The Brussels Journal - The Voice of Conservatism in Europe

A History of European Music, Part 1

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:09:29 -0500

The earliest evidence we have of musical instruments dates back to the Old Stone Age. We know that there were rich musical traditions in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China and elsewhere. Indirectly, it is possible that some aspects of Babylonian musical theory and practice influenced the Greek, and by extension European, musical tradition. The ancient Greeks used various musical instruments such as harps, horns, lyres, drums and cymbals. Greek music theory evolved continually from Pythagoras before 500 BC to Aristides Quintilianus in the late third century AD, whose treatise De musica (On Music) is an important source of knowledge of the Greek musical tradition. Music was closely connected to astronomy in Pythagorean thought, as mathematical laws and proportions were considered to be the underpinnings of both musical intervals and the heavenly bodies.

Plato and Aristotle argued that education should stress gymnastics to discipline the body and music to discipline the mind. Plato was, as usual, the stricter of the two. He would only allow certain types of music for limited purposes and asserted that musical conventions must not be changed, since lawlessness in art leads to anarchy. Aristotle was less restrictive and argued that music could be used for enjoyment as well as for education. To the Romans, music was a natural part of most public ceremonies and featured in entertainment and in education, too. During the early Christian era, the musical legacy of the Greco-Roman world was modified and transmitted to the West by scholars such as Martianus Capella (fifth century AD).

The Church was the dominant social institution in post-Roman times and deeply affected the future development of European music. Some elements of Christian observances may derive from Jewish tradition, chiefly the chanting of Scripture and the signing of psalms, poems of praise from the Hebrew Book of Psalms. How much borrowing there was from Jewish sources is hard to say, but similarities between Jewish melodies passed down through oral tradition and medieval melodic formulas for signing psalms in Christian churches suggest that there might have been some borrowing. For medieval Christians, music was the servant of religion. The most characteristic Byzantine chants were hymns, which became more prominent in the liturgy of the Eastern Church than in the Western one.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (ca. 480-525) was born in Rome, knew Greek and has been called “the last of the Romans, the first of the scholastics.” Like Augustine before him, he believed that the application of reason to theology was essential. According to Edward Grant, “Boethius began a trend that would eventually revolutionize Christian theology and transform it into a rationalistic and analytical discipline.” He wrote on philosophy, logic, theology and mathematics, and his influence helped to preserve some fragments of Greek philosophy and mathematics in Western Europe during the Early Middle Ages. His De institutione musica (The Fundamentals of Music), written in Latin but drawn from Greek sources, was widely cited for the next thousand years. Church leaders drew on Greek musical theory but rejected pagan religious customs, elevated worship over entertainment and singing over instrumental music.

The term “medieval” has, somewhat unfairly, come to carry decisively negative connotations for many people. Renaissance humanists viewed everything in between the fall of Rome in the fifth century AD and the revival of the Classical heritage in the fourteenth century as an unenlightened age which they labeled the Middle Ages. Much later, historians such as Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) from Switzerland and George Voigt (1827-1891) from Germany devoted considerable time to the epoch which was dubbed the “Renaissance,” or “rebirth,” and they reinforced the impression of the previous era as a “Dark Age.”

There is no doubt that there was prolonged unrest and urban disintegration following the collapse of Roman authority, accompanied by major population movements across the European continent, yet even during these troubled times there were exceptions. Charles Martel and the Carolingians managed to halt the Islamic invasion in France in the eighth century and for some time rebuilt a stronger state. Christianity spread among the barbarians.

Saint Isidore of Seville (ca. 560-636) and the Venerable Bede (ca. 672-735) contributed to the modest storehouse of scholarly and philosophical knowledge that was available in much of Europe before the organized recovery began in earnest from the twelfth century onward. The theologian Isidore was born into a prominent family in Roman Spain and served as Archbishop of Seville, then under Visigothic rule, for several decades. His encyclopedia Etymologies exists in more than a thousand manuscripts, making it one of the most popular books of the European Middle Ages before the printing press. It covers the seven liberal arts, medicine, law, timekeeping and the calendar, theology, anthropology, geography, cosmology, mineralogy and agriculture. He was not a very original writer, but his work contained some useful information in an age when this was in short supply.

The Venerable Bede was an accomplished English (Anglo-Saxon) monk and historian. At the age of seven he entered the monastery of Monkwearmouth in northeastern England, near the modern city of Newcastle. He is especially remembered for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which constitutes the chief source of information for modern scholars about early Britain. He also helped popularize the system of dating events from the birth of Christ. Bede’s work is a fine example of good medieval scholarship, but he was not typical, as most monks spent more time in the fields and farms or in administration than on being scholars.

Monks from Ireland, which was very early converted to Christianity following the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, played a major role in keeping alive what remained of learning in the West during the Early Middle Ages. John Scotus Eriugena (ca. AD 810-877), the Irish philosopher and theologian who served King Charles the Bald of France, wrote a significant treatise titled On the Division of Nature. According to Edward Grant, “Eriugena’s emphasis on reason was given institutional roots in eleventh-century Europe with the development of the cathedral schools that emerged in various European cities.” Grant believes that “…medieval theology was a systematic, rationalistic discipline.”

Emperor Charlemagne brought in Alcuin, a distinguished scholar and headmaster of the cathedral school at York in present-day England, to serve as his educational adviser. Alcuin had studied with an Irish teacher and was assisted by several Irish clerics. John McKay, Bennett Hill and John Buckler elaborate in A History of Western Society, Seventh Edition:

“At his court at Aachen, Charlemagne assembled learned men from all over Europe. The most important scholar and the leader of the palace school was the Northumbrian Alcuin (ca 735-804). From 781 until his death, Alcuin was the emperor’s chief adviser on religious and educational matters. An unusually prolific scholar, Alcuin prepared some of the emperor’s official documents and wrote many moral exempla, or ‘models,’ which set high standards for royal behavior and constitute a treatise on kingship. Alcuin’s letters to Charlemagne set forth political theories on the authority, power, and responsibilities of a Christian ruler. Aside from Alcuin’s literary efforts, what did the scholars at Charlemagne’s court do? They copied books and manuscripts and built up libraries. They used the beautifully clear handwriting known as ‘caroline minuscule,’ from which modern Roman type is derived. (This script is called minuscule because unlike the Merovingian majuscule, which had letters of equal size, minuscule had both upper- and lowercase letters.) Caroline minuscule improved the legibility of texts and meant that a sheet of vellum could contain more words and thus be used more efficiently. With the materials at hand, many more manuscripts could be copied.”

Although this Carolingian revival was initially motivated primarily by concerns about the low level of clerical literacy, it welcomed the natural sciences as well. Astronomy, for instance, was relevant for timekeeping and the calendar and for determining the correct date of Easter. As David C. Lindberg says,

“The importance of the copying of classical texts is demonstrated by the fact that our earliest known copies of most Roman scientific and literary texts (also Latin translations of Greek texts) date from the Carolingian period. The recovery and copying of books, combined with Charlemagne’s imperial edict mandating the establishment of cathedral and monastery schools, contributed to a wider dissemination of education than the Latin West had seen for several centuries and laid a foundation for future scholarship.”

There was some revival of interest in mathematics after the work of Gerbert d’Aurillac (ca. 945-1003), who became Pope Sylvester II in 999. As Grant states,

“In the eleventh century, Gerbert’s students disseminated his love of learning and his teaching methods throughout northern Europe. As a consequence, logic became a basic subject of study in the cathedral schools of Europe. And, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, would become ever more deeply entrenched in the curricula of the cathedral schools and then the universities of Europe.”

The number of monks greatly exceeded the number of nuns during the Middle Ages, but nuns had an important impact on society, too. As with monks, intellectual and scholarly nuns were not typical of the era, but some of them did exist. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a German abbess and composer who was given by her family when eight years old as an oblate to an abbey in the Rhineland, where she learned Latin and received a good education. A talented poet and composer, she collected 77 of her lyric poems, wrote scholarly works and carried out a vast correspondence with many prominent persons of her time. “Hildegard represents the Benedictine ideal of great learning combined with a devoted monastic life.”

The theologian Peter Lombard (ca. 1095-1160) wrote a treatise titled Four Books of Sentences, which became the basic textbook in all schools of theology in the Latin West until the seventeenth century. Between 1150 and 1500, only the Bible was read and discussed more than the Sentences. After education at Bologna, Italy, before 1150 he taught theology at the school of Notre Dame, Paris. Here he came into contact with Peter Abelard and the mystic Hugh of Saint-Victor (1096-1141), who were among the most influential theologians of the time.

The codification of liturgy, helped by Frankish kings, led to the repertory known as Gregorian chant, which was codified after centuries of development as an oral tradition. It was used in Christian services in Western and Central Europe until the Protestant Reformation and in Catholic areas even after that. Most people in these regions heard Gregorian chant at least weekly. From the ninth through the thirteenth centuries, chant formed the foundation for most polyphonic music. All later music in the Western tradition wears its imprint.

The Greek system of notation had apparently been forgotten by the seventh century when Isidore of Seville wrote that “Unless sounds are remembered by man, they perish, for they cannot be written down.” Yet with increasingly complex chants arose the need for notation, a way to write down the music. The earliest surviving books of chant with musical notation date from the ninth century AD. The invention of musical scales was important, but music antedated the invention of scales. The invention of musical notation enabled musicians to build upon the work of the past. It may well have been a necessary condition for the development of musical expression, but not alone sufficient to explain all later advances.

The connection between mathematical ratios and musical intervals discovered by Pythagoras and independently by the Chinese was important, but not as crucial as polyphony. “Just as linear perspective added depth to the length and breadth of painting, polyphony added, metaphorically, a vertical dimension to the horizontal line of melody.”

As stated in A History of Western Music,

“Many particular features of Western notation have been around for a millennium, including staff lines, clefs, and notes placed above the text and arranged so that higher notes indicate higher pitches. The invention of a notation that could record pitches and intervals precisely and could be read at sight was decisive in the later evolution of Western music, which more than other musical traditions is not just played and heard, but written and read. Indeed, notation is the very reason why we have a thousand years of music we can still perform and hear, and why books like this can be written. Almost as important, the codification of Gregorian chant and its diffusion in notation made it the basis for much of the music from the ninth through the sixteenth centuries. That these events took place under the Franks was significant, since Charlemagne’s empire was the political and cultural center of western Europe. From his day through the fourteenth century, the most important developments in European music took place in the area he once ruled.”

Churches and monasteries prospered after AD 1000 due to the relative political stability and great economic growth of the High Middle Ages. Europeans developed new and large cathedrals which employed the principles of the Roman basilica and the round arch, and artists decorated these buildings with frescoes and sculptures. In the ninth and tenth centuries, the Vikings and Magyars had burned hundreds of wooden churches. In the eleventh century the abbots therefore wanted to rebuild in a more permanent fashion, so the builders replaced wooden roofs with arched stone ceilings called “vaults.” Because these ceilings were heavy, only thick walls could support them, which again allowed for only small windows.

Nineteenth-century historians coined the term Romanesque, meaning “in the Roman manner,” to describe church architecture in many regions of Europe between the tenth and the twelfth centuries. The main features of this style, solid walls, rounded arches and masonry vaults, had been the characteristics of large Roman buildings. Romanesque churches had a massive quality to them and symbolized a “fortress of God,” a place of refuge in a time of insecurity. Because of this, churches of this style often have a powerful, fortress like appearance.

The Romanesque style is usually called Norman style in English, as it was championed in England by the Normans, the conquerors of mixed French and Viking (Norsemen) origins. After the Norman Conquest in 1066 under the leadership of William I (ca.1028-1087), better known as William the Conqueror, English culture was more closely allied to that of France. The Norman-style Winchester Cathedral has been the seat of many coronations and burials.

