We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
As an anti-statist, free market capitalist libertarian, I am often ‘accused’ of being on the political right. Yet as so many libertarians will tell you, many of my ilk refuse to accept the statist left/right axis as having any relevance to us. One only has to listen to a pro-immigration libertarian such as myself and then listen to most Tories in the UK/Republicans in the USA to see an issue which shows the differences.
We often find that neo-conservatives agree with libertarian antipathy to Marxist and Keynesian state centred economics and the wealth & liberty destroying regulatory state. Yet to think that advocating laissez-faire makes us ‘right wing’ is to misunderstand just how large the cultural and philosophical gulf is between most true (i.e. capitalist) libertarians and most conservatives. Conservatives are about conserving, they are about continuity above all else… however libertarians are about liberty, conserving it where it can be found but also tearing down whatever impeeds it, regardless of whose sacred cows get gored in the process. We may wish to conserve what is objectively good but otherwise we are as Promethean as the Marxist left.
In the Daily Telegraph article Britain risks huge influx of east Europe migrants by Philip Johnston, Home Affairs Editor, we see loaded language even in the title: ‘risk’. How about calling the article:
‘Britain opens doors to those formerly oppressed by Communism’
or maybe:
‘Britain steals a march on Continental Europe in grab for east European labour’
But no. The thrust of the article is that only the wonderful Tories want to ‘protect us’ from the Eastern Hordes.
Ministers said that allowing migrant workers from these countries into Britain at the earliest opportunity would help the economy. But Oliver Letwin, the shadow home secretary, challenged the Government to explain why it had not made use of the transitional arrangements. “We live in a small and crowded island,” he said. “Why does the Government consider it appropriate not to have transitional controls when other EU countries have imposed them.”
Well it just so happens that the Telegraph article I am quoting from actually links to an article here on Samizdata.net from the Telegraph external links sidebar (cheers, guys!) called Why do people think that Britain is overcrowded? It really is not overcrowded and the idea we are somehow not going to be able to assimilate other Europeans is laughable. Oliver Letwin does not really care about providing the British economy with high initiative eastern European workers and entrepreneurs, he is just concerned with playing politics and attacking anything the dismal Blair government does, even when it is entirely correct.
Perhaps this is my own personal jaundice and nothing else but I seem to have found myself in an ‘issue-trough’. I think this is what journalists call a ‘slow news day’. I can seem to find anything worthy of truly sinking my teeth into and grinding away. I do detect the onset of a series of ‘Great World-Shaking Events’ in the offing but they’re teetering back-and-forth on the precipice so tantalisingly that they’re starting to lull me into a hypnotic trance.
Well, something will come along pretty soon, I’ll bet. But, in the meantime, I shall use this hiatus in the global narrative to indulge in a bit of mischief-making.
It’s becoming quite clear that the EU is adopting an increasingly anti-American character. As illustrated in this post from Perry a while back, the EU elites are actively marketing their project as being the plausible rival to the American ‘hyperpower’, the antidote to US-style ‘cowboy’ diplomacy and vigourous (which they see as ‘virulent’) market ideology.
The grumbling and foot-dragging from various European governments over US plans for Saddam Hussein are a symptom of this background antipathy not the cause of it. It’s already causing a rift in relations and that rift is only going to get worse. Having given up trying to forge an identity for their superstate, the EU elite are having to rely increasingly on an anti-identity and that anti-identity is Anti-American.
So, what could the US government do about this? Work round it? Fight against it? Try to mollify it? Options which are all expensive, difficult and far from guaranteed to succeed.
No, I can think of a better solution: open up the US to immigration from Europe.
It’s a policy that would have nothing but nothing but benefits for the US:
- It would attract vast numbers of bright, young, well-educated Europeans grown weary of the burden of their increasingly fossilised economies. They would sprout wings and fly in the more entrepreneurial environment of the USA.
- European immigrants would be able to assimilate seamlessly in a heartbeat and, more importantly, they would want to.
