A late Post

We have below from a popular historian some thoughts on the eve of WWII and the players who made it possible:

Chamberlain drew around himself an inner circle of subservient mediocrities, most of them knights remote from the practice of chivalry. Sir John Simon, a serpentine lawyer described as a snake in snake's clothing. Sir Samuel Hoare...: he was said to have 'passed from experience to experience, like Boccaccio's virgin, without discernible effect upon his condition.' Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for Coordination of Defence, had little ability, less power and no perceptiveness: 'He could look with frank and fearless gaze at any prospect, however appalling--and fail to see it....' And Sir Kingsley Wood, who on the outbreak of war opposed the bombing of munition works in Germany because they were private property....

Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley. Vintage: New York, 2002. p. 611.

As Franco explained to the Italian Chief of Staff, "In a civil war, systematic occupation of territory, accompanied by the necessary purges, is preferable to a rapid defeat of the enemy armies, which in the end leaves the country still infested with enemies. (Brendon: p. 389.)

There was much to be said, as Arthur Koestler decided, for a country run by Blimps rather than Commissars, a country:

suspicious of systems, bored by ideologies, sceptical about utopias, rejecting all blueprints, enamoured of its leisurly muddle, incurious about the future, devoted to its past.
Yet such happy pragmatism could easily be confused with complacent laziness. Certainly George Orwell thought so . Returning home from Catalonia to the green and pleasant land of his childhood, he found it almost impossible to believe in foreign emergencies. Posters told of cricket matches and royal events. Men in bowler hats wandered among the pidgeons of Trafalgar Square. Red buses and blue policemen patrolled the streets. Everyone was "sleeping the deep, deep, sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs." (Brendon: p. 410.)

It's late, and there's nothing more to be done for the evening now than to look ahead to tomorrow. Please join us then.

Photo from Shiva

http://www.fomi.nu/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=17972#17972

Sorel (4)

Well folks, we're at war again, the whole world, just like the last times. Maybe Napoleon started all this, this war of the victors of Modernity, to see who will rule among us over the whole. Today, like then, we're fighting to see who will control the future of the world: the Moderns-- or the reactionaries; those who are enlightened or those who prefer life as it was, when people were farm animals and life went in predictable unchanging cycles of nothingness from birth to death. We, the Moderns, fight for Progress and teleology and a better future for Mankind; and our opponents, the fascists, fight for roughly the same goals, reaction, stasis, and the future of Mankind.
5

This is a Western war. Most of our enemies are primitives from the Muslim world, but really, they don't count for much over-all: they are mere proxies, stickmen in the struggle to control the future of how Mankind will live and what the nature of Human life will be. It comes down to the epistemology of Man, of all things, something most of us wouldn't pay any attention to if we had it laid out clearly before us by people who could explain it clearly. But there it is. We are proxies too in this war. Most of us will just go along with the flow of Human life not really grasping what and why. Who gets excited enough about epistemology to kill anyone over it? And yet, here we are. The bodies continue to pile up. It's getting worse daily. More and more Muslims going crazier by the day, killing more and more people ever more viciously, and here we are too wondering what this all means. What is this war about?

We know that our governments, our media, our intelligentsia lie to us unashamed, and we hear our neighbours repeat idiot cliches about this war without a name or an identified enemy, and we wonder what is wrong. Here, at this blog, we declare that this war of ours is a war for the future of Human life as either modern middle class people or the return to the past, a time when people were farm animals or, in the case of Islam, also the slaves of Allah. We declare that this war is one for the mind of Man. How shall the mass of Mankind live?

Some people among us demand the power to control the way others live and think. They have a vision of what Human life should be, and they use force to impose their visions on the world's people. Some demand that people live what they term a "natural" life. Others demand that people live as they choose personally and privately. There is an irreconcilable conflict between the two powers. We are at war therefore. Here we define the sides as Modernists and Left dhimmi fascists. Muslims are thrown into the mix as bulk on the side of our enemies. They are the cannon fodder of this struggle, on the side of our Left dhimmi fascist enemies in the West. Muslims as enemies are, according to us, like garbage in the streets cluttering our advances. Our true enemies are our own people. It is they whom we must identify and conquer so we can move ahead to our goal of Human progress in the world.

There is a specific fascist epistemology. How do we know the nature of our world? Once we know, or think we know, the way we know, then we act from that position. It defines us. It chooses for us which side in the war we take. To help clarify this point we'll look at Isaiah Berlin's critique of Georges Sorel. It seems odd to spend time reading about a man whose work most of us have never heard of, whose name most of us have never heard of, and whose ideas are forgotten even among the majority of professional intellectuals who study the nature of the West. But Georges Sorel is one of the creators of our current public opinion, whether we know of him or not. To understand his position is to know our own better, and with that understanding we might better know what we must do to fight for one side or the other in this war for the future of Humanity. In understanding Sorel's critique of the world we might see why we have a split in our population between progressive and modern people and those who do their utmost to turn the course of life back to the Middle Ages. It comes down to a struggle for the power to determine how the majority of people will view life itself. Are we individuals or are we part of a Human collective? Do we think things through rationally or do we rely on the government's benevolence and the word of Allah? Are we rational or irrational? How do we know what our world is? How do we live rightly? Our epistemological position defines where we stand and what we fight for.
***

Georges Sorel is dark matter in the vast mosaic of our Western intellectual history, a man whose ideas surround other, brighter lights, whose ideas make them shine by providing contrast and definition, and without whom others would not shine at all. Sorel is the unseen background of modern fascism. When we look without seeing the context of others better known we miss the depth of our enemies' programme. We cannot afford to do so any longer. Our victory depends on knowing who we fight and what we fight for and against. Sorel, by being dark, can shed light on our struggle.

Berlin write that "there are two natures: artificial nature, the nature of science-- a system of idealised entities: atoms, electric charges, mass...fictions compounded out of observed uniformities, particularly in regions relatively remote from man's daily concerns... deliberately adapted to mathematical treatment that enable d man to identify some of the furniture of the universe, and to predict and, indeed, to control parts of it." (Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981: p. 301.)

That nature, the rational nature of Man, is the result of critical inquiry into life separate from revelation and received ideas. Therein we have the crux of our problem in the world today. Is Man a rational creature who has control over the universe? Can we really know the nature of the universe at all? It's a matter of epistemology. If we are rational beings, then our lives are so different from what our opponents consider the right course of Humanity that we are literally at war against them. As trivial and strange as it might appear, that is the nature of our fight against Islam and our our own Left dhimmi fascists. How is the world organised and how do we live in it? How we determine our vision of reality determines how we organize our societies, and some people are determined to organise our societies for us, regardless of our objections. Muslims demand that reality reflect the ideology of early Islam. The Muslim view of reality is at odds with that of Modernity. They see the world and Man's place in it from a view too different from ours for us to live in coexistence at all. We must encroach upon Islam by the very nature of our successes as a system based on science and rationality. We are so successful that nothing Islam can do is strong enough to counter our progress other than sheer violence. The Islamic view of reality cannot sustain its place in the world against Modernity. They must destroy us or die.

