France, America, and The Thing

One of the major movies from the period Tony Judt is writing about – at least in America, was The Thing, a 1951 movie in which a scientific expedition digs up an alien and makes the mistake of letting it thaw out. The Americans defeat the alien through Yankee ingenuity and at the end one of the characters warns America to keep a lookout for more of them – to “watch the skies.”

That was good political advice at the time because the alien Communists were out there as well. Meanwhile back in France, the French were just getting over the shock of having been “occupied” by a bunch of aliens: us, America. They were so befuddled by their recent Vichy experience that they were fearful of us. The only people they trusted were Communists. That’s pretty strange all by itself, but they were easily befuddled back then (some would say they still are), despite all the intellectuals they had and the “purchase” these intellectuals had on French citizenry. It seems these intellectuals were really big into painting, poetry and music but didn’t know very much about history or foreign affairs.

And so these intellectuals worked at sublimating their guilt. They had collaborated to some extent with the Germans – all of them had to some extent – even if it was just holding one’s tongue rather than saying what one really thought. There was plenty of guilt to sublimate. So to help them with that, the French intellectuals created Existentialism. Sartre wrote Being and Nothingness in 1943. This work is credited with beginning the Existentialist movement of the twentieth century. There are no universal standards he tells us, and therefore, no reason to feel guilty because guilt implies falling short of a standard. There is also no purpose in life because in addition to their being no God, there is neither heaven nor hell. The most one can hope for in life is to seek some cause to occupy one’s mind. Sartre selected Communism.

I might scoff at French intellectuals, but I haven’t all that much respect for American intellectuals either. They follow after the French rather faithfully. France, after all, is the center of all things wild and wonderful, true and beautiful; so they (the American intellectuals) read all these French intellectuals – instead of reading French history which would have warned them how screwed up they were.

Time passes, French Existentialism is dutifully swallowed by American intellectuals. One of them, John Carpenter, decides to remake The Thing. He gets Ennio Morricone to do the score, and acquires a cast of excellent actors, e.g., Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, Tom Waites, David Clennon, and Joel Polis. Only in this new movie, on the other side of Existentialism, The Thing isn’t out there. Oh, it is to begin with, but it doesn’t stay there. Soon it is inside, in the characters. They are all alien and evil and deserve to die and – they all do. There are no survivors in this Existentialist remake – no one telling us to watch the skies. We are on our own, for none of us deserve to live and the sooner we realize that the better off we’ll be – at least according to Sartre and his fellow Existentialists.

Lawrence Helm

www.lawrencehelm.com

Intellectuals, French and American, & Obama

In reading Tony Judt’s Past Imperfect, French Intellectuals, 1944-1956, I have on several occasions wondered how representative some of the views he discusses were. Then on page 202 I read, “The same public that had resented being liberated and ‘occupied’ by the Americans was quite clear by 1948 that U.S. aid was vital to French national recovery. This did not make the United States universally popular: despite the fact that in 1950 it was the foreign country that most people liked more than any other, it was also the one with the highest negative coefficient: more people also actively disliked it than disliked any other country, Germany included. But except for the young and the highly educated, the French were overwhelmingly sympathetic to the United States in general even as they feared and resented its economic power and were opposed to some of its foreign policies, including support for a renascent Federal Republic in Germany. In 1953, 61 percent of those asked were ‘sympathetic’ to the United States, only 8 percent expressing ‘antipathy,’ 5 percent ‘distrust,’ and 1 percent ‘hate.’ It is thus worth noting that a sizable percentage of the Communist electorate had no apparent dislike for Washington – only 10 percent of all persons questioned would have favored a Franco-Soviet alliance.’”

Another source indicates that the percentage of Frenchman who voted the Communist ticket during this period was probably around 25%. http://www.jstor.org/pss/1951672

Getting back to the French intellectuals, further down on page 202 Judt writes, “One of the distinctive and enduring differences between France and the United States has been the insignificance of the intelligentsia in the public life of the latter. In marked contrast to their French homologues, American intellectuals are marginal to their own culture. For a multitude of reasons, the intellectual in America has no purchase upon the public mind, not to mention public policy. Thus there was (and remains) about the United states something profoundly inimical and alien to the European and French conception of the intellectual and his or her role. If ‘America’ represented the future, then it pointed to a society in which the role of the intellectual, real as well as self-ascribed, would be dramatically reduced.”

