009 which gave the game away.
Immigration, he wrote, didn't just happen; the deliberate policy of Ministers from late 2000...was to open up the UK to 'mass immigration.'
But the fact that this is being discussed so openly is the interesting thing. Can any American reading this blog imagine one of our large daily newspapers acknowledging such a thing? I can't. The Washington Times is the only thing approaching a 'conservative' major daily paper, and it is politically correct in its way. I confess I have not read the Washington Times lately, because it is so predictably Republican and 'safe.' But though stories about border violations (Border Patrol agents shot by illegal immigrants or drug gangs, etc.) they did not address immigration policy, or the very fact that our country was being transformed, even though it may be the biggest story of our lifetimes.
So, the British media is sometimes more open and frank than our own media on this issue, at least. And given the fact that the UK overall seems to keep a much tighter control over people's speech and behavior, this is not what we would expect.
A commenter says:
''Immigration has utterly ruined this country. Our homogenous British population gave us a stable society to which everyone belonged to, with everyone sharing the same culture and values. Mass immigration of foreign people and their cultures has thrown a very large spanner in the works, one which is rapidly eradicating the cultural and ethnic identity of our country. I really fear for the future of our country. It's the British people who made this country great, but they are now being replaced.
- Oliver, Surrey, G Britain
This is a very civil and factual comment, but I think in some of our papers, the moderators would delete it. The first sentence alone would probably doom the comment to deletion.
Most such articles in the Telegraph seem to elicit hundreds of comments, so there are obviously strong feelings on the part of many people in the UK, where immigration is concerned.
We here in the States have some latitude as to freedom of expression, but politically incorrect comments on newspaper websites are often deleted or heavily moderated, and usually are met with obnoxious responses from leftist readers -- who may in fact be people who are paid to shout down politically incorrect comments on the Internet, or they may just be true believer leftists. In any case, I would say that outside the blogosphere, viewpoints that are politically incorrect are just not heard, not allowed to be heard. Some news websites are more lenient than others, but a great deal of censorship goes on.
This is also true of talk radio, which used to be considered a bastion of conservatism. So other than blogs, these issues are pretty much ignored.
Most Americans on 'conservative' blogs jeer at the British for being too passive and supine when it comes to the transformation and ethnic cleansing that is going on, but I question whether that is an accurate impression; it may be that there are things going on beneath the surface.
Before someone tells me that I am imagining this to be true, just indulging in wishful thinking, I think that one advantage that the people of the UK have is that they are not afflicted with this national neurosis regarding slavery, racial amends, and proving our lack of 'racist' inclinations. While American 'conservatives' are scouring the landscape, searching the farthest horizons for 'conservative blacks' to promote to leadership, the British, French, et al seem relatively free of this strange affliction, thus enabling them to think more clearly about the situation. Until we Americans can disentangle ourselves from this obsession, we will forever be spinning our wheels.
I don't count the British out just yet; we don't know what may happen. And there are signs of life in France as well, though now ''our'' government is presuming to teach the French how to have better rapport with their 'minority populations.' It would be laughable, were it not so tragic.
Somebody needs to teach the American people, particularly those of the colorblind Republican persuasion, how to shed their peculiar hangups so that this country might be able to see clearly again.
Official figures to be published on Thursday will confirm that foreign immigration under Labour added more than three million to our population.
At the same time nearly one million British citizens voted with their feet, some saying that they were leaving because England was no longer a country that they recognised.
How could all this have happened in the teeth of public opposition? Even the Labour government�s own survey last February showed that 77 per cent of the public wanted immigration reduced, including 54 per cent of the ethnic communities, while 50 per cent of the public wanted it reduced 'by a lot�.
[...]
The strongest evidence for conspiracy comes from one of Labour�s own. Andrew Neather, a previously unheard-of speechwriter for Blair, Straw and Blunkett, popped up with an article in the Evening Standard in October 2009 which gave the game away.
Immigration, he wrote, didn't just happen; the deliberate policy of Ministers from late 2000...was to open up the UK to 'mass immigration.'
But the fact that this is being discussed so openly is the interesting thing. Can any American reading this blog imagine one of our large daily newspapers acknowledging such a thing? I can't. The Washington Times is the only thing approaching a 'conservative' major daily paper, and it is politically correct in its way. I confess I have not read the Washington Times lately, because it is so predictably Republican and 'safe.' But though stories about border violations (Border Patrol agents shot by illegal immigrants or drug gangs, etc.) they did not address immigration policy, or the very fact that our country was being transformed, even though it may be the biggest story of our lifetimes.