- It’s a no-cost policy. Not a penny of US taxpayers money would have to be spent.
- It’s a politically winning policy. The American left could hardly object unless they want to stand on an anti-immigration platform; the isolationist right won’t mind because, let’s face it, the overwhelming majority of Europeans are white, and libertarians cannot possibly have any cause for complaint. Thus all potential political opposition within the US is neutralised.
- America gets progressively richer and more dynamic while Europe’s enarques are left lording it over a constituency consisting of pensioners, cretins and Al-Qaeda sleepers.
So, if the EUnuchs get too far up George Bush’s nose, may I suggest that a heady revenge can be obtained by a mere stroke of the Presidential pen by which he could consign the aforesaid EUnuchs to a slow, lingering, humiliating death. It really is a win-win-win-win policy. In fact, from an American point of view, I cannot think of a downside.
Oh yes, sorry, I can think of a downside; some Americans living in the vicinity of any Ports of Entry risk being trampled to death in the rush.
So. Okay. Like right now, for example, the Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all: “What about the strain on our resources?” But it’s like, when I had this garden party for my father’s birthday, right, I said R.S.V.P. because it was a sit-down dinner. But people came that, like, did not R.S.V.P. So I was like totally buggin’. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, squish in extra place settings, but by the end of the day it was like, the more the merrier. And so, if the government can just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Haitians. And in conclusion may I please remind you that it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty. [Applause] Thank you very much.
-Cher (Alicia Silverstone) in the movie Clueless
I don’t like “Yes you did” “No I didn’t” conversations in newsgroups so I’m wary of doing so here. Brian refers to the horrors faced by mixed-married couples in Yugoslavia. I think we’ll find that these are precisely the people who didn’t start looking for an ethnic or religious war with their neighbours. Oscar Wilde would no doubt have suggested that matrimonial strife was amply sufficient. Alexander the Great tried to solve racial problems by ordering his officers to marry Persians. Napoleon suggested that if the French all married blacks then the issue would be ended once and for all. Both were poisoned for their pains. Next time someone compares these tyrants to Hitler I’ll dig out the reference.
As for my awkward posts: suck eggs Brian! and let’s look forward to Zinedine Zidane (a Moslem who’s idea of terror is firing footballs into a goal full of terrified innocent defenders) versus Nicky Butt in the second round, assuming Cameroon don’t cripple half the England team in the ‘friendly’.
Brian Micklethwait should try applying an individualist approach to the problem of Islamic fundamentalism. Is Mohammed Al Fayed a viper in the nest of free-market(ish) Europe? Perhaps, but he’s not a threat to Western Civilization because of his religious beliefs. The Turkish kebab shop in Tachbrook Street (now demolished by predatory developers  ) with the Galatasaray and Arsenal football fan may be included on census forms as a “non-white European” to terrify drawing room society, but I was less frightened of his political opinions than I am by some of Sean Gabb’s, and his cooking was a lot less threatening than Brian’s.
Go to an Italian restaurant in central London. Many of the raven haired waitresses are no more Italian than I am, and no more Catholic than Osama bin Laden. They’re wine drinking economic migrants from Kosovo whose parents had “Moslem” on their communist era identity cards. Sure, add them up and you get 40 per cent of the population of a grotty flat in Finchley or Norwood. The other 60 per cent are as likely to be Serbs, Croats or Slovaks all with their nominal ethnic or religious hatreds. How come they aren’t slaughtering each other in Ballards Lane or West Norwood High Street? As individuals, Moslems are no worse than Glaswegians. It’s when a mob looking for a fight at a football match run into you that they’re a nuisance.
The problem isn’t immigration… Its immigration and a welfare state. We have to choose one or the other. I make no bones in saying that the NHS, comprehensive education, state benefits, council housing, free abortions (no charge to the user) all have to go. All that immigration has done is accelarate the process of creating an underclass. If we’d had the welfare state in the seventeenth century the Jews and Dutch would have a reputation in Britain for being alcoholics, single mothers, violent etc. No doubt Jewish fundamentalist groups attacking the decadence of the West would be scaring Gabb and Micklethwait with demands for shop closures on Saturday, modest clothing for women and demands for apologies for anti-semitic persecutions. Instead some of them went into banking.