Sorel is of the view, common to Mankind until the Revolutions in America and France, that Man is a thing of nature, and that he is at his best when he lives in a natural environment, one without machines and factories and capitalism and money economies. When man is in contact with other men as natural man rather than man as employee and employer, then he is truly man as he should be, creative, authentic, and right in his being. Modernity, according to Sorel, is a disfigurement of Man, a mutilation of Man's soul. To destroy Modernity and to allow Man to return to the primitive past of social relations without capitalism perverting his true nature is the best goal of any decent man. At heart, this is an fascist view of reality, of how we know our universe.

Sorel and others like him, view science and rationality as a corruption of Man. Science is a metaphor of reality, not reality itself. Rationality is a false picture of reality, one that twists people into things they should not be.

Science "was a stupendous achievement, but an achievement of the creative imagination, not an accurate reproduction of the structure of reality, not a map, still less a picture, of what there was. Outside this set of formulas, of imaginary entities and mathematical relationships in terms of which the system was constructed, there was 'natural nature-- the real thing-- chaotic, terrifying... compounded of ungovernable forces, against which man had to struggle... with the help of science [was] something that was not found but made. The assumption that reality was a harmonious whole... all this was an enormous fallacy.... When we extend such [scientific] manipulation to men as well, we degrade and dehumanize them, for men are not objects but subjects of action...." (Berlin: p. 302.)

To build machines and factories and cities is to destroy nature and man. For the irrationalist it is to destroy Man. To make the world knowable to Man outside the terms of revelation and nature is to destroy the harmony of life as it should be and as it was before the rise of science and rationality. For the fascist, all effort is made to destroy the Modern and to return life to its original place and manner. Science and rationality are systems, false and evil, and they must be destroyed.

"To confuse our own constructions and inventions with eternal laws or divine decrees is one of the most fatal delusions of men.... " (Berlin: p. 303.)

Our constructions and inventions arise from our epistemological view. Ours are Modernist. Sorel objects:

"The true basis of all association is the family, the tribe, the polis, in which cooperation is instinctive and spontaneous and does not depend on rules or contracts or invented arrangements. Associations for the sake of profit or utility, resting on some artificial agreement, as the political and economic institutions of the capitalistic systems plainly do, stifle the sense of common humanity and destroy human dignity by generating a spirit of competitive opportunism." (Berlin: p. 304.)

He feels that Modernity and particularly democracy are wrong approaches of social organisation and the human project:

"Democratic politics resembled a huge stock exchange in which votes were bought and sold without shame or fear, men were bamboozled or betrayed by scheming politicians, ruthless bankers, crooked businessmen... lawyers, journalists, professors, all scrambling for money, recognition, power, in a world of contemtpible fools... in a Europe 'stupefied by humanitarianism.'" (Berlin: p. 300.)

When we understand reality and base our lives and societies on democracy we cut ourselves off from the right course of life, creating evil societies in the process. To make life right we must return to a time before democracy and industry and reason as the orgainising principles of life. We must stop analysing intellectually and thinking rationally and scientifically and return to a natural and intuitive way of thought. We must destroy the institutions that reify Reason: we must destroy law courts, businesses, factories, schools and so on, and in their places plant trees and allow tufted puffins to roam freely, or whatever.

Here we argue daily that there is a conflation of Left and Right, and that it is all a reactionary struggle to return our Modernity to the primitive past of pre-industrial society. It means the destruction of Reason as the way we think about reality. It means that we stop thinking and start feeling as our way of life.

Berlin writes: "There is an inti-intellectual and anti-Enlightenment stream in the European radical tradition... that goes back to Rousseau and Herder and Fichte, and enters agrarian, anarchist, anti-Semitic and other illiberal movements.... (Berlin: p. 316.) And it is that that we term Left dhimmi fascism.

For Sorel "[R]eason was a feeble instrument compared with the power of irrational and the unconscious in the life both of individuals and societies.... Not theoretical knowledge but action, and only action, gives understanding of reality. Action is not a means to preconceived ends, is its own policy-maker and pathfinder." (Berlin: p. 316-17.)

In that light we can look at irrationality as world-view and see what we term the "fascist grand gesture" as the counter-part to science and reason. We see the Muslim homicide bomber as fascist actor. This is what we find when the sleep of reason sets in. Sorel celebrates it. So too do our Left dhimmi fascists. Irrationalism informs our cultural world-view to the core, and we find its results in our surrender to fascist Islam.

There's more, and I'll post it tomorrow.

A Look at Dhimmitude in Morocco

We're relying for this day's post on our friend Eliyahu mT'sion to see what we can expect if the West continues to appease Islam, to continue to self-destruct demographically, to simply give up on life. This is the future of Sweden:

Jewish Life in 19th Century Morocco -- one aspect

For a quaint glimpse of how Jews were traditionally treated in Muslim society, look at 19th century Morocco. Here is an account by a contemporary French traveler there. Bear in mind that this was many years before France occupied Morocco. In 1883-84, the Muslims there were free to do what they wanted with the Jews, what came naturally.
Consider Morocco in 1883-1884:

"Every Jew in the Bled es-Elba belongs in his person and property to his lord, his sid. If his family has been established in the area for a long time, he came down to him [his lord] as an inheritance, as part of his property, according to the rules of Muslim law or the imaziren customs. If he himself came to settle in the place where he is [now] living, he had to make himself someone's Jew as soon as he arrived. Once the Jew has paid homage to him, he is tied forever --he and his posterity-- to the one he has chosen... The Jew lives the most wretched, most unhappy life, he cannot earn a penny without it being torn away from him. His children are taken away from him. In the end, he himself is taken to the marketplace; he is put up for auction and he is sold, as things are done in certain places in the Sahara, but not everywhere. On the other hand, he may be looted and his house destroyed, and he be driven away with his family. One sees villages where a whole quarter is deserted; the astonished passerby learns that there was a mellah [Jewish ghetto] and that one day all the sids by common accord attacked their Jews and drove them out. Nothing in the world protects the Jew from his lord. He is at his mercy. If he wants to be away, he needs authorization. He is not refused this since the Jew's trips are necessary for his commercial activities. But he will not take his wife and children with him for any reason. His family must remain behind close to the sid as hostages for his return..."