So, the British media is sometimes more open and frank than our own media on this issue, at least. And given the fact that the UK overall seems to keep a much tighter control over people's speech and behavior, this is not what we would expect.
A commenter says:
''Immigration has utterly ruined this country. Our homogenous British population gave us a stable society to which everyone belonged to, with everyone sharing the same culture and values. Mass immigration of foreign people and their cultures has thrown a very large spanner in the works, one which is rapidly eradicating the cultural and ethnic identity of our country. I really fear for the future of our country. It's the British people who made this country great, but they are now being replaced.
- Oliver, Surrey, G Britain
This is a very civil and factual comment, but I think in some of our papers, the moderators would delete it. The first sentence alone would probably doom the comment to deletion.
Most such articles in the Telegraph seem to elicit hundreds of comments, so there are obviously strong feelings on the part of many people in the UK, where immigration is concerned.
We here in the States have some latitude as to freedom of expression, but politically incorrect comments on newspaper websites are often deleted or heavily moderated, and usually are met with obnoxious responses from leftist readers -- who may in fact be people who are paid to shout down politically incorrect comments on the Internet, or they may just be true believer leftists. In any case, I would say that outside the blogosphere, viewpoints that are politically incorrect are just not heard, not allowed to be heard. Some news websites are more lenient than others, but a great deal of censorship goes on.
This is also true of talk radio, which used to be considered a bastion of conservatism. So other than blogs, these issues are pretty much ignored.
Most Americans on 'conservative' blogs jeer at the British for being too passive and supine when it comes to the transformation and ethnic cleansing that is going on, but I question whether that is an accurate impression; it may be that there are things going on beneath the surface.
Before someone tells me that I am imagining this to be true, just indulging in wishful thinking, I think that one advantage that the people of the UK have is that they are not afflicted with this national neurosis regarding slavery, racial amends, and proving our lack of 'racist' inclinations. While American 'conservatives' are scouring the landscape, searching the farthest horizons for 'conservative blacks' to promote to leadership, the British, French, et al seem relatively free of this strange affliction, thus enabling them to think more clearly about the situation. Until we Americans can disentangle ourselves from this obsession, we will forever be spinning our wheels.
I don't count the British out just yet; we don't know what may happen. And there are signs of life in France as well, though now ''our'' government is presuming to teach the French how to have better rapport with their 'minority populations.' It would be laughable, were it not so tragic.
Somebody needs to teach the American people, particularly those of the colorblind Republican persuasion, how to shed their peculiar hangups so that this country might be able to see clearly again.
Labels: Ethnic Cleansing, France, Free Speech, Globalism, Mass Immigration, Race Replacement, Tyranny, Uk
0 comment Thursday, August 21, 2014 | admin
Thomas Jefferson famously said "I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." We've all heard this quoted, or read it, but it's significant that he specifically said ''tyranny over the mind of man."
Often when we hear the word 'tyranny' we automatically envision the old Communist regimes in Eastern Europe where people were shipped off to gulags or mental institutions for dissenting from the regime and the Party. This hard totalitarianism, with its roundups of dissidents, or its midnight knocks on the door, is not the only kind. Though the systems could and did imprison (and sometimes kill) the bodies of dissenters, they could not always imprison the minds of their subjects.
It's commonly said, by those with direct experience of these regimes, that the people in general did not truly believe the ideology whichwas the basis for the Communist regimes. Newspapers, radio, and television, as well as movies, offered only the accepted party line on anything, and heavily censored anything that belied the official belief system. However, it seems that this information control was rather clumsy and transparent, and many people thus saw through it, inwardly rejecting it while outwardly conforming, and discreetly keeping silent.
Sometimes it's a temptation to wonder if the same is not true in the Western countries, where our politically correct, mandatory multiculturalism and ''equality'' are the dictates of the day. There is, certainly, a core of people who, for whatever reason, have managed to reject the lies at the heart of the prevailing order. But are these people sufficient in numbers to form any significant opposition?
Sad to say, I think the majority in our country, and perhaps in all Western countries, are fully indoctrinated, so much so that they have no idea they have even been programmed to think as they do. I think many are indoctrinated so thoroughly that they believe the ideology of the regime to be their own, independent beliefs, and what's more, they would probably be willing to give their lives or take the lives of others for the sake of those beliefs.
True believers, no matter how bereft of truth the system to which they've pledged themselves, will do this. How many cults have made the headlines, as their benighted followers commit suicide or go to the extreme of killing the ''traitors'' who desert the cult or question its tenets?