Launching an air strikes on Harrods and rounding up all Moslem males over the age of five for an unstated purpose is not the answer, it seems more likely to worsen matters and destroy the moral meaning of the West. Actually the libertarians got it right who said that the best way to prevent another Oklahoma bombing would be to get Clinton out of the White House, and a relatively non-interventionist government in her place.
The best way to improve race relations in the UK is for the state to get out of welfare and stop appearing to spend white taxpayers money on layabouts who happen to be black. The state should however either get out of policing, or vigourously enforce laws against violent crime and crimes against property. Islamic sentences for property crimes would seem to me preferable to the present lunacy in Western Europe.
Fundamentalist terrorism is not uniquely Islamic. The shopkeeping Moslems are as afraid of a nuke in London as anyone, they are also pretty worried that they might become scapegoats for Brian’s fears. War on Moslems because of Bin Laden is like having a war on Californian hippies because of Charles Manson.
In the early hours of Sunday morning (the 19th – last night as I finish this) I watched BBC News 24, although following that link will probably only get you the operation as a whole, not the story I’m about to refer to. Which was: John Simpson talking, in Holland, with a Dutch journalist, who interestingly had just returned to Holland after spending a decade in South Africa. I didn’t see the beginning of the interview and I therefore didn’t catch the name of the Dutchman. Peter something, I think. It was on just before 3 am.
For the time being anyway, democracy is doing its job. There was mass unease in Holland, and the ballot boxes had registered it. In Pim Fortuyn, Holland – indeed I would go further and say Europe – found a major politician who knew how to talk about “multiculturalism” and all that, in a way that does justice to the fears that regular people (by which I mean non-Muslim people) have about it, without being blatantly racist in the manner of the BNP (British National Party), or, if I understand him and his followers correctly, Jean Marie Le Pen.
Simpson mentioned that interview he did with Fortuyn a few days before Fortuyn’s death. He recalled that when he had said that something that Fortuyn had said to him “sounded very like racism”, Fortuyn had got extremely angry, for this was a distinction Fortuyn (unlike Simpson, it would seem) well understood. Islam is not a race, and being hostile to it, as Fortuyn was (and as I – a convinced atheist – also am), is not racism. Islam is a body of ideas, predominantly false and – insofar as Islam has anything to say about the likes of me – aggressively nasty ideas, in my opinion. It is a culture, political as well as religious. I congratulate John Simpson for reporting his conversation with Fortuyn accurately. His own opinions about “racism” are silly, and hit the nail squarely in its surrounding timber. But when Fortuyn told him this he reported Fortuyn’s reaction for the important fact that it is.
Maybe Fortuyn’s answer – stop immigration now – isn’t yet very appealing, and may never be workable in a way that is remotely humane, but his question cannot now be funked. There is, as Fortuyn insisted, a clash of civilisations going on within Europe, never mind between Europe and other places. Muslims now make up forty per cent of the population of the big cities of Holland, and will soon be in a majority in them, or so the Dutch journalist said. If some Muslims then start taking the idea of majority rule seriously, the bad times could begin. At that point democracy may stop working, and become the justification of and provocation of major conflict instead of the means of avoiding it.
For the last few decades, the idea in the West has been that the severe conflicts that have erupted between Islam and the West over the centuries could be made to go away by us all pretending that there was no problem and refusing to talk or even think about it. Since 9-11, and now since the shooting star that was Pim Fortuyn’s political career, that notion is in the process of being junked. Ever since 9-11, the internet has pulsated with infidels analysing Islam, explaining its doctrines, describing its foundation ideas, reflecting upon the career and example of Mohammed himself (not good news in my opinion), gasping with horror at the virulently anti-Semitic grotesqueries of the Middle Eastern press.