COMMENT: Many French intellectuals during this period sought to submerge their distinctiveness in their conception of the Proletarian “Ummah,” if I may borrow a term from Islam. The Proletarians were well-muscled, hard-working, honorable, and virtuous. They weren’t terribly bright, however; so the French intellectuals needed to be careful with them. If the intellectuals had thoughts critical of what Stalin was doing in the East, perhaps it was better that they keep them to themselves. There was no reason to disturb the equanimity of the Proletariat. But many of the non-intellectual French paid attention to their intellectuals and were influenced by them. These intellectuals had a significant “purchase upon the” French mind.

It occurs to me that one of the reasons American intellectuals have no “purchase on the” American mind is that Christianity has a much larger “purchase” here than in France. American intellectuals who are Christian may be treating the Christian “Proletariat” as the French attempted to treat their Communist Proletariat during the period Judt is writing about.

It is interesting that Obama said it was in Jeremiah Wright’s church that he “found Jesus.” If this comment isn’t explored, it would make Obama seem safe to the American Christian majority. Wright is a Black Liberationist. Wright’s Christianity is not “traditional.” He has some political strings attached to his Christianity. A “white person” may join a Black Liberation church only after he admits his sins against black people. These sins may not be overt, but unless the white person is working for the good of black people, he is living in a state of sin. Listen to the theologian most responsible for Jeremiah Wright’s Black Liberation Theology: http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2008/09/james-cone.html

In my opinion, Obama would be acceptable to Christians, only if they do not examine the Christianity of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Put another way, if the American Christian were just the slightest bit more intellectual, he would be able to Google enough information to inform himself about the Christianity of Cone, Wright and Obama.

Lawrence Helm

www.lawrencehelm.com

French Anti-War Leftists, and Obama

It has always puzzled me that anti-War Leftists who came of age during the Vietnam war focus so completely on the deaths caused during the fighting, and not upon deaths caused by Communists for Communist purposes. They claim to abhor death in general. They claim to be a bit pacifistic, that is, death for any reason during war is wrong, and yet they concentrate entirely on deaths caused during wars fought by the U.S. These anti-War people were too busy protesting to study history. They knew nothing about the need to come to the aid of allies or to oppose Communism by resisting its attempted takeovers. They only knew that the U.S. was opposing Communism. Communism was good and American Democracy bad. Why didn’t they go the extra mile and claim, instead of their phony pacifism, that they approved of deaths caused by Communism?

When they refer back to those times, they mention the deaths caused by our bombing. Never have I heard any of them describe what the Communists did in South East Asia after the Americans were finally forced to abandon their allies. Estimates vary, but perhaps 500,000 were killed by the Ho Chi Minh afterwards to solidify his control. Another 500,000 or so died in attempts to flee Vietnam, mostly by boat. And then Pol Pot in Cambodia decided it was time, now that there was no worry about Americans returning, to institute a true workers paradise; so he killed perhaps 2,000,000. There was little outcry about this. After all, Communists need to kill people. It is okay because that is how Communism spreads, and as any anti-War protestor of the 60s can tell you, Communism is good and America is bad.

Communist sympathizers have always understood the need to kill off huge numbers of people, people who opposed, or potentially opposed, the dictatorship of the Proletariat. On page 139 of Past Imperfect, French Intellectuals, 1944-1956, Tony Judt wrote, “No one who reads the innumerable books, essays, articles, and polemical exchanges that studded French public life in the postwar years can fail to be impressed, in the midst of all that noise, by a certain silence. In the welter of verbal presences, there was, so to speak, one ‘great absence.’ This was a generation whose attention was incessantly directed at the responsibility of each person for his or her acts and their outcome, where humanism and the destinies of humanity were on every lip and where the untold suffering brought about by dictatorship and was the measure of all political choices. Yet the human cost in deprivation, pain, injustice, and death that was the openly acknowledged price paid for the establishment of Communist regimes in half of Europe provoked hardly any expression of concern or protest.”

COMMENT: Because of the nearness of our election, what occurred to me wouldn’t seem germane at some other time, but I reflected on the fact that we may be about to elect someone who shares the prejudices of those pro-Communist French Leftists in the 40s and 50s, and the anti-American Leftists of the 60s. Not that Obama would use any of their words, but his intellectual roots are in that Leftist milieu. Everything I read about him tells me he is a Leftist who shares the views of the Leftists I’ve been reading about.