Thomas Jefferson was a man who chose his words with great precision and care, as he did all things. When he wrote the phrase, 'tyranny over the mind of man,' he did so for a reason.
Imprisoning men's bodies does not confine their minds. The Left knows this. It's often said, however, that an idea can't be killed. When the Communist regimes imprisoned people like Solzhenitsyn, they did not destroy his ability to think freely. When a dissident or resister is killed, his ideas often spread because of his death. You truly can't kill ideas, but the tyrants know that you might kill an idea a-borning, and stop it from becoming fully formed and growing. And you might, to a great extent, render many people incapable of conceiving a free idea. You might intellectually sterilize or stunt people by steady, unrelenting propaganda, especially if it's started as early as possible in life, and sustained. You might, if you wished to do this, use everything from advertising to movies, to plays, music, literature, the visual arts, sports and games. Soon, as the propaganda takes hold, people propagate it without even realizing they are passing it on, like a virus. It becomes part and parcel of the whole culture.
To truly condition people and diminish their ability to think freely, you might also make plenty of mind-numbing, dulling drugs available, from the illegal ''street drugs'' to the respectable kind, prescribed by your kindly doctor and dispensed by the pharmacist. Have you ever noticed how many people you meet are on some kind of mood-altering drugs these days? The children are on various drugs for 'ADD", or ADHD or whatever it's called now, and the adults are often on antidepressants or sleep medications. Why are our medical professionals so eager to press these things on us? Every time I visit the doctor, the routine question ''are you depressed?'' is asked. Whose idea is it to importune people to take antidepressants? Is it some kind of official policy?
I am not impugning the character of doctors or other medical workers. I don't doubt that they believe they are doing only what is for our benefit, but I wonder why as a people we are so medicated.
A population that is harried and stressed by unstable conditions, uncertainty about tomorrow, and grieving, in some cases, the loss of the familiar, may feel more need to medicate their feelings away, and our government is probably happy to encourage this trend, as they become increasingly involved in our medical and health business. But a population that is anxious, stressed, and medicated for it will be less likely to be able to think clearly and judge rightly.
The ideologues who shape our culture do not want a populace with the time, the acuity, or the inclination to think and evaluate for themselves. The ideologues, those soft totalitarians who sit in seats of power, want to influence if not control our thoughts. Not only are our thoughts fair game, but our feelings, our emotions, our attitudes, our opinions, our moods, our wishes, aspirations, dreams, hopes, and expectations. They want to dictate the language we use, the words we choose to express ourselves. Obviously, via our entertainment, they want to shape the most private and personal fantasies and urges, too, and then enslave us to those as well.
Even our most sacred impulses are being shaped by the insidious influence of the prevailing ideology, which of course is, like the true God, a jealous 'god' who wants us to have no other deity but itself. Our churches, being led by and populated by imperfect people, has also fallen prey to the world's belief system, and the propaganda, which wants to govern how we relate to God as well as to our fellow man.
The Bible tells us not to fear those who kill the body. The soft totalitarians, the mind tyrants, may not kill dissenters outright, but they want to abort our ability to think and to feel as free men and women.
Often when we hear the word 'tyranny' we automatically envision the old Communist regimes in Eastern Europe where people were shipped off to gulags or mental institutions for dissenting from the regime and the Party. This hard totalitarianism, with its roundups of dissidents, or its midnight knocks on the door, is not the only kind. Though the systems could and did imprison (and sometimes kill) the bodies of dissenters, they could not always imprison the minds of their subjects.
It's commonly said, by those with direct experience of these regimes, that the people in general did not truly believe the ideology whichwas the basis for the Communist regimes. Newspapers, radio, and television, as well as movies, offered only the accepted party line on anything, and heavily censored anything that belied the official belief system. However, it seems that this information control was rather clumsy and transparent, and many people thus saw through it, inwardly rejecting it while outwardly conforming, and discreetly keeping silent.
Sometimes it's a temptation to wonder if the same is not true in the Western countries, where our politically correct, mandatory multiculturalism and ''equality'' are the dictates of the day. There is, certainly, a core of people who, for whatever reason, have managed to reject the lies at the heart of the prevailing order. But are these people sufficient in numbers to form any significant opposition?
Sad to say, I think the majority in our country, and perhaps in all Western countries, are fully indoctrinated, so much so that they have no idea they have even been programmed to think as they do. I think many are indoctrinated so thoroughly that they believe the ideology of the regime to be their own, independent beliefs, and what's more, they would probably be willing to give their lives or take the lives of others for the sake of those beliefs.