Personally I am extremely pessimistic, and see no lower limit to how nasty things may eventually get, down to and including genocide. I further believe that looking such horrors in the face makes them less likely, rather than more likely, to happen, which is why I believe in trading these moderately insulting insults now.
What makes the situation particularly horrible is that there is little that “individual decent Muslims”, of which there are huge numbers, can do about all this. Islam itself, as Fortuyn insisted, is the problem. Individual Muslims, however genuinely decent, and however desperate they may be to escape from the economic stagnation and political nastiness of the Mulsim heartlands and hence desperate to live instead in a country like Holland, are nevertheless the carriers of an inherently antagonistic culture. They seem doomed eventually to destroy the very havens they are now moving to in such numbers, by their very presence in such numbers. Until Islam undergoes fundamental changes, there’ll always be trouble between it and its neighbours.
Or, of course, Western culture could be profoundly altered. We could accept Islam. Let me give a passing nod to political correctness, and temper the savageries in the previous paragraphs by saying that there is, of course, a quite different way of alluding to these same notions. Instead of Islam being blamed, it could equally well be said that we infidels are the basic cause of all the trouble between ourselves and Islam, because of our stubborn refusal to submit to it. Either way, as far as the formerly or still Christian West is concerned, we are talking about two fundamentalisms here, not just one. Something very big has to give between us and Islam if these two now utterly distinct and antagonistic cultures are ever to learn to get along in a state of prolonged and intermingled amicability.
This is the problem that Holland is now squaring up to. Should Muslim newcomers be forced to learn the Dutch language? Should there be some kind of oath of allegiance which all, of all cultures, must swear? Or what?
All this stuff should be and will be of intense interest to us in Britain, because our demographics are heading in a similar direction.
Tolerate v.tr. 1 allow the existence or occurrence of without authoritative interference. 2 leave unmolested 3 endure or permit, esp. with forbearance
Accept v.tr. 3 regard favourably; treat as welcome 4 a believe, receive (an opinion, explanation etc.) as adequate or valid. b be prepared to subscribe to (a belief, philosophy etc.)
The assassination of Dutch cultural nationalist Pim Fortuyn has raised many questions about the nature of tolerance and liberty. Orrin Judd suggests that Fortuyn was not a libertarian as some have claimed and in this I agree. Fortuyn was indeed informed by some very libertarian principles but sought to apply them within a statist context that placed him at least somewhat within the stranger wing of a Euro-conservative fringe with more than a few touches of the ‘classical liberal’ about him.
In truth Fortuyn defied easy categorisation but in some ways his views on immigration were just dealing with the inherent contradictions between distributive statism’s prerequisite of homogeneity (the need for a quantifiable unit called ‘citizen’) and the dis-incentivization for cultural assimilation and social integration inherent in welfare statism. Much of what he said has also been said by Ilana Mercer (who is a top flight pukka libertarian with whom I just happen to disagree regarding the implications of immigration in a free society) as well as many cultural conservatives.
Orrin Judd takes the view that the essence of Fortuyn was just about advocating sexual licence (a word loaded with political meanings I reject) whilst himself not tolerating religious based distaste in others for Fortuyn’s overt homosexuality. Yet having read some of what he said and trying to filter out the political populist crap that all democratic political figures encode their words with, it seems clear to me that what Fortuyn really opposed was the fact within the Muslim community in the Netherlands were elements who wanted to translate their lack of acceptance into intolerance.
Fortuyn was not insisting Muslims or for than matter Christians like Orrin Judd accept, which is to say agree with his sexual predilections, just that they tolerate them and for him this was non-negotiable (and I happen to think he was correct in that view). And therein lies the fatal flaw of all democratic state centred societies rather than classical liberal civil societies with the state just as ‘nightwatchman’… if political manipulation of the state gives the more cohesive sections of that society the ability to back their lack of acceptance with force (i.e. to make the laws of the state reflect their views), then a legitimate lack of acceptance becomes illegitimate intolerance. Fortuyn feared that in a democratic state, a cohesive alien Muslim cultural bloc lead by people for whom society and state were logically one and the same, would start to move the state away from being the guarantor of tolerance for people largely not accepted: of which homosexuals are a classical example being as they are both ubiquitous and always a minority.