This account has been translated from the French.
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http://ziontruth.blogspot.com/

The Future of Europe

Europe is changing into something unrecognizable in terms of world history, causing questions of identity that in the history of the world no extant group can answer because they exist and not those they conquered. This is a fascinating philosophical question, but it's also a very disturbing problem of what, if anything, we as free citizens do when we watch our world shrink due to conquest by primitives. Below we see one tepid response from France, and then following that we see a letter posted here by a Swede. These questions of identity of the West are going to be with us till there is a concrete resolution, one that we feel will determine the future of Humanity in ways that are not considered by the general populations in the West at this time but that are fundamental to the nature of Man. Over the course of the evening we will return here to add more comments below. for now we leave the reader with these two approaches to our futures:

FRANCE: INTERIOR MINISTER AIMS FOR 25,000 EXPULSIONS IN 2006

Paris, 30 Nov. (AKI) - France's interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy has indicated he intends in 2006 to deport some 25,000 foreigners without proper papers, continuing a policy of increasing the number of such expulsions each year. Addressing the French Senate's commission on illegal immigration, Sarkozy also announced a tightening of rules governing asylum seekers.

In 2006, temporary accommodation will no longer automatically be provided to asylum seekers if they turn down the accommodation offered them, Sarkozy announced. And if their application for asylum is rejected, the asylum-seeker will now have 15 days instead of one month to appeal the decision, he said.

"I have embarked on a policy of systematically sending people back," Sarkozy told the commission. "The number of deportations of foreigners without proper papers which have been carried out has risen strongly," he continued.

A total 10,000 deportations were carried out in 2002, 12,000 in 2003, and 15,000 in 2004, he noted. "There are going to be more than 20,000 in 2005, and I have set a target of 25,000 for 2006," Sarkozy said.

An estimated 80,000-100,000 illegal immigrants arrive in France annually, according to Sarkozy. This compares with an annual 16,000-17,000 irregular migrants currently arriving in Italy per year. The income of traffickers involved in illegal immigration from Africa to Europe amounted to between one-quarter and one-third of the income generated by international drug trafficking, Sarkozy stated.

Sarkozy also criticised the regularisation of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants by the Spanish and Italian governments as "dangerous", the French AFP news agency reported. "In the context of the freedom of movement, these large-scale regularisations are dangerous because they produce a considerable inward pull across Europe," the agency quoted him as saying.
http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level.php?cat=Security&loid=8.0.234900726&par=0
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This letter came in response to a piece on Sweden that we ran in July. Our friends at Gates of Vienna posted the link, and this writer responds as below:

Please. What a load of crap. Here in the socialistic state of sweden we deal with problems in a contructive, slow but clearing way and is not eliminating them as it were some kind of bugs with weapons. The Muslim´s is not a problem, but an unfair society is. ALWAYS. When these people have a solid ground, a nice environment, an income and self-believe there won´t be anything like violence. And this is what will be when the socialistic model work. You´ll see, buddy. (I´m not a big social party fan but I´m certainly not the opposite either. )

And please, we do have a culture, based on respect, freedom and equality values.
***

We welcome your comments, as always.

Here is a link that covers in great and lucid detail some of the situation in Scandanavia. In all, this is a site we find worth visiting, particularly today:
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2005/04/cultural-self-denial.html

Strange Fruit

Why do our private intellectuals and members of the public intelligentsia and even many ordinary private men and women of the general public in the West assume that Islam is a religion, and one at that given to peace and love and warmth and fuzziness of all kinds? Islam is demonstrably a violent poligion, one based on theft, rapine, murder and imperialism. So, why do our fellow citizens so blithely ignore the obvious even when it's fatal? Why do so many Westerners look at the bodies on the streets and say it's nothing to do with Islam but with our local policies?

We believe that philobarbarism is a form of public insanity growing in our culture from roots in 18C. Romanticism, and that the fruit of the Romantic ideology is Left dhimmi fascism, a poisoned fruit we eat not knowing its effects even as we obviously sicken and die. We as a general population in the West accept obvious lies regarding Islam, and we suffer mutilation and death at the hands of Muslims because we receive our public ideas from those intellectuals who promote Romantic ideologies whose ground is Irrationalism and proto-fascism. We read, we hear, we see Islam is a religion of peace, and that Zionism is racism, that the Palestinians are victims of Israel, and that the world is under threat from American militarism and hegemony. We buy this nonsense because our public intellectuals sell it and we don't bother to look for another set of ideas in the mental marketplace. We live with the cliches of the age, and they are the same cliches that were made up in the 18C by those whose ideas founded modern fascism. Our intellectuals lie to us, and we, being busy, being social creatures, rely on our professional thinkers for our public ideas. Our public ideas are becoming increasing fatal. Our public intellectuals are becoming increasingly crazier, and we as a general population must be thinking more and more that the course of our general opinions is leading us right to the nut-house. Our public intellectuals, filled to the hilt with hubris, cling to and advance their fascist agendas in spite of all realities and decency. They wallow in the most insane puddles of fascism and expect us to continue to adore them. No, it's time to forget these these fools and look at our own views as we see them without the filters of Left dhimmi fascism. It really doesn't take any particular intellectual gifts to see that if Muslims maim and kill civilians at random and claim they do it in the name of Islam that Islam and Muslims are a genuine threat to our existence. It's time we look at the idiots who belong to the Middle Eastern Studies Association and see them for what they are: Nazis.

It might become clearer to the reader that our current dhimmi academics on the Left are fascists if we look at the history of Nazism in German universities in the 1920s. Below we'll look at a MESA gathering, and then we'll look at a few pieces from a short history of the German Wandervogel movement that became the Hitler Youth. It's our position here that MESA is a Nazi-like organization, and that many of our university professors, particularly in the social sciences, are Nazis no different from those in the German universities of the 1920s.
***

MESA: The Academic Intifada.

Every three years, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) brings its annual conference to Washington, presumably to impress upon lawmakers the relevance of Middle Eastern studies. The conference is meeting in a Washington hotel right now. So it's an appropriate moment to consider how the field's priorities have shifted since 9/11 and the Iraq war.

One measurable indicator is the papers presented at the annual conference. In the four MESA conferences since 9/11 (2002 through this year), some 1,900 papers have appeared in the program. That's a substantial sample of what interests people. But it's more than a measure of pure intellectual interest. Like all such meetings, MESA is a place where grad students and untenured faculty display their wares, in the hope of attracting job offers. It's also where the mandarins send signals to their lessers about what's in and what's out.

So just what do these people study? There are all sorts of ways to answers this question. One could look at different themes (e.g., gender, Islamism), categorize MESA papers accordingly, and come up with some trends. But that leaves a lot of room for subjective judgment, and some paper titles are so obscure as to defy easy categorization.