The Romanesque style was eventually replaced by new ideas, which later scholars termed “Gothic.” This is a misnomer as the style had nothing to do with the Goths, a post-Roman Germanic tribe. The term was coined following the Renaissance and the revival of the Classical style by Filippo Brunelleschi, when everything before this was considered inferior. Those who have had the pleasure of seeing impressive Gothic cathedrals such as the Notre Dame in Paris will, however, fail to detect any sign of barbarism in them.

Due to the pointed arch, the ribbed vault and the flying buttress, the ceiling weighed less in the new architecture. This made possible thinner walls and large stained-glass windows which flooded the church with light. The construction of such cathedrals represented a gigantic investment of time and money. Many craftsmen and their apprentices had to be assembled: quarrymen, carpenters, stonecutters, glassmakers etc., in addition to unskilled laborers to do the heavy work. The construction was rarely completed in a lifetime, and later generations often added to the building. Contributors and workers left their imprints on the cathedrals, which often carried scenes celebrating country life and the activities of ordinary people.

According to A History of Western Society, Seventh Edition,

“Medieval churches stand as the most spectacular manifestations of medieval vitality and creativity. It is difficult for people today to appreciate the extraordinary amounts of energy, imagination, and money involved in building them. Between 1180 and 1270 in France alone, eighty cathedrals, about five hundred abbey churches, and tens of thousands of parish churches were constructed. This construction represents a remarkable investment for a country of scarcely 18 million people. More stone was quarried for churches in medieval France than had been mined in ancient Egypt, where the Great Pyramid alone consumed 40.5 million cubic feet of stone….Gothic cathedrals were built in towns and reflect both bourgeois wealth and enormous civic pride. The manner in which a society spends its wealth expresses its values. Cathedrals, abbeys, and village churches testify to the deep religious faith and piety of medieval people. If the dominant aspect of medieval culture had not been the Christian faith, the builder’s imagination and the merchant’s money would have been used in other ways.”

New instruments appeared or came into widespread usage at this time, among them brass instruments such as trumpets and various horns. This was during the revival of Classical learning and the foundation of the first universities, and these developments were paralleled in music. “Like stained-glass windows, song touched hearts and lifted spirits.” Those who sang polyphony at first valued it as decoration, a concept central to medieval architecture. “Polyphonic performance heightened the grandeur of chant and thus of the liturgy itself.”

We cannot say with certainty that the ancient Greeks did not invent polyphony. For Plato and Aristotle, music was considered to be a force that shaped ethical behavior and society itself. This music must have been more powerful than a few simple melodies. Just how sophisticated it was we don’t know for sure, yet as Charles Murray writes in Human Accomplishment:

“But as far as can be determined from the evidence, every previous musical tradition, Greek or otherwise, consisted of horizontal linkages of notes placed one after the other, forming melodies. The melody might have a rhythmic accompaniment. Many instruments might be involved in playing the melody. But the music had a single, linear melodic line. Polyphony was the first expression of the idea that notes could be stacked on top of one another, creating musical lines that went different directions at the same time. Technically, polyphony has a narrow meaning. It is music in which simultaneous voice or instrumental parts are in two or more melodic lines, each of which can stand alone. Exactly where and when polyphony began is uncertain. The Welsh apparently sang in different parts very early, and so did the Danes. It may well be that other folk cultures had local musical traditions that used simultaneous melodic lines. But the main sequence for the development of polyphony came through the Catholic monasteries, especially the great monastery of St. Martial in Limoges, in central France, via an evolution of the method of singing prayers called organum.”

Organa (pl.) grew more complex and sophisticated between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries, and secular versions of polyphony began to develop. “Advances in theory and notation during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries allowed musicians to write down polyphony and develop progressively more elaborate varieties, in genres such as organum, conductus, and motet. The rise of written polyphony is of particular interest because it inaugurated four precepts that have distinguished Western music ever since: (1) counterpoint, the combination of multiple independent lines; (2) harmony, the regulation of simultaneous sounds; (3) the centrality of notation; and (4) the idea of composition as distinct from performance. These concepts changed over time, but their presence in this music links it to all that followed.”

The term organum is used here for two or more voices singing different notes in agreeable combinations. This term was used for several styles of polyphony from the ninth through thirteenth centuries. Early in the twelfth century, singers and composers in France developed a more ornate type of polyphony which is known today as Aquitanian polyphony. The twelfth-century liturgical composer Léonin, or Leoninus, was the first major European composer we know by name. He had probably studied at the emerging University of Paris and was associated with the Notre Dame school of composition in that city. His works were superseded by those of his French successor Pérotin, or Perotinus, during the early 1200s.

A History of Western Music explains:

“Musicians in Paris developed a still more ornate style of polyphony in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The creators of this style were associated with the new Cathedral of Paris, Notre Dame (‘Our Lady,’ the Virgin Mary). One of the grandest Gothic cathedrals, Notre Dame took almost a century to build: the foundations were begun around 1160, the apse and choir completed in 1182, the first Mass celebrated in 1183, the transept and nave finished around 1200, and the façade completed about 1250. During this time, musicians at or connected to Notre Dame created a new repertory of unprecedented grandeur and complexity. This new repertory was perhaps the first polyphony to be primarily composed and read from notation rather than improvised, and included the first body of music for more than two independent voices. Such elaborate music was valued for its artistry in decorating the authorized chant, making important services more impressive, and paralleling in sound the stunning size and beautiful decoration of the building itself. The Notre Dame composers developed the first notation since ancient Greece to indicate duration, a step of great importance for later music.”

These developments had far-reaching consequences for the future course of European music. A History of Western Music again:

“Before 1000, virtually all composition consisted of inventing a single melody line. By 1300, composition increasingly meant creating polyphony, although monophonic melodies continued to be composed. The emergence of written polyphony was a major turning point in Western music, as the coordination of multiple parts, interest in vertical sonorities, and use of counterpoint and harmony to create a sense of direction, tension, and resolution became characteristics of the Western tradition that set it apart from almost all others. In this sense, medieval polyphony was of enormous historical importance. Moreover, the notation that composers developed for polyphony introduced two features that became fundamental to later Western notation: vertical placement to coordinate multiple parts, as in Aquitanian and Notre Dame organum and modern scores, and different noteshapes to indicate relative duration, pioneered in Franconian notation and continued in our whole, half, quarter, and eighth notes and rests.”

These developments continued during the Renaissance era. The Franco-Flemish Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450-1521), one of the leading composers of Renaissance Europe, was widely hailed as a great musician and held prestigious positions at courts and churches in France and Italy. The Franco-Flemish composer Orlando di Lasso (ca. 1532-1594) ranks with the Italian Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (ca. 1525-1594) among the great composers of sacred music in sixteenth century Europe, although unlike Palestrina he also wrote many secular works.

Despite the many contributions made by composers and theorists of late medieval polyphony, their music seldom outlived them by more than a generation or two. As new styles were created, older styles soon fell out of fashion. At the time of Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, medieval music was often regarded as crude, harsh and primitive. Nevertheless, the medieval era created the entire basis for the future developments of European music. Without medieval polyphony there could have been no Bach, Mozart or Beethoven.

As Charles Murray puts it:

“The process that had begun with the invention of polyphony would continue for centuries. If one were looking for the most dazzling immediate effects of a musical invention, the most promising candidate would not be the original invention of polyphony, but the development of modern tonal (major-minor) harmony that began in the Renaissance and reached its full expression in the Baroque. It is tonal harmony that made possible the music from the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras, and that fills most of today’s concert programs. But tonal harmony falls in the category of a great invention that builds on a more fundamental expansion of the human cognitive repertoire – in this instance, the idea that music has a vertical dimension as well as a horizontal one. Notes can be stacked. Melodies can be stacked. Once that idea was in the air, all else became possible.”

This is the first part of a history of European music, from Pythagoras to The Beatles. It will consist of five parts published at The Brussels Journal, Atlas Shrugs and possibly other websites such as Europe News and La Yijad en Eurabia. After these parts have been completed, the entire essay will be republished at the Gates of Vienna. I have utilized many sources for this text, but the single most important reference work is A History of Western Music, Seventh Edition, by Donald J. Grout, Peter J. Burkholder and Claude V. Palisca.

A Failed Diplomatic Outreach to Tehran

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 02:58:15 -0500

A few days ago Tehran expelled Britain’s diplomats and arrested some of the British embassy’s local staff. The semiofficial Fars news agency suggested that the latter had played a “significant role” in recent protests, inferring that Britain herself was fermenting unrest inside Iran. Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband has responded, however, saying that the suggestion was “wholly without foundation.” And the Czech EU presidency has also said that, “The harassment or intimidation of foreign and Iranian staff working at the EU embassies will be met with a strong and collective EU response.”

Speaking last year at ‘The Second Stage: Building Democracy in a Posttotalitarian World’ conference [video] hosted by The Hoover Institute, Richard Perle remarked on the difficulty facing diplomats working in authoritarian regimes. “It is almost always the case,” he said, “that encouraging [human] rights where they do not exist will not improve the relationship [between the diplomat’s nation and the other] – at least not in the short term – but will complicate it and even worsen it, so there is a natural resistance to doing what needs to be done to encourage human rights on the part of the diplomatic establishment.”

Yet, Perle would have the US encourage human rights in other countries, regardless of such difficulties, and perhaps especially in Iran. Tehran, he observed, is “an unpopular regime,” and there is “potential” for real change inside the country. However, Perle also pointed out the lack of contact between the US and the Iranian dissident movement, calling the US’s broadcasting efforts “feeble.”

A year on, the West’s support for Iran’s dissidents has, at times, come close to pathetic. And NewsMax.com is even reporting that, “[…] the Obama administration […] has zeroed out funding for pro-democracy programs inside Iran from the State Department budget for fiscal 2010, just as protests in Iran are ramping up.”

President Obama has made his presidency about healing the supposed rift between the US and the so-called “Muslim world.” And to his credit, Obama did speak about human rights and even women’s right at Cairo last month. This was an undoubtedly bold move, and one that is to be welcomed. But his outreach has been largely, mistakenly, directed towards the regimes, rather than the people.

Earlier this year, he openly pushed for Turkey’s entrance into the EU, claiming that these had been brought together by “Centuries of shared history, culture and commerce.” Yet most Europeans would undoubtedly disagree that the connections between Turkey and Europe are anywhere near as significant as those that have linked current EU member states.

But, perhaps more importantly, Obama ignored the fact that the Muslim majority country is governed by the Islamist The Justice and Development Party (AKP), and that there is widespread concern in Europe over the possibility of the country joining the EU. Turkish citizens have also protested against their government’s push toward greater Islamification of the state, with its attempt to ban the selling of alcohol in some regions, and its annulling the university headscarf ban.

A few weeks ago Obama sent a letter to Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei, indicating the administration’s willingness to talk with Tehran.

No doubt partly as a consequence of such outreach, his response to the violent crackdown on peaceful protests was bewilderingly weak. Taking questions from the press early on in the crisis, Obama commented, “[…] I want to start off by being very clear that it is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran's leaders will be; [and] that we respect Iranian sovereignty […]” After which, comments about being “rightly troubled” by violence against civilians are more or less redundant. Tehran can only have got the message that the US poses no serious threat to the regime, regardless of its actions or genocidal ambitions.

But, by his own admission, Obama believes that the best way to prevent Iran from going nuclear is through “tough, hard-headed diplomacy – diplomacy with no illusions about Iran and the nature of the differences between our two countries.” Yet if overtures to Tehran have meant all but ignoring violence perpetuated against Iranian citizens, then being friends with the regime must mean acquiescing to a nuclear Iran, turning a deaf ear to threats to wipe Israel off the map, and to more and more accommodation of Islamic fascism.