Tolerance however is not a value neutral condition, far from it in fact. To tolerate something is to not accept it. One does not tolerate one’s friends, one accepts them. I tolerate people listening to heavy metal music even though I think most of it is drivel, for the simple reason it is none of my damn business what other people listen to. It only becomes my business if they are playing it loudly in the next house at four o’clock in the morning but then it is not a matter of ‘tolerance’ any more, it is a matter of unwillingly imposed real cost regardless of the type of music involved. I tolerate smokers because if they want to kill themselves and smell like ashtrays, that is their business not mine. I do not accept it as a good idea however. What is wrong is to use the violence of the state to prevent people doing what they want to themselves and others of a like mind and there is the problem with some conservative Christians and more or less all radical Muslims: they want to criminalise what they see as sin rather than criminalise the violation of the objective rights of others. Opposing that is not intolerance because tolerance does not mean tolerating intolerance, any more than it is tolerance to tolerate anything which actively seeks to violate your self-ownership. If you believe homosexuality (or eating pork or looking at pictures of naked women) is a sin, well fine, that is up to you, feel free to not engage in gay sex (or pork dinners or Playboy). If that then induces you to vote for people who will use the violence of the state (laws) to discriminate against homosexuals (or ban pork butchers and Playboy magazine), well that is not fine.
Just remember that what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. In a democratic state, no one group ever monopolizes power for ever. If the people who, on the basis of religious non-acceptance, want to legally disadvantage (i.e. no longer tolerate) certain people because of their sexual peccadillos… and then use their transitory political clout to actualise that, well don’t be too surprised if one day the object of that discrimination tries to use the state to legally discriminate against the religions which are seen as the source of the intolerance towards them. In a democratic state, any large cohesive voting bloc with intolerant rather than just non-accepting views is a potential threat. The more truly democratic a system is, the greater such threats are.
The BBC‘s John Simpson was shown on last night’s TV news interviewing the late Pim Fortuyn. Fortuyn said something along the lines of: “we have guests who are trying to take over the house.” Said Simpson: “That sounds very racist to me.” Replied Fortuyn: “Give me a definition of racist.” At which point the BBC report ended.
I sympathise with Fortuyn on this. If ever there was a word that can mean several different things within the same conversation, or even the same paragraph or sentence, that word is “racist”. David Carr and I had an exchange on Samizdata not long ago in which I said that the number of definitions of “multiculturalism” was two, while he replied that it was zero. Number of definitions of “racist”? Well, let’s see how many we can think of.
- Believing that races differ from each other.
- Believing that races differ from each other in important ways, like intelligence or physical abilities.
- Believing that races differ from each other in important ways, like intelligence or physical abilities, for genetic reasons rather than because of cultural or environmental circumstances.
- Believing that because of such differences, members of different races should have different political rights.
- Believing that a particular group of people who are racially different are also different in their culture.
- Believing that a particular group of people who are racially different are also different in their culture, for genetic rather than historically contingent reasons.
- Not liking the different culture associated with a different race and wanting that culture changed, opposed, corrected, or confronted.
- Because of believing that a member of a different race is likely to be different in a particular way, believing that this particular member of the different race is himself likely to be different in this particular way.
- Believing that this particular member of a different race is different in this way, even when you have got to know him individually and know that it isn’t so.
- Believing that all the members of a particular race should be murdered.
I haven’t polished this list, or tried to make it exhaustive. I’ve listed ten different meanings, but if you took as long doing your version of the list as I have just taken doing mine, it would probably contain a different number of items, and if you took as long as you needed to get yours exactly right, your list would probably be a lot longer (as would mine). But my point here is not to start a “how many meanings and exactly what are they?” debate.