Sandstorm takes a different approach. The Middle East is a large and diverse place. It includes many Arab countries, Turkey, Iran, and Israel. With the help of my research assistant, Sandstorm has gone back over the last four MESA conference programs. We've looked through all paper titles for explicit mention of one of seven countries: Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. These countries are where where you would expect to find a greater focus, because of their large populations or geostrategic significance. We've added up the papers, and plotted the results here. (The vertical axis is the percentage of total papers; the figure next to the name of the country is the total number of papers in the 2005 conference.)

[....]

The conclusion of these findings is incontrovertible. For MESAns, the Palestinians are the chosen people, and more so now than ever. More papers are devoted to Palestine than to any other country. There are ten times as many Egyptians as there are Palestinians, but they get less attention; there are ten times as many Iranians, but Iran gets less than half the attention. Even Iraq, America's project in the Middle East, still inspires only half the papers that Palestine does. Papers dealing with Israel are only half as numerous as those on Palestine, and only three of these are about Israel per se, apart from the Arab-Israeli conflict. More than half of the Israel-related papers actually overlap the Palestine category. MESA's Palestine obsession has reached new heights, suggesting this: academe is gearing up for its next intifada.

To appreciate that, you have to go beyond the numbers, to the content of this "scholarship." There you discover that many of the presentations, if not most of them, are blatant attempts to academize anti-Israel agitprop. Here are three quick examples, selected pretty much at random from the program.

There's a paper by one Nasser Abufarha, University of Wisconsin-Madison, entitled "The Making of a Human Bomb: State Expansion and Modes of Resistance in Palestine." It turns out that Abufarha, a grad student, is already well on his way to recognition as a one-man Palestinian propaganda machine. He made this speech at an April 2002 rally in Madison:

In 1948 the State of Israel stole Palestine of its people, its land... In 1967, the Israelis occupied the remainder of Palestine after stealing the nation as a whole....They came to Palestine and forced us, the Palestinians, to pay the price for their troubled history—and we are still paying with our blood and tears.... I salute my people in Jenin for defending our city in the face of the most brutal, murderous army, supported by the most lethal American weapons.... Our message to Powell and Bush: join the world community that has called to impose sanctions on the apartheid state of Israel! (applause)

Abufarha also oozed this bit of sentimental syrup:

For over fifty years, cactus trees in stolen Palestine produce their fruit every season and don't find the people to pick them (they are surrounded by strangers who don't know how or when to pick them, or what they taste like, or if they are even edible). They are patiently blooming their beautiful yellow flowers every spring and fruiting every summer hoping that the people who know them would come the next season. We shall return.

With a Wisconsin Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, an "academic" paper on Palestinian "human bombs," and the support of the MESA network, Abufarha is sure to land a spot teaching "Israel/Palestine" at a university near you.

Here's another example, taken at random: Noura Erakat, law school at the University of California, Berkeley, offers a paper on "Non-State Parties in International Criminal Tribunals: A Case Study of Palestinian Refugees from Jenin Refugee Camp." Noura Erakat is a campus agitator and co-founder of Law Students for Justice in Palestine, a pro-divestment group. This is how she describes herself (warning: this is not a parody):

I never hesitate to assert my Palestinian identity. I am frustrated by the U.S. government's colonization of Iraq, its support of Israeli colonization of Palestinian land, and its economic and military domination of the Arab world in general.... I believe that imperialist ambition of conquest and the accumulation of wealth drive U.S. foreign policy. I believe that people of color within the U.S. and the Global South, generally, incur similar repression and marginalization due to U.S. imperial exercises; I, therefore, identify as a person of color from the Global South. Consequently, I share similar struggles with Latina women, but I am Arabiya [an Arab woman].

Erakat has a two-year fellowship at Berkeley to develop a litigation project to sue Israelis for alleged human rights violations, sue U.S. corporations doing military business with Israel, and protect pro-Palestinian activists and scholars in the United States. Now she'll have a MESA conference paper on her resume—another "academic" fig leaf to cover her naked propaganda when she goes for her next fellowship.

Here's another case: Lori Allen, a post-doc in anthropology at Brown University, offers a paper trendily entitled "Martyr Bodies: Aesthetics and the Politics of Suffering in the Palestinian Intifada." Allen's projects are textbook cases of how to disguise agitprop as scholarship. She did a doctorate at the University of Chicago which purports to be an "ethnography" of the second intifada. The Social Science Research Council funded her research in the West Bank, which was to "examine the role which discourses of pain and suffering play in the creation of Palestinian nationalism."

While in the field, she wrote passionate reportage full of... Palestinian pain and suffering, which she made her own. "It is true that some have accused me of writing one-sided propaganda," she admitted, "and others have warned me against publishing views in a necessarily simplified form that might be interpreted in credibility-wrecking ways. But writing about Palestine from a sympathetic point of view is always going to elicit such commentary, and the professional risks are outweighed by what I feel to be professional obligations and moral imperatives." (I assure Dr. Allen she has nothing to worry about. If she keeps writing one-sided propaganda in simplified form, her academic credibility will increase. It's a risk-free strategy. But I suspect she knows this already.)

One could go on and on in this depressing exercise. Paper after paper reveals itself to be elaboration of Palestinian nationalist ideology, "academized" into "discourse" by grad students and post-docs who've already given stump harangues, organized sit-ins, and written passionate propaganda pieces. This same kind of nationalism, practiced in any other field, would be dismissed as primitive pap. But exceptions are regularly made, and standards are regularly suspended, for crudely apologetic and celebratory analysis applied to (and by) Palestinians. Of course, no one dares to call any of this work mediocre, which is why so many mediocre pseudo-academics produce it. The appalling truth is that in the Edward Said-inflected, Rashid Khalidi-infested field of Middle Eastern studies, you dramatically improve your chances if you sell yourself as a Joseph Massad-in-the-making—someone likely to come up with the next great breakthrough to follow Massad's ingenious discovery that Zionism is really a form of antisemitism.

The foundations of the next academic intifada are being laid right now. When the next major crisis comes in Israeli-Palestinian relations, dozens of Massad-like agitators will have taken up secure positions on campuses, having first established their polemical bona fides in the Palestine-fest of MESA. A few years hence, they will have completed the academic mainstreaming of the "one-state solution" and "apartheid Israel," and they will have generated a vast literature, with theoretical prefaces and bloated footnotes, blaming Palestinian suicide bombings on their Israeli victims. When the sign is given from Palestine, Israel will be assaulted on campus by a veritable army of propagandists, who've been smuggled into the ivory tower because no one has had the courage to stop them, or even to call such smuggling a degradation of scholarship.

