Identity Fascism (4)

The concept of intelligentsia must not be confused with the notion of intellectuals. Its members thought of themselves as united by something more than mere interests in ideas; they conceived of themselves as being a dedicated order, almost a secular priesthood....
Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers. New York: Viking Press; 1978, p. 117.

Sean Penn, Brittani Spheres, Barbara Streisand, these are our public intellectuals, the West's intelligentsia today. They announce positions on this or that issue du jour, and our media lap it up and splash it around like it's manna from Heaven. Our public policy ideas come from idiots in Hollywood, and they are valued highly as oracular. They are special, not only in the minds of the public but in their own minds they are especially special, so special that they must continue to tell the world their every opinion. Why do we read their nonsense? Because they are geniuses.

Yes, we have a special definition for this special type of genius. We use the term in the sense of 19th century Romance, genius as Artist, Alone, Sensitive, Tormented, Tragic, and oh so Creative! Michael Jackson summed it up nicely when he responded to criticism from The National Enquirer:

"Am I not human? Can you not see I bleed?"

Deep.

At least part of the problem we in the West face today regarding the mire of multi-culturalism and its attendant micro-cultural miasmas of identity fascism comes from Romance philosophy, from the elevation in the public mind of the Artist as Thinker who Feels! Deeply! and Significantly!

God help us. We live in the age of the triumph of the will of Susan Sarandon.

Romanticism is a direct reaction against the Enlightenment, and they are those whom Isaiah Berlin refers to as the Counter-Enlightenment, the ones today we term Left dhimmi fascists. The line is continuous from the 1790s to today. We live with the dregs of Romanticism. In our look at identity fascism below for the sake of brevity we will quote from Ivan T. Berend, History Derailed to give a thumbnail version of Romanticism. It is our hope that such a view will begin to show why we in the West are saddled with such idiots in the public domain and why such idiots are lauded for their idiocies. We must be idiots.

Our public intelligentsia are not intellectuals, they are "Romantic Figures!" Not today our figures Byron, Frankenstein, Damien, or Sam Spade: Today's Romantic Figure! is a Hollywood idiot such as Michael Moore. Romance has degenerated. It wasn't always this bad. It started long long ago in a galaxy far far away...

In the West, romanticism was "an intellectual reaction against the eighteenth century ideals of order, discipline, and reason" (Eugene Weber 1960, 13) and an effort to liberate sentiment, emotion, instinct, and even the subconscious.... German romantics revolted more against reason and the ideas of the French Revolution (Reiss 1995, 3)....
Romanticism, thus, was a war against the rules of convention and existing reality. (Berend: p42.)

That is Romanticism at a personal level. One might stomach the insipid individual mooning about holding a rose in his tubercular- pale hand but it goes far further and becomes sinister and eventually murderous as we follow Romance into the pit of nationalist xenophobia and pathological racism. Berend writes that Romanticism left the man and became an expression of Man as part of Nation. Schiller writes, if memory serves, that man is a fragment of the whole, meaning that man is not anything in and of himself, not the end entire of himself as Kant has it, but only identifiable as being in conjunction with others and as opposed to others. No one can be without the boundary of not being, i.e. not being someone or something else. The suffering and tragic poet, the genius alone and tormented, becomes the symbol of the nation, the symbol of the people, the movie star of the time, one whose words are deeply meaningful to the mass of inarticulate and anonymous. But the poet, the Artist!, he who must die a tragic and operetta death, embodies the national soul, and he is not a real person at all. No one in the Romantic version of reality is real unless he is part of the whole that gives him identity, that gives him meaning and soul and validity and authenticity as a being of the identifiable group.

This idea of nation and identity becomes important in the reaction against the French Revolution in Europe and the invasion of German areas during the Napoleonic era: German principalities were not Germany, and politically they were not a nation, not a unity in anything but-- at best-- the German language. And there were the French on the borders of Germanic lands, invading, bringing with them all those horrible fancy French ideas of Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood, the horrors of reason, rationality, and logic. The German people needed a rallying point from which to unite against the invasion of Modernity, and they chose Romance.

Romanticism arrived as a militant national idea, expanding the notions of freedom and individualism beyond the realm of the person. [ed. emphasis.] It was transformed into a matter that required the mobilization of the nation. The romantic cult of genius shifted from the sphere of art to that of politics.... (Berend: p. 43.)

To be not French the Germans had to be something else, and they chose to be German. Whereas the French Revolution valued the Enlightenment, the Germans reacted against it and valued the Counter-Enlightenment. The Germans were not alone. Many joined the old guard French establishment in resisting and sabotaging the Revolution. Because of nearly endless westward migration America had no such counter-revolution, nor did America have centuries of entrenched feudalist tradition to wipe out. France and Europe generally had, and have, the problem of feudalism to this day trying to re-establish itself as the dominant force of society. the Germans in particular, became Romantic to the extreme. And one of the first things that made them German was the German language. Next was the German Soil. Eventually, the German Blood. And then the German Soul, embodied in the leader, similar to today's idiot movie star.

It's no good being different from the French unless that difference makes one better than the French.

The "West was declining because of its skepticism, its rationalism, its materialism... the Germans... should be viewed as a fresh and youthful nation... barbarous indeed, but full of violent energy," (Berlin 1978, 120; Berend: p 43.)

But, not only was Germany a new and violently dynamic nation it was also rooted in the heroic past:

Romantic individualism and Weltschmretz [world pain, oh, the pain of it all,] and passion were connected here with national cataclysm and national oppression. Romantic longing conjured up a glorious past and a victorious future, stirring desire to rejuvenate the ailing nation.

We have here a group of people , the Germans, very much like today's Muslims, who are faced with a superior culture and superior military; and the Germans, as the Muslims today, were in reaction against it, longing for the time when there was no such threat to the old order. Being no nation, no way of identifying themselves as alike to others of their group, they fastened onto, in the case of Germans, the language, and in the case of the barbarians of our time, the Muslims, Islam. The group identity of Romance fascism, we hope, is becoming clear.

Like today's Muslims, the Germans had to create an identify different from the others around them in order to be something recognizable to themselves. If I am infinite then I am nothing because I am everything. If there is something other than me, then I know that I am specifically me. So it is with the created German nation: each person who could be German was so by not being other. He had an identity. But his identity would be meaningless if he were the only German in existence. He could only be German if there are other Germans with whom to share his identity, to give him boundaries within the Germanness of being. Every man is a fragment of the whole, and as a fragment he is nothing. Only the whole has integrity. Thus, only the German nation has integrity, and only by belonging to the nation can the German find his personal identity.

To be German meant to be other, and to be German meant to be better than them, the French, for example. But what is German? It had to be invented. The past had to be great. It had to be the time of Heroes and mythological beings who the Germans were descended from till today, in their current lowly state they could again, if they united, become. they used to be great, and now, brought low, they were invaded. The solution would be to return to the idealize past to become what they were then. To be good,they had to be pure. For the Germans it meant ridding the land of those who were pretend Germans, the Jews, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the ill, the old, the foreign. For today's Muslim, add the same groups and give them perhaps different names, kafirs, Jews, polytheists, apostates, and so on.

The intelligentsia of the group, not the intellectuals exactly but the ones who know, the gnostic and feeling top dogs of the nation would lead the nation to glory. They, being the mind of the body politic, would lead the group to the pure and heroic past. Perhaps, as Herder wished, each national group would lead its own to its own glories. But only as individual groups of peoples. Each peoples a collection of fragments of the whole, meaningless in themselves, inferior to the whole. Only the nation was important, and only the part of the nation that were authentic had a place in that whole. The others had to be excluded for the health of the Nation. The group had an identity.

The geniuses who came up with this crap were smart people, not all of them evil. The idea of group identity lives with us today in the concepts of multi-culturalism and identity politics. Those who speak for it are the intelligentsia of the West, the idiot movie stars we we read about in the tabloids. And they are the professors of anthropology, such as the one we will read here in our next installment on Identity Fascism.

More on Sean Penn and the idiocies of Hollywood Gods below:

http://rightwingdeathbogan.blogspot.com/

Identity Fascism (3) Irrationalism

How do we know our world and our lives? Do we look at the world as controlled by spirits and gods and daemons and sprites? Do we look at our lives as controlled by the stars or by the whims of tarot cards? Those who do are Irrationalists. Their epistemological base is founded on intuition, on feeling, on hunches, on things that come in the night we know not from where. Irrationalism is a philosophical position, and more and more it is the ruling ethos of our time in the Modern West. It's got us as a culture into the state we're in today, which we'll look at below.