My point is merely the simpler one that according to some definitions of “racist” almost everybody is racist, while according to other definitions, hardly anyone is.
Who does not believe, for example, that races differ from one another? Who but a total ignoramus about the world and its ways sincerely believes that there is no such thing as a cultural difference associated with any racial difference, anywhere?
But, so frightened are we of being called racist that we would sooner deny everything on the list, whoever compiled it, rather than risk being thus labelled. The few brave or perhaps brutal souls who are prepared to admit to “racism”, that is, who tick yes to some of the items on the list, even as they strenuously deny others, demonstrate with their fate why denying everything makes sense.
Yet for the majority of thinking people to be denying everything is also very dangerous, because important truths get neglected in public debate, such as the exact truth about Muslim culture, and the exact things that ought, and ought not, to be done about this truth.
Equally dangerous is that if, under challenge from someone like Mr. Le Pen, any of the items on the list are admitted through clenched teeth to be true, it is then liable to be assumed that therefore the entire racist agenda, racist by any definition, has been acknowledged to be correct, when in fact defensive lines can be dug in between different items, and should be. It is assumed, that is to say, that the one huge defensive line must be drawn this side of “racism” by any definition. But this is to concede that no worthwhile lines can or should be drawn between different items on the list.
It is this latter syndrome that the nastier racists stand ready to exploit, as soon as any of their more obviously true complaints are conceded to have merit. I can see why lots of the people who read things like Samizdata want even quite nasty racists to do well electorally. Few of such readers are themselves nasty racists, but they want some of the more obvious truths about racial matters to be faced rather than funked in public debate. The trouble is that the nasty racists won’t stop there. They’ll use what power they are able to garner with the truth to spread untruths and to do truly nasty things.
For further intelligent thoughts on this subject, see Natalie Solent‘s posting last night. As for what she posted in the morning, let me just say: my sentiments exactly. Thanks Natalie.
I would like to thank Daniel Antal for his lucid and informative observations about Pim Fortuyn and for illustrating the many reasons why it is wrong for me to bracket him in with Jean-Marie Le Pen.
I have no doubt that there are qualitative and ideological differences between all of the so-called ‘far-right’ politicians in Europe but it does occur to me that they have all, to a greater or lesser degree, ridden to power on the back of the anti-immigration tiger. That they are all perceived as racists is due to the fact that the current political-media establishment is unable to grasp the difference between ‘racist’ and ‘culturalist’.
Well, when he is not a fascist… Daniel Antal, a Hungarian economist currently visiting London, takes the view that David Carr was wrong to tar Dutchman Pim Fortuyn with the same brush as the neo-fascist Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen
I have to disagree with some of David Carr‘s analysis in What say ye, Fukuyama? regarding the extreme nationalist ‘right-wing’ successes in Europe recently. I do not think Jean-Marie Le Pen is comparable with Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands or the Schiller Partei in the German local elections in the Bundeslander. I think these parties have challenged a profoundly decadent strain of European cultural relativism. I have not completely read through through Schiller’s or Fortuyn’s manifestos yet, but my first impression is that Dutchman Pim Fortuyn is the first populist leader who started a strong movement to defend the current level of liberties and democratic institutions rather than being behind some atavistic fascist movement.
Fortuyn is not racist: he discriminates on the issue of Dutch language skills as a measure of cultural integration. The Muslim immigrants refuse to learn Dutch and are thus seen as being ‘unavailable for democratic dialogue’. Fortuyn says that he wishes a new anti-discrimination paragraph in the Dutch constitution because he wants to criticize the Islamic immigrants who refuse to accept western norms of human rights. He says that inciting violence against these groups should be banned, but not merely criticizing them. He is a sociology professor and proud to be gay, and he says he is quite thankful for the Dutch Liberal democracy for the fact that he need not hide away all his life because of his sexual orientation. He accuses the non-Dutch speaking immigrants of hatred towards homosexuals, extreme oppression of women, sexism and such things, thus he should not be lumped in with the ‘far right’ like Le Pen.