So remember MESA 2005 when the next intifada sweeps academe. Sandstorm warned you.

http://www.geocities.com/martinkramerorg/2005_11_21.htm
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The following is a brief look at German universities and students in pre-Nazi Germany:
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Universities and colleges had many supporters of anti-Semitism in their faculty. The Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Popular Education described a "massive swelling of anti-Semitic tendencies in our universities." Two-thirds of the Technical University of Handover student assembly called for a exclusion of "students of Jewish descent" from the student union in 1920.²

2 - "Volkisch Origins of Early Nazism: Anti-Semitism in Culture and Politics", Uwe Lohalm pp. 185

http://www.geocities.com/onemansmind/hr/nazi/Weimar01.html
***
And this is a short bit on the Wandervogel movement that became the Hitler Youth movement:

A Berlin university student, Herman Hoffmann Fölkersamb, founded a study circle for shorthand at the all boys Berlin-Steglitz grammar school where he was teaching. This schoolboy group began to meet without adult leadership about 1895. The early members of the Wandervogel movement liked to consider themselves the pioneers of the youth mission, yet not until November 1901, in the Steglitz town hall cellar, was the Wandervogel, as an association formally created.

Hoffmann did not have a firmly-defined program for the group. He had vague notions about what did and did not represent a reasonable life. These thoughts were developed as the Wandervogel movement spread and was adopted by increasing numbers of German youth. He realized that industry and commerce had come to stay, but he was equally convinced that the individual, instead of passively surrendering to the impersonal and atomizing forces of industrialism, should actively control them. What seems strange to the modern reader is that along with the heralding of nature and the individual was a healthing dose of Teutonic nationalism and anti-Semitism, sounding much like a melding of today's' greens and neo-NAZIs. Here we review some of the tenants of Hoffman and other Wandervogel adherents.

As Wandervogel was the principal German youth movement and not Scouting, it suggests that the movement was more in tune with German youth than Scouting. It is often thought that the Hitler Youth in the 1930s perverted innocent German youth. It appears, however, that German youth in the years before the NAZI seizure of power willingly adopted some of the tenets of the Hitler Youth before even more the more virulent ideology of NAZIism was forced upon them.

The Wandervogel movement was an outgrowth of German Romanticism which influenced the NAZIs. The Wandervogel featured groups of youths hiking, singing, and camping. We would have called it "getting back to nature" a couple of decades ago. It was a reaction against industrialization and urbanization, as was romanticism, and it was something of a model for various Hitler Youth activities.
http://histclo.hispeed.com/youth/youth/org/nat/ger/wander.htm

***

The unbroken line from Herder and the German Romantic proto- fascists to today's MESA Nazis and Left dhimmi fascists is completely clear to those who care to look at it. Our universities are over-run by Nazis and fascist allsorts careerists.

When the general public sees and understands that MESA is acting in step with Geman academics and students of the 1920s they will then see the future we face. Until our public is informed and educated regarding the fascist intentions of our academics we will continue to poison ourselves eating the strange fruits of our knowledge gardens.

Model Muslims

Hey, they're not all bad. What a babe this one is. And check out the story of Muslim babes below. They're not only good to look at, they're real smart too. Like, you know, you can listen to them for a bit?

Model Muslims

Michelle Leslie has raised questions about whether women can follow Islam and a career in fashion, writes Caroline Overington

November 29, 2005 BEFORE she became famous as the young woman arrested in Bali for possession of ecstasy, Michelle Leslie was one of thousands of young Australian girls trying to make it as a model. As part of her job, she posed in bikinis and underwear, and she once was photographed astride a motorbike baring her bottom.

After her arrest Leslie adopted a more modest wardrobe. At one court appearance she wore a sarong over her head; at another, she adopted the full, black burka, the garment worn by the most devout (and the most oppressed) women in the Muslim world.

Leslie's spokesman, Sean Mulcahy, says she converted to Islam at a private ceremony at a friend's house a year before she was arrested. Yet Muslim commentators, including Australian Federation of Islamic Councils head Ameer Ali, say Leslie can't be Muslim and a model. "There's an Islamic code of dressing [that] says women must be modest," Ali says. "You can't go cat-walking with a semi-naked body. That is not allowed in Islam."

But Leslie is not the world's only Muslim model; there are thousands working with the sanction of their parents and communities.

Eva Roslan, 22, is one example. She started modelling at 16, after getting permission from her Muslim parents. "I actually did ask my parents because it was important that they approved," Roslan says. "They had no objection. They were actually quite worried that I was still too young and I will be influenced, that I will get into dangerous stuff, because people are saying that modelling is dangerous. So my mother, she actually followed me everywhere, from when I was 16 until I was 19 and after that she trusted me. Then she said: 'Now I think you can go on your own, just don't break the trust."'

Roslan, who was born and reared in Singapore, says her religion is important, but Muslim society in Singapore is not as strict. "There are a few models who are Muslim," she says. Roslan follows Muslim teaching, she fasts at Ramadan and prays at the mosque, "although not five times a day".

[....]

She has not posed nude but has no objection to doing so in the future, depending on what the occasion. "I haven't so far, but I think I wouldn't mind," she says.

[....]

One of the first internationally known Muslim models was Iman Abdul Majid, who is married to David Bowie. The Somalian-born Iman, now 50, was reared by progressively minded Muslim parents. She was discovered at 19, living in Kenya, by photographer Peter Beard, who took pictures of her nude from the waist up, with her breasts covered by her hands and traditional necklaces.

In an interview in 1999, Iman said she knew her Muslim parents would not approve of the photographs, "known in the fashion world as artful nudes. My father would have found other words," she said. The photographer asked Iman to leave Kenya for a modelling career in the US. "But I was a Somali girl who had been raised a devout Muslim," she said. "I was a diplomat's daughter."

She was also secretly married and could not leave the country without her husband's permission, so she forged the documents she needed to get a passport and fled. She hated disappointing her father by becoming a model, a job he believed unworthy of her talents, and when her parents visited she collected photographs that showed her in any state of nudity and stored them until they left.

The father of supermodel Yasmeen Ghauri, who was born in Canada in 1971, also disapproved of her profession. Moin Ghauri is a former imam of the Islamic community of Quebec. In interviews, he has expressed strong disapproval of his daughter's chosen career. "She is still my daughter, but her actions are completely contrary to the teachings of Islam," he said in one interview. "She is doing something that encourages others to be doing bad things."

Yasmeen Ghauri has said she tried to become a devout Muslim, particularly after she once visited Saudi Arabia, where women are not allowed to drive or show any flesh. "I thought, 'OK, OK, I'm going to be really religious, I'm going to cut off school, I'm going to cover my head and everything.' Then I woke up and said: 'This is ridiculous, I haven't gone to hell."'

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,17393861%255E28737,00.html
***

Oh, tie me up. I can hardly stand it.

Thanks to Pastorius at http://www.cuanas.blogspot.com/ for the title graphic.

Quo Vadis, France?