"Irrationalists deny that the world can be comprehended by conceptual thought, and often see the human mind as determined by unconscious forces."
http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/encyclopaedia/hutchinson/m0006607.html


Yes, Freud and Jung are Irrationalists. Freud tries to take a rational approach to understanding the irrational man, but still, at heart, Man is irrational. There are more things in Heaven and on Earth, dear reader, than are dreamed of in your philosophies.

There are mysteries, things known only to those with deep mystical vision, et cetera. One must be in touch with the spirit of the universe, and so on. Insh'allah. Shit happens.

Our Western world turned from that unexamined life of the mind roughly 500 years ago. Some Westerners said that there are other approaches to knowing about the world than simple faith and superstition. We gave up the Edenic life of acceptance of the nature of things as being outside the control of Man, and we took it upon ourselves to ask what we can do to make nature conform to our wishes and will. Easily found and read surveys by Daniel Boorstin and Jacques Barzun, as examples, lay out 500 years of extraordinary creativity and invention and triumph of reason over passive acceptance of the way it is. These past 500 years show a course of Human thought unknown before then, and also one that cuts us off from the main body of our own history and existence as Humans before and elsewhere. We in the Modern West are revolutionaries, utterly different from those who came before us, totally different from those who live outside our world of Modernity, and increasingly divided from our own who refuse to live in our Modernity. The high price Man pays for Modernity is too great for many even among us who benefit from it throughout the whole course of their lives. Modernity isn't free: it demands a sacrifice that some, and even many in our lands, and nearly all outside, are not willing to pay; and many if not most are willing to die to destroy our Modernity, and to kill themselves in doing so. For some, for many, maybe for most, this 500 year turn from the course of prior Human history is an outrage that must stop, must be destroyed, and must be forgotten. Those who struggle to destroy Modernity are Irrationalists.

Smart people can be Irrationalists. Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, and C.G. Jung are intellectual Irrationalists. The list of names is very long, and we accept those people as mentors at great risk to our Modernity. They have a clear philosophical position that is in clear conflict with Modernity. Irrationalism is a clear philosophical approach to deciding what we know and deciding that what we know is true. It's the opposite of science for a start. Irrationalism is a way of knowing the world not by observation followed by testing our observations against other observable tests but by observing the world and then coming up with answers about the nature of things based on feelings, intuitions, great leaps of flowing genius, just plain knowing that what is is the way it is because it's naturally right. Irrationalism tells us that the world is thus because we can sense it in our bones or know it through our vibrations or that Mother Nature tells us things are as they are. We can read of the "collective unconsciousness" or the power of myth or intuitive knowledge and the superiority of native spiritual healing rituals and think it's meaningful and pretty, and we can like Carl Jung, and we can draw mandalas on our table cloths and wear love beads, and we can get in touch with our feelings and baby-sit our inner child; and there's no great harm in it until we realize we're naively sliding into fascism. We find ourselves valuing the irrational over the real. We find ourselves saying things about our own lives that are in conflict with our own lives, and we don't know where we went wrong. Is it our lives that are wrong? our societies? our ways of life? Or is it that our approach to epistemology is all askew? Maybe we've half understood some very smart people who have lead us to the brink of ruin, to the edge of the abyss into which we are seemingly ready to throw ourselves because we have lost sight of the value of our Modernity, thinking that we've gone wrong by losing touch with the authentic values of life, that we've become materialists, consumers, philistines, and valueless people with a destructive mode of production, i.e. capitalism, rapacious and world destroying. We've listened to the siren songs of the smartest of the smart Irrationalists till we are at the rim of ruin. It's time to look clearly at where we stand.

Teleology is the study of the purpose of Man. Many people refuse the idea that Man has any purpose at all. Some argue that Man's purpose is up to God, not Man. Here we state clearly and unapologetically that Man is the centre of the universe, and Man is the purpose of Man's life as a species. The proper study of Mankind is Man, to quote Alexander Pope. He does not write that the proper study of Man is Mankind. No, the proper study of all men is Man, the person. The Irrationalist does not follow us there. For the Irrationalist the proper study of Man is the spirit world, and the epistemology of spirit is intuition and superstition. the Irrationalist rejects Reason as the road to knowledge, and more, he hates Reason with a passionate intensity, even a murderous intensity. The proper study of Man is not Man for the Irrationalist, it is to study the unknowable to know not Man but Mystery. Man is not important to the Irrationalist, only is Mankind, the collective Mankind, the Spirit of Mankind, and so on. It is there that we find our Modernity threatened from within by the naive fascism of our own Irrationalists in the shopping malls and discotheques and offices of the West. We have given the lead to the Irrationalists to take us into the dark past of Human epistemology, to the days before Modernity when men were farm animals and the priests of unreason ruled by whim and privilege and title. We have given up our cause of Modernity in many cases to those who would rule by fiat, by reference to the stars, to the Oneness of Mother Nature, to the Myth of the collective Will. The purpose of Man is to obey his masters and the state they rule.

In 1789 we chopped off a lot of empty heads to rid Western Europe of the feudalists and reactionaries who ruled the people like gods herding sheep. Since then and to this our own time, the old guard has scratched and scrambled to regain their past and lost positions of rulership. we are silently and slowly and unknowingly giving back our freedom as individual men and women to the neo-feudalists as we let go of Reason in favor of Irrationality. Our revolutions of Modernity are crumbling before our eyes, and most of us only know consciously that something, some unidentifiable something is wrong. The Eurocrats and the entitled and the priests are sneaking back into places and palaces of power, and we don't see them clearly, they coming into our lives like rats sneaking into our rooms in the dark of night. We've lost sight of the purpose of Man. Our collective gaze is turned to the aether of Mysteries and Spirit. We are the children, we are the children of the world. We are family. We are all one. We are screwed.

When we view our Modernity as corrupted by Irrationalism things make some sense as they are. Rather than prize our accomplishments as the fruit of intellectual endeavour and Reason rationally pursued logically, we toss it out in fits of nervousness and insecurity, thinking we've lost our roots, lost touch with Nature, lost our authenticity as beings in the world. We look to primitives and barbarians as more valid then we, and we elevate them in our own minds as somehow better than us because of their naturalness, their closeness to Nature, their innate spirituality. We who live in concrete jungles, who eat chemicals, who dress in plastic, who are cut off from the real meaning of life by television, we long for authentic life the way the barbarians seem to live it, so romantically, so heroically. And because we see ourselves as rapacious in our pursuit of oil and capital, we see ourselves as destructive of the Real people who are not tied to the work-a-day routine of paper and machines. We see ourselves as petty and trivial compared to the heroism of the noble savage. We see our speeding bombers destroying villages that have sustained simple-living people for generations untold, and we feel that we have violated something almost
--even-- scared. We tell ourselves we are not murderers who kill for the sake of plastic goods. We say to ourselves that we do not wage war for the sake of profits. We say we are wrong, and that we, as individuals, object; and that because our nations wage these campaigns against the primitives, it must be our system that is at fault and not us. We rebel against our nations and thereby against our Modernity in favour of sentimentality and philobarbarism. We long to compromise, to make peace with the primitives, to share our wealth with them, our goods, our Modernity, and to do so we will also cut back on our Modernity so we do not continue to displease them. And the less satisfied with our efforts they are the more we blame ourselves for not doing enough to accommodate them. We think we have gone totally wrong, and that somehow the primitives are right to hate us and to kill us. We are unnatural, and they should hate us for who we are and what we do to them. We, having lost touch with Nature, have lost our Humanity, and they, who still have theirs, are better than we. Our horoscopes tell us so. Our gurus tell us so. Our spiritual counsellors tell us so, and our gut reactions and intuitions tell us so. We should be more Natural. Then things will be better. We are all One. We are Mankind.