True believers, no matter how bereft of truth the system to which they've pledged themselves, will do this. How many cults have made the headlines, as their benighted followers commit suicide or go to the extreme of killing the ''traitors'' who desert the cult or question its tenets?
Thomas Jefferson was a man who chose his words with great precision and care, as he did all things. When he wrote the phrase, 'tyranny over the mind of man,' he did so for a reason.
Imprisoning men's bodies does not confine their minds. The Left knows this. It's often said, however, that an idea can't be killed. When the Communist regimes imprisoned people like Solzhenitsyn, they did not destroy his ability to think freely. When a dissident or resister is killed, his ideas often spread because of his death. You truly can't kill ideas, but the tyrants know that you might kill an idea a-borning, and stop it from becoming fully formed and growing. And you might, to a great extent, render many people incapable of conceiving a free idea. You might intellectually sterilize or stunt people by steady, unrelenting propaganda, especially if it's started as early as possible in life, and sustained. You might, if you wished to do this, use everything from advertising to movies, to plays, music, literature, the visual arts, sports and games. Soon, as the propaganda takes hold, people propagate it without even realizing they are passing it on, like a virus. It becomes part and parcel of the whole culture.
To truly condition people and diminish their ability to think freely, you might also make plenty of mind-numbing, dulling drugs available, from the illegal ''street drugs'' to the respectable kind, prescribed by your kindly doctor and dispensed by the pharmacist. Have you ever noticed how many people you meet are on some kind of mood-altering drugs these days? The children are on various drugs for 'ADD", or ADHD or whatever it's called now, and the adults are often on antidepressants or sleep medications. Why are our medical professionals so eager to press these things on us? Every time I visit the doctor, the routine question ''are you depressed?'' is asked. Whose idea is it to importune people to take antidepressants? Is it some kind of official policy?
I am not impugning the character of doctors or other medical workers. I don't doubt that they believe they are doing only what is for our benefit, but I wonder why as a people we are so medicated.
A population that is harried and stressed by unstable conditions, uncertainty about tomorrow, and grieving, in some cases, the loss of the familiar, may feel more need to medicate their feelings away, and our government is probably happy to encourage this trend, as they become increasingly involved in our medical and health business. But a population that is anxious, stressed, and medicated for it will be less likely to be able to think clearly and judge rightly.
The ideologues who shape our culture do not want a populace with the time, the acuity, or the inclination to think and evaluate for themselves. The ideologues, those soft totalitarians who sit in seats of power, want to influence if not control our thoughts. Not only are our thoughts fair game, but our feelings, our emotions, our attitudes, our opinions, our moods, our wishes, aspirations, dreams, hopes, and expectations. They want to dictate the language we use, the words we choose to express ourselves. Obviously, via our entertainment, they want to shape the most private and personal fantasies and urges, too, and then enslave us to those as well.
Even our most sacred impulses are being shaped by the insidious influence of the prevailing ideology, which of course is, like the true God, a jealous 'god' who wants us to have no other deity but itself. Our churches, being led by and populated by imperfect people, has also fallen prey to the world's belief system, and the propaganda, which wants to govern how we relate to God as well as to our fellow man.
The Bible tells us not to fear those who kill the body. The soft totalitarians, the mind tyrants, may not kill dissenters outright, but they want to abort our ability to think and to feel as free men and women.
Labels: Freedom Of Expression, Freedom Of Thought, Leftism, Media Manipulation, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Totalitarianism, Tyranny
0 comment Sunday, June 8, 2014 | admin
Over at American Thinker there is a pretty good piece entitled 'How Democracies Become Tyrannies'. It sums up the process rather well, by examining Plato's Republic.
In the Republic, two young men, Glaucon and Adeimantus, accompany the much older Socrates on a journey of discovery into the nature of the individual soul and its connection to the harmony of the state. During the course of their adventure, as the two disciples demonstrate greater maturity and self-control, they are gradually exposed to deeper and more complex teachings regarding the relationship between virtue, self-sufficiency, and happiness. In short, the boys begin to realize that justice and happiness in a community rests upon the moral condition of its citizens. This is what Socrates meant when he said: "The state is man writ large."
Near the end of the Republic Socrates decides to drive this point home by showing Adeimantus what happens to a regime when its parents and educators neglect the proper moral education of its children. In the course of this chilling illustration Adeimantus comes to discover a dark and ominous secret: without proper moral conditioning a regime's "defining principle" will be the source of its ultimate destruction. For democracy, that defining principle is freedom. According to Socrates, freedom makes a democracy but freedom also eventually breaks a democracy.''