Reaching out to dictators at the expense of those under their control that want democracy and freedom is a strategy that will not pay dividends, and, over the last few months, it has only put freedom further on the defensive. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s barefaced demand that Obama apologize for supposed meddling in Iran is no doubt an embarrassment to the US administration. But it cannot be a complete surprise, coming, as it does, on the back of Hamas and Hezbollah demanding more accommodation of their positions – on Israel in particular.

However, the West was shocked by the murder of music student Neda Agha Soltan [video], and by other scenes of violence against unarmed Iranian citizens. And as yet more photographs and footage of police and gangs of Basij thugs attacking peaceful protestors surface in the West, so Obama is afforded fewer and fewer options. His outreach to Islamic fascists looks increasingly like a failed policy.

“There is no doubt that any direct dialogue or diplomacy with Iran is going to be affected by the events of the last several weeks,” Obama has said. “The violence perpetrated against [the protestors] is outrageous. We see it and we condemn it.”

Spain Deconstructs the Traditional Family

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:41:38 -0500

Spaniards are currently debating a controversial plan by Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to liberalize the country’s abortion law. The new measure would obligate the public healthcare system to provide free abortions without any restrictions for women 16 years and over up to the 14th week of pregnancy, and up to 22 weeks if there is a risk to the mother’s health or if the foetus is deformed. Women can also undergo the procedure after 22 weeks if doctors certify that the foetus has a serious deformity or incurable illness.

The new bill would reform the present law, passed in 1985, which legalizes abortion only for certain restricted cases: up to 12 weeks of pregnancy in cases of rape, up to 22 weeks in the case of severe foetal malformation, and at any point if a doctor certifies that the pregnancy represents a threat to the physical or mental health of the mother.

The Zapatero government says the new law is groundbreaking in Spain because it regards abortion as a right, not a crime. Equality Minister Bibiana Aído says that with the new law, “no woman will go to jail for interrupting her pregnancy.” In actual practice, however, abortion is already essentially legal on demand in Spain because the existing law is not enforced. According to the Spanish Ministry of Health, the number of abortions has more than doubled in the past decade, reaching a record-high 112,138 abortions in 2007 (the latest year for which official data is available), or more than 300 every day. At the current rate, one out of every five pregnancies in Spain will end in abortion by 2010. By some estimates, that would rank Spain as having one of the highest abortion rates in Europe.

The most controversial part of the proposed reforms would give girls aged 16 the right to abort without consulting their parents. The move, which has outraged Spanish voters on both sides of the political aisle, is the latest in an ambitious program of social change under Zapatero, who critics say is resolutely determined to destroy Spain’s Judeo-Christian ethical foundations, primarily by deconstructing the traditional family. Since Zapatero came to power in April 2004, Spain has legalized homosexual marriage and adoption, approved fast-track divorce, pushed stem-cell research and even granted “human rights” to apes.

In July 2005, Spain became the one of the first countries in the world to legalize same-sex “marriage.” The new law, which has now facilitated more than 13,000 “weddings” and 165 “divorces,” also grants homosexual couples the right to adopt children. In March 2006, the Zapatero government banned traditional gender references in legal documents relating to the family. On marriage certificates, for example, words such as “husband” and “wife” have been changed to “Spouse A” and “Spouse B.” On birth certificates, words such as “father” and “mother” are now “Progenitor A” and Progenitor B.”

In December 2006, the Zapatero government announced that homosexual “diversity” training would be mandatory in all schools. Also known as “Citizenship Education,” the new program requires that children from the age of nine be taught that homosexuality is the moral and physical equivalent of true marriage. It also includes lessons on “moral pluralism,” which argues that the Judeo-Christian concept of moral absolutes is inherently intolerant. Although many parents conscientiously object to what they say is a “totalitarian” move by the state to usurp the right of parents to determine the moral education of their children, the Spanish Supreme Court in January 2009 ruled that course is indeed obligatory for all children.

In June 2008, the Spanish parliament approved a Zapatero-inspired proposal to grant “human rights” (including the right to life, liberty and freedom from torture) to great apes, such as chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. The initiative, which is premised on the idea that humans and apes are equal, is a direct attack on the concept of the sanctity of human life.

This purely materialistic view of human nature, which dominates the Zapatero government’s thinking, brings Spain’s abortion debate full circle. In defending the new abortion measures, Aído, recently speaking on the left-wing Cadena SER radio, argued that a 13-week-old foetus is not a human being. Responding to a call-in question from a radio listener, who said that a three-month-old foetus looked like a baby, Aído said: “A living being, yes. But we cannot say that it is a human being because this has no scientific basis.” And in answering critics who say 16-year-old girls should not be allowed to abort without informing their parents, Aído said: “A young girl can have breast enlargement surgery without the knowledge of her parents.”

Meanwhile, Health Minister Trinidad Jiménez announced that effective immediately the government will make the so-called “morning-after” contraception pill available at pharmacies without prescription, provoking accusations by the conservative opposition Popular Party that the Zapatero government views abortion as just “one more method of contraception.”

For her part, Deputy Prime Minister María Teresa Fernández de la Vega says the new bill is necessary to “preserve the dignity of women.” She also says it is “in line with today’s Spanish reality.”

But Spain’s real reality is that abortion, in addition to corroding Spanish attitudes toward life, is also imploding the Spanish population. According to the Madrid-based Institute for Family Policy (IFP), abortion is now the number one cause of death in Spain. By way of illustration, it says that every twenty days the number of abortions equals the annual number of people killed in traffic accidents. The IFP estimates that more than one million abortions have been carried out in Spain since 1985. As a result, Spain now has one of the lowest replacement fertility rates in the world. Even with millions of new immigrants from Latin America and North Africa, births just barely exceed deaths, resulting in what Spaniards call “desnatalidad” or the “de-birth rate.”

In response to Spain’s population crisis, Zapatero has launched the so-called “cheque bebé,” by which the government hopes to bribe Spanish parents into having children by paying them €2,500 ($3,500) for every newborn baby. In announcing the new policy, Zapatero (without even a touch of irony) declared: “In order to continue progressing, Spain needs more families with more children.”

Spanish voters are slowly beginning to take notice of Zapatero’s social re-engineering projects. During the general elections in March 2008, voters denied him an absolute majority in Spanish parliament, which is where his new abortion bill is now being debated. The bill also faces mounting opposition at the street level. Tens of thousands of people have marched against abortion in Spanish cities, and three recent opinion polls shows that most Spaniards, including a majority of socialist voters, are opposed to liberalizing the abortion law. A total of 64 percent of those surveyed in a poll for the leftwing daily newspaper El País opposed the measure. A poll for the conservative daily ABC found that 57 percent of Spaniards “totally” or “relatively” opposed the measure. A third survey, published by the left-leaning La Vanguardia newspaper, found that 71 percent of respondents were opposed to the new law.

Zapatero hopes to increase his poll numbers by stepping up attacks on the Roman Catholic Church. When church leaders dared to question why the state was trying to indoctrinate children with the homosexual ideology of the Spanish left, Zapatero unleashed the influential sociologist (and socialist attack dog) Gregorio Peces-Barba, who accused the church of “an extreme arrogance, a sensation of impunity and an insufferable sense of superiority, derived from the fact that they administer ‘superior truths.’” When the Catholic Church organized a poster campaign arguing that endangered species like the Iberian lynx have more legal protections than unborn babies, the socialist government threatened to review the church’s legal status.

As Zapatero fiddles with his post-modern “progressive” vision of morality, Spain is burning. Illegal immigration, joblessness, radical secularism, corruption, divorce, violent crime, drug abuse, alcoholism, obesity, sexual assault, murder, abortion and hedonistic utilitarianism are all up. Meanwhile, Judeo-Christian values, traditional marriage, personal responsibility, academic performance, respect for parental authority, pursuit of the work ethic, economic growth and procreation are all down. Many observers link both the cause and the effect of Spain’s societal troubles to a breakdown of the traditional family.

Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group

Duly Noted: From the Rule by Consent to the Rule by Fear

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 03:34:08 -0500

George Handlery about the week that was. The Islamic Republic of Iran is openly transmuting into a theocratic dictatorshi. The virtues of applied Socialism. How about a charter to protect the endangered majority? Again they are fighting Coca-Cola. Property is theft, expropriation via taxes is what?

1. Any reaction to the days past must include Iran. The need is clear. Having witnessed the collapse of several systems, an attraction to follow comparable events develops. Admittedly, in some of its details, the wobbling of Iran’s theocratic dictatorship differs from the writer’s experience. Iran’s system is not supported by the probable intervention of a great power. The security organs of the régime are still obeying orders. Furthermore, a significant segment of the public not only tolerates, but also supports the system. Regardless of the caveats, one can foretell much about the years to come.
A. Iran might be one country but it harbors two societies. Their gears match badly. One of these is rural and pre-industrial. It is mired in an obscurantist traditionalism supported by lacking knowledge. It is also badly educated in areas that determine the modern world. The other society is urban, possesses modern knowledge and skills. Therefore, it can fearlessly connect to the modern world.
B. On the long run, the ruling system is threatened, as it must base its ideology-driven power grab on the weapons-hardware contributions of relative progressives. This means that, the internal enemy’s support is needed to implement the foreign policy the regime’s extremist supporters demand.
C. The political ambitions of the reactionary rulers demand that the contribution to the armaments demanded by their foreign policy and contributed by the modernist group be emphasized. Its will to cooperate will prove to be fickle.
D. The rulers’ ideology makes them not to want to participate in and comprehend the processes that shape our time. Ignoring a suspected process and blocking it at home will still not stop global transformation.
F. The retrograde system, even if, for the sake of utility it decides to enter the modern world, is unfit to survive the consequences of its needed modernization. Ultimate success demands reforms. However, these reforms are not system-compatible. Thus, forces are unleashed that the system cannot accommodate. As in the case of the Soviet Union, to reform the system you need to abolish it.
G. Challenged at home, the clerics will need its hard core constituency’s support. Accordingly, the US attempt to cozy up to them will be resisted.

2. Iran’s rulers, self-deputized to rule in the name of the Almighty, might be able to club down their more moderate opposition. Today the struggle is not yet between freedom and theocratic tyranny. So far, only senseless servitude and the cause of a better dictatorship confront each other. The ruling prophets may disapprove, but the dispute is still about the improvement of the existing system. Characteristically for a pre-revolutionary situation, the leadership is developing fissures. Supporters are mobilized and the masses are appealed to for support. However, as long as the instruments of the power-monopoly (army, police and “party army” thugs) are not yet infiltrated by the doubts that divide the clerical elite, the troglodytes will prevail. This victory will fundamentally change the real agenda of the opposition that will evolve within a decade. The reform’s failure and indications that the system can not be reformed, will create an opposition with a program that is adjusted accordingly. Regardless of the formal terms used in public, the next time the goal will not be reform but revolution. Ultimately, unfolding events will convince a minority as it grows into a majority that clerical rule, whether exercised by bad, good or indifferent mullahs, is unsuited to solve their nation’s problems.

3. Until now, Iran’s ranting clerics could rule with the consent of a majority and without having to contend with a principled and organized opposition. It helped that the system’s failures could be attributed to the lay apparat. Rescuing Ahmadinejad undermines the Mullah’s ability disassociate themselves from their flunkies’ failures. The prophets will be able to continue to rule by credible threats of violence and the fear that this instills. In the process, they will surrender the advantage of ruling with the consent of the governed. From the pinnacle of moral authority the elect is about to descend to the level of extorting compliance by applying physical power. Until now, indigenous critique aimed at persons endowed with state power. Future doubters will fundamentally question the system of rule by men acting for God.
Ahmadinedjad’s cronies were smart enough to steal votes. They were dumb enough to leave their fingerprints on the evidence left on the crime scene. The resulting charge sustains claims against them in a court in which society is the jury.