When we examine the universe and life within we need a position from which to make our decisions about the nature of things. Science, we are told, is simply one form of grand narrative, one concocted by dead white men 500 years ago that lead to capitalism and atomic individualism, an approach that really only benefits the few who are rich, some others to a lesser extent who are the dupes of the rich, and at the expense of the masses of the world's people who live in harmony with Nature until we invade and kill them in our pursuit of oil and profits. Science is a bad thing. A good thing is returning to our roots as natural beings at one with the ecosystem. A good thing is relying on the wisdom of Earth Mothers who know things from the female spirit. Who sense deeply the mystical union of all souls in touch with the higher powers of the universe. These things are known, not by the dead hand of science but through intuition and spiritual knowledge, through feeling, which cannot come to those cut off from Nature in cities and in the midst of machines and artificial corporate environments. To know is to move back to nature, to become one with the Spirit of the Universe as it is, to become again authentic, though never so much as those who are indigenous to The Land. No, we who are cut off from The Land and who are on The Land as interlopers cannot ever be truly valid on the land because our roots are elsewhere, in Europe, and we have there a ground of existence soaked in innocent blood of the victims of our heartless aggressions for thousands of years of Christianity. Our best hope is to be second fiddlers to the best of the authentic people who are still Natural and Pure. Oh, we learn so much from them, like herbal remedies and spiritual growth.

We have to take a position to know where we stand so we can face reality accordingly. We can choose to be Irrationalists, and we can choose not even to think about it but to merely accept what others around have chosen of accepted from above or outside or somewhere. But we do take a position of epistemological bias. We value intuition or we value Reason. In today's world we accept submission to Islam, the religion of peace, a beautiful religion, a religion misunderstood by most, a world religion of great importance, or we are Islamophobic and racist, cut off even further from nature and submission to the will of Allah, the Will of the Universe, the Natural, the primitive and the vital, we who walk on plastic soles and concrete paths.

We can long for the Romance of prior times, for the Golden Age before the capitalists came to wreck everything, and before the cold and heartless scientists came to rip the soul out of the Human experience; or we can look at the world as Rational, at men as self-actual and the ground of their own existence, as Feuerbach writes, a the proper subject of the study of Mankind. We can look at Man as the ultimate good in the universe, and we can look at Man as something to know by logic, by empirical study, by reason and rationality, and we can look at science as the highest plane of our thoughts on the discoveries of the way things are likely to be. We can look at science as reason, and we can look at the scientist who has no intuition as being little more than a clerk. Yes, there is a necessary place for imagination and intuition, and even for irrationality in science. But we, if we choose to continue our progress into the revolutions of Modernity, cannot lapse into primitivism and nostalgia and Irrationality as valid epistemology. Nor can we compromise with irrationalality. Irrationalism is not the path of Modernity. Nor is the piling up of cold fact upon cold fact science. Rationalism is more, not even a synthesis of Reason and intuition but a creative science of the study of Man.

We in the Modern West are at war with the primitives of the world and those who would draw us back to the pre-industrial world, into a new feudalism, into a new Dark Age of life as farm animals and savages living in fear of spirits and under the heel of fascist Islam. Our enemies are Muslims and Left dhimmi fascists. They would raise up the irrational and tear down the Reason of our lives. We must understand that if we do not value our outlook on reality as Rationalists, as people dedicated to the pursuit of universal Truth, and as men and women who are willing to fight and die for the continued progress of our revolutions that we will whither and die and return to the cycles of nature, living from generation to generation with nothing more than the faint hope of Heaven to console us. That, if it is the future of Man, is not worth living for. We have allowed the primitives and their friends, our own intelligentsia, to concoct a dream value of the right life of Man, and we have accepted it at face value. It's time for us to look at that face of our received reality and to decide whether we wish to slap it silly and choose something better than the grinning death-mask of dhimmitude and barbarism we see before us.

Are we to continue our Modernity? Are we to surrender to the barbarians and live like farm animals? It will depend on our epistemological postion. Who will control our lives? If we allow the Irrationalists to do so, they will control us through spritis and the will of Allah, infantalized and tormented by ghosts and daemons. If we chose to control our own destinies as free and individual men and women then we had better shake of the idiocies of Romantic sentimentalism and the ingantalization of our nations and people. We either live like adults responsible for our own destinies or we live like beasts for the sake of our rulers's pleasures. What kind of people are we?

In coming posts on identity we'll look more at this irrationalist approach to life and Man. Next we hope to look at the atavistic approach to Identity. In coming posts further we will continue this theme by looking at more on ecology fascism.

Dutch Rocks

I don't know beans about rocks. I don't know much about science. But, this post comes to us from the efforts of a geology professor at University ofWisconsin, Green Bay, and I'm impressed. The following excerpt is on topic, but we'll look at other things in coming days that are less topical from this author, and in many ways more interesting. This is a first glimpse of the works of Steven Dutch.

***

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pscindx.htm

Volume III: Islamic Fascism

But a new magnet for intellectuals is emerging: radical Islam. It's not that intellectuals are likely to embrace radical Islam themselves anytime soon - for one thing, the requirement of believing in God would deter many of them. But what they can do is obstruct efforts to combat radical Islam and terrorism, undermine support for Israel, stress the "legitimate grievances" of radical Islamists, and lend moral support to the "legitimacy" of radical Islamic movements.

This is a phenomenon at first glance so baffling it cries out for analysis. Both fascism and Marxism censored, harassed, and imprisoned intellectuals, but they also gave lip service to intellectualism. Russia and Germany both had great universities. Both fascism and Marxism appealed to their respective nations' cultural heritage in support of their ideologies. Our mental picture of fascism is now mostly colored by images of Nazi book burnings and bad art, but before World War II fascism was quite successful at passing itself off as a blend of socialism and nationalism.

Marxism in particular offered an intellectual framework that many intellectuals bought into. Marxism presented a facade of support for culture and science, paid intellectuals highly and created huge academic institutions. True, intellectuals in the Soviet Union were well paid mostly in comparison to the general poverty of everyone else rather than in real terms, the economy was so decrepit that the money couldn't purchase much of value, and a lot of the academic institutions were second-rate in comparison to any American community college, but at least the Soviet Union could put forth an illusion of fostering intellectual inquiry. (I once sent a letter to the Soviet Embassy inquiring about films on the Soviet space program. This was after word-processors had become universal in American offices. I got a reply - a couple of years later - typed on a manual machine that looked as if Lenin had typed his high school term papers on it, and the embassy was still using the same ribbon.) But radical Islam is openly hostile to intellectual inquiry. Iran under the Ayatollahs banned music. In the United States, the work Piss Christ ignited a fierce debate - not over whether such work should be allowed, but whether it should be publicly supported. In parts of the Islamic world, dissident works invite not debate over public funding, but death sentences. Fascism and Marxism at least offered the illusion that they supported intellectual inquiry. Radical Islam offers intellectuals nothing. So why aren't Western intellectuals whole-heartedly behind any and all diplomatic and military attempts to combat radical Islam?

Hatred of Democracy

When we try to discover what fascism, Marxism, and radical Islam have in common, the field shrinks to a single common theme: hatred of democracy. Despite all the calls for "Power to the People" from radical intellectuals, the reality is that no societies have ever empowered so many people to such a degree as Western democracies.

The problem is that people in democratic societies usually end up using that empowerment to make choices that intellectuals hate. How can we reconcile the fact that the masses, whom intellectuals profess to support, keep making wrong choices? I've got it - they've been duped somehow. Those aren't their real values; they've been brainwashed into a "false consciousness" by society. If they were completely free to choose, they'd make the "right" choices. But of course we have to eliminate all the distractions that interfere with the process: no moral or religious indoctrination, no advertising or superficial amusements, no status symbols, no politically incorrect humor. "False consciousness" is a perfect way of professing support for the masses while simultaneously depriving them of any power to choose; a device for being an elitist while pretending not to be.

The post-Soviet version of "false consciousness" is "internalized oppression." If you're a woman who opposes abortion, a black with middle class values, or a person with a lousy job who nevertheless believes in hard work, those aren't your real values. You've internalized the values of the white male power elite and allowed yourself to become their tool. You don't really know what you believe. When the enlightened elite want your opinion, they'll tell you what it is.

Democracy confronts radical intellectuals with a threat more dangerous than any censor, secret police, or religious fatwa - irrelevance. An intellectual working on behalf of a totalitarian regime can imagine himself as an agent of sweeping social change. If he ends up in a labor camp or facing a firing squad he can at least console himself that his work was so seminal that the only way the regime could cope with it was to silence him. He made a difference. A radical intellectual in a democracy, on the other hand, finds the vast majority ignoring him. They never heard of him. His most outrageous works go unknown or are the butt of jokes. He watches in impotent rage as the masses ignore art films and go to summer blockbusters. Worse yet, things that are noticed get co-opted, watered down and trivialized. Works that are supposed to shake the System to the core are bought by fat cats to decorate corporate headquarters or stashed in bank vaults as investments. Fashions that scream defiance of everything the society holds dear end up being the next generation's Trick or Treat costumes. Protest songs end up being played on elevators twenty years later.