The battle for the future is being fought in the minds of the Western public. It's in those dark and frightening spaces that we will find the answer to the question of the survival of Western Modernity, if it survives, if it survives as something we can recognize. The battle for the survival of the West might already be lost, and we might face the blood-dimmed tide already. Europeans seem to have given up the will to live as free and independent people in favor of sliding into decay and death at the hands of knife-wielding Muslim fanatics bent on world domination and the return to primitivism as World Spirit. Here we look for signs ot the future, signposts along the roadside, as it were, that show us the direction of the West. Below we have two pieces on France, recently visited by Islamic havoc, and we see the mind of the French at work, sort of, if one can call it thought at all.
***

(Angus Reid Global Scan) – Many adults in France express satisfaction with the way Nicolas Sarkozy faced the recent episodes of civil unrest, according to a poll by CSA released by Profession Politique. 48 per cent of respondents believe the interior minister was as tough as required in dealing with the situation.

Conversely, 23 per cent of respondents believe Sarkozy was too tough, while 25 per cent expected him to be tougher.

On Oct. 27, riots broke out in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after the death of two teenagers who allegedly were being pursued by police officers. On Nov. 17, French authorities declared a "return to normalcy" in the whole country. Over 20 nights of violence—which spread to 19 French provinces—at least 8,973 vehicles were torched, 2,888 people were arrested, 126 police officers were injured, and one person died.

In the first days of rioting, Sarkozy referred to the alleged troublemakers as "scum." On Nov. 8, French president Jacques Chirac authorized a state of emergency. Sarkozy declared, "For a period of 12 days, searches will be possible every time we suspect possession of weapons (in order to) systematically apprehend troublemakers and systematically prevent a spread of violence."

In mid-November, Sarkozy openly advocated for the deportation of foreigners who were involved in the violence—even if they are in France legally—declaring, "The Migration Act allows expulsion. I am the interior minister and I implement the rules."

[....]

Polling Data

How would you define the attitude of Nicolas Sarkozy in dealing with the problems in the suburbs?

He was as tough as required	48%
He was too tough	23%
He was not as tough as he should have been	25%
No reply	4%

Source: CSA / Profession Politique
Methodology: Telephone interviews with 957 French adults, conducted on Nov.16, 2005. No margin of error was provided.
***

Chirac's influence sinks to new low
By Henry Samuel in Paris
(Filed: 28/11/2005)

Jacques Chirac's presidency hit a new low yesterday when a poll revealed that most voters think he now has little or no influence over events at home or abroad.

Of those polled, 72 per cent regarded the influence of their president - who turns 73 tomorrow - over what happens in France as "weak".

	Jacques Chirac: perceived as a lame duck

Two thirds said his clout on the world stage was feeble, while only 36 per cent thought he held any significant sway over European politics.

[....]

The poll, conducted for Le Parisien newspaper by the CSA institute, was all the more humiliating in that the opinion of supporters of Mr Chirac's conservative ruling UMP party was scarcely more favourable than those of voters on the Left. Only 43 per cent of UMP voters thought he still had a leading role to play in France.

With presidential elections not due until 2007, the poll raises serious questions about Mr Chirac's perceived lame-duck status and his ability to maintain his authority.

[....]

Mr Chirac's 10th year in power has been a bad one. He has a notched up an unenviable string of defeats - not least over the referendum on the European constitution.

The poll is also an indictment of his handling of the wave of rioting in the poor suburbs this autumn.

[....]

The pair appear to have gained political credit from the riots - Mr Sarkozy for his tough stance, and Mr de Villepin for his statesmanship.

[T]he fact that he took three weeks to solemnly address the French [after the rioting began] was manifestly a mistake," said Mr Cayrol.

[....]

Some analysts say his absence from the political stage has been carefully orchestrated to allow his protégé, Mr de Villepin, to appear as the nation's de facto leader, and a credible presidential alternative to his rival, Mr Sarkozy, who leads the UMP.

[....]

The prevailing view is that the president will stop at nothing to block Mr Sarkozy's rise to power - even if it means backing a socialist candidate.

[....]
Chirac's influence sinks to new low
Telegraph.co.uk
***

The French can vote for anyone they like, and not too many people would care, as a rule, even the French. But there is a concern when we read that the miserable Chirac will stop at nothing to block Sarkozy's rise to power. We read above that Chirac is unloved by the French, that he's a lame-duck leader, and that he's on his way out anyway. Why does he think he has the power to stop Sarkozy? Who cares what Chirac's opinions are these days? Muslims do. Obviously Chirac has nothing but contempt for the French people, even those who voted for him, for his own party members. He'll sell out his own for his vanity. What more might he do in the time remaining to him as leader of France? What more might he do to secure his place in the world of Islam? What might that slimey little bastard do to the French people in favour of Islam?

Above, according to one poll, about 73 percent of the French people are roughly in favour of Sarkozy's appraoch to law and order in France regarding the recent Muslim rioting. Chirac seems happy enough to sabatoge Sarkozy. Will Chirac dismiss the opinions of 73 percent of the French people? Ten percent are Muslim. At what point does Chirac slide across the pit from being a scum-bag to being a dictator and a traitor?

If the mind of the French public is a dark and empty space of moods and anti-Anglo hysteria, and if Chirac sells them out to the Muslim world from spite and vanity, what's left for us in the West? Might we, in a fit of outrage, find ourselves in a state of genuine hostility toward the French? And might the French, in a state of rage at the betrayal of their own nation not find themselves divided between fascsims? If Islamic fascism prevails in France thanks to Chirac's dirty dealings, and if the French Right goes to extremes against both Islam and America, then what do we do?The survival of the West isn't just a French matter. If France goes Islamic, thanks to Chirac, we are in serious trouble.

Romantic Origins of Left Dhimmi Fascism

Islam threatens the existence of the modern world and each and every individual living today and all to come. Islam is a primitive fascist poligion, a dirty little tribal practice that's gotten out of hand and become a world-wide mind-trap for peasants and dysfunctional authoritarians. Islam is a garbage ideology for the stupid and the violent and the hateful. It's the perfect mind-set for the mentally disordered savage who needs total order to survive at a primitive subsistence level. It's spread across the globe and picked up minds like a magnet collecting iron filings. And somehow we in the West are falling for it, accepting it as some kind of benevolent alternative to our own historical values of Israel, Greece, Rome, and Modernity. The question is why we accept the rantings of a 7th century psychopath as acceptable at all, even for a man of Mohammed's time and place. He is obviously, to any thinking and feeling person, one sick piece of work. And yet we are inundated with Muslims, dumped on daily by Islam, and are made dhimmis by self-will in our appeasement of it. Why would we allow ourselves to be swamped by garbage? What is the appeal for so many of our leaders whom so many of us follow blindly and trustingly?