Consider, we know that Obama’s voting record is to the Left of every other Senator. We know he was sponsored by Bill Ayres and Bernardine Dohrn, unrepentant former members of the Weather Underground. We have Obama’s own words telling us that Ayers is now respectable, but we have Ayers own words at a recent SDS reunion telling us that he is not. Added to this is that Obama for 17 years sat under the tutelage of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright who is an avowed Black Liberationist. Wright is a follower of the Black Liberation Theologian James Cone. You don’t get even a hint of traditional Christianity when you listen to Cone. I watched a video of Cone and he mentioned Jesus only once if I recall correctly, and that was to tell us that Jesus was really black. Cone’s theology is strongly influenced by Marxism. He takes Marx and gives him a little Black twist. And then there is Obama’s job as “Community Organizer.” I’ve been reading Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days, and he refers to Community Organizers as his radical allies. What was Obama’s purpose during his days as a Community Organizer?

We can take comfort, those of us who aren’t Leftists, in the fact that the American Presidency is a position of limited power. Furthermore, if Obama were elected, he would have enormous peer pressure urging him to do the typical things that presidents do. His ability to do something utterly radical would be limited. Then too, he has a well developed ego and may begin worrying about his legacy as soon as he enters his Oval Office.

Nevertheless I don’t respect the prejudices of someone raised in the shadow of the sort of Leftism I’ve been reading about. Maybe such a person can’t overturn our traditional form of government, but he will be no defender of it. Obama will look as longingly toward modern-day-French Leftism as it looks longingly toward him. It isn’t going to be the end of Americanism as we know it if Obama is elected, but it won’t do our way of life any good, and if he can make compromises with Leftism without incurring a political penalty, we can be sure he’ll do it.

Lawrence Helm

www.lawrencehlem.com

French Leftism and Communism

When I referred to the Marxist-Leninist influence in France, a Frenchman recently seemed befuddled.

Of course, when we speak of any nation we cannot say “all” of them are anything, because there will be many who are not. That should go without saying. Take present day America as an example. If one reads our media, one would assume that we are “all” Leftists over here, but we who are not Leftists seem to make up about 50% of our population. In fact, it seems common in Europe to speak of us as a nation of cowboys. That assumes that Leftism over here is not in the majority. Our election next month will be close. Will the Leftist Obama win? Or will it be the Cowboy McCain. No one knows.

Now in the case of France we also have a complicated situation. They have a Right Wing over there, but it isn’t like ours. In fact it often strikes me as being more like our Left Wing in its desire for a patrimonial state to care for a citizen’s every need – however, one suspects these French Rightists only go along with that idea so far. In actuality, their Right reveres the nationalist De Gaulle. He antagonized Roosevelt during the Second World War by insisting on the dignity that was (De Gaulle believed “is”) France when France was either occupied by the Germans or in cahoots with them (Vichy). And afterwards, De Gaulle set about attempting to restore the glory that was France by getting back its empire. It tried first in South East Asia and suffered its Dien bien Phu. Later it attempted to restore Algeria which thought it was qualified to be equal in light of its help during World War Two, but De Gaulle wasn’t interested in that, at least not initially. Eventually he presided over its independence, but he still had a vision of France that was passed on to Chirac who sought first to make France equal to the U.S. and the USSR, but that didn’t work out terribly well. Later when the USSR failed, one would think he would have accepted the idea that France was just another European nation, but not so. He spearheaded a plan to make the EU stronger. He envisioned a European empire with France guiding it. But the French people refused to sign away France’s independence.

Which brings me back to the matter of Communist influence in France. If one read French newspapers, one would have thought the French would have been happy to sign away its independence to the EU, but there is obviously a majority in France which is at variance with Gaullism – at least as I see Gaullism.

I have read a number of books about France, but maybe most of them have been written by the French elite. I know that France embraced Communism after the Vichy period, but “which” France did the embracing? Was it a majority or the “elite” only? From the fact that French Communist-admirers spoke so freely, I must conclude that the feeling was shared by the populace in general. Tony Judt speaks of those who didn’t share this admiration, Raymond Aron, for example, but Judt’s book is subtitled, French Intellectuals, 1944-1956; so perhaps the French populace at large was interested in other matters while their intelligentsia agonized over Stalin’s purges and “Show Trials” in Russia and Eastern Europe.