We can see the hatred of democracy most clearly in criticisms of the economic world. We hear that the automobile creates pollution and urban sprawl. Megastores undercut local merchants and produce armies of low-paid workers. Agribusiness drives family farms out of business and puts agriculture in the hands of corporations. (Actually what is driving the family farm out of business is the family farm - people in Western societies have been moving off farms for the last 800 years.) Aquaculture results in marine pollution and mixing of cultivated fish with wild populations. Every single innovation that provides the masses with more freedom or material goods is a target for intellectual disdain. You'd think people who are concerned with poverty would be delighted by more abundant and cheaper consumer goods, or that people who are concerned about hunger would be thrilled with cheap, abundant food. Exactly the opposite. You'd think that people who are concerned about the dichotomy between rich and poor countries would be ecstatic over globalization and the spread of jobs to underdeveloped countries. Surely people who are concerned about peace would glory in seeing the leaders of the industrialized world meet to discuss how to better integrate their economies. Yet every economic summit is besieged by protestors railing against globalization.

U.N. Eurocrats Make Web Grab (update)

There is a war of minds between those who would live as individuals and those who would treat the world's people as farm animals. It it at times a tough call which side to support. When Europeans bring down the hell of Left dhimmi fascism and then pay to import fascist Islam to ruin the continent, one wonders if they deserve to be free at all; whether they are organically equipped to survive independently of their welfare states.

This war of minds between the individualists and the communitarians is a real war in which people are killed: riding subway trains to work in Madrid and London, sitting at work in American offices, going to school in Russia, and so on. Muslims are responsible for the actual murders, but behind them are European politicians who pay for the jihad, give it aid and comfort, who assist in the murder of civilians by protecting and nurturing Islam in European states and by protecting and promoting it world-wide. Chirac lies and commuters die.

These are the same people who want to take control of the Internet because they fear American hegemony and discrimination against "others" and inequity in Internet accessibility, and so on. These are the same men and women who are complicit in the murder of their own people who now want to control even further the lives of the infantalized dhimmi populations under their control.

Below we have two pieces from a Canadian newspaper on the European attempt to control the world's access to information.
***

Peter Foster
Financial Post
Wednesday, November 16, 2005

The first question one feels compelled to ask about this week's World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis is why the 14,000-plus delegates couldn't have got together online.

Silly question, of course. If there's one thing UN bureaucrats like even more than hypocritical posturing on behalf of the poor and dispossessed, it's racking up frequent flier points.

The summit was originally intended to address the "digital divide," a bogus concept based on the unavoidable fact that every time a new technology is developed not everybody immediately has it. Thus the wonders of the Internet suddenly become a cause for fretting on behalf of the "information have-nots."

Such hand-wringing tends to go hand in hand with bashing the biggest "have," and sure enough the United States has come under assault for efficiently overseeing the running of the system. How dare they!

A California-based organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was created by the U.S. Commerce Department in 1998 to administer the master list of Web addresses, which are assigned by ICANN-accredited companies. ICANN manages top-level domains such as .com and .org, as well as country-specific domains, such as .ca. Countries already have control over what goes on in their national Internet space, but apparently some are after something a little more Orwellian.

A group of the world's most repressive regimes, including China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Cuba, wants the UN to take over from ICANN. Disgracefully, the EU recently threw its weight behind this initiative. Canada appears -- thank heavens -- firmly, or at least provisionally, behind the current arrangement.

The United States has been utterly opposed to this attempted power grab. The notion that the Internet would be more safely administered by the kind of guys who hijacked the UN Human Rights Commission is little less than ludicrous. Just how ludicrous has become obvious from the actions of the summit's host.

Tunisia is reckoned to be one of the more "enlightened" North African regimes, but it severely restricts media freedom, spies on cyber-cafes and blocks Web sites. This week in Tunis a French journalist who had been reporting on Tunisian government repression was beaten up and stabbed, allegedly by state goons. Although one must sympathize with his plight, there is a certain rich irony in his nationality. When French President Jacques Chirac visited Tunis two years ago, he congratulated the country's astonishingly popular President Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali (who regularly pulls in 99% of the vote) and declared, "The most important human rights are to eat, receive medical care and education and have a place to live." Fidel couldn't have said it better: You're being gagged for your own good!

A couple of weeks ago, UN Secretary-General Kofi "oil-for-food" Annan declared in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post that there had been "misinformation" about UN designs on the Internet. He claimed that the UN only wanted to "ensure the Internet's global reach." But has any technology ever spread faster and with more dramatic impact? Mr. Annan noted how important the Internet had been "for people trapped under repressive governments." But then how could he support any attempt by China, Cuba and Iran to control it?

Eventually, Mr. Annan got around to suggesting that "many" were claiming that the U.S. authority over the Internet should be "shared with the international community." However, beyond this usual collectivist UN bafflegab, he also suggested, "What we are seeing is the beginning of a dialogue between two different cultures: the nongovernmental Internet community, with its traditions of informal, bottom-up decision making, and the more formal, structured world of governments and intergovernmental organizations."

This seemingly bland statement was every bit as chilling as any direct attempt to control the Internet. By "nongovernmental Internet community" did Mr. Annan mean the kind of people who used the Internet to organize the recent riots in France, or who use it to co-ordinate the rock-throwing that now routinely accompanies every meeting of international leaders? More basically, the Internet is merely a communications tool, not an agency of political legitimacy. Nobody ever elected any "nongovernmental Internet community."

In fact, the "nongovernmental Internet community" to which Mr. Annan referred is a deliberately seeded and funded web of NGOs who broadly oppose demonic "globalization" and support UN interventionism. They are dragons' teeth sown by the likes of Canada's former UN-meister Maurice Strong to create "calls to action" to which the UN can then "respond."

The whole point about the Internet is that it is essentially -- and blissfully -- free of "governance." ICANN is an overwhelmingly technical organization. If the United States tries to interfere with its operations (as in fact it has done on the issue of pornography), we soon hear about it. That's because the United States, unlike Cuba, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, is a free society.

Other countries are quite capable of balkanizing the operations of the Internet in retaliation for the U.S.'s "non-cooperation," but in doing so they would make clear their real purpose: to control a medium that threatens their repressive regimes.

http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/financialpost/columnists/story.html
***

Compromise on overseeing Internet opens World Summit on Information Society

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) - A UN technology summit opened Wednesday after an 11th-hour agreement that leaves the United States with ultimate oversight of the main computers that direct the Internet's flow of information, commerce and dissent.

A lingering and vocal struggle over the Internet's plumbing and its addressing system has overshadowed the summit's original intent: to address ways to expand communications technologies to poorer parts of the world. Negotiators from more than 100 countries agreed late Tuesday to leave the United States in charge, through a quasi-independent body called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.

That averted a U.S.-EU showdown that threatened to derail the so-called World Summit on the Information Society.

"If the Internet had been developed in Australia, I don't think we would have had so much heat on this discussion," ICANN chief Paul Twomey, an Australian, remarked of the tension surrounding the U.S. control of the Internet.

The computers under dispute control Internet traffic by acting as its master directories so web browsers and e-mail programs can find other computers.

Although Pakistan and other countries sought a takeover of that system by an international body such as the United Nations, negotiators ultimately agreed, as time ran out, to create an open-ended international forum for raising important Internet issues. The forum, however, would have no binding authority.

The onus now lies with the developing world to bring in not just opinions, but investment to expand the Internet to their benefit, said U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Michael Gallagher.

David Gross, the U.S. State Department's top official on Internet policy, told reporters that despite the U.S. hand in ICANN, Internet governance was not the provenance of one specific country.

"The term . . . is quite broad. It is very inclusive," he said, trying to dismiss claims that the U.S. is holding onto its position as the arbiter of the Internet.

Negotiators had met since Sunday to reach a deal on a draft declaration that world leaders are expected to ratify before the three-day gathering ends Friday.

http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/
***

Find this page online at: http://www.news.vu/en/business/Tech/051108-Vanuatu-tech-news-Beware-a-Digital-Munich.shtml

Beware a 'Digital Munich' - Internet Under threat

By Norm Coleman
Posted Tuesday, November 8, 2005

It sounds like a Tom Clancy plot. An anonymous group of international technocrats holds secretive meetings in Geneva. Their cover story: devising a blueprint to help the developing world more fully participate in the digital revolution. Their real mission: strategizing to take over management of the Internet from the U.S. and enable the United Nations to dominate and politicize the World Wide Web. Does it sound too bizarre to be true? Regrettably, much of what emanates these days from the U.N. does.