The shocked left-wing, whose ‘multi-cultural’ agenda is facing its strongest challenge in the last three decades, accuses Fortuyn of discrimination when he says things like: “Islam is a backward religion, whose followers see us Westerners as an inferior race.” And he questions the first article of the Dutch constitution, which bans discrimination. “If it means that people are no longer allowed to make discriminatory remarks, I’d say this is not good. Let people say what they want. However, there is another important line to be drawn: one should never incite violence.” In short, Fortuyn is advocating an approach not unlike the US First Amendment.
Also not indicative of neo-fascist views is Fortuyn’s anti-militarism: he wants to have a Dutch navy only, but no army or airforce. He wants a smaller government, a cause close to the heart of any libertarian. He wants to change the Dutch election system, in which currently people vote for party lists and thus the political elite never changes and there is no personal responsibility in the system. This is a far from undemocratic or unreasonable aim. Fortuyn attacks segregation in the cities, denouncing it as ‘city apartheid’. However, he gives a ‘right wing’ answer to the problem: Dutch education without cultural relativism. He says that refugee welfare benefits should be contingent on Dutch schooling: only those should receive Dutch education, learn the Dutch language and some aspects of the achievements of the broader Dutch culture will qualify for welfare benefits. This is not exclusion: this is a new and ‘politically incorrect’ way of rejecting the exclusion of ghettoization.
I do not want to praise Fortuyn too much before knowing more about his manifesto. But I believe that people who are proud of their liberties and the culture from which they sprang should listen to him carefully. Analyse the left wing media with caution and bemused skepticism: they are not beyond outright lying when a populist politician like Fortuyn seems to be not just challenging the unquestioned world view of the left from an unexpected direction but doing it successfully.
Daniel Antal (London/Budapest)
Tony Millard writes in from Tuscany in Italy to express his views on Le Pen, multi-culturalism and over-enthusiastic well-diggers
I am now a regular reader of the Samizdata (or the Lib Sam as I like to call it) and enjoy most of the articles. What I find depressing at the moment is that as I raise my gun to shoot a topical bunny I see hundreds more all around me – Le Pen, the UK Budget, Italian politics, NHS, multi-clutch-and-graspism, blah blah. It has taken a while to start shooting them down as I currently have a well-digger on my farm here in Tuscany. Charming chap, though he has a habit of trying to reach magma in order to enhance revenues (they are paid by the foot) so I’m keeping an eye, as they say.
Whilst overseeing the keen well-digger, I heard a number of things on Radio 4 yesterday that disturbed me, to say the least. Most of the afternoon’s bulletins were taken up with a slanted condemnation of Le Pen by an almost constant referral to the “thousands” or, in extremis, “tens of thousands” of protesters on the street. Not one single reference was made to the fact that he did after all garner the votes to oust Jospin from the fight. Odder still was my recollection that by comparison last year’s Countryside Alliance pro-hunting march in London was supposed to have produced in excess of half a million people on the streets. However, the general reporting slant was decidedly unfavourable. Hmm.
I am not exactly sure of Monsieur Le Pen’s precise political destination and would probably find it on the crude side. I am not a supporter by any stretch of the imagination, so no skin off my nose, if he doesn’t win the presidential seat. What I do find shocking though is the childishly obvious suppression of any voice that dissents from the European melting pot theory, and the assumption that any anti-immigration stance implies a shaved head and a tattooed forearm.