On page 120, Judt writes, “In humanisme et terreur; which was published in 1947 but had already appeared the previous year as a serious of articles in Temps moderns, Maurice Merleau-Ponty placed a bet upon history. Let us suppose, he wrote, that history has a meaning. Let us further suppose that this meaning is vouchsafed to us through change and struggle. Let us also accept that the proletariat is the force for revolution in our era. Finally, let us credit the Communists with their claim to embody the consciousness and interests of the proletariat. If these premises are correct, then the purges and show trials of the thirties in Moscow are shown to have been not only tactically and strategically wise but historically just. Although Merleau-Ponty did try to argue that the Soviet victory over Hitler justified some of Stalin’s previous actions, he recognized that this did not constitute sufficient proof. We remain uncertain as to the outcome of all this, he acknowledged. The verdict of the future is not yet in. But we have no choice but to act as though it will be positive, because to renounce Marxism (i.e., to dismiss the Communists’ claim) would be to dig the grave of Reason in history, after which there would be left only ‘dreams and adventures.’

“This is the classic presentation of the argument from History. Like all influential arguments, it is really very simple. It took the central Marxist fantasy, of a human history simultaneously intelligible and manipulable, and inserted it firmly within Merleau-Ponty’s own version of contemporary French philosophy. Because it was written as a reply to Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, it took as its subject the Moscow trials fo the thirties, that of Bukharin in particular; but its application is universal. The question is not whether Bukharin and his associates were guilty, nor even whether or not their trials were rigged and the pretexts employed indefensible. What mattered was the overriding need to give our lives, our history, a meaning. . . .”

COMMENT: I sympathize with Tony Judt here. He loves the French – more specifically, he loves French intellectuals; so how could they have tried to justify the Stalinistic savagery? Surely, no intellectual Westerner, especially no intellectual French Westerner, could be so deluded, so illogical, and yet he had their history before him -- of the French intellectuals doing precisely that. Not all of them to be sure, but most of them. They loved the Communistic ideal – not the actuality as it existed in the USSR, but the ideal as they imagined it. When the actuality intruded by means of such books as Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, or when the purges and show trials moved closer and closer to the French borders, it was more and more difficult for these intellectuals to hang onto their ideal, their fantasy. And they began falling away.

We had something similar in the U.S., but on a much smaller scale. Whitaker Chambers fell away in just this manner and was then ostracized and ridiculed by the American Left. When Elizabeth Bentley fell away she too was ostracized and ridiculed. Then when McCarthy attempted to alert the U.S. government to the USSR’s spying activities, he too was ridiculed and ostracized. But these seem like blue-collar struggles compared to the struggles of the French intellectual elite. Their struggles are much more cerebral. An intellectual can enter into their angst much easier than into McCarthy’s “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the . . . .”

Getting back to the Frenchman who gave the impression that Communism was no longer any sort of influence in France, I submit that it is not so easy to abandon our histories or the experiences and the revered ideals of our past. Just consider a few examples: The Japanese code of Bushido, German Militarism, Russian Imperialism, and American rugged individualism. In each case these revered ideals have been sublimated to a large extent, but they still exist, and they still influence many of the citizens of those nations. In the case of France we could say that during the Gaullist period it, like present day Russia. was anguishing over the loss of its empire. But during this same period, and carrying forward to today the French embraced Communistic ideals.

After the Vichy period, these intellectual Frenchmen embraced everything that was Communistic. They imagined a perfect Communism but they couldn’t separate their fantasy from the actual Communist nation that existed; so when it engaged in excesses, they suffered. They engaged in some “my family right or wrong-type” thinking. And Judt in his book is examining this thinking with considerable sympathy.

But let us look at the present time. It is no longer comfortable for the Left to refer to Communism as something they believe in, but it is their history, their heritage, and they have sublimated it into other forms of society and government. We can see the effects in State-Controlled Socialism, aka Welfare-Statism. We can see the effects in the desire to have the European nations wither away and become absorbed in a Proletarian EU. We can see the effects in their desire to submerge their French nationalism in either the Supranational EU or UN. After all, wasn’t that what the USSR was – a supranational Moscow controlling satellite states along its borders? Why couldn’t that work again? Why couldn’t it work with a kinder gentler EU, or a kinder gentler UN?