The Internet faces a grave threat. We must defend it. We need to preserve this unprecedented communications and informational medium, which fosters freedom and enterprise. We can not allow the U.N. to control the Internet.

The threat is posed by the U.N.-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society taking place later this month in Tunisia. At the WSIS preparatory meeting weeks ago, it became apparent that the agenda had been transformed. Instead of discussing how to place $100 laptops in the hands of the world's children, the delegates schemed to transfer Internet control into the hands of intrigue-plagued bureaucracies.

The low point of that planning session was the European Union's shameful endorsement of a plan favored by China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Cuba that would terminate the historic U.S. role in Internet government oversight, relegate both private enterprise and non- governmental organizations to the sidelines, and place a U.N.- dominated group in charge of the Internet's operation and future. The EU's declaration was a "political coup," according to London's Guardian newspaper, which predicted that once the world's governments awarded themselves control of the Internet, the U.S. would be able to do little but acquiesce.

I disagree. Such acquiescence would amount to appeasement. We cannot allow Tunis to become a digital Munich.

There is no rational justification for politicizing Internet governance within a U.N. framework. The chairman of the WSIS Internet Governance Subcommittee himself recently affirmed that existing Internet governance arrangements "have worked effectively to make the Internet the highly robust, dynamic and geographically diverse medium it is today, with the private sector taking the lead in day-to-day operations, and with innovation and value creation at the edges."

Nor is there a rational basis for the anti-U.S. resentment driving the proposal. The history of the U.S. government's Internet involvement has been one of relinquishing control. Rooted in a Defense Department project of the 1960s, the Internet was transferred to civilian hands and then opened to commerce by the National Science Foundation in 1995. Three years later, the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers assumed governance responsibility under Department of Commerce oversight. Icann, with its international work force and active Governmental Advisory Committee, is scheduled to be fully privatized next year. Privatization, not politicization, is the right Internet governance regime.

We do not stand alone in our pursuit of that goal. The majority of European telecommunications companies have already dissented from the EU's Geneva announcement, with one executive pronouncing it "a U-turn by the European Union that was as unexpected as it was disturbing."

In addition to resentment of U.S. technological leadership, proponents of politicization are driven by fear -- of access to full and accurate information, and of the opportunity for legitimate political discourse and organization, provided by the Internet. Nations like China, which are behind the U.N. plan to take control, censor their citizens' Web sites, and monitor emails and chat rooms to stifle legitimate political dissent. U.N. control would shield this kind of activity from scrutiny and criticism.

The U.S. must do more to advance the values of an open Internet in our broader trade and diplomatic conversations. We cannot expect U.S. high-tech companies seeking business opportunities in growing markets to defy official policy; yet we cannot stand idly by as some governments seek to make the Internet an instrument of censorship and political suppression. To those nations that seek to wall off their populations from information and dialogue we must say, as Ronald Reagan said in Berlin, "Tear down this wall."

Allowing Internet governance to be politicized under U.N. auspices would raise a variety of dangers. First, it is wantonly irresponsible to tolerate any expansion of the U.N.'s portfolio before that abysmally managed and sometimes-corrupt institution undertakes sweeping, overdue reform. It would be equal folly to let Icann be displaced by the U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union, a regulatory redoubt for those state telephone monopolies most threatened by the voice over Internet protocol revolution.

Also, as we expand the global digital economy, the stability and reliability of the Internet becomes a matter of security. Technical minutiae have profound implications for competition and trade, democratization, free expression and access to information, privacy and intellectual-property protection.

Responding to the present danger, I have initiated a Sense of the Senate Resolution that supports the four governance principles articulated by the administration on June 30:

• Preservation of the security and stability of the Internet domain name and addressing system (DNS).

• Recognition of the legitimate interest of governments in managing their own country code top-level domains.

• Support for Icann as the appropriate technical manager of the Internet DNS.

• Participation in continuing dialogue on Internet governance, with continued support for market-based approaches toward, and private- sector leadership of, its further evolution.

I also intend to seek hearings in advance of the Tunis Summit to explore the implications of multinational politicization of Internet governance. While Tunis marks the end of the WSIS process, it is just the beginning of a long, multinational debate on the values that the Internet will incorporate and foster. Our responsibility is to safeguard the full potential of the new information society that the Internet has brought into being.

Mr. Coleman is a Republican senator from Minnesota.

***

The post below, written by Lisa, comes from jihadwatch:

When the EU threw its weight behind the China-Iran proposal, many in the EU were surprised by this action, as made clear in the linked article in the nodhimmitude blog. The EU bureaucracy, being a non-elected government, needs money to survive. The EU is seeking to impose a DNS resolution tax on Internet usage. More than censorship or balkanization, this tax would do more to kill the Internet than anything.

As Jay points out, "Feel free to use it." That is the beauty of the Internet to all except EU bureacrats, to whom nothing should be free, least of all, free from taxation.

For a pittance, less than a week's supply of grande lattes from Starbucks, anyone can own a piece of the DNS space, your very own domain name myownspace.com. For an month's supply of grande lattes, the domain owner can find space on a web server that hosts the domain for 1-3 years. With a little sweat equity and some rudimentary knowledge of HTML tags, anyone can have their own personal space on the Internet.

What the EU would like to do is tax the owner of myownspace.com each time someone's browser sends a DNS request to the DNS root servers to translate myownspace.com to the IP address (e.g., 012.345.678.901) of the space on the host web server. Imagine as a small retail business owner being charged a tax each time someone came into your store to browse and did not buy.

Many websites are informational only, such as this one. No revenue is generated from the visits, much to the chagrin of Mr. Spencer would no doubt be independently wealthy by now. If an information website is popular enough, ad space could be sold (which is also taxed as income) to help cover the DNS tax. But then informational sites contain a message. Even if such message is personally appealing to a prospective advertiser, perhaps many of that advertisers customers are not, leading to a loss of customers.

Since our visits to this site do not make Mr. Spencer independently wealthy, what then would be the effect of a DNS tax levied against him? Even a tax of one tenth of one United States penny could become an impossible financial burden for a website owner who does not generate any income from a highly successful website.

Thus, the website would be taken down. Hugh's excellent commentaries would be silenced.

Posted by: Lisa at November 19, 2005 05:36 PM

134 % For Math Egalite

(Angus Reid Global Scan) – Many adults in France trust their interior minister to deal with recent episodes of civil unrest, according to a poll by Ifop published in Le Journal du Dimanche. 53 per cent of respondents have confidence in Nicolas Sarkozy to deal with the situation.

Prime minister Dominique de Villepin is second with 52 per cent. French president Jacques Chirac is a distant third with 29 per cent.

On Nov. 8, Chirac authorized a state of emergency. On Nov. 13, Sarkozy said the government will maintain tough restrictions, saying, "The Migration Act allows expulsion. I am the interior minister and I implement the rules."

Yesterday in an address to the nation, Chirac said the unrest evidenced "a crisis of identity" in the country, adding, "France must instil values and hope in (all) sons and daughters of the Republic."

Polling Data

Do you have confidence in the following political leaders to deal with the civil unrest in the suburbs?
("Yes" answers listed)

Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy	53%
Prime minister Dominique de Villepin	52%
President Jacqes Chirac	29%

Source: Ifop / Le Journal du Dimanche
Methodology: Telephone interviews with 957 French adults, conducted on Nov. 9 and Nov. 10, 2005. No margin of error was provided.
http://www.angus-reid.com
***

Some here say we're deliberately misreading the poll results. No, friend. The numbers do not lie. The French government is that popular. Just ask them.

(I asked Henri Poincare. He told me. I'm not making it up. Honest.)

Coito Ergo $um

It pays to riot in Europe. It doesn't pay much, perhaps, but what the hey. No one is giving us any money, so perhaps we should burn cars and smash windows and burn schools, churches, and crippled ladies till they do. It works in France. And the U.S. tax payer is going to pitch in too, via the U.N. Hey, how do you like giving money to Muslim insurgents for rioting and beginning seriously to impose sharia on the whole of France? You get to help pay for it.

And look at how it'll be in the future, this Franco-stein Monster. We have below some thoughts on demographics and Islam in Europe. We get what we pay for, and this is some kind of bargain. First the dollars and sense.
***

PARIS, France (UPI) -- The European Union came to France`s aid with an immediate offer of $58 million, with another $1.16 billion to come, in order to help France`s cope with the social investments deemed necessary to tackle the anger of the boiling 'banlieus.'

