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Samizdata quote of the day – Eurovision Song Contest and Israel edition “Israel placed fifth this year, due to low support in the jury voting. But it came second to Croatia in the popular vote. Though Ireland’s entrant, a “nonbinary” satanist named Bambie Thug, had called for Israel’s expulsion, Irish voters put Israel in second place. Israel topped the popular vote in Britain, Spain, Germany, France, Finland, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal and Italy. Europeans may struggle to tell good tunes from bad, but they know the difference between good and evil.”
– Dominic Green, Wall Street Journal ($)
For more coverage on the rather satisfying result of this admittedly silly competition, see here.
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Thanks – Great article! I am linking to it instead of typing my own post to friends.
It’s all quotable:
Eurovision voting resembles EU voting. The voters send national representatives to the EU Parliament in Brussels, but the unelected European Commission overrules them. In Eurovision, half the points come from national telephone votes, half from unelected juries. Across the Continent, the nationalist right is leading the polls for June’s elections. The jurors of Brussels will try to overrule the voters, fearful of immigrant and Islamist violence, but the EU’s show can’t go on forever without the majority’s support.
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… a scenario which is also playing out in the USA, in its own way.
and:
During the final, protesters tried to storm the stadium while the audience booed Ms. Golan’s performance. But Europe’s silent majority gave her strong support. They also know what it’s like to be attacked by Islamists, demonized by leftist elites, and derided for defending their borders and their way of life.
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Indeed.
It is a silly contest – but it is revealing as it shows how the establishment (the “juries”) think. Ordinary people did not want the Swiss man in a dress to win – but the establishment did, so he was declared the winner. Much like the “election victory” of Mr Biden – the actual voters overruled by massive amounts of “mail-in ballots” under the control of the establishment.
Ordinary people allowed to vote – as long as how ordinary people vote does NOT determine the result. That is the “democracy” of the international establishment.
It is the same with Freedom of Speech – people are quite free to say such things as “I like pussy cats” or “my favourite colour is green” – but people are NOT allowed Freedom of Speech over serious matters, as that would be “Hate Speech” and get in the way of the long term plans to destroy historic Western nations.
The international establishment did not just wake up one morning and say “let us destroy Freedom of Speech – that would be fun!” – they had a serious reason for what they did, if people are not allowed to speak, to dissent, without risk of punishment (of being “cancelled”), then they can not organise to try and prevent their destruction, the destruction of Western societies.
“But a man in a dress saying he is a “they” (denying their individual existence – and denying objective reality) rather than a “he” is only a tiny part of that destruction of the West” – yes a very tiny part, a trivial matter, but it is part of it.
Well it’s hard not to chuckle at this:
If, in fact, Europeans know good from evil, it’s a recent development.
Would it be wrong of me to point out that Israel is no in Europe? So why are they in the Eurovision song contest? And why do we even have a Eurovision song contest? Perhaps because the poor Europeans wouldn’t have access to music were it not for this wonderful Intergovernmental Quango helping them out?
“Israel is not in Europe”
Neither are Armenia, Morocco, or Australia, all of whom have competed. It’s not something peculiar to Israel. Eurovision is not restricted to Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_in_the_Eurovision_Song_Contest
The last time I watched Eurovision was in 1998 when the Israeli tranny won. It was bad enough then.
It has something to do with membership in EBU, European Broadcasting Union. I think Israel should withdraw from this, they don’t need to enable unrepentant European Nazis and their Islamist pets. Israel is well able to host a similar song contest, and everyone should be able to compete, as long as they don’t belong to a hate group.
At May 13, 2024 at 8:10 pm, Ed Snider opined:
What a daft thing to say. The Enlightenment, which led to the creation of the U.S. among other civilized countries, emerged in Europe precisely because Europeans have long known the difference between good and evil. European countries like the Italian republics and the Kingdom of England, along with the Kingdom of Scotland and the Kingdom of France, and the Dutch republics, all created at various times the conditions for great progress to happen because they rejected evil. Progress doesn’t happen in backwards and evil places, if it happens it does because the peoples of those places have for a time created the conditions to allow flourishing of good ideas. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness didn’t spring forth in splendid isolation on July the 4th, 1776. It was a reassertion of ancient liberties. The ideas found in the American declaration of independence were from the wellsprings of European civilization, from Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome and then-modern England (ironically, but truly), from the Italian Republics and the English Republic, and the memory of the horrors of the English Civil War, from ideas of the Dutch Republic, and of course formatively from the Magna Carta of the Kingdom of England, and from the contemporaneous intellectual flourishing of the Scottish Enlightenment. In all of those places you find rejection of tyranny in favour of natural rights, rejection of princes and potentates for the commonwealth of man, rejection of dictates and pressures to conform in favour of freedom. It is well known that whisky and freedom oft gang together.