It's good as far as it goes, and it applies to our present situation. Still, it could be said that our decline into tyranny was in the cards, given the trends of the last half-century, or even a century -- or more, depending on how you read and interpret our history.
But over at Gates of Vienna, El Inglés writes a piece called Pick a Tribe, Any Tribe, in which he examines how the presence of Moslems in the European countries, including the UK, has been a destructive force for democracy and freedom. And he discusses how a resurgence of tribalism may be the only way in which the incursions of Islam may be resisted.
The central contention of this essay is that tribalism will prove to be an essential component, if not the central component, in allowing a defense of Western societies against Islam. There are two reasons for this. The first is that such tribalisms will tend to keep Muslims out of those societies in the first place, and the second is that certain types of situations impose such severe psychological pressure on those who would confront them that they cannot consistently or usefully do so without a type and degree of psychological reinforcement that can only be provided by a tribe.''
But wait; he does not define 'tribes' by the conventional dictionary definition.
According to my old Webster's, the word 'tribe' means 'a social group comprising a series of families, clans, or generations...', whereas El Inglés says that
The most obvious and common tribal types would be those organized along racial lines (for the most obvious and literal type of tribe), cultural lines, religious lines (which tribes could be considered a subset of cultural tribes, as they pertain to behaviour and belief), ideological lines (Communists vs. Fascists), regional lines (my nation against yours, North against South), or organizational lines (a British Army regiment).''
I've said on this blog before that 'tribes' which have been formed on ideological lines, such as the hard-core left in this country, have taken the place of real tribes in postmodern America. Certain other groups, such as young single people under, say 30 or perhaps 35 also have become a kind of tribe. This goes back at least to the Woodstock days -- remember how the Woodstock rock festival was billed as 'the gathering of the tribes'? For some people, the American identity is their only 'tribal' identity, but the people who are that kind of 'patriot' also tend to be the types who aver that anybody and everybody is potentially one of us, by virtue of saluting our flag or 'believing in freedom.'
But I would say that these quasi-tribes, these superficial identities would not have morphed into 'tribal' groupings had we not become deracinated. For years there has been a conscious effort to remove all vestiges of genetic tribal loyalties, and to convince us that we are all brothers under the skin, at least as long as we believe in 'freedom and democracy.'
It's obvious, though, to those who have not been blinded to group and race differences that when an American, or a Western European, says 'freedom' it likely has a much different meaning than it does to a Middle Easterner or a Latin American or an Asian.
Yet we engage in this pretense that all men speak a common language and are of the same mind when it comes to these slogans and shibboleths like 'freedom', 'liberty' and 'democracy.' And it is this pretense that has allowed so many people to believe that we can admit millions of people from very alien societies under the assumption that they 'love freedom and democracy' in exactly the same way that we do, and moreover, who are we to deny 'freedom and democracy' to these poor people by refusing to let them come and live with us?
El Ingles discusses how 'principle' is not sufficient to motivate Europeans to oppose Islam, and how principle itself can be (and has been) corrupted in the attempt to 'dialogue' or engage peaceably with Moslems. And it's not only the Moslems themselves who twist and pervert principles, but their multicultist groupies in the West also do their part.
He points out how principle, had it been applied usefully to prevent the mass settlement of Moslems in Europe, might have been sufficient, but once the enemy is within the gates and using Western rhetoric to diminish the rights of their host peoples, it's too late.
This applies very much to America, too, although our percentage of Moslems is at this point considerably smaller than in Europe. However the tidal wave of Latin American immigrants, legal and illegal, are our equivalent of the Moslem problem. And we are weakened in defending ourselves for the same reasons: we have become deracinated and stripped of normal and healthy tribalism, while they themselves are allowed to be openly tribal and aggressively ethnocentric towards us.
Many Europeans, and even many shortsighted Americans, refuse to recognize the fact that Latino immigration is as big a threat to us as Moslems are to Europe. The people who minimize the threat they pose usually justify that attitude by saying 'well, at least they aren't trying to blow us up, and at least they are Christian, and at least they are hard workers...'' and so on. In fact, I would say that the sort of 'humble' image Latinos have acquired makes them appear more harmless than they are. The idea that 'at least they don't blow us up' is sufficient reason to welcome them is absurd, and I wonder if the people who say that ever read their local newspapers or look at the 'most wanted' posters for their towns or cities. So far there is no open terrorism, but many, many crimes against Americans by Latino immigrants constitute a kind of low-grade terrorism in my book, and it's fact that more Americans have been killed by those 'hard-working' folk than in the Iraq war, as of now.