The French government has already announced a package of social reforms designed to give career guidance and job placements to all the young unemployed below the age of 25 in the poorest suburbs. The government also plans tax breaks for companies who start branch offices or businesses in the poorest public housing districts where the bulk of two weeks of riots have taken place, with more than 8,000 vehicles torched and more than 3,000 arrests.

The government is also offering a $1,160 lump sum for jobless people who return to work, plus another $174 a month for a year. It has pledged to hire 5,000 extra teachers and teaching assistants and 10,000 scholarships to encourage those with high marks to stay in school, and will open 10 new boarding schools for those who want to leave their run-down housing estates to study.

With scattered incidents of rioting in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Holland, the EU is taking the view that the French riots, launched mainly by the teenage children of Arab and African immigrants is becoming a broader European problem. Brussels had its worst night over the weekend, with 42 vehicles torched.

[On the policeman being scapegoated:] 'This policeman is taking the blame for the over-abundant number of declarations from politicians who, after calling on the police`s help over the past two weeks, now want to buy back social peace ,' they said.

[T]he tough policing seems itself to have been part of the problem. Rioters have claimed they are 'an occupying army of whites' -- only 1 percent of police chiefs are of North African descent, compared with 10 percent of the population. The opposition Socialist Party has blamed Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy for scaling back the previous 'community policing' system in order to form special squads whose jobs is to retake control of housing estates that had become `no-go` areas for the police.

Meanwhile Islamic Internet sites are calling the riots 'a new jihad' and claiming that the firing of a tear gas grenade into the mosque at Clichy-sous-Bois and the hurling of a petrol bomb at a mosque in Lyon meant that the riots had become a religious war.

'May Allah send them victory,' is the slogan on tajdeed.net and alsaha.com, Islamist sites that the police claim have been used to coordinate the riots. The Algerian Islamist group GSPC (Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et Combat) is claiming responsibility for the outbreaks after it called in August for French Muslims to 'join the struggle against the Algerian state and its French friends.
'http://news.monstersandcritics.com/europe/article_1062055.php/EU_aid_as_French_riots_slacken
***

This will be old news to many readers here, but it's very nicely written and smart to boot. After all the money goes into the Islamic sink-hole, let's see what we get for it.

Coito ergo sum.
***

It's All About Demographics in France
by Joseph A. D'Agostino

Demographics is not a fashionable issue. Pundits and politicians prefer to discuss other aspects of social difference and reasons for social change such as economics and race.

Most American news stories about and commentators on the recent riots in France have blamed a combination of high unemployment (economics) and discrimination (race) for the riots. They have suggested that more jobs, quotas, and government spending would solve France's problem with her young Muslim rebels.

Unfortunately, another aspect (demographics) tells us that there is no practical solution to France's problem, and the radical Muslims are likely to win.

The importers of the Algerian insurrection certainly seem to have won this round, with French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin promising more money for areas dominated by immigrants and their offspring and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy forced to back off from the hard line he took when he called the rioters "scum."

French authorities asked Muslim religious leaders to help end the violence, granting tacit legitimacy to the anti-Western imams. Regardless of the intrinsic wisdom of these decisions, the fact that they came in response to violence means they will encourage more violence.

As Heywood Brown said, "Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will become a vegetarian." These riots were organized, at least to a large extent, according to de Villepin and Sarkozy. The tigerish organizers of the riots have achieved a victory. Terrorism works.

So what is France to do? She has failed to create employment for many of her young people, whether French or foreign, due to her socialistic policies, while the French electorate continues to demand continued statism and unaffordable social welfare policies. Despite trying hard, she has failed to assimilate her immigrants and their children, and contrary to what one might think, the children and grandchildren of the initial immigrants tend to be more radical and anti-Western than the immigrants themselves.

The trends are all in the wrong direction. And the self-destructing, cringing, appeasing, and degenerate Western European nation in which they live will never win the respect of these radical young men, who will demand more and more and more. I read that the French media are full of stunned incomprehension: Why are they rioting here, when France has been so steadfast in opposing the war in Iraq and in leading international opposition to the United States generally? Their craven lack of understanding of basic human psychology, the psychology of men not so effete as themselves, condemns them.

The sort of young men that France has nurtured in her bosom are very scary indeed, and sound worse than many inhabitants of our own urban ghettos. In the Autumn 2002 City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple described the vicious street loiterers he saw when he visited Paris' government-planned immigrant suburbs.

"A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, 'official,' society in France," he wrote. "This alienation, this gulf of mistrust—greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years—is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them."

The huge amounts of money that the French government has poured into these area has done nothing to improve mainstream France's image among these ghetto-dwellers, and never will. "Benevolence inflames the anger of the young men of the cités as much as repression, because their rage is inseparable from their being," said Dalrymple.

"Ambulance men who take away a young man injured in an incident routinely find themselves surrounded by the man's 'friends,' and jostled, jeered at, and threatened. . . . Of course, they also expect him to be treated as well as anyone else, and in this expectation they reveal the bad faith, or at least ambivalence, of their stance toward the society around them. They are certainly not poor, at least by the standards of all previously existing societies: they are not hungry; they have cell phones, cars, and many other appurtenances of modernity; they are dressed fashionably—according to their own fashion—with a uniform disdain of bourgeois propriety and with gold chains round their necks."

Like all men reduced to useless dependence, they hate those who support them while being unable to throw off their sloth. Raising their standard of living without putting them to work will do nothing. "They enjoy a far higher standard of living (or consumption) than they would in the countries of their parents' or grandparents' origin, even if they labored there 14 hours a day to the maximum of their capacity," Dalrymple noted.

"But this is not a cause of gratitude—on the contrary: they feel it as an insult or a wound, even as they take it for granted as their due. But like all human beings, they want the respect and approval of others, even—or rather especially—of the people who carelessly toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity. Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of most of the inhabitants of the cités."

Yet the sloth of the native French is more debilitating, because though a people can survive the advanced degeneracy of its men, as many have, it cannot survive that of its women. If a people's women cease to bear and raise enough children, that people dies. If most of its women decide career, freedom, and pleasure are more important than hearth and family, that people dies. In no other area of life does the accumulation of individual decisions more profoundly affect society as a whole. Feminism kills.

Muslim women, in Europe and most other places, are relatively family- and child-oriented. Most Frenchwomen couldn't care less. Examining the birthrates for the two groups, the "French" French will be overwhelmed by their guests soon enough. France's overall birthrate of children per woman is about 1.9, a little less than the replacement rate. The French government forbids the collection of statistics by race or religion (it's one nation, they say), but demographic experts think that the mostly Muslim immigrant population's birthrate is an astonishing twice that of the native population, possibly higher—and more immigrants flood into France every day, where up to 10% of the population is already Muslim. Some folks think France will be 40% Muslim by 2050, perhaps sooner.

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/
***

We can sum this up in two words: Ennui and Anomie. Tres French.

Polio in Islamic countries is said to be, in the article below, a cultural problem rather than one stemming from Islam. We are left puzzled by the distinction: at what point is Islam separate from culture in Islamic countries? One might argue that if the imam says it's OK to take a vaccine to combat polio and the natives refuse on other ground, then yes, there is a cultural rejection of vaccines rather than a religious rejection. But is that what we read below? We think not. We think what we read is a dhimmi idiot pandering to Islam, a cover-up, if you will, that tries to explain away the influence of Islam on primitive people. Look at the nations suffering now from polio, and see if they are Islamic or not. See who else suffers from polio because the natives will not allow the vaccine. Ask why so people won't allow its use and for what reasons. And ask: "If the polio spreads, who is responsible for it, and what is there to be done about those who will not allow its halt?"

Polio gains power amid pockets of Muslim distrust

Cultural bias, and not religious proscription, is to blame for a resurgence of polio in Muslim countries.

By Kevin Ferguson
(November 14, 2005)

Cultural bias, rather than religious proscription, is more to blame for a resurgence of polio cases in Muslim countries where the disease had been all but vanquished, according to international health workers.

This year, for first time ever, the number of afflicted children in reinfected countries, 718, is higher than that of endemic countries, 426, according to the World Health Organization and UNICEF. ...

Polio is spreading most rapidly in Nigeria and Indonesia, and new cases have cropped up in Yemen, Sudan, Ethiopia, Angola, Mali, Cameroon, Chad and Eritrea. All told, the number of polio cases worldwide has dropped drastically, from 350,000 in 1988 to 483 in 2001. But last year the figure rose to more than 700.