If Europe today is a place where freedom is giving way to tyranny, so too is America unfortunately. And if you live in one of the other products of European colonization that had the fortune to inherit a solid start in the form of the English bill of rights, the magna carta, trial by jury and a society that was used to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, then perhaps you live in Canada or Australia who are also sadly going wildly astray in recent years. However the evil times that we are coming to will not last forever, and I hope that in the future some folk can learn a balanced idea of where the ancient freedoms we once enjoyed predominantly originated not only the American exceptionalism that is seemingly exclusively taught in American schools. They then may have a decent chance of recreating a free society.
I will also take this opportunity to remind everyone that Britain acted decisively to end slavery not only within our borders but around the world and used our influence, wealth and a whole lot of blood, sweat and toil to do it. That is possibly the most transformative act against evil in the history of the world.
Just wondering out loud, if all EU Member States competed under the EU flag, there’d only be one song for the soi-disant ‘Europe’ instead of 27, and the whole thing could be wrapped up much sooner, with the EU not being allowed to vote for itself, they’d be up against, say, Iceland, Bosnia-H, Norway, (North) Macedonia, Andorra, Serbia, Albania and Montenegro. Sounds far more manageable and surely the EU would approve of no citizens actually having a vote in their own affairs.
@Alex
“Hoo-raa!”
Because I’m British, of course I mean that ironically. And because I’m a libertarian, because I know the history you mention too, and because I’m also an English patriot, unironically as well.
For the same reason Israel is in UEFA. In the qualifying for the 1958 FIFA World Cup, every Muslim nation Israel were drawn against in qualifying refused to play them. Israel would have qualified automatically, except that FIFA had a rule that except for the hosts and defending champion, you had to play at least one match to qualify, so they had to play a tie against a UEFA member (if memory serves, either Northern Ireland or Wales) and lost that.
The European Broadcasting Area is defined geographically, ‘cos radio waves don’t respect political borders. It’s anything North of 30degN, west of 40degE, and east of the mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Wonderful Alex, a breath of fresh air. Did you deliberately leave out the influence of Jewish and Christian ideas?
”Europeans may struggle to tell good tunes from bad, but they know the difference between good and evil.”
I respectfully suggest that they also know who they do and who they don’t like (and, off topic, based on votes for the UK entry although certain juries may be fans of cottaging the general public are not at all enthusiastic).
Anyway, the attached table of how individual nations, both juries and general public, voted makes interesting reading:-
https://eurovisionworld.com/eurovision/2024
Although the general public in more than 50% of the countries gave Israel the maximum 12 points by contrast the citizens of Croatia, Armenia, Serbia and Ukraine awarded just one point between the four of them. Their chosen juries were even less impressed with a total of zero points. Maybe they all just didn’t like the song?
In any event the Eurovision organisers were undoubtedly shitting bricks at the prospect of the 2025 event being held in Tel Aviv (with maybe half a dozen countries competing) and therefore not displeased by the votes of the national juries saving their collective bacon.
@Feral Lunch Lady
While I agree with the spirit of this comment, I strongly disagree with it in practical terms.
So long as Israel continues to produce singers as gutsy as Miss Golan, they should compete so that the majority (as indicated by the popular vote) can call out the entitled, virtue-signalling, closet anti-semites who wouldn’t recognise genocide if it bit them on the *rse, or indeed, if it wiped out everyone in their society who didn’t march in lock-step with them.
To further emphasise the fact that it has little to do with the actual song and everything to do with the country singing it, in a departure from previous years when the general public could only vote after all the songs had been performed, this year the phone lines opened just as the first performer was nervously clearing zir throat. A songfest equivalent of the British (and I’m sure many other countries) tradition of voting for a pig as long as it’s wearing the correct coloured rosette.
The ESC started as an scientific and engineering endeavour. Back in the 1950s a Europe wide simultaneous television broadcast was a groundbreaking technical achievement. I still enjoy it, the sheer lunacy and eccentricity of it appeals to me for some strange reason. Over the decades there has also been the occasional memorable song.
This post has really cheered me up this morning. The alphabet people can wave their flag but sorry mate yours is just too offensive.
Yes – people do know the difference between moral good and moral evil, and they can choose between them (the doctrines, on this matter, of Hobbes, Hume and Bentham are false).
And the international elite choose evil (they choose it – they could choose otherwise) knowing that it is evil, and choosing evil because-it-is-evil.
Happy Israeli Independence Day.