Then too there is the Communist ideal, “to each according to his need.” Each election, French leaders try to be more responsible with the national budget, but Frenchmen feel the State owes them security – that it owes them what they “need.” It owes them long vacations and short work-weeks. It owes them early retirement and enough money to live on comfortably. And yet one of these Frenchman recently looked up from his long vacation and challenged me about the Communist influence in France. Surely not. Surely, France has excised all Communist influence, he would say. I think not.

Lawrence Helm

www.lawrencehelm.com

Will France ever abandon its Socialistic dream?

France and much of the EU has had to rethink itself because of the failure of Russian Socialism. After the Vichy, France embraced Socialism and was especially attracted to the USSR as the embodiment of the Socialistic ideal. They put the best light on everything the USSR did. But with successive Communist failures and abuses, the French admiration of the USSR weakened. There was a crisis in this regard in the sixties and all, but the most dedicated Communist diehards, abandoned all regard for the USSR after its fall in 1989. France connects Socialism with the USSR, and other Western European nations do as well.

While the ideals popularized by Marx and Lenin are widely known and, especially in France, are much admired, but no Socialistic government has been a success. Most collapsed in a relatively short period of time. The few holdouts such as Cuba and North Korea, are relics and not successes by anyone’s standards. Some Middle Eastern nations such as Syria claim to be Socialistic, but it would be difficult to hold them up as successes. Still, many in France cling to socialistic ideals. The cradle to the grave Welfare State is Socialism-Lite.

In France Luc Ferry and Alain Renault’s French Philosophy of the Sixties fell like a bombshell in 1985: In the preface we read: “For what is now in fact forty years, two critiques of the democratic world have always been competing: the Marxist one, conducted in the name of an ideal future, and the Heideggerian one, depending more openly on traditions dating from before the advent of the modern world (for example, on the Greeks). Since the (recent) collapse of the Marxist dream of a radiant future, it is the neoconservative critique of the Heideggerian type that is in turn being politically compromised. That the two major critiques of modern humanism have been linked with totalitarian adventures is most significant; Whether conducted in the name of a radiant future or a traditionalist reaction, the total critique of the modern world, because it is necessarily an antihumanism that leads inevitably to seeing in the democratic project, for example in human rights, the prototype of ideology or of the metaphysical illusion, is structurally incapable of taking up, except insincerely and seemingly in spite of itself, the promises that are also those of modernity. . .”

A host of books have followed Luc Ferry and Alain Renault’s lead and some believe Liberal-Democracy may be making a comeback in France and other parts of Europe. Many were purported to have turned away from Heidegger as well as Marx and Lenin; however, I haven’t read anything recently that would make me sanguine about France giving up its Socialistic dreams.

Lawrence Helm

Hurrying out of Germany and the Middle East in 1919

Those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat its mistakes. We today are on the cusp of just such a mistake, one that could be prevented if we are willing to learn from history. Let’s consider what we know about 1919 and then relate it to the current desire on the part of the Obama to hurry out of Iraq at the present time:

As World War Two rolled around, the events that took place in Paris of 1919 were revisited and it was seen that mistakes were made in regard to Germany that made World War Two an inevitability. What were those mistakes and who made them? Probably France’s Clemenceau made most of them in respect to Germany; though he got the others to go along with him. Germany made France suffer grievously and Clemenceau believed it should be made to suffer in its turn. While this approach may have satisfied Clemenceau, it eventuated in far worse suffering for France in the not-too-distant future.

Yes, Yes, World War Two, but why an interest now? We are interested now because this 1919 Committee is the group that bollixed up the Middle East. They created the artificial borders that Arabs and other Muslims have fought over almost ever since. So who is this cast of players that set about to establish these artificial borders? We learned about the vindictive Clemenceau. Next we learned about the ignorant Lloyd Jones. Even if we knew nothing about the aftermath in Germany or the Middle East, we would believe that it didn’t bode well for them – if we knew anything about Clemenceau and Lloyd Jones. But perhaps Wilson could make a difference. He was certainly better informed than Lloyd Jones and not as vindictive as Clemenceau, but he tended to preach and to antagonize the people he needed to work with. Clemenceau told Colonel House, Wilson’s second in command, “You are practical. I understand you but talking to Wilson is something like talking to Jesus Christ.”