4. What were the belatedly realized virtues of applied Socialism? All leaders were in theory equal to all in their official poverty. Legally no one earned more for working badly than you did. The input of others was rewarded the same as your indolence multiplied by demonstrated “partyness”. The achievements of the able could not shame you, while those who had more could be dismissed as being well connected.

5. Moslem immigrants in Europe are displeased. Actually, the term “immigrant” needs modification. It does not include the case of those who have slipped into the country illegally. It also ignores the situation of the un-integrated element that does not want to accept their hosts’ way of life and who lack skills to build existences commensurate to their self-esteem and the demands of the local economy. Athens, for centuries under the occupation of Muslim conqueror has no minaret and no Muslim cemetery. The easily insulted (it pays!) but uninvited guests express their disapproval of the hosts by riots and criminal violence. Its excuse is that it is directed against unworthy nonbelievers. These happen to be the majority harboring them in the name of tolerance. The global duplication of comparable situations suggests we need a new charter regulating entrants’ privileges and residents’ rights. It could assert; Majorities retain a right to live according to their preferred life-style. They are protected from the demand of migrants to continue in the style of the homeland they had decided to abandon. There is no absolute right to immigration. Illegal entrants forfeit the rights they might have had had they entered as refugees. The laws of the land apply to all on the territory of the hosting state. These are to be enforced regardless of their rejection justified by the imported conflicting culture and the lacking formal consent of immigrants. The way of life found at the place of immigration might not suit an individual because of a commitment to contradictory norms: therefore, he might consider the way of life he finds to be an insult of his religion. Nevertheless, the claim is expressly rejected that, the adjustment to be made is a duty of the majority that offers refuge. Taking residence abroad entails an express obligation to adjust to the norms of the hosting entity.

6. Chavez’ epic struggle with the “Empire”, has pushed him to open a new front. In doing so, he has boldly declared war on Coca-Cola. His “Kampf” makes him knowingly or unknowingly to trod in Stalin’s footprints. This is typical while it is also easy. The prints left in the mud are larger by several numbers than Chavez’ boots. In my Stalin-shaped youth, Coke had my special interest although, unfortunately, I could find no one who has ever tasted it. The curiosity was not accidental. In “civics” we were taught that the world revolution – the uprising of the West’s proletariat – is delayed because of the lacking class consciousness, meaning the revolutionary will, of the exploited masses. This “false consciousness” had a cause. It was Coca Cola. The junk fed to us alleged that the Capitalists feed Coke to the working class in order to suppress their revolutionary class-consciousness. This made me curious as I surmised that, being declared the source of evil by the Party, that dew must be something terribly good. Therefore the writer feels safe to predict that the struggle against Coke will augment its attractiveness and that even without that drug, just due to Chavez’ policies, the revolutionary consciousness of Venezuela’s masses will imitate the southern section of the Amu Darya river’s flow in the dry season.

7. The Left’s problem is that it regards property as theft. That might explain why its addicts steal so much once their will becomes the law. In case of taxing, allocating and the self-maintenance of bureaucracies, no crime comes to their mind covering expropriation via taxes.

The Impact of Islam on Free Speech in America

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:40:27 -0500

Americans are proud, and rightly so, of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, which, among other things, protects speech from government control. The Amendment says in part: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

Increasingly, however, Americans seem content to regard the First Amendment not as the fundamental working tool of democracy, but as a national heirloom, a kind of antique to admire rather than put to use. I don’t think many of my countrymen perceive how profoundly their attitude toward free speech has changed. But there is a difference between having freedom of speech and exercising freedom of speech, one that has become glaringly and distressingly obvious to me since September 11, 2001. So, while it is true that the US government is not Constitutionally empowered to make laws that censor Americans, it is also true, I believe, that Americans have come to censor themselves. But why?

I speak today in regard to the effect of Islam on speech in America - Islam as it has entered our national discussion and debate – and, I must add, lack of national discussion and debate - since the heinous Islamic attacks on the US nearly 8 years ago.

You may recall that just days after the attacks, then-President Bush said “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” At that same moment, the Pentagon, just across the river from the White House, was a colossal ruin, there was still carnage and mangled steel in the Pennsylvania woods, and an acrid fire of souls burned at the bottom of Manhattan. But once President Bush uttered that word “crusade” a new fear seemed to grip Washington and the wider world: namely, the fear that the President would “alienate” Muslims, even so-called “moderate Muslims.”

I believe such a fear may be unique in the annals of peoples under assault and bears further consideration. The English word “crusade,” of course, harkens back to the medieval wars between Islam and Christendom, which Islam ultimately won, as we know. In the more than nine centuries since, the word has become a familiar metaphor for any moral fight for right: Long ago in America, Thomas Jefferson spoke of a “crusade” against ignorance; the feminist Susan B. Anthony called for a women’s temperance “crusade”; more recently Colin Powell referred to the “equal rights” crusade. And when Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote his memoir of World War II, he called it “Crusade in Europe.”

But after 9/11 it became instantly clear that there wasn’t going to be a 21st-century-“crusade” against newly expansionist Islam – not even against the most violent manifestations of jihad as exemplified by these bloody attacks on civilians and cities in the United States. Why? Muslims didn’t approve. Non-al Qaeda Muslims, presumably, didn’t approve of a “crusade” against al-Qaeda, and the leader of the Free World deferred. A White House spokesman quickly expressed the president’s “regret” that anyone might have been “upset” by the word “crusade.” After that, the word was effectively struck from the English language.

This may seem like a small thing, no more than a diplomatic nicety, but the significance of excising this rousing and storied word from the vocabulary of Americans at the onset of war can hardly be overstated, and must be understood as an early and decisive psychological victory for Islam over the West. In this early semantic retreat we can see the beginnings of the official American lexicon that now strives to avoid associating Islam and jihad altogether, that no doubt gives mighty encouragement to the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s continuing efforts to outlaw all criticism of Islam.

Let me explain. In acceding to the Islamic interpretation of the word “crusade” as something wrong and indefensible – and, worse, something taboo and also verboten - the president traded away a piece of our history and our language – and our understanding of our history through our language – for the sole sake of appeasing Islam. And truly, this was just the beginning.

Soon, the president was giving up other words, other pieces of our culture. Operation Infinite Justice, the Pentagon name for the assault on the Taliban, for example, was changed after Muslims complained that they believed only Allah dispenses infinite justice. The new name was Operation Enduring Freedom. Presumably, Muslims do not believe Allah dispenses freedom, enduring or otherwise (which is interesting), so that was all right. But in making the change, the US was again deferring to Islamic demands, Islamic understandings. In other words, as a military intelligence officer-friend of mine likes to put it, we were “outsourcing” our judgment to Islam. Indeed, the name “war on terror” itself was a generic sop to Islamic sensibilities, omitting any reference to the Islamic dimension of the struggle, namely the jihad that was and is underway.

In those early days after 9/11, President Bush also made it part of his job to serve as the nation’s head cheerleader for Islam as “the religion of peace.” Confusingly, this immediately put “jihad” in a box as something superfluous to Islam. This is now the conventional wisdom in America, from Left to Right: jihad has nothing to do with Islam. Or: “Jihadism is not Islam,” former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney obediently declared last month. People think Barack Hussein Obama is the first American president to promote Islam. The fact is, President Bush’s incessant declarations that Islam is a peaceable creed that terrorist-traitors had “hijacked” or “twisted” drove Abu Qatada, the notorious imam in Britain linked to Al Qaeda to comment “I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Koran that justifies jihad or violence in the name of Islam. Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Koran?”

It’s fair to say that the answer to both questions is no. It’s also disturbing to realize that in the mainstream conversation, the only questions balking at the president’s depiction of Islam as a hearts-and-flowers ideology came from an Islamic terror-imam – never from our own media or politicians. Last year, George W. Bush’s Department of Homeland Security made it difficult for government officials to talk about anything but “hearts and flowers” Islam by issuing a long memorandum “suggesting” that government officials stop using all such words as “jihad,” “jihadist,” “Islamic terrorist,” “Islamist” “Islamofascist” and the like when discussing, well, Islamic terrorism. “Using the word “Islamic” will sometimes be necessary,” the memorandum said, adding that the department’s Muslim experts were concerned that in such a case “we should not concede the terrorists’ claim that they are legitimate adherents of Islam.”

It’s not hard to imagine Abu Qatada cackling over this propaganda, but I regret to say there was scant media coverage of even this outrageous Islamic apologetic via government directive.

This shouldn’t be surprising since the media in the US, as elsewhere in the West, is overwhelmingly predisposed to ignore or deny, as a key point of cultural relativism, all specifically Islamic roots of jihad violence and conquest. This is the philosophical basis of what I call Islam-free analysis. Add to that the fear factor of Islamic violence – as we saw in the Danish cartoon crisis – or fear of Islamic protests or harassment, and the United States of America is happy to comply with a universal gag order on Islam, First Amendment or no First Amendment.

And so, from the so-called war on terror – which is now, even more opaquely known by the Obama administration as an “overseas contingency operation” - to newsrooms across America, Islam as what sociologists call “an underlying cause” is increasingly treated as a forbidden topic. Another example: As a journalist, I attend expert lectures in Washington, DC, on, What happened in Iraq? or, The future of Afghanistan. I can attest that at all the ones I have attended, Islam – its culture, its history, beliefs, supremacism, sharia, jihad, anything - is never even mentioned. In this same mold, Gen. Stanley McChrystal gave one his first interviews as the newly confirmed commander in Afghanistan last week about the challenges facing coalition forces in Afghanistan. Such challenges, apparently, have nothing to do with Islam, Islamic law (sharia), or jihad – none of which he even mentioned.

This same see-no-Islam mindset, to focus on the media for a moment, drives stories such as the Buffalo, New York “businessman” who beheaded his wife this spring after she filed for divorce. Did I mention he was a Muslim? That he had founded a television station to combat negative Islamic stereotyping? Most US media didn’t. Initial reports, such as they were, cited “money woes,” or general “domestic violence” as the trigger, never noting the sacralization of misogyny within Islam, let the unfortunate Koranically inspired propensity toward beheading people. To take another typical story, last month authorities uncovered a terror plot in New York City targeting synagogues and military aircraft. I listened to a 2 minute and 29 second radio report of the story and didn’t get the information that the suspects were jailhouse converts to Islam until the final eight seconds. And that was typical. Another non-story for the Islam-blind: When Harvard University’s Muslim chaplain recently declared support for the traditional Islamic penalty of death for apostasy, there were exactly two newspaper stories: one in Harvard’s student newspaper, and one that I wrote. Some of the most egregious examples of Islam-free reporting came out of the jihadist attacks on Mumbai. Early this year, for example, the Indian government released intercepts of conversations of the jihadists who murdered 163 people last November. The conversations frequently invoked Allah, Islam and the need to spare Muslims in the bloody rampages but world media including the New York Times and the Associated Press, for example, omitted all or very nearly all references to Allah, Islam, and the need to spare Muslims in the bloody rampages.

As a conservative, I would like to say that such silence on all things Islam is a phenomenon of the mainstream media, or the Left in general. But this same silence is also a phenomenon of the Right, the side of the political spectrum where one expects to find some fight. But American conservatives, too, protect Islam by not talking about it - our most famous conservative talk show hosts, for example, barely ever mention it - or by obscuring the subject with the nonsense words that hide the mainstream Islamic roots of terror and supremacism.