And even were they not committing violence, low-grade or otherwise against us, it's clear that their presence is changing our country beyond recognition in many areas, and that they are bringing their culture with them, and replacing ours.
And the real way to deal with this problem should have been to act preventively, but once we have masses of these interlopers in our country, we have already sacrificed a great deal of our right to speak freely and candidly and honestly, because of the PC censors, and because we censor ourselves. It's easy and painless to declare pre-emptively that we don't want immigrants from certain countries, and we used to have such sensible policies, before 1965. But now that we have tens of millions of Latinos and who knows how many other immigrants in our midst, we cannot speak so frankly. And once we 'know' individuals from each group, we soften somewhat; somebody has a Hispanic co-worker, or they have Hispanic famiies attending their church, or someone knows friendly Moslems who run a local business. On and on it goes, and soon it becomes unthinkable to think of suggesting these people don't belong among us. We begin to see them as part of the natural American landscape, or we feel pity or sympathy for them. Nobody wants to be the hard-hearted person who would repatriate them. So the more of them living among us, the harder it becomes for us to think tribally and thus 'exclude' anybody. Even if we are not multiculturalist bleeding-hearts, most of us don't want to be harsh or unfriendly when we look at the outsiders who are among us -- even if they have no problem being hostile towards us.
I used to believe that the UK and the rest of Europe had an advantage in resisting the invasions of their countries, in that Islam is a much more obviously threatening system which is so obviously alien to Europe. For that reason, one would think that the natural ethnocentrism and desire to defend oneself and one's people would kick in and enable the Europeans to resist the Islamization of their countries. But for some reason, such doesn't seem to be the case.
We, on the other hand, are lulled by the fact that we have been next door to Mexico for centuries, and we have had small numbers of Hispanic immigrants for decades, with many of them having become quasi-assimilated after several generations. Again, we are lulled into thinking that they are 'Christian' like most of us, or that they are 'Western' as some people strangely claim. Many Americans thus blind themselves to the Hispanic presence here.
I don't quite understand El Ingles's ambivalence towards the BNP:
Let me put it succinctly: if the BNP won two seats at the next general election, I would be delighted. If it won two hundred, I would emigrate. I view BNP support as playing a role similar to that of a price in a free-market economy, which is to say that I see it as a signal conveying a certain type of information. If the BNP were to be banned and its support therefore to disappear at the electoral level, this information would be lost to the system, easing the pressure on the establishment parties to formulate a real response to Islamization, which I fervently hope they will eventually do. Lamenting the advances of nativist groups at this level would be like lamenting a rise in the price in oil when demand grows more quickly than supply. That said, given my beliefs about the gap between the true ideological commitments of the BNP leadership and the motivations of those who vote for it, it is impossible for me to avoid the conclusion that it would be a disaster for it to obtain real power.''
but then I am not British; I don't know the full situation as he might.
I encourage you to read the whole piece.
From where I sit, the BNP are the only party speaking up for the historic British people; without them or someone like them, there would be no hope, as the two major parties are as anti-British and pro-multiculturalist as our two useless parties are.
My doubts about the BNP come from the opposite direction: it seems I detect some efforts to be 'inclusive' and to thus play to the politically correct and the timid. I think this is always a bad move. Being 'inclusive' to outsiders or attempting to prove one's lack of 'bigotry' is always a victory for political correctness. I believe that a sharp correction to the right is absolutely essential to counter the many decades of leftward movement. The effort to prove one's lack of 'xenophobia' or 'racism' is exactly what has put the West at the edge of the precipice. More of the same will push us over the edge.
I fear that ingrained vestiges of political correctness on the right will doom any nativist efforts to resist what is happening. We have been taught for so long that ethnocentrism and nativism are evil, and that we must lean over backwards to expunge any hint of these things from ourselves and our political organizations. This merely helps our foes and may ultimately doom the West, if it continues.
In the Republic, two young men, Glaucon and Adeimantus, accompany the much older Socrates on a journey of discovery into the nature of the individual soul and its connection to the harmony of the state. During the course of their adventure, as the two disciples demonstrate greater maturity and self-control, they are gradually exposed to deeper and more complex teachings regarding the relationship between virtue, self-sufficiency, and happiness. In short, the boys begin to realize that justice and happiness in a community rests upon the moral condition of its citizens. This is what Socrates meant when he said: "The state is man writ large."