Another problem was that Clemenceau didn’t like Lloyd George. At another time he said in a phrase that went the rounds of Paris, “I find myself between Jesus Christ on the one hand, and Napoleon Bonaparte on the other.”

Macmillan writes, “Wilson puzzled him: ‘I do not think he is a bad man, but I have not yet made up my mind as to how much of him is good!’ He also found him priggish and arrogant. ‘What ignorance of Europe and how difficult all understandings were with him! He believed you could do everything by formulas and his fourteen points. God himself was content with ten commandments. Wilson modestly inflicted fourteen points on us . . . the fourteen commandments of the most empty theory!’”

Someone (was it Colin Powell?) said about the invasion of Iraq, “you break it, you own it,” and it is true that we were much better at the war than its aftermath, but the same sort of thing was true in 1919. Europe, the Middle East, and much of the rest of the world were “broken,” and this was the group that “owned” them. Would they do any better in the fixing of them than the Bush Administration did Iraq? Here is what Macmillan writes in Margaret Macmillan’s Paris 1919, on page 55:

“It was already two months since the end of the war, and people were wondering why so little had been accomplished. Part of the reason was that the Allies were not really ready for the sudden end of the fighting. Nor could they have been. All their energies had been devoted to winning the war. ‘What had we to do with peace,’ wrote Winston Churchill, ‘while we did not know whether we should not be destroyed? Who could think of reconstruction when the sole aim was to hurl every man and every shell into battle?’ Foreign offices, it is true, colonial ministries and war offices had dusted off old goals and drawn up new demands while the fighting went on. There had been attempts to think seriously about the peace: the British special inquiry, established in 1917, the French Comite d’Etudes and the most comprehensive of all, the American Inquiry, set up in September 1917 under House’s supervision. To the dismay of the professional diplomats, they had called on outside experts, from historians to missionaries, and had produced detailed studies and maps. The Americans had produced sixty separate reports on the Far East and the Pacific alone, which contained much useful information as well as such insights as that, in India, ‘a great majority of the unmarried consist of very young children.’ The Allied leaders had not paid much attention to any of their own studies.”

Thus we see that not only were the Allied leaders not using the best information available to them, there was apparently no one to convince the impatient Allied populaces that important decisions needed to be made and that if the committee rushed through the process precipitously, just because an ignorant populace couldn’t see what was taking them so long, the world would pay for that haste later on. And that is what did happen. The leaders were themselves ignorant and ill-prepared to “fix” what had become “broken,” but they knew how to listen to the folks back home who urged them to hurry, hurry, hurry. Those people back home didn’t know what was at stake and there was no one to explain it to them. What happened instead of a self (and populace)-education process is that the committee hurried and as a result the world became even more broken.

Some now suggest that enough is known about the world so that we should never again “break” a nation until we know how to “fix” it later on. That certainly is one lesson we should have learned from World War One and its aftermath, and we did learn it in regard to Europe. We “broke” Europe during WWII and did a much better job of fixing it the second time around, but we apparently haven’t “learned” anything in a universal way. What we learned in Europe (and Japan) isn’t being applied well to the Middle East.

Another thing that we should learn is that the populace is going to remain ignorant unless someone explains matters to them. It can’t be someone like Wilson who does it in an arrogant way. It can’t be someone like Clemenceau who would do it in a vindictive way, and it shouldn’t be someone like Lloyd George who is too ignorant of Foreign Affairs to do it intelligently, but it should be done. Otherwise, the populace will say, “hurry, hurry, hurry” pull out of Iraq, and we will rush off leaving this cornerstone of Middle-Eastern peace unfinished, unfixed, or at best poorly fixed and open to the increased possibility that we will one day have to go back and fix it again – at much greater cost.