Soon after 9/11, I tried some of these same terms out myself – Islam”ist,” Islamo-fascist, radical fundamentalist, Wahhabist, and the like - but came to find them confusing, and maybe purposefully so. In their amorphous imprecision, they allow us to give a wide berth to a great problem: the gross incompatibility of Islamic ideology with Western liberty. Worse than imprecision, however, is the evident childishness that inspires the lexicon, as though padding “Islam” with extraneous syllables such as “ism” or “ist” is a shield against politically correct censure; or that exempting plain “Islam” by criticizing imaginary “Islamofascism” spares us Muslim rage--which, as per the Danish experience, we know explodes at any critique. Such mongrel terms, however, not only confuse the discussion, but keep our understanding of Islam at bay.

Here is how it works on the Right. In writing about Cartoon Rage 2006, Charles Krauthammer, probably the leading conservative columnist in America, clearly identified why the Western press failed to republish the Danish Mohammed cartoons.

He wrote: “What is at issue is fear. The unspoken reason many newspapers do not want to republish is not sensitivity but simple fear.”

This was clear as a bell: but then he wrote: “They know what happened to Theo van Gogh, who made a film about the Islamic treatment of women and got a knife through the chest with an Islamist manifesto attached.”

To repeat, the columnist wrote that Theo van Gogh made a film about the “Islamic treatment of women” and was killed by a knife “with an Islamist manifesto” attached. Given that both Theo’s film and murder-manifesto were explicitly inspired by the verses of the Koran, what’s Islamic about the treatment of women that’s not also Islamic about the manifesto? The “ist” is a dodge, a semantic wedge between the religion of Islam and the ritual murder of van Gogh. It saves face. But why, why, is it up to an infidel American columnist to save face … when the face is Mohammed’s?

I think the answer is connected to what may have been the real war President Bush began to lead the day he gave up the “crusade.” I’m afraid this effort isn’t against “jihad,” and it isn’t against Islamization. On the contrary, it’s a very strange war for the West: it’s our war against alienating Islam; our war against blaming Islamic ideology for violence and repression in the cause of Islamic conquest. In this Western struggle to protect Islam, denouncing an Islam”ist” manifesto, for example, leaves Islam itself ideologically blameless. And this constitutes a win in this very weird war.

But the war against alienating Islam is not a war I want to fight — and no adherent of Western liberty could believe it’s the war we want to win. Indeed, this war effort turns out to be the same thing as fighting for Islam. It calls us to self-censorship, self-abnegation, self-extinguishment. It depends on and encourages our submission. This is the behavior of the dhimmi and the culture of dhimmitude as catalogued by the great historian Bat Ye’or. Honestly, I don’t think Americans realize they’re engaged in such a suicidal effort, which has even intensified under President Obama. Nor do I believe most Americans would rally to such a cause - if, that is, they became educated to understand it. But the knowledge gap is as wide as the communications gap. Deep down we may not have lost our will; however, at this terrible point, we have lost our language to mobilize that will. And very few Americans seem to realize it.

A final point: I’ve had the opportunity to observe Geert Wilders speak in the United States this past year, and, as you know, he speaks in robust terms to explain forthrightly the perils of Islamization in the West. His heroic manner and clarity electrify many of the Americans who hear him – which suggests there is a healthy flicker of life out there. But there is often someone in the crowd who will tell Mr. Wilders that while he agrees with the message, Mr. Wilders should soften his words so as not to offend anyone – meaning, of course, Muslims. “Don’t say Judeo Christian culture is better,” I heard one man say to Mr. Wilders. “Say: ‘we believe in women’s rights.’” I know I don’t have to worry about Mr. Wilders “moderating” his message, but I worry greatly about all the Americans who ask him to.

On hearing about the Dutch court’s sharia-compliant prosecution of his freedom of speech, an American journalist reacted with genuine horror that such a state of repression could exist in a Western country. At the same time, I could sense his quiet pride in knowing, at the back his mind, that he, as an American, was fully protected by the First Amendment. But I wondered to myself, Did he use it? Did his colleagues use it? If the state of American journalism is any marker, the answer is no. Geert Wilders speaks out as if he is protected by the First Amendment, but US journalists and politicians speak so as not to “give offense,” so as not to raise alarm, so as not to criticize Islam.

Islam, of course, is not our only block on speech. For decades, Americans have been schooling themselves to speak with political correctness. As the country has lurched Left under President Bush and now even further under President Obama, we are now seeing ominous legislation making its way through Congress – so-called “hate crimes” legislation – that bodes ill for free speech and also for equality before the law. We are seeing alarming efforts on the Left to “regulate” – in fact, to censor - radio talk shows, for example, and also the Internet.

I wish I could end on a hopeful note, but my sense is that it will have to get worse in America before it gets better. And how will we know when things are beginning to improve? When Americans, as a people, learn, or re-learn something: that it’s not enough to possess freedoms. We must learn that it’s vital to exercise our freedoms if we want to have any hope of preserving them.

This is the text of Diana West’s speech at the free speech conference of the International Free Press Society on 14 June in the Danish Parliament building in Copenhagen.

The Flying Dutchman and the Press

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:26:48 -0500

Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV), has already made four trips to the United States this year. He has also been to Italy and Denmark and is planning a couple of new trips to the US later this year, plus trips to Canada and Australia.

Why does the politician from the Netherlands travel so much? This is a question the Dutch media have been asking themselves. Last week, both the weekly magazine Vrij Nederland and the newspaper De Volkskrant wrote long articles about Wilders’ travels, written by journalists who followed him on a couple of his trips. The only reason why a man would so eagerly travel the world, is obvious, they say: He does it for the money. Wilders is said to be on fundraising tours, especially among the “American far-right.”

“Dollars for Wilders; How the PVV Leader Raises Money from Far-Right America,” Vrij Nederland headlines. Both Vrij Nederland and De Volkskrant acknowledge that Mr. Wilders is doing nothing against Dutch law. De Volkskrant, however, has a couple of Dutch law professors say that the situation, though legal, is nevertheless “unclean.” “There is a problem if a donor expects something in return. In Holland we cannot ascertain this because we do not know the money flows,” says one of them.

Mr. Wilders’ donors, however, do not expect anything in return. The man is not in a position of power. He is a simple member of the parliamentary opposition. He lives under constant police protection, in frequently changing safe houses, and has not even slept in his own home since Muslim terrorists threatened to assassinate him almost five years ago. In early November 2004, Mohammed Bouyeri, after slitting Theo van Gogh’s throat, placed a knife in his victim’s body with a note announcing that Geert Wilders was next on the hit list. Since that dreadful day, he and his wife (the couple have no kids) virtually live as prisoners.

The Americans who give him money do so voluntarily, out of generosity and in solidarity with a man whose predicament did not end with the Muslim death threats. Political adversaries brought him to court on charges of “inciting racial hatred” and want to have him fined and imprisoned to stop him from speaking out against the Islamization of Europe. Although the public prosecutor initially declined to open a case against Mr. Wilders, the Amsterdam Court of Appeals, backed by the Dutch Supreme Court, ordered his prosecution, putting the whole weight of the Dutch exchequer against Mr. Wilders. The possibility that he will really be in prison next Fall cannot be ruled out. The politician is raising funds to pay the lawyers defending him in court. It takes a Dutch law professor and leftist media to suggest that people who help Mr. Wilders pay his legal costs “expect him to do something in return.”

Empathy for the victims of totalitarianism is a quality which is totally unknown to the liberal media of the Western, so-called “free” world. The reason why Geert Wilders travels so much is pretty obvious. He accepts almost every invitation to speak abroad, even if there are no possibilities of being funded because, as he says, he fears that if he is convicted next Fall, he will not be allowed to travel anymore. After living in the Netherlands, in his heavily protected bulb, traveling gives him a feeling of freedom which he can no longer enjoy at home. Although armed bodyguards accompany him on his travels, the foreign trips give him the opportunity to meet people and occasionally even visit a shop to buy a pair of shoes. Abroad he is treated as a VIP, but it is small compensation for his loss of personal freedom. In the Netherlands he spends his days in the parliament building without ever being able to go out except to heavily guarded places.

Why does he travel so much? Also, he says, because he likes traveling. This is something utterly unimaginable for the Dutch journalists trailing him. Their trips are fully underwritten by their employers, who pay them their wages to do their job – which is to harm a man who knows that he is dead the moment the police stop protecting him. Why does the Dutch press insinuate that he raises money for private purposes? What use is there in being rich without freedom?

When the Dutch journalists hear Wilders’ speeches to his foreign audience of “far-right, mostly Jewish, Americans”, they report home how he receives standing ovations for “ever more radical” speeches on Islam, but they do not listen to what he, or those who speak along him, have to say

Last week, Mr. Wilders spoke in Copenhagen at a conference of the International Free Press Society. One of the other speakers at the event was the Syrian-born psychiatrist Wafa Sultan, a Muslim apostate who had to flee her native country for criticizing Islam. She says that growing up as a Muslim and witnessing its effect on people as a psychiatrist has convinced her that Islam, rather than a religion, is a totalitarian political ideology. It is a thesis which Mr. Wilders has borrowed from her.

Dr. Sultan says the world is currently witnessing “a battle between modernity and barbarism which Islam will lose.” She is one of Mr. Wilders’ great admirers. In order to liberate her fellow Arabs from barbarism, she stated in Copenhagen, “Islam has to be defeated in the West first.” This, she says, is why Geert Wilders plays such a pivotal role. Instead of interviewing Wafa Sultan, the Dutch journalists in Copenhagen tried to find out from the conference organizers and from Mr. Wilders’ friends how the Dutch politician is raising money, whether anyone knows how much he has secured so far and on what accounts he collects the money for his legal defense.

A free press is one of the main characteristics of a free society. However, the Western press did not play a major role in defeating Soviet totalitarianism in the 1970s and 80s. Ronald Reagan was utterly despised by the media and only succeeded as a politician because he did not care much about what the media said. Likewise, today, the media do not seem intent on playing a major role in defeating totalitarian Islam. Indeed, empathy for victims of political tyranny is something utterly unknown to journalists who often see themselves as major political players on a par with politicians who, like Messrs. Reagan and Wilders, have been elected by the people.

Further Remarks on Eric Voegelin and Gnosticism

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:47:38 -0500

In my previous Brussels Journal essay on Jorge Luis Borges and Karen Blixen, I used the analysis of modernity undertaken by Eric Voegelin (1901-1986) as my critical framework. These current remarks constitute an extended footnote to the Borges-Blixen essay, in which I want to return to the text of Voegelin’s New Science of Politics (1952), particularly to its analysis of the Gnostic mentality, as that makes itself manifest on the contemporary political scene, and even more particularly to the book’s treatment of the Gnostic “second reality” or “dream world” in its remarkable Chapter 6, entitled “The End of Modernity.” I believe Voegelin to be central to any understanding of our condition.

I.

Voegelin’s use of the term Gnosticism generated controversy from the beginning because scholars could not immediately see any obvious connection between the modern world and a set of baroque theological positions associated, as was also Christianity, with the breakdown of Pagan religiosity in the period of Late Antiquity. Most especially the scholars could see no such immediate connection because Gnosticism seemed to them to have its peculiar context in a long-vanished historical society classifiable as a purely theological one, with God-emperors and so forth; whereas the modern West seemed to them to be a secular society par excellence that had come into being, starting in the Sixteenth Century, by systematically repudiating the dogmas of religious revelation. Antiquarians of religion like Franz Cumont (1868-1947) or Hans Jonas (1903-1993) might take a legitimate interest in Gnosticism, but what possible relevance could their erudite studies have for secular society, which, of course, “believes” in absolutely nothing, but rather places its confidence in natural science and technology?