Near the end of the Republic Socrates decides to drive this point home by showing Adeimantus what happens to a regime when its parents and educators neglect the proper moral education of its children. In the course of this chilling illustration Adeimantus comes to discover a dark and ominous secret: without proper moral conditioning a regime's "defining principle" will be the source of its ultimate destruction. For democracy, that defining principle is freedom. According to Socrates, freedom makes a democracy but freedom also eventually breaks a democracy.''
It's good as far as it goes, and it applies to our present situation. Still, it could be said that our decline into tyranny was in the cards, given the trends of the last half-century, or even a century -- or more, depending on how you read and interpret our history.
But over at Gates of Vienna, El Inglés writes a piece called Pick a Tribe, Any Tribe, in which he examines how the presence of Moslems in the European countries, including the UK, has been a destructive force for democracy and freedom. And he discusses how a resurgence of tribalism may be the only way in which the incursions of Islam may be resisted.
The central contention of this essay is that tribalism will prove to be an essential component, if not the central component, in allowing a defense of Western societies against Islam. There are two reasons for this. The first is that such tribalisms will tend to keep Muslims out of those societies in the first place, and the second is that certain types of situations impose such severe psychological pressure on those who would confront them that they cannot consistently or usefully do so without a type and degree of psychological reinforcement that can only be provided by a tribe.''
But wait; he does not define 'tribes' by the conventional dictionary definition.
According to my old Webster's, the word 'tribe' means 'a social group comprising a series of families, clans, or generations...', whereas El Inglés says that
The most obvious and common tribal types would be those organized along racial lines (for the most obvious and literal type of tribe), cultural lines, religious lines (which tribes could be considered a subset of cultural tribes, as they pertain to behaviour and belief), ideological lines (Communists vs. Fascists), regional lines (my nation against yours, North against South), or organizational lines (a British Army regiment).''
I've said on this blog before that 'tribes' which have been formed on ideological lines, such as the hard-core left in this country, have taken the place of real tribes in postmodern America. Certain other groups, such as young single people under, say 30 or perhaps 35 also have become a kind of tribe. This goes back at least to the Woodstock days -- remember how the Woodstock rock festival was billed as 'the gathering of the tribes'? For some people, the American identity is their only 'tribal' identity, but the people who are that kind of 'patriot' also tend to be the types who aver that anybody and everybody is potentially one of us, by virtue of saluting our flag or 'believing in freedom.'
But I would say that these quasi-tribes, these superficial identities would not have morphed into 'tribal' groupings had we not become deracinated. For years there has been a conscious effort to remove all vestiges of genetic tribal loyalties, and to convince us that we are all brothers under the skin, at least as long as we believe in 'freedom and democracy.'
It's obvious, though, to those who have not been blinded to group and race differences that when an American, or a Western European, says 'freedom' it likely has a much different meaning than it does to a Middle Easterner or a Latin American or an Asian.
Yet we engage in this pretense that all men speak a common language and are of the same mind when it comes to these slogans and shibboleths like 'freedom', 'liberty' and 'democracy.' And it is this pretense that has allowed so many people to believe that we can admit millions of people from very alien societies under the assumption that they 'love freedom and democracy' in exactly the same way that we do, and moreover, who are we to deny 'freedom and democracy' to these poor people by refusing to let them come and live with us?
El Ingles discusses how 'principle' is not sufficient to motivate Europeans to oppose Islam, and how principle itself can be (and has been) corrupted in the attempt to 'dialogue' or engage peaceably with Moslems. And it's not only the Moslems themselves who twist and pervert principles, but their multicultist groupies in the West also do their part.
He points out how principle, had it been applied usefully to prevent the mass settlement of Moslems in Europe, might have been sufficient, but once the enemy is within the gates and using Western rhetoric to diminish the rights of their host peoples, it's too late.
This applies very much to America, too, although our percentage of Moslems is at this point considerably smaller than in Europe. However the tidal wave of Latin American immigrants, legal and illegal, are our equivalent of the Moslem problem. And we are weakened in defending ourselves for the same reasons: we have become deracinated and stripped of normal and healthy tribalism, while they themselves are allowed to be openly tribal and aggressively ethnocentric towards us.