Rumors have been circulating in Indonesia that polio vaccinations are contrary to Islamic dietary law and are a plot by Christians to secretly sterilize Muslim women and introduce the HIV virus. Similar rumors precipitated a 2003 Nigerian outbreak, when Muslim leaders in the country's northern Kano state forbade inoculations for 10 months. The declaration was later rescinded, though the polio virus has since spread across Africa and to Asia.

"Religion is not an issue at the moment," said John Budd, UNICEF's Indonesia communications officer. In West Java, for example, only one child in 500 studied this year was found to have refused polio vaccination because of fears that the shots were haram, or forbidden, by Islamic dietary laws. "In fact, I went to one village where health workers told me that children weren't being immunized due to religion. On discussing it with the local imam, we discovered, on the contrary, he was totally supportive of the campaign. It was the issue of [medical] safety."

While religious beliefs have played a relatively small role in preventing vaccinations, approval by religious leaders is considered essential for polio eradication. In Indonesia, which in March saw its first case of polio in 10 years, international health organizations have been working closely with religious leaders and have received strong support for the campaigns and for the vaccine, according to Budd. "Essentially, [the vaccine] is safe and has been declared halal [or acceptable] by Islamic leaders in Indonesia and all over the world," including the Grand Sheikh Tantawi of Egypt's Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia and the Indonesian Ulemas Council, he said. "Furthermore, it is haram not to allow vaccination, as this would expose children to dangers of the disease."

Despite such declarations, the notion that polio vaccinations are, indeed, haram surfaces from time to time because the manufacturing process often includes the laboratory cultivation of polio virus from the cell lines of African green monkeys. As such, Muslim leaders offer contradictory or ambiguous advice.

"It's not always as simple as whether or not pork is involved," said Sheikh Suheil Laher, the Muslim chaplain of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. "There are animals that can be eaten and those that cannot. Those that can must usually be slaughtered in a certain way." Canine-toothed animals are considered not to be halal, according to many scholars, said Laher, and that makes the omnivorous African green monkey haram. However, there are also concessions or dispensations in Islamic law for medical necessity.

Laher, a Zimbabwean of Indian origin, was inoculated as a child and has no reservations about polio vaccinations. "But in northern Nigeria, where it's mostly Muslim, I can understand that there would be mistrust amongst some people."

Dr. Rehana Kausar, an anesthesiologist and newly appointed president of the Islamic Medical Association of North America in Lombard, Ill., is pointed in her assessment: "To say that you cannot take a polio vaccination has nothing to do with Islam." The Kashmiri physician said she saw no evidence of religious-based objections to polio vaccinations during a medical relief mission to Banda Aceh, Indonesia, in late March.

Rather, residents of small villages and their leaders simply distrust the motivations of foreign aid workers and are uncertain that the vaccinations are medically safe. "This is then multiplied by confusion among health workers about whether they should give sick babies the vaccine," said UNICEF's Budd. Distrust is also bred by the very nature of vaccines, said Nathaniel Raymond, communications advisor for humanitarian response for Boston-based Oxfam America. "People are suspicious of vaccines because they don't see results immediately. If this is the first time, you're introducing an abstraction to them," he said. ...

Such reservations have worldwide impact. Many of the current outbreaks have their genetic roots in Nigeria, where polio vaccinations were suspended for 10 months. From Nigeria, one strain has spread successively to Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and eventually to Indonesia, according to Oliver Rosenbauer, communications officer for UNICEF's Geneva bureau. "I think there is a distrust of health services in these countries," said Rosenbauer. Residents see foreign health workers come regularly to administer polio vaccinations while millions succumb to measles, tuberculosis, malaria and AIDS. They don't understand that there are no vaccinations for malaria and HIV, and that measles and TB shots are more difficult to administer than the oral polo vaccine, he said. "I would begin to get suspicious, as well," Rosenbauer said.

Such distrust is inevitable, said Aminah Beverly McCloud, director of DePaul University's Islamic World Studies Program. "If people know our history, they will understand why there is mistrust," she said. McCloud cited the use of Trovan, an experimental oral meningitis vaccination manufactured by Pfizer and used in clinical trials in Nigeria in 1996 in which – said local residents at the time – 11 children died. Eventually, 15,000 Nigerians died of meningitis during the epidemic. In August, a federal judge in Manhattan dismissed a class-action suit against Pfizer by Nigerian families who claim the drug maker put their children in dangerous drug trials without proper consent. The dismissal bounces the case back to Nigerian courts.

"Religion does play a huge role," said Rosenbauer. "A lot of times the religious leaders are often the community leaders. As a partnership we work with religious and community leaders to try to become advocates for polio eradication."

Meanwhile, the Nigerian polio strain continues to wend its way around the globe. Since March, the strain has paralyzed 225 children in Indonesia. In response, 24 million Indonesian children were immunized in late August as part of the country's largest-ever mass immunization campaign, according to the WHO. More than 750,000 vaccinators, health workers and volunteers went house to house across Indonesia to reach children under the age of five years. Initially restricted to two provinces on the Banten and West Java provinces on Java island, the outbreak is geographically expanding, having recently infected the country's capital, Jakarta, as well as Sumatra and Central Java, said the WHO.

Kevin Ferguson is a freelance writer based in Arlington, Mass. His work regularly appears in BusinessWeek and numerous computer-industry journals.

http://www.stnews.org/News-2281.htm
***

So there we are. The dhimmi idiots contradict themselves, apologize for Islamic obscurantism, fall over themselves to blame modern medicine via a case no one is likely to have heard about, and claim it's nothing to do with Islam that polio is spreading across the Islamic world. What do we do? We shake our heads and wonder how people can be so completely dishonest and still make a living outside the confines of the mafia.

Identity Fascism (2)

"This sacred land has belonged to the Palestinian Peoples from the beginning of time. It is ours, and it will be ours forever."

Chop and change all you like, swap the Palestinians for the "natives" of X in the land of Y, and off you go on a whole new crusade of Identity fascism in the name of Z.

There is no such thing as the X people. There is such a thing as the identity of the X people, and it comes from families grouped together for inbred generations on small parcels of depleted land they couldn't escape from because they were part of the landowners' holdings. There are ties that bind, family ties, and ties of custom and language, and perhaps they make up an ethnic group one can recognise with a keen eye for such things. But for the concept of the people, it's a stretch to claim ownership of land by virtue of ethnicity over the course of anything longer than owns own life time. What my grandfather owned isn't mine but his. Unless, of course, I own what he owned by virtue of atavistic whim. If I can convince myself and you and others that I am continuous by racial identity, and if not there, by language and personal custom, then I can make an argument that this is mine and not yours because I am mine and you are not. If I can convince us that I am of my own kind and you are an outsider, not an authentic insider, not part of the group who owns by virtue of being of the group, then you are excluded by the laws of nature and spirit.

The point of the exercise is to claim that I have an identity within a group, and that you do not share that identity. If you do not share it, you are not a legitimate recipient of the goods and services we have, not entitled to what we have and get and give, and you do not have a right to be among us as an equal.

There are common instances of separateness that make fine sense to all but communitarians of all sorts, those who claim the family of man takes precedence over the smaller group, including the nuclear family. One can find theoretical expression of communitarian families in Plato's Republic and in the writings, such as they are, of Sparta. More recently, a great deal of ink is wasted in the 19th century socialist and anarchist press on the concept of internationalism and community of nations. Today we live with daycare centres and the U.N. Altogether, we have, in the Modern West, multi-culturalism, the family of man and the unity of all peoples. And too we have identity. We have the common idea that man is not individual by only valid in comparison and in contrast to others, and that his identity and validity comes from his belonging to a group who defines him by virtue of boundaries, a shore around a body of water that defines a lake, for example, a body of language that defines a German, a religion that defines a Muslim.

This is a relatively new concept, this idea of identity. Until recently there was no such thing as nation, (cf the Treaty of Westphalia here,) and there was no sense of the universality of man outside his family, clan, and tribe (cf Modern Agriculture here.)