Other writers than Voegelin had discerned in modernity, secularity, and even in science and technology themselves, qualities of a civic religion that substitutes for the discarded Biblical spirituality, but most of them, like Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) or Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) were eccentrics, or could be dismissed as such, whose analyses had no traction in the positivistic dispensation of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

Voegelin’s response to this pervasive skepticism – which sometimes sharpened itself into outright hostility – was patiently to describe the inner-structure or psycho-epistemology of the Gnostics, and to catalogue the varieties of their agitated behavior on the social scene. On such a basis he could demonstrate the psychic and behavioral identity of, say, the Second-Century Valentinians and Marcionites, and the Seventeenth-Century English Puritans. Voegelin also called on existing scholarship to demonstrate that actual continuity in concepts and practices that linked Late Antique Gnosis with medieval religious movements such as Paulicianism in Anatolia and the Balkans and Cathar Christianity in Southern France; and again the similar continuity that linked those irate doctrines with later ones right through to the Enlightenment and beyond.

An important part of Voegelin’s argument, which he took from writers like Cumont and Walter Bauer (1877-1960), was that the Gnostic attitude, like resentment, is always present in a society, and that the Gnostic religions were never anything like original but always took the form of parodies of the existing mainstream religion, whether it was Platonic Monotheism, Judaism, or Christianity. Gnosticism, for Voegelin, is essentially reactionary and parasitical: it is an intellectualizing form of resentment that obsessively opposes all norms.

By drawing on Hans Jonas, as I will do here, one can briefly sketch in the basic characteristics of ancient Gnosticism. The antique Gnosis represents, for Jonas, a thematic reversal of standing representations of existence. The pervasive civic theology of the Hellenized Roman Empire in late Antiquity centered on the idea of a cosmos, the visible universe in which humanity finds itself, understood as fundamentally good (the word kosmos implies beauty and harmoniousness) and as the deliberate creation of a good Demiurge or Creator-Deity. Qualities of the Creator-Deity, such as his logical mind and his approval of beauty, are reflected in the structures and laws that govern existence within the cosmos. The basic concepts of this view came from Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. Gnosticism, as Jonas shows in The Gnostic Religion (1958), systematically reverses the basic precepts of Greek cosmic monotheism.

When Plato and his followers say that the Creator-Deity is benign, then the Gnostics insist that he is evil, or even that he is not the real Creator, but a usurper who misappropriated creation and then criminally sabotaged or polluted it. When Plato and his followers say that one should love the Creator-Deity and attune himself carefully to the beauties of his creation, then the Gnostics insist that one should hate the Creator-Deity (who is anyway a usurper and a polluter) and revile the many debased phenomena of creation. When Plato and his followers say that it is good to have been born in a beautiful world, then the Gnostics insist that it is intolerable to have been born in a polluted world and that enlightened people will seek to be redeemed from the universal miasma or will dedicate themselves to detoxifying existence.

One can list several more features of ancient Gnosticism, again drawing on Jonas, that Voegelin “imports” into his own argument, although Voegelin’s main source in 1951 was Bauer (1934), not Jonas. When Plato and his followers argue for a universal humanity, then the Gnostics insist that humanity is not single, but dual; that there is a vast preterit of the unenlightened and unsalvageable who probably belong in the Hell where Fate has consigned them and that, set apart from those, there is an elect of the enlightened and salvageable, who, by spiritual exercises, can either escape from the Hellish world or transform it back into its pristine state before the usurper polluted it. In the second of those two possibilities emerges the theme of the Paradise-on-earth, as constructed by the vanguard. Finally, when Plato and his followers say that the world is at least contingently knowable, that it is, more or less, as our senses and our mental operations report it to be, then the Gnostics insist that phenomena are false, or worse yet deliberately falsified, and that the world is a lie concealing a hidden truth to which they alone have access.

It is important to remember that the Platonic cosmology largely passed into Orthodox Christian cosmology, so that where first the Gnostics were anti-Platonists, latterly they were anti-Christians. But no real change had occurred.

The actual Gnostics in Late Antiquity characteristically formed small in-groups of the disgruntled, who regarded themselves as pure and whose attitude towards the larger out-group was one of contempt and hostility. Augustine depicts the Manichaeans this way in his Confessions (397 or 398). As such in-groups proliferated, it fell out that the only people whom their members hated more than those in the larger out-group were the members of the other radical, self-isolating in-groups. Gustave Flaubert depicts this sectarian hostility in Anthony’s great sanguine vision of the religious riot in Alexandria in The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1848).

II.

Against this historical and scholarly background, it is possible to understand what Voegelin means when he asserts that Gnosticism is, at one level, in any given society where it appears, a contest by an agitating minority to monopolize the representation of “immanent reality.” With the goal of transforming existence and of realizing their own Paradise-on-earth, Gnostics begin a campaign to discredit the standing representation of reality, insisting on a reversal of terms, as Jonas has described. Of course, reality is that which exists, as and what it is, despite anyone’s dissatisfaction over it or contrary description of it. Thus the Gnostic propaganda campaign is foredoomed to being endlessly ratcheted up in its level of vituperation against actual existence.

With the proviso that Voegelin thinks that Gnosticism failed to triumph in Late Antiquity but indeed triumphed in its disastrous manner in modernity, here is one of the precise formulations of these views from The New Science of Politics: “The truth of Gnosticism is vitiated… by the fallacious immanentization of the Christian eschaton. This fallacy is not simply a theoretical mistake concerning the meaning of the eschaton, committed by this or that thinker, perhaps an affair of the schools. On the basis of this fallacy, Gnostic thinkers, leaders, and their followers interpret a concrete society and its order as an eschaton; and, insofar as they apply their fallacious construction to concrete social problems, they misrepresent the structure of immanent reality.”

But what is the true representation of “immanent reality”?

Voegelin locates that representation in many places – in philosophy and religion, for example. Thus Christian theology shares with Pagan Monotheism (Plato’s and Aristotle’s) the insistence, founded in experience, that nothing is perfectible in this world, and that disappointment, resentment, unjust shares, bad luck, arguments with one’s wife, pain, debt, and all the rest belong ineradicably to the mortal realm. The most that a just political order can do is to ameliorate the worst cases of these woes.

Plato said that perfection existed, or was – or, putting it in the eternal present tense, is – only in the transcendental realm of the Ideas, whose fullness, as the philosopher saw things, the world below only inadequately reflected. Christian theology says that perfection will exist only at the End of Days, when, after the Last Judgment, the righteous will enjoy their translation into Paradise; but by the time of Augustine, Christianity had more or less reconciled itself to the non-occurrence in the foreseeable future of the End of Days, the Greek term for which in Revelations is the eschaton. Christianity declares that good people must make the best of mortal existence because the eschaton is indefinitely postponed; people must adhere to morality, love one another, and act as stewards over the earth, while reconciling themselves to fallibility and imperfection.

When Voegelin writes that impatience to immanentize the eschaton constitutes the essence of Gnosticism, he refers to the petulant dogma that one need not wait, without schedule, to be translated into Paradise, but that one can, by his own self-salvaging activity, realize Paradise in this world. The skeptical claim that such a work is impossible is more of a focus for the Gnostic than the Gnostic’s own claim that such a work is actualizable because the first, the standing, the intuitive and plausible claim is what blocks and scandalizes the Gnostic’s own project. From this mis-priority of arguments stems the desperate nastiness of the Gnostic towards those who criticize or disagree with him. What does it mean, however, when Voegelin asserts that, “on the basis of this fallacy, Gnostic thinkers, leaders, and their followers interpret a concrete society and its order as an eschaton; and, insofar as they apply their fallacious construction to concrete social problems, they misrepresent the structure of immanent reality”?

More precisely, what does it mean to “interpret a concrete society and its order as an eschaton”?

Understanding the kernel of this sentence hinges on remembering that Voegelin now addresses, not ancient Gnosticism, which lost its contest with normative religion, and with common sense – with what Voegelin calls “the truth of the soul” – but rather modern Gnosticism, the triumphant “civic theology” of Post-Enlightenment history. Voegelin, following Plato and Augustine, notes that existence is open and uncertain, not closed and pre-decided. Men write history, the account of the past and its relation to the present, but there is no agency called History that, like a human actor, can do things; the stream of time is a great flux, buffeted by contingency, in which, precisely, nothing is permanent, but rather everything must, in due course, wither and perish.

In one sense, this truth can lead to pessimism: everything comes from dust and goes back to dust. In a better sense, the mortality of human works guarantees the openness of the future, which, unknowable, cannot be predetermined. Classical philosophy well understood this state of affairs, as did also theology, going back to Hesiod, Job, and Ecclesiastes.

Thus the condition of any given polity or society at any given moment is not a transcendental fact or Idea; but rather it is merely a passing state, bound to be altered by unpredictable and emergent factors. It would be a fallacy, therefore, for anyone to assert that the existing social conditions constitute a cosmic fact, part of the structure of existence in a metaphysical, unchangeable sense. For an example of this type of error, one might remember the pervasive fallacy in place before 1991, which held that the Soviet Union was an indissoluble element in the structure of reality, and that, declarations of its imminent demise like President Ronald Reagan’s or Pope John-Paul’s sprang from a delusion. This conviction held both inside and outside the Soviet Union, in different ways but with almost equal strength; it influenced even those people who deeply feared and loathed the Communist empire, but who inclined despondently to agree with the proposition. The claim, as history now shows, was utterly false.

III.

Gnostics and revolutionaries, unlike the spurious agency called History, can do things: make a Puritan revolution, depose a king, commit regicide, order banks to make loans, fire legally appointed CEO’s, give away welfare-largesse, mobilize national industry to invent an atom bomb, establish Gulags, send astronauts to the moon, or bloodily put down the peasant-farmers in the Vendee or the Ukraine. Militant secularists, beginning in the Renaissance, marshaled the forces to bring about the modern, materially based civilization, either in its mild form in what eventually became the Western industrialized democracies or in its radical form in the one National Socialist and plural Communist countries. When a militant phalanx, either an effective minority or an enthusiastic and even more effective majority, brings about some few items of its ambitious schedule to remake existence, it can commit that exact formal error, as Voegelin argues, of interpreting itself as a necessary and permanent fact of the universal order, as a realization of the “eschaton,” and therefore, but also erroneously, as an actual rearrangement of reality.

Thus, again, the fallacy that, “Gnostic thinkers, leaders, and their followers interpret a concrete society and its order,” the one in which they exert effectiveness, “as an eschaton.” When they do so, they argue from a temporary arrangement as though it were a fixed axiom, but because their basic premises contradict reality, they swiftly find themselves, as Voegelin says, “vitiated.” Their Paradise stubbornly refuses to fulfill itself in its universality and permanence: “The eschatological interpretation of history results in a false picture of reality; and errors with regard to the structure of reality have practical consequences when the false conception is made the basis of political action.”

For a ready illustration, see the current economic crisis in the United States, where the magical spending of money that does not exist, in an exasperating scandal for the policy-makers, stubbornly fails to result in the rescue of an economy whose collapse stems, in the first place, from pathological, non-reality-related super-spending of money that did not, even then, exist. Voegelin writes: “Gnosticism, thus, has produced something like the counterprinciples to the principles of existence; and, insofar as these principles determine an image of reality for the masses of the faithful, it has created a dream world that itself is a social force of the first importance in motivating attitudes and actions of Gnostic masses their representatives.”