The problem does not reside in the shape (or lack) of a haircut or the pattern of a tattoo. We are wasting time arguing about the mode of travelling when the real need is to decide on the destination. What happens if we ‘prove’ that the mass immigration of 40 years ago to date was ‘wrong’? The argument is sterile (and therefore futile) as the situation is with us and cannot be humanely reversed. We might as well argue and debate a meritocracy based on the colour of people’s eyes. On the basis that someone born in Europe is an honorary Caucasian, most of the population is on a level. What we must therefore focus on is the evils of the tiered language and cultural gap currently opening and prompted by the left. Le Pen is gaining support from the Franco-Jewish population (courtesy of Radio 4 news) and why? Buried at around 3.30pm in the yesterday’s programme was a possible answer – they are apparently regular victims of Muslim violence in the Parisian suburbs and have had enough. Allowing a separate ‘nation’ to grow within the EU is societal suicide. I am, in accordance perhaps with the previous Lib Sam articles (see related article links below), a fervent supporter of anti-multiculturalism in its accepted sense – that is I believe it’s a load of rubbish and smacks of left wing appeasement and head-buried-in-the-sand denial of reality.
Realpolitik is that we like our neighbours to be like us and we all, whatever our racial origin, need to face up to this reality. Incidentally, my oldest friend is from Sri Lanka. Unless you saw him, you would not know. He is an Englishman, like Nathan Rothschild aspired to be and in the end considered himself to be. Perhaps, more needs to be done to foster the true concept of Englishness or Frenchness or whatever, and less time should be spent on muddled searches a là: Mr Blair for a sort of crypto-Britishness that is designed to please and appease rather than make sense of cultural and racial diversity.
Tony Millard (Tuscany, Italy)
Jean-Marie Le Pen is not President of France and is unlikely to become President of France but I don’t think that it is an exaggeration to say that his success in the first round of the presidential elections is already sending shockwaves across Europe and maybe the wider world.
Why? Anyone who has been following events in Europe over recent months cannot help but have noticed Nationalist politicians of the Le Pen variety notching up stunning electoral success all over the continent, including Holland, Denmark, Austria and Italy. The success of Le Pen, in this context, is not so much an eruption as part of an ongoing pattern. Something is radically changing in Europe and the ruling jacobin elites have no idea how to respond much less stop it. They are worried. They are right to be.
The settlement of post-war Europe was a centrist consensus built around an all-encompassing welfare state where high taxes and generous benefits were seen as a type of ‘enlightened’ self-interest; people happily paid into the system to help their less fortunate neighbours and friends in the sure and certain knowledge that the system would care equally well for them as and when the time came. But, whatever we say about the inquities of tribalism, the fact appears that those same people were less enthusiatic about providing such bounty to strangers from faraway lands with whom they felt no affinity or kinship. Is this an admission of racism? Well, yes, it most certainly is. Why try to invent anaesthetising euphamisms for it?
The massive third world immigration into Europe in the last twenty years or so has seen the system stretched to breaking point resulting in a surly, resentful and thoroughly balkanised polity that is starting to express itself through people like Le Pen in France and Pym Forytun in Holland. The ossified Eurocrats are starting to reap what they have so blithely sewn.
But it isn’t just the Napoleonic welfare-state which is to blame. The post-war political class was shot through with post-colonial guilt and haunted by the horrors of Nazi Germany to the extent where they saw ‘European culture’ as something which had to be curbed, repressed and, preferably, phased out. Europeans were required to demonstrate open-ended ‘tolerance’ while immigrant communities were required to do quite the opposite. It was an appallingly misconceived and damaging bit of social engineering that may yet have terrible reprecussions.
There are those who will point to 9/11 as a turning point but that would not be entirely true. These tensions have been fomenting in Europe for years. What may be true is that both 9/11 and the Israel-Palestinian conflict have further radicalised the large Muslim minorities in much of Europe, particularly in France and Holland. How many Europeans have visualised, rightly or wrongly, homicide bombers devastating the pavement cafes of Paris or Amsterdam and shuddered? Failing to find comfort in their mealy-mouthed and morally relative incumbents, have they turned to other sources for their salvation?
Of course, this could all just be a protest vote rather than a long-term trend but the former sometimes has a knack of of morphing into the latter even if nobody meant it to. I have a sense that the world is shifting in tectonic ways and moving the plates of history around under our feet.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