Here we will look at the concept of national identity as formulated by J.G. Herder (cf Herder here.) We will see again more of the roots of the common concepts of our time in the Modern West, and below we will see the evidence again of the fascist reactionary Counter-Enlightenment that is to day Left dhimmi fascism. We will see the roots of such repugnant cliches as "the people." We will see the beginnings of nonsense such as "we have always lived on this sacred land." We will see the beginnings in Herder of the Nazi quest for racial purity and living space for Germans, and also the place held today by those who claim the Palestinians are a people with a right to land by virtue of identity. We will see the mass of confusion that creates both multi-culturalism and fascist identity politics. We will see "We are all one, but you are different, you have a right to the sacred soil of your ancestors, and we, being outsiders, defer." All of the seeds of identity fascism and Left dhimmi philobarbarism are in the two short excerpts below. We will continue this look in further detail in our next post, and there we will sort it out to show the fascism of identity and the roots of modern anti-Semitism as well.

Our first piece is a breathless introduction to Herder from the Goethe Institute, which we have mercifully cut severely for the sake of our readers. We follow it with more of the same from wikipedia. We will take time again tomorrow to follow up on this important and sinister thinker as preparation for the introduction to Fichte, and he as introduction to our eventual look at identity and ecology fascism.

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"I feel! I am!" - Johann Gottfried Herder

Johann Gottfried Herder was undoubtedly one of the most significant representatives of Weimar Classicism. Nevertheless, he tends not to be mentioned in the same breath as Goethe and Schiller. However great his impact on the "Sturm und Drang" movement, German Classicism and Romanticism, philology and history may have been, it is not easy to sum up Herder's work under a single heading .

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Born in 1744 ....

Folk Song and "Sturm und Drang"

Herder studied theology and philosophy in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) – where his lecturers included Kant and Hamann. He subsequently worked as a teacher and preacher in Riga until setting off for France in 1769. He then got to know Goethe as a result of a chance meeting in Strasburg.

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Herder looked across state borders in his search for lyric poetry rooted in the traditions of folk song; his anthology, "Volkslieder" (Folk Songs), helped to establish the concept of "world literature", a term coined later by August Wilhelm Schlegel. This significant anthology contains over 90 texts translated from English and Scots, a variety of Romance, Slavic and Northern European languages and Greenlandish.

National character and humanity

In the 19th century, Herder's view of peoples, their languages and the character of individual nations – which was untainted by nationalistic bigotry – also encouraged smaller nations to explore their languages and cultures and regard them as having value in their own right.

The preacher and educationalist had a lasting influence with his belief that nations (like languages as well) are subjects of history and manifest a character of their own tied to particular places and times. The modern philosophy of history begins with Herder, as does a historiography that concentrates its attention on the formation and development of individual nations.

His unfinished major work "Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit" (Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, 1784-1791) can be read as a synthesis of his thought. ... And he ascribes a central function to humanity: "Humanity is the purpose of man's nature and God has placed our race's own destiny into its hands with this purpose" (Book XV).

Like the "Ideas", Herder's "Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität" (Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, 1797) .... In the "Letters", Herder argues strongly for other nations to be accorded respect and esteem: "The insolent violator of others' rights, […] the audacious abuser of others' customs and opinions, the boaster who imposes his own merits on peoples who do not desire them will be hated."

Thinking and feeling

The recent interest in the Age of the Enlightenment has probably contributed to the renaissance of Herderian models of thinking. Herder's holistic attitude contrasts with the total domination of rational thought from Descartes to Kant, an approach felt by many to be inadequate. Herder's thinking also encompasses the "other" of reason: "Loving the body without the spirit, said a philosopher full of great insight, is idolatry; loving the soul without the body is zealotry; loving each in the other, is true, whole humanity" ("Vom Erkennen und Empfinden", Of Cognition and Sensation, 1775).
Herder stands for the anthropological turn. Following French sensualism, Herder accords greater significance to sensual cognition, and associates the senses and the intellect more closely with each other. In his posthumous text "Zum Sinn des Gefühls" (On the Meaning of Feeling), Herder sets out his own counterpart to Descartes's "Cogito ergo sum" when he says, "I feel! I am!"

http://www.goethe.de/kug/ges/phi/prt/en72435.htm

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In 1772 Herder published Concerning the Origin of Speech and went further in this promotion of language than his earlier injunction to "spew out the ugly slime of the Seine. Speak German, O You German".

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Herder wrote that "A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world." To him such poetry had its greatest purity and power in nations before they became civilised, as shown in the Old Testament, the Edda , and Homer, and he tried to find such virtues in ancient German folk songs and Norse poetry and mythology.

[....]

Herder's philosophy was of a deeply subjective turn, stressing influence by physical and historical circumstance upon human development, stressing that "one must go into the age, into the region, into the whole history, and feel one's way into everything". The historian should be the "regenerated contemporary" of the past, and history a science as "instrument of the most genuine patriotic spirit".

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Volk and Nation

Herder replaced the traditional concept of a juridico-political state with that of the folk-nation as organic in its historical growth. Every nation was in this manner organic and whole, nationality a plant of nurture. He talked of the "national animal" and of the "physiology of the whole national group" , which organism was topped by the "national spirit", the "soul of the volk".

Herder gave Germans a new pride in their origins, ... remarking that he would have wished to be born in the Middle Ages and musing whether "the times of the Swabian emperors" did not "deserve to be set forth in their true light in accordance with the German mode of thought?" Herder equated the German with the Gothic... equally he proclaimed a national message within the sphere of language. ... This urged Germans to glory in their hitherto despised language, and Herder's extensive collections of folk-poetry began a great craze in Germany for that neglected literature.

Along with Wilhelm von Humboldt, he proposed what is now called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — that language determines thought . Herder's focus upon language and cultural traditions as the ties that create a " nation" extended to include folklore, dance, music and art, and inspired Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their collection of Germanic folk tales.

Herder attached exceptional importance to the concept of nationality and of patriotism — "he that has lost his patriotic spirit has lost himself and the whole worlds about himself ", whilst teaching that " in a certain sense every human perfection is national". Herder carried folk theory to an extreme by maintaining that "there is only one class in the state, the Volk, (not the rabble), and the king belongs to this class as well as the peasant". Explanation that the Volk was not the rabble was a novel conception in this era, and with Herder can be seen the emergence of "the people" as the basis for the emergence of a classless but hierarchical national body.

The nation, however was individual and separate, distinguished, to Herder, by climate, education, foreign intercourse, tradition and heredity. Providence he praised for having "wonderfully separated nationalities not only by woods and mountins, seas and deserts, rivers and climates, but more particularly by languages, inclinations and characters". Herder praised the tribal outlook writing that "the savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species", isolated since "each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity". With no need for comparison since" every nation bears in itself the standard of its perfection, totally independent of all comparison with that of others" for "do not nationalities differ in everything, in poetry, in appearance, in tastes, in usages, customs and languages? Must not religion which partakes of these also differ among the nationalities?"

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Germany and The Enlightenment

This question was further developed by Herder's lament that Martin Luther did not establish a national church, and his doubt whether Germany did not buy Christianity at too high a price, that of true nationality. Herder's patriotism bordered at times upon national pantheism, demanding of territorial unity as "He is deserving of glory and gratitude who seeks to promote the unity of the territories of Germany through writings, manufacture, and institutions" and sounding an even deeper call:

"But now! Again I cry, my German brethren! But now! The remains of all genuine folk-thought is rolling into the abyss of oblivion with a last and accelerated impetus. For the last century we have been ashamed of everything that concerns the fatherland."

Herder presented formal defiance of the age of reason and Enlightenment . In his Ideas upon Philosophy and the History of Mankind he even wrote "Compare England with Germany: the English are Germans, and even in the latest times the Germans have led the way for the English in the greatest things."

Herder, who hated absolutism and Prussian nationalism, but who was imbued with the spirit of the whole German Volk, yet as historical theorist turned away from the light of the Eighteenth century. Seeking to reconcile his thought with this earlier age Herder sought to harmonize his conception of sentiment with reason, whereby all knowledge is implicit in the soul; the most elementary stage is sensuous and intuitive perception which by development can become self-conscious and rational. To Herder, this development is the harmonizing of primitive and derivative truth, of experience and intelligence, feeling and reason.

Herder is the first in but a long line of Germans preoccupied with this harmony. This search is itself the key to much in German theory. And Herder was too penetrating a thinker not to understand and fear the extremes to which his folk-theory could tend, and so issued specific warnings. While regarding the Jews as aliens in Europe, he yet refused to adhere to a rigid racial theory, writing that "notwithstanding the varieties of the human form there is but one and the same species of man throughout the whole earth".

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottfried_von_Herder

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This is a hurried presentation, and if there are questions you, dear reader, wish to ask, please feel free to leave comments so we can return to this with a perhaps clearer exposition later.