Our position is that this Islamic filth we're fed daily is wrapped in Romanticism. No matter how high it stinks, no matter how foul it is to swallow this Islamic slime, we accept it from fear of being anti-social. Most of us grin and smile and die on commuter trains going to work or sitting in office towers or taking our children to school or dancing in nightclubs or just being alive in the presence of Muslims. We dare not speak aloud of our doubts about Islam because our societies are based on common assumptions about the good will of all religions other than Christianity, Satanism, for example. And we are terrified of being called racists, though anyone who cares to know will already know that Islam is a poligion not a race, and that most Muslims are Indonesians and Pakistanis, not ethnic groups one finds often on the front lines of race abuse. No, those people would be Jews. So, don't we find it often easier to be tolerant of Satanist Jew hating child-molesters? "Why, yes we do, Dag," you say. And of course we're all embarrassed. Something is really badly wrong. Our position is that much of the wrong stems from the very beginnings of the Romantic movement of the late 18th century, a movement that continues to this, our own day. The apples of our wisdom are rotten due to the roots coming from Romance.

We need a working definition of Romanticism if we are to follow this thesis, and today we include definitions from Barzun, a dictionary, and the ever nearly worthless wikipedia. Even this tiny introduction to the concepts of Romanticism will give us a better understanding of why we tolerate the sickness of Islam at all, let alone why we tolerate it in our homelands. With that view of Romanticism giving us a clearer understanding of why we hold the opinions we hold, why we have the attitudes we have, why we say the things we think we mean, we might find that upon some better understanding we don't like the things we hold to be true by virtue of not disagreeing with the commonly held assumptions of our societies. If we see that many of our opinions are held simply because we never gave them any real thought, and that now we do and see them as shop-worn and dirty, maybe we'll toss them out for some new and better opinions. Maybe, knowing the make-up of our beliefs we'll choke on the next dose of Islam poured down our throats. Maybe we'll gag on it and refuse anymore of that filth. But let's look at the origins of our ideas regarding the religion of peace as just another valid expression of the world's Peoples' cultures. Let's look at Romance.

You have lovely eyes, I'm sure, since you're reading this, and I brought flowers. Yes, it's true Romance:


***
[R]omanticism was not a movement in the ordinary sense of a program adopted by a group, but a state of consciousness exhibiting the divisions found in every age. Hence all attempts to define Romanticism are bound to fail. [It is] a Zeitgeist and not an ideology. [Barzun: p. 466]

As soon as it is seen that Romanticism was a phenomenon like the Renaissance, the need for a definition disappears. [p. 466.]

The span of years when Romanticism was the spirit of the age is roughly the last decade of the 18C and the first half of the 19C. [p. 469.]

The use of romantic in English goes back to the 17C when it was used to denote imagination and inventiveness in storytelling and, soon after, to characterize scenery and paintings. [p. 467.]

Behind the first unmistakable Romanticist works stands the thought of four men who by date and upbringing belong to the 18thC but were at odds with it: Rousseau, Burke, Kant, and Goethe. [p. 469.]

In many past posts here we've written about the Counter-Enlightenment movement, part of which is Romanticism, and according to me, not Kant. However, these quotations belong to Barzun, and allowing him space we'll continue by looking at what the general idea of Romanticism is:

[Not Reason but] mind-and-heart is the single engine of moral, social, and scientific progress.... Man, then, is conceived by Romanticism as a creature that feels and can think.... The Imagination emerges as a leading faculty, because it conceives things in the round, as they look and feel, not simply as they are conceived in words.... [P]oetry of the period is predominantly lyrical-- it speaks in the first person to report on its findings within the self. [p. 470.]

Romanticism, then, is a break from the Enlightenment and the search for Human truth through Reason for the universal. Romance becomes a personal quest, and often a community quest, one found in the volk rather than in the individual as individual. But it's more than that as we'll see. The individual becomes not a person but a genius:

He who is possessed by these ideas and can communicate his discoveries is the Genius. [p. 470.]

The Romantic rebels against the rationalist and celebrates the emotionalist. As we've seen in Herder and the nature of private property, the Romantic is at odds with the man as a private person: he must be part of a group to have identity as person. Therefore, to be a genius, one must be the genius of a nation, and that cult of genius that the Romantics developed leads to the cult of personality that we find in the leadership principle, for example in movie stars or in Hitler. The man, being nothing in himself, must be the paradigm of his group, a genius for the whole. The Romantic hero is such a genius. He doesn't merely think, he feels!

The feeling Romantic must return to the age of purity and the place of purity, to a time when the group was strong and happy. The return to Nature, the love of Nature, the fetishizing of Nature that we see today in ecology is rooted in early Romanticism. It is a hatred of cities and privacy and individuality cut off from the world of dirt and feudalism. Fort the Romantic it is a return to Eden where and when people were good because they were good, not because they had material wealth. Simple things, such as manna from Heaven, that is what they long for. There is none of that in the coldness of modern machines and cities. So for the Romantic there is a cult of genius and a cult of Nature. We see it today not only in ecology and hippie idiots dancing naked around the fire at Stonehenge on the summer solstice but in the average concern for healthy food and vitamins. We take the good and we take the bad, not often knowing the difference.

In a piece we ran last post there was reference to eating moose. The writer made it out to be a privilege to eat moose with native Indians in northern Canada. Why is it a privilege in that dim mind? Because of the fetish of Nature that comes down to us unexamined from Romanticism. Frankly, any wild animal is so filled with worms and germs that no one in his right mind would eat any of it if not from necessity. But, when one is told by the culture that it is very cool to eat moose with Natives in the wild, then it seems to taste OK, regardless of the sickness that follows. To refuse to eat wormy meat that tastes like garbage is to fall afoul of the majority opinion that natives living in a state of Nature are spiritually advanced. We buy into these lies and accept them in spite of our own good reason and good sense because we don't have the confidence to shout out loud that this is a load of crap. Our culture values ideas that came to us from men and women who were fighting Napoleon! There is nothing good about eating moose. It is not a spiritual thing, man.

Barzun continues:

In Rousseau's Emile, the eloquent profession of faith offers Nature-- the works of God-- as the proof of His existence and attributes. The concrete beauty of nature speaks directly to the receptive mind. And from the same source comes, as we saw, the cult of nature-- the love of trees and flowers, gardening for pleasure, bird-watch and camping, the the belief that one must leave the unnatural city at least once a year and restore in the countryside something essential to life. [p. 471.]

Flower children, for those old enough to be embarrassed by it, want to save the trees. Yes, and rightly so. But the Romantic ideology that pushes it is not known to be linked to the aesthetic response for most of us. We are not aware of the ideology of Romanticism that validates our aesthetic appreciation. With that Romance ideology that we accept as natural and right, that most of us like when we garden and hike in the wilderness, we do not link a philobarbarist ideology that makes us also swallow Islam. It's there, though. We take the good with the bad slipped in on us. If Nature is good, then those who live in a state of nature must also be good. And if they eat moose, then it must be a privilege to eat it with them. But it ain't. It's a con job. It's the ideology of Romanticism.