Lawrence Helm

www.lawrencehelm.com

Geert Wilders War! Dutch and EU Islamic Problem

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=486C49FC-333F-43AB-8B23-31ABDAE869E2

The above article, written by Jacob Laksin is about Geert Wilders. He has produced a film critical of the Islamists; so Islamists, being the reasonable folk that they are, are lining up to have a go at killing him. I can imagine the abuse Geert is suffering in the Netherlands. I mentioned the Muslim problem in France and got instant outrage. I mentioned Bat Yeor and was criticized form mentioning her name. People who describe the problem are attacked. The problem itself is not. The following is from the article:

“The reality, though, is more complex. Although, at around one million, the Dutch Muslim community still is only about 5.8 percent of the population, it is increasingly a majority in some neighborhoods – and a hostile one at that. Overtoomse Veld, the west Amsterdam neighborhood of Theo Van Gogh’s killer Mohammed Bouyeri, is by some estimates 80 to 90 percent Muslim. Major Dutch cities like Rotterdam, now home to the Islamic University of Rotterdam, are nearly half Muslim. On their face, such statistics may seem unobjectionable. But it has not escaped notice that these cities, with their restive and unassimilated immigrant populations, boast some of the highest crime rates in the Netherlands and serve as havens for religious radicalism. Nor do Dutch voters need Wilders to wonder about some Muslims’ capacity for tolerance. A spate of attacks on gay men by young Muslim thugs in Amsterdam, once the self-styled “gay capital of Europe,” has convincingly made the case for him.”

A Frenchman who commented on an earlier note, denied that France had as high a Muslim population as it actually does. I quoted the BBC on the number of Muslims in France. He countered it with his own number. He gave no reference for it. It isn’t just the raw numbers. His thinking, and I mention it because it seems representative, seems to be (to apply it to the Netherlands) what can a minority of 5.8 percent do? We see in this quote from the article what they can do. They can live in enclaves and can cause considerable trouble in the areas where they are not a minority. Why this is so difficult for Europeans to understand escapes me.

Repeat after me, “We Europeans do not welcome immigrants.” And you European Muslim immigrants, repeat after me, “we didn’t come here to assimilate.” Of course there are exceptions to these rules, but from all I’ve read these rules predominate. The Dutch are functioning like our American Leftists. They have embraced a socialistic ideal. They don’t care that this ideal has never existed. They don’t care if it is unrealistic. It was created by Marx and Lenin and they love it. From each according to his ability. To each according to his need. There is no religion in this political paradise. Religion is opiate of the masses. There is only Capitalism and labor. There is Imperialism, the highest form of capitalism and the oppressed. There is a Capitalistic hegemony and the Wretched of the Earth. Rise up, ye Wretched. Throw off your chains.

But alas for these idealistic Europeans. Alas for these Dutch. Alas for the French. This is a myth. Socialism has never worked. There is no point in tweaking it as you do. It can never work. Look at the Wretched you have invited into your cities. Are they embracing your ideals? No, they aren’t. They cluster in enclaves and embrace their traditions. They embrace the Islamic ideology called Radical Islam. They have a different ideal from yours. They don’t like your socialistic ideal. They think your vaunted Amsterdam a licentiousness a disgrace. They would like to impose Sharia Law there and clean it up. They have a different ideal. They want Islam to cover the earth. They want to be in a position to give you the choice of becoming a dhimmi (see Bat Yeor’s writings to find out what that entails) or dying. You don’t cover that sort of commitment with fluffy airy failed socialistic idealism. At least you don’t for very long.

Not everyone in the Holland has his head in the sand. Laksin writes, “The PVV currently has around 10 percent support in national polls . . . Double what it attracted when it first stood for election in 2006, this would translate into 15 seats in the parliament in the next general election in 2010.” “Hey,” someone says. Wilders is too extreme. We don’t want that. Well, if you don’t, provide your voters some other choices In the meantime, what the PVV is proposing sounds pretty good to me:

Geert Wilders’ “. . . Party for Freedom (PVV) now has nine members in the 150-member Dutch parliament, where it continues to press for its Wilders-inspired platform of restricting immigration from Muslim countries; for more aggressively monitoring domestic extremism, including radical mosques; and for reducing an indulgent welfare state that allows immigrants to live comfortably without assimilating. To be sure, these remain minority views in Dutch politics. “We vote every Tuesday and it’s always the same,” says Martin Bosma, a PVV MP. “Nine people raise their hands and the other 141 stare at their shoes.”

“Hey,” I say. The PVV has proposed a sensible approach to your Islamic problem. It won’t solve it, but it is a move in the right direction. What is wrong with you others? Quit staring at your shoes, get your heads out of your idealistic Socialistic fundament and do what is sensible.

Lawrence Helm

www.lawrencehelm.com