Voegelin has now broached the all-important topic of the “dream world” in and of itself, taking us to the heart of the Gnostic “pneumopathology,” or sickness of the soul.

I offer a quotation at length, the necessity of which I hope my readers will perceive:

Gnosticism as a counterexistential dream world can perhaps be made intelligible as the extreme expression of an experience that is universally human, that is, of a horror of existence and a desire to escape from it. Specifically, the problem can be stated in the following terms: a society, when it exists, will interpret its order as part of the transcendent order of being. This self-interpretation of society as a mirror of cosmic order, however, is part of social reality itself. [But not of cosmic reality.] The ordered society, together with its self-understanding, remains a wave in the stream of being… an island in the sea of demonic disorder, precariously maintaining itself in existence. Only the order of an existing society is intelligible; its existence itself is unintelligible. The successful articulation of a society is a fact that has become possible under favorable circumstances; and this fact may be annulled by unfavorable circumstances… Especially when a society has a glorious history, its existence will be taken for granted as part of the order of things. It has [then] become impossible to imagine that the society could simply cease to exist.

This dense passage presents a few philosophical subtleties. The dominant one is Voegelin’s careful distinction between the one fact of “the order of an existing society” as being “intelligible” and the other fact of “the existence” of such a society as being “unintelligible.” One can gloss the distinction under an example. The Constitution of the United States articulates the order of the North American polity that it establishes; and the Constitution is explicable to educated people who speak English, think logically, and have some sense of history before the Constitutional Convention. However, as the current campaign to undo the Constitution makes clear, the “fact” of the Constitutional order is only a contingent one, a “wave in the stream of being.” All of this is “intelligible.” But that unaccountable factors and incalculable chances could so dispose themselves at a particular moment in the swirling temporal pattern of the late Eighteenth Century so as to give rise to the Constitutional order, is not “intelligible.”

Next in relevance and still quite important is Voegelin’s assertion that, when a society mistakes itself for a cosmic fact, “it has become impossible to imagine that the society could simply cease to exist.” To understand this proposition in its fullness, one must go back to the phenomenon, discussed earlier, of the Gnostic’s hatred of criticism. The Gnostic claims that he can build Paradise on earth and that, once built, this New Eden will last forever. Of course he cannot build Paradise and nothing that he can build will last forever, but because he lives in the “dream world” of magical, intention-related deeds, the Gnostic can never admit to ineffectiveness. He must suppress his own knowledge of his ineffectiveness and he must coerce potential critics not to remind him of it.

Of course, this last requirement means that the Gnostic must coerce potential critics not to remind him of reality. Gnosticism requires the mental obliteration of reality. “In every society,” Voegelin writes, “is present an inclination to extend the meaning of order to the fact of existence, but in predominantly Gnostic societies this extension is erected into a principle of self-interpretation.”

When the Gnostic project collides with reality and begins to falter, as it inevitably does, the Gnostic regime goes into panic-mode; it hardens into totalitarian rigidity exceeding even its “normal” Puritan intolerance. As Voegelin writes: “With radical immanentization the dream world has blended into the real world terminologically.” By manipulating language under various editorial codes and mandates, the Gnostic regime attempts to conceal failure under the language of success, inequality under the claim of equivalency, dispossession of personal or corporate wealth under the jargon of social justice, and so forth. “The obsession of replacing the world of reality with the transfigured dream world has become the obsession of the one world in which the dreamers adopt the vocabulary of reality, while changing its meaning, as if the dream were reality.”

IV.

The word Puritan has occurred several times in the discussion. Another controversial claim that Voegelin makes in The New Science of Politics (I am now leaving Chapter 6 for Chapter 5, “Gnostic Revolution”) is that the prototype of a Gnostic polity is offered by England under the Puritans. Voegelin had some precedent for the claim. Spengler had argued, in The Decline of the West, that English Puritanism bore almost no relation to Christianity, but represented something novel, a purely political religion, that merely borrowed its terms from the Gospel; Spengler also characterized the Puritan revolution as the rehearsal for the French Revolution. Much of what Spengler discusses in The Decline under the rubric of “Second Religiousness” is related to what Voegelin discusses under the rubric of Gnosticism.

Voegelin draws on the writings of Richard Hooker (1554-1600), an Anglican clergyman and theologian who, a liberal himself and “High Church,” married into a Puritanical family that inclined to radical Calvinism. Hooker used his in-law connections to observe and cogitate on the mentality and behavior of the Calvinist agitators who would soon create a political paroxysm, culminating in a regicide, in English society, before being deposed themselves in a restoration of monarchy.

Given that Puritanism, once having lost its power over the English polity, sought to create a New Eden in North America, and given again that the sitting American chief executive emerged into public life as a “community organizer” associated with the Afrocentric equivalent of a radically Puritan congregation, Voegelin’s appropriation of Hooker gains renewed contemporary interest.

A “community organizer” is someone with a cause and causes lie at the heart of Puritanism seen under the genre of Gnosticism. “In order to start a movement moving,” writes Voegelin, “there must in the first place be someone who has a ‘cause.’” The word cause appears in quotation marks in Voegelin’s sentence because he quotes it from Hooker. So too in what follows:

In order to advance his “cause,” the man who has it will, “in the hearing of the multitude,” indulge in severe criticism of social evils and in particular of the conduct of the upper classes. Frequent repetition of the performance will induce the opinion among the hearers that the speakers must be men of singular integrity, zeal, and holiness, for only men who are singularly good can be so deeply offended by evil. The next step will be the concentration of ill will on the established government. The task can be psychologically performed by attributing all fault and corruption, as it exists in the world because of human frailty, to the action or the inaction of the government.

It would require considerable obtuseness – a type of Gnostic blindness to reality – not to recognize in the foregoing description the precise pattern of agitation and propaganda that delivered the American presidency to its current holder and that continues in campaign mode to incite the masses against evil, in the form of various scapegoats for national difficulties that have resulted, not from any action by the scapegoats, but rather from policies previously urged on the nation by the people now holding uncontested power and using it to calumniate their opposition.

Voegelin makes an ominous comment: “Once a social environment of this type is organized, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to break it up by persuasion.” Faced with appeals to evidence or good logical refutation, Gnostics have recourse to their pamphlets and encyclopedias. Voegelin adduces the works of Karl Marx in their service to Communist regimes as, in context, “the Koran of the faithful, supplemented by the patristic literature of Leninism-Stalinism.” For the segment of the existing Gnostic regime that makes environmentalism its “cause,” Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth provides this “Koran.” In respect of dissent, the regime can respond by “putting a taboo on the instruments of critique,” so that “a person who uses the tabooed instruments will be socially boycotted and, if possible, exposed to political defamation.” Indeed: “Since Gnosticism lives by… theoretical fallacies… the taboo on theory in the classical sense is the ineluctable condition of its social expansion and survival.”

Again, it is difficult not to see the phenomena that Voegelin here describes as being hyperactive in our current affairs. It was not Voegelin’s design, however, to induce in those sympathetic to his argument a state of cosmic pessimism. Because Gnosticism is a pneumopathology at war with reality that does its best to seal itself inside the bubble of its “dream world,” it cannot, over any long term, succeed. For one thing, when “the critical exploration of cause and effect in history is prohibited… the rational co-ordination of means and ends in politics is impossible.” When emergent factors pierce the bubble, or at least impinge on the membrane, Gnostic leaders vaguely acknowledge them, but respond irrationally “by magic operations in the dream world, such as disapproval, moral condemnation, declaration of intention, resolutions, appeals to the opinion of mankind, branding of enemies as aggressors, outlawing of war, propaganda for world peace, world government,” and so on.

One can predict, generally, that the radical spasm through which Europe and North America are now passing will eventually remit. De-creation can only be called creation for so long before the fraud becomes undeniable and the masses become disenchanted with their formerly charismatic leaders.

The trouble for all of us is that, in the meantime, in “the weird, ghostly atmosphere of a lunatic asylum,” as Voegelin writes, the agitating elites can wreak enormous harm. In the USA, even if the electorate were to repudiate the Democrats at the next Congressional election and return the GOP to majority in one or both houses, terrific mayhem will already have been perpetrated. And it is fair to say that the GOP has disgraced itself in innumerable ways in the last decade, so much so that it would be foolish to pin any hopes on its reacquisition of the policy helm. At most a reassertion of the GOP would replace chaos with torpor. Torpor is perhaps preferable to chaos, but it is not the same as a healthy society.

Quite apart from election results, the extremism and intolerance of those currently in power polarizes the society increasingly, day by day, with no terminus of the process in sight; nor will their polarizing activities cease, should they lose their majority. Gnostic propaganda is nowadays organized as a colossal communications-network. Certainly American society is therefore in the rhetorical phase of a civil war, or perhaps in the policy phase, now that liberals have the votes to justify their schemes and do as they please. Even if the USA did not advance to some kind of actual civil war, the damage to civic institutions and to trust among people will have been, as it already is, profound and lasting.

One might agree with Voegelin, who was writing sixty years ago, that, “the end of the Gnostic dream is perhaps closer at hand than one ordinarily would assume.” But this need not mean that the aftermath will resemble the status quo ante, or be in any way familiar to those who, during the period of nightmare, held fast to the truth of the soul.

Two Readers Reply to Borges, Blixen, and Voegelin

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:43:55 -0500

Eric Voegelin

It pleases me a good deal that the citations from the work of Eric Voegelin – particularly from his New Science of Politics – in my recent Brussels Journal essay on Jorge Luis Borges and Karen Blixen appealed to the acuity of two Journal readers, the parties who identify themselves as “Wynne” and “Ribera.”

I first read Voegelin nearly thirty years ago at the moment when I began graduate studies at UCLA in Comparative Literature. The time was the mid-1980s, the watershed moment for postmodern thinking in North America due to the publication in English of books by Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and a host of lesser Parisian radicals. In the proverbial blink of eye, the literature faculties and the cohorts of graduate students fixated on the weird syntax and abstract, rather threatening vocabulary of De la gammatologie and Les mots et les choses, which constituted, from that epoch, almost the sole object of interest in the reading-courses and seminars. Together, Voegelin and René Girard gave me the intellectual tools for understanding what I was seeing. Girard, a Frenchman but not a Parisian, would have called it a mimetic crisis, with literature and all normative views as the sacrificial victim under the pejorative of “Logocentrism.” Voegelin, who was more central to my understanding at the time than Girard, would have seen it as another manifestation of metastatic faith, or rather of a metastatic – or contagious – pseudo-faith pitting itself in contest with received tradition.

In the time since my graduate studies, I have seen that pseudo-faith metastasize beyond the universities, which provided its germ with a perfect Petrie dish, into the public forum, along with its evasive vocabulary. “Wynne” sees the same thing. The passage from Voegelin that especially impressed him was the following: “A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time – but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves.” Voegelin adds that a society reaches this “limit” when “an activist sect that represents the Gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule.”

“Wynne” suspects that the recent American presidential election has precipitated just this process:

That activist sect, I fear, is making its move… The administration and its surrogates have seemingly grown so confident of their power that they have abandoned customary prudential considerations. I cite for example the unashamed bias of liberal media, who appear to have recklessly… placed their bets on the triumph of the left’s political agenda… This abandonment of caution leads me to infer that the left believes it has accrued enough power to carry the day.

“Wynne” accurately characterizes the contemporary American Left, of which the Obama administration is an organ, as an “activist sect.” I would further emphasize the religiosity of this sect, which has its roots partly in Obama’s twenty-year front-pew membership in Jeremiah Wright’s Afrocentric church in Chicago, but also in the utopian, heaven-on-earth ambitions of the executive agenda, for which Obama, himself, has become the living fetish. Indeed, the excitement surrounding these unrealizable schemes has come to have something Bacchanalian about it, which “Wynne” recognizes when he refers to the abandonment of “prudential considerations.”