We are too often told that we Modernists are cut off from our roots, that we live sterile and meaningless lives in cities and that we should slow down and eat the roses. We should get back to nature. We should get in touch with our feelings. And so on. These things are fine. But it's when we don't realize the Romantic nature of the ideology that puts these ideas forward that we get sucked into accepting Islam and dhimmi fascism along with them.

In the reaction to the Age of Reason, in reaction to the revolutions of Modernity, the American, French and Industrial Revolutions, in particular the French invasions of neighbouring areas of Germans, there was a strong revolt against everything the French stood for: Reason and rationality, science and commerce, privacy and individualism topping the list. There was more: there was a hatred of universality, of men being equal in rights rather than being privileged by titles and birth. There was a hatred of making money rather than of having everything come from land wealth. There was a hatred of cities because they weren't estates with lords. There was a hatred of machines that took away the work of men who made things in their crofts by hand. The individual sold his labour for cash, and he was alone rather than part of a community. That romantic reactionary position of hatred is with us today, and it grows steadily. Both he so-called Left and the Right share that animosity to Modernity. In reaction against Modernity they all look back to the time of feudalism to see if they might not find those who are still living life that was before the time of the revolutions, and yes, dear reader, they find Islam.

Barzun goes on to describe some of the Romantic view thus:

As prophets, for the earliest days of the religion, they castigated the society in which they lived. It was sunk in the mire of commerce and industry, activities that blunted the senses, narrowed the mind, killed the imagination. With these tenets the campaign against the middle class had begun.

The mark of this contemptible creature is his incapacity to understand and enjoy art-- except the academic or sentimental kind. [p. 474.]

Romanticism is a snobbery. We are philistines. We live badly. We chase after oil and profits, and we don't care who we kill in our pursuits, nor that we destroy Mother Nature in the process. We are bad, and we are bad because we are petty, unlike our Romantic heroes who feel real feelings and are in touch with real people, those who live in squalor and eat wormy meat.

REgardless of the many flaws of Romanticism, we cannot claim they were stupid. Many were geniuses. Barzu writes:

With their searching imagination in literature and art, it could be expected that the Romanticist's intellectual tastes would be anything but exclusive.... This was a genuine multiculturalsim, the wholehearted acceptance of the remote, the exotic, the folkish, and the forgotten. [p. 481.]

Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decandence. New York: Harper Collins, 2000. pp 465-89.

There is a lovely line in a Herzen novel, Fathers and Sons, that comes to mind dimly, and in time I'll remember it rightly: The father cries out to his wife that their [obnoxious] son is an intellectual and that he's sophisticated, and that he won't spend time with them after his long abscence at university from which he's now returned because his parents are "boring."

Folks, we are the boring ones our dhimmi leaders and intelligentsia despise. They prefer the exotica of Muslim murderers. We are boring!

On that note, we'll leave Barzun and look at less frothy and prolix definitions of Romanticism below. We will see that our own society is caught up in an 18th century ideology of which we really don't have much understanding, and that from it we hold some pretty poor ideas as normal and right when in fact they really suck.
***

Romanticism: The Romantic favours the concrete over the abstract, variety over uniformity, the infinite over the finite, nature over culture, convention, and artifice, the organic over the mechanical, freedom over constraint, rules, and limitations. In Human terms it prefers the unique individual to the average man, the free creative genius to the prudent man of good sense, the particular community or nation to humanity at large. Mentally the Romantic prefers feeling to thought, more specifically, emotion to calculation, imagination to literal common sense, intuition to intellect.
[....]
[Romantics] saw understanding, the intellect as it works in science and everyday life, as an inferior faculty supplying useful, but distortedly abstract, opinion about fragments torn from reality for practical purposes. Reason, on the other hand, was for them intellect in its highest form as an apprehension of the totality of things in their essential interconnectedness.
[....]
Non-philosophical Romanticism disdains ordinary rationality as a practical makeshift for the earth-bound, yielding only a truncated, superficial, and distorted picture of the world as it really is. The directly intuitive, even mystical, apprehension of the world which we owe to poets and to other such creative geniuses does not stand in need of any reasoned support of articulation....
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Edited by Ted Honderich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. p. 778.
***

Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement in the history of ideas that originated in late 18th century Western Europe. It stressed strong emotion....

In a general sense, "Romanticism" covers a group of related artistic, political, philosophical and social trends arising out of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe. But a precise characterization and a specific description of Romanticism have been objects of intellectual history and literary history for all of the twentieth century without any great measure of consensus emerging. Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of this problem in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see romanticism as completely continuous with the present, some see it as the inaugural moment of modernity, some see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to the Enlightenment, and still others date it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution.

Romanticism is often understood as a set of new cultural and aesthetic values. [A] new emphasis on common language and the depiction of apparently everyday experiences; and experimentation with new, non-classical artistic forms.

Romanticism also strongly valued exotic locations and the distant past. Old poetical forms, such as ballads, were revalued, ruins were sentimentalized as iconic of the action of Nature on the works of man, and mythic and legendary material which would previously have been seen as "low" culture became a common basis for works of "high" art and literature.

Origins and precursors

The term 'Romanticism' derives ultimately from the fictional romances written during the Middle Ages ("romance" being the medieval term for works in the vernacular Romance languages rather than in Latin). ...

In English literature, Coleridge and Wordsworth were the true architects of the Romantic movement, beginning with their Lyrical Ballads (1798), but the revival of 'romance' in this narrower sense was preceded by a cult of Sensibility. The ' Sturm und Drang' (Storm and Stress) movement in German drama was associated with Friedrich Schiller, and the early work of Goethe, in particular his play "Goetz von Berlichingen", about a Medieval knight who resists submission to any authority beyond himself. Goethe's novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774) had huge international success. This too concerned an individual who felt a strong contradiction between his own internal world of intense feeling, and the external world that failed to correspond to it. Werther eventually commits suicide. In later works Goethe rejected Romanticism in favour of a new sense of classical harmony, integrating internal and external states.

In English, the term 'Romantick' also embodied experiences of human inadequacy and guilt, quite separate from their traditional Christian grounding; such a sense of [ ] and ever-present dark forces seemed most appropriate in settings of Medieval culture. In Germany and France, Herder praised the Aurora borealis.

While these precursors partly explain the Romantic fascination with the Middle Ages, the pleasures of stressful emotions, and the thrill derived from wilfulness, the actual expression of the Romantic movement itself corresponded to the sense of rapid, dynamic social change that culminated in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. However, Romantic literature in Germany preceded these crucial historical events.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
***

Nosferatu is the first film version of the classic Romantic era novel Dracula.