Many Europeans, and even many shortsighted Americans, refuse to recognize the fact that Latino immigration is as big a threat to us as Moslems are to Europe. The people who minimize the threat they pose usually justify that attitude by saying 'well, at least they aren't trying to blow us up, and at least they are Christian, and at least they are hard workers...'' and so on. In fact, I would say that the sort of 'humble' image Latinos have acquired makes them appear more harmless than they are. The idea that 'at least they don't blow us up' is sufficient reason to welcome them is absurd, and I wonder if the people who say that ever read their local newspapers or look at the 'most wanted' posters for their towns or cities. So far there is no open terrorism, but many, many crimes against Americans by Latino immigrants constitute a kind of low-grade terrorism in my book, and it's fact that more Americans have been killed by those 'hard-working' folk than in the Iraq war, as of now.
And even were they not committing violence, low-grade or otherwise against us, it's clear that their presence is changing our country beyond recognition in many areas, and that they are bringing their culture with them, and replacing ours.
And the real way to deal with this problem should have been to act preventively, but once we have masses of these interlopers in our country, we have already sacrificed a great deal of our right to speak freely and candidly and honestly, because of the PC censors, and because we censor ourselves. It's easy and painless to declare pre-emptively that we don't want immigrants from certain countries, and we used to have such sensible policies, before 1965. But now that we have tens of millions of Latinos and who knows how many other immigrants in our midst, we cannot speak so frankly. And once we 'know' individuals from each group, we soften somewhat; somebody has a Hispanic co-worker, or they have Hispanic famiies attending their church, or someone knows friendly Moslems who run a local business. On and on it goes, and soon it becomes unthinkable to think of suggesting these people don't belong among us. We begin to see them as part of the natural American landscape, or we feel pity or sympathy for them. Nobody wants to be the hard-hearted person who would repatriate them. So the more of them living among us, the harder it becomes for us to think tribally and thus 'exclude' anybody. Even if we are not multiculturalist bleeding-hearts, most of us don't want to be harsh or unfriendly when we look at the outsiders who are among us -- even if they have no problem being hostile towards us.
I used to believe that the UK and the rest of Europe had an advantage in resisting the invasions of their countries, in that Islam is a much more obviously threatening system which is so obviously alien to Europe. For that reason, one would think that the natural ethnocentrism and desire to defend oneself and one's people would kick in and enable the Europeans to resist the Islamization of their countries. But for some reason, such doesn't seem to be the case.
We, on the other hand, are lulled by the fact that we have been next door to Mexico for centuries, and we have had small numbers of Hispanic immigrants for decades, with many of them having become quasi-assimilated after several generations. Again, we are lulled into thinking that they are 'Christian' like most of us, or that they are 'Western' as some people strangely claim. Many Americans thus blind themselves to the Hispanic presence here.
I don't quite understand El Ingles's ambivalence towards the BNP:
Let me put it succinctly: if the BNP won two seats at the next general election, I would be delighted. If it won two hundred, I would emigrate. I view BNP support as playing a role similar to that of a price in a free-market economy, which is to say that I see it as a signal conveying a certain type of information. If the BNP were to be banned and its support therefore to disappear at the electoral level, this information would be lost to the system, easing the pressure on the establishment parties to formulate a real response to Islamization, which I fervently hope they will eventually do. Lamenting the advances of nativist groups at this level would be like lamenting a rise in the price in oil when demand grows more quickly than supply. That said, given my beliefs about the gap between the true ideological commitments of the BNP leadership and the motivations of those who vote for it, it is impossible for me to avoid the conclusion that it would be a disaster for it to obtain real power.''
but then I am not British; I don't know the full situation as he might.
I encourage you to read the whole piece.
From where I sit, the BNP are the only party speaking up for the historic British people; without them or someone like them, there would be no hope, as the two major parties are as anti-British and pro-multiculturalist as our two useless parties are.
My doubts about the BNP come from the opposite direction: it seems I detect some efforts to be 'inclusive' and to thus play to the politically correct and the timid. I think this is always a bad move. Being 'inclusive' to outsiders or attempting to prove one's lack of 'bigotry' is always a victory for political correctness. I believe that a sharp correction to the right is absolutely essential to counter the many decades of leftward movement. The effort to prove one's lack of 'xenophobia' or 'racism' is exactly what has put the West at the edge of the precipice. More of the same will push us over the edge.
I fear that ingrained vestiges of political correctness on the right will doom any nativist efforts to resist what is happening. We have been taught for so long that ethnocentrism and nativism are evil, and that we must lean over backwards to expunge any hint of these things from ourselves and our political organizations. This merely helps our foes and may ultimately doom the West, if it continues.
Labels: Cultural Marxism, Democracy, Ethnocentrism, Islam, Mass Immigration, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Tribalism, Tyranny