“Uncle Sam” did NOT “create Israel” – there was no military aid in 1948, the Jews bought arms (now difficult for Israeli civilians to do – which is one of the reasons more Jews died on October 7th 2023) than on any day since the Holocaust) and fought hard – because they knew they would be exterminated if they lost.
Sorry to be OT but I thought that fellow Samis would find this interesting.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/05/14/climate-professor-thinks-we-should-cull-the-human-population-to-reach-emissions-targets/#more-73340
Remember Magna Carta! Did she die in vain?
It looks like she may have.
One could have guessed that Israel would top the popular vote in “Holland”, from the success of Geert Wilders at the last Dutch national elections. But it’s nice to hear about the other countries. (Especially Germany & France, which the ADL estimated have a much larger number of antisemites than Britain & Italy.)
@John Tee
Neither are Armenia, Morocco, or Australia, all of whom have competed.
IKR?
@jgh
The European Broadcasting Area is defined geographically, ‘cos radio waves don’t respect political borders.
Radio waves actually are beginning to respect geographical borders. The idea of blasting high energy signals out into the ether is something we had to do due to the limits of technology, however it is extremely wasteful of a scarce resource. So the huge trend in radio is away from that. Either by encasing the signal in a wire with cable TV and similar, or putting it in small low powered cells, or using things like phased array antenna to narrow the amount of space the radio wave occupies.
These things can be controlled within geographical boundaries, perhaps with a bit of leak at the actual borders.
I guess my point is that the whole notion of broadcast TV and the accompanying broadcast authorities and quangos are a huge white elephant. Technology allows for more and more things to become private, local and subject to individual choice which is why the massive growth of government over the past 100 years is so very repugnant. The Eurovision song contest is a weird anachronism, no doubt paid for by tax payers and people forced to pay license fees under threat of prison time.
I has gone downhill since Abba won a hundred years ago. I’d like to say that this incident was Eurovision’s Waterloo, however, I doubt that is true.
And they couldn’t even get the lyrics right.
Wey hey! At Waterloo, Napoleon did retreat.
Yeah yeah. On Bellarophon three weeks later he did surrender.
Snorri – as you know there is a terrible struggle going on in the Netherlands, I hope things turn out for the best.
Stonyground – of course they want a dramatically lower population, their policies (for example promoting the break up of the family – and encouraging endless casual sex without future generations of people being produced) have long been designed with this goal in mind – C02 is just the latest excuse.
As for killing existing people – H.G. Wells wanted a “painless gas” (how kind of him – sarcasm alert) to get rid of populations he did not like, and George Bernard Shaw wanted everyone to be forced to justify their existence to a government board – with those the board judged to have failed, to-be-executed.
To-be-executed.
They were not “joking”, as idiot apolgists claim, the Fabians were EVIL – just as the modern international elite are EVIL.
This is the basic point that a lot of conservatives still seem unable to to grasp – we are not dealing with misguided people with good intentions, someone like (for example)_Saul Alinsky in Chicago (who inspired Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and even, indirectly, Paul VI – who did not understand Saul Alinsky, any more than Jacuues Maritain really understood his “friend” Saul Alinsky) did NOT have good intentions.
If one reads a work such as “Rules for Radicals” one does not find any rational argument or evidence that Collectivist policies will lead to a better standard of life for ordinary people – that is NOT what Saul Alinsky, or the left generally, were (or are) about.
They want people to be slaves of the Collective – or (like the person you cite) they want ordinary people to be dead.
Paul Marks:
This is the basic point that a lot of conservatives still seem unable to to grasp – we are not dealing with misguided people with good intentions
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Not exactly true.
It is more useful to compare the Left to those crabs that attach bits of coral to their shells as camouflage… The hard, power-hungry Marxist core collects around itself various dreamers and good-hearted fools who fall for the “social justice” cover story… And others who are drawn to the glamour of the rebel/revolutionary pose… Or just want to be popular and with-it.
Consider the large number of Jews in the last century who called themselves “liberals”, who saw the Left’s earlier positions on race and 1st wave feminism as the modern incarnations of “liberal humanist” Jewish ideas.
Not evil – but these fools enabled the moral deconstruction we now see.
Many of these folks are deeply shocked that their grandchildren turned out to be postmodern intersectional nihilists.
Old sad joke:
“Rabbi! I’ve always been a proud Jew… I remember so fondly my grandma lighting Sabbath candles, my grandfather blessing the wine and bread…but now my grandchildren are marrying gentiles! We gave them everything! Where did we go wrong!”
“Did you give them a grandma who lit candles, and a grandpa who knew the blessings?”
BenDavid – yes indeed Sir.
And perhaps I am too hard on the good-hearted fools – but, like yourself, I see where their good intentions lead, and how they have allowed themselves to be manipulated by the power-hungry (both Marxist and non Marxist).