“Wynne” worries, with good reason, that, “the post-modern momentum cannot be halted in traditional, incremental ways… by political discourse or short-term election outcomes.” What “Wynne” implies although he does not say it directly is that the Left has not come to power by the traditional means, but through bypassing debate and appealing, not to reason, but to emotion. Much of the “progressive” achievement since the 1960s has come about through the mandates of activist jurists, who impose radical reconstructive programs on entire segments of the population and whole communities, essentially unopposed by Congress, which has the right – some would say the obligation – to limit the courts. When the Republicans held Congress after 1994, the majority could have legislated, for example, to prevent the Courts of Appeals from adjudicating, hence also from overturning, voter-endorsed propositions like those passed by majorities in Colorado and California concerning “gay marriage” and affirmative action in hiring and college admissions, but they did not.

So-called conservatives in Congress have behaved like cowards for as long as I have been aware of politics and they bear as much blame for the current calamity as their liberal opposition.

“Wynne” asks rhetorically: “How, then, to stop it,” especially considering that “postmodern thinking and behavior are firmly established in the West and beyond?” Europe, he believes, is a lost cause, but America strikes him as not yet absolutely abject in its posture. “Wynne” writes, “In America… fear is not yet existential,” pointing out that, “polls in the U.S. indicate that as many as [eighty per cent] of Americans describe themselves as conservative.” Of course, “given the K12 legacy it’s impossible to know what they mean, [but] I think there is reason to believe that persons outside of government and between the coasts are at least less liberal than the party in power.” I share this assessment.

I would only add that precisely because conservatives tend to be people who are conspicuously not besotted by politics as the be-all and end-all of existence, they always suffer from a disadvantage when it comes to their policy arguments with liberals. Liberals are expert at taking to the streets, inserting mobs into public meetings, and libeling their opponents – behaviors that ordinary people, ethical people are loath to undertake.

This could change, and might change, if the self-aggrandizing federal government were to continue on its present course, which bids fair to wipe out remaining wealth and shackle people with increasing taxes and regulations. In that case, what “Wynne” calls “the native distrust that Americans traditionally have had for government” might be activated at last. Leadership could then come at the state level. There is already some business stirring, in states like Texas, to reassert Tenth Amendment states-rights against federal encroachment, and the word “secession,” which has long been taboo, is now occasionally heard and by no means in a capricious or unserious way.

But how would a convinced Left-Liberal government react to a declaration of secession? The United States have already endured one Civil War. As “Wynne” says, “Our choices may be stark – eventual widespread civil unrest, anarchy, and bloodshed… or the uncontested loss of liberty under the rule of a collectivist authoritarian state.”

“Ribera” takes seriously Voegelin’s characterization of modern Left-Liberalism as “Gnostic.” He offers some analysis supplementary to my own, noting that:

Gnostics, basically, do not accept a [supernatural] God: in their opinion only Humanity can pretend to be that. But in fact they know that God actually exists, and then the trouble begins: instead of changing their views, they have decided to negate and if possibly destroy, everything in reality which reminds God's acts, including human deeds (as we are created by God too).

“Ribera” identifies one of the difficulties that most people have in identifying “progressive” politics as religious or as a pseudo-religion. The difficulty stems from the fact that “progressives” insistently identify themselves as purely secular and, frequently, as aggressively non-religious or even anti-religious. The coincidence of “progressive” convictions with militant agnosticism or with professed atheism is large. But atheism has a history and the history is revealing. The codification of atheism occurred in the work of the post-Hegelian German Idealist philosophers, particularly in the writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, who exercised powerful influence on Karl Marx. Feuerbach believed that, in religion, especially in the concept or image of God, people had projected (“alienated”) their own potential capacities. When once people, disabusing themselves of myth and superstition, re-absorbed what they had projected, then Reason would be perfected and there would be nothing standing in the way of the this-worldly utopia.

As “Ribera” remarks, this position grants effectiveness, if not existence, to God, and suggests that the atheist and his cousin the “progressive” are articulating a complicated type of resentment; and that they, rather than the believer, are the ones who are guilty of massive, self-deluding projection. This projection would be what accounts for the tendency of “progressives” to espouse their convictions vehemently and to be reactive rather than creative. Liberals, which is what “progressives” now call themselves, employ a vocabulary of “campaigns,” “wars” (on poverty, on prejudice), and (deceptively) “change,” which hint at a purely destructive impulse. The phrase “cutting edge” has unavoidable sacrificial connotations. This barely concealed aggression, by the way, was exactly what I saw in all that excitement over Derrida and Foucault in graduate school, which I mentioned at the outset, directed at the bogeyman “Dead White Male.”

“Ribera” gets it absolutely right when he reasons that the “progressive” or Gnostic agenda always begins with mayhem. As Saul Alinksy, Obama’s mentor, put it, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Crises provide handy opportunities to destroy things. “Ribera” understands this. The true believer, he writes, must abolish “philosophical order… reason, [a sense of] logic and causality.” He must also abolish “political order [and] morality and religion” because he “must be freed of any determinism from outside his own will and impulses, so anything the civilization brings to him is somehow suspicious.” The Gnostic “pretends to build a new world,” but what he really aims at doing is “destroying the old one… that is, any organized and superior civilization (especially the Western and Christian one).”

As “Ribera” puts it so succinctly, “Gnosticism is an entropic mind,” whose convictions being entirely reactive are also, for the Gnostic, humiliatingly dependent on what they denounce, just as atheism can never be anything more than a secondary denial of a primary position. (It matters little whether belief is “true” – it is the firstness of belief, any belief, which outrages the Gnostic non-believer.)

“Ribera” adds that the Gnostic schedule of destruction necessarily includes “any ethnic or sexual differentiation.” Yes – because such differentiation is a structure in reality that the Gnostic experiences as an intolerable because limiting imposition. “Ribera” sees in this nihilistic propensity the roots of the promotion of “immigration in western countries” and of the similar promotion of “homosexuality” and other powerfully non-normative behaviors. He points out that “androgyny is one the most basic Gnostic myths, where male and female are merged in a single being.” Interested readers will find abundant confirmation of this point in any of the standard works on Gnosticism – in Hans Jonas’ Gnostic Religion, for example, and in Kurt Rudolph’s Gnosis. Some apologists for Gnosticism, like Elaine Pagels, have praised the Gnostics for their promotion of the Androgyne, evaluating Gnosticism as superior to Gospel Christianity on the basis of the concept.

I wish to thank “Wynne” and “Ribera” publicly for taking the time and exercising the care to comment so usefully on my essay. One can tell by their prose that these are two civilized people, whose education must have occurred before or despite the corruption of the public schools. I would guess, judging by the pseudonym, that “Ribera” is a Spaniard or someone from one of the Spanish-speaking countries, in which case I would also guess that he is a reader of José Ortega-y-Gasset. Like Oswald Spengler and Voegelin – and like René Girard – Ortega is one of those colossal writers whose work helps us to understand what we are seeing when we look out on the tumult of our condition.

Speaking of Girard, I would like to draw the attention of both my “interlocutors” – and of all other interested parties – to the work of Eric Gans, the inventor of “Generative Anthropology,” whose theoretical meditation on humanity picks up, as it were, where Girard’s leaves off. They might start with Gans’ latest book, The Scenic Imagination, or with his earlier Originary Thinking. I just had the pleasure of participating in the Third Conference on Generative Anthropology, held this year in Ottawa, about which I hope to report in The Brussels Journal in future.

Britain and America Compete in Economic Suicide

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:21:14 -0500

Victoria Station. Picture by René Slaats

Victoria Station, London. Look around this 150-year-old rail station and you can see the rise and fall, and rise and now again decline of the British nation.

Victoria Station is just a few blocks from Buckingham Palace and was for many decades the connecting station with the "Continent" (Europe) and the greater world, much like the large international airports of the present day.

The kings and queens of England would greet the various European royals and other heads of state at Victoria Station.

Most of the parts of the station that were built in the late 19th century are still there - the great steel trusses and the Victorian brickwork. In its time, it was state-of-the-art, befitting what was the superpower of its day. After World War I, the station slowly was allowed to decay, as was the British economy.

Beginning with the Thatcher reforms, England had a quarter-century run as the fastest-growing major economy in Europe, but still slower than that of the United States. Yet the basic structure of Victoria Station was only partially renovated during the good years, even though rail privatization and sleek new trains began to reinvigorate rail travel.

Victoria Station now resembles a poorly designed shopping mall where passengers can shop in small modern stores for the latest in consumer electronics or go to a variety of food servers - from unsightly and even somewhat dirty fast-food outlets to better-maintained, but not elegant, restaurants.

Thus, the station is a rather unsightly hodgepodge of shops and trains. The neighborhood directly surrounding Victoria Station, however, has been almost totally rebuilt in recent years with tasteful, modern glass buildings and upscale renovations.

British government spending grew rapidly as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) from about 36 percent of GDP in 1950 to a peak of about 48 percent in 1980, which was one of the causes of the economic stagnation and seedy look of Victoria Station that persisted during that time.

In the early 1980s, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was able to reduce the relative size of government and the very destructive high marginal income tax rates. But government spending, as in the United States, has been allowed to drift higher during the past decade.

Professor David Smith, a former Bank of England economist and well-known commentator on the British economy, has forecast a rise in government spending to more than 53 percent of national income by 2010, the highest level since World War II.

To fund this expanded public sector, net borrowing will increase from 8 percent of national income last year to more than 14 percent next year.

Mr. Smith argues:

"There must be serious doubt whether deficits on this scale can be financed in a non-inflationary manner without very large capital inflows from abroad. And it is hard to see why such inflows should be forthcoming now that the British economy has become so highly taxed by international standards."

If President Obama carries through on his threats to greatly increase U.S. taxes on carbon, etc.; allows the George W. Bush tax cuts to expire next year; and does not begin seriously to reduce spending, many economists will be able to say the same things about the U.S. economy next year that Mr. Smith says about the United Kingdom's economy today.

Mr. Smith also says: "The rise in nonproductive government spending as a share of GDP since 2000 is likely to have cut the U.K.'s sustainable growth rate by some 1.0 to 1.7 percent per annum."

The evidence shows that almost the identical economic slowdown has occurred in the United States over the past decade as government spending has increased as a percentage of GDP.

Many studies have shown there are no discernible benefits in terms of objective measures of human welfare from raising the share of government spending beyond the 25 percent to 30 percent mark, yet Britain is slated to go over the 50 percent mark and America over the 40 percent mark.

The British and Americans seem to be in a suicidal race as to which country can put in the most destructive economic policies. The British are ahead at the moment. Unfortunately, there are no winners.

America is Not Iran, Get Over it

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:27:00 -0500

The moral bankruptcy of the Left – epitomized by its backing of Islamic dictators and extremists over moderate Muslims – saw it defeated across Europe in recent EU elections. From what I read yesterday, the Huffington Post, and American liberals, might want to take a lesson from that.

In one op-ed piece, Frank Schaeffer tells us that “the real lesson of Iran” actually has nothing to do with Iran, and everything to do with American conservatives. Neoconservatives and the religious-Right are – so we’re told – trying their best to establish a Christian, pro-Israel dictatorship, replete with Old Testament law.

According to Schaeffer, Republican “hypocrites” would introduce “capital punishment […] to punish a variety of crimes including being gay.” It would also ban “gay men and women from serving in the military” (when they’re not being executed, of course). And would roll back “civil rights for blacks, women, gays [again], [and] unions […]” And “Gay men and women would be hounded and if they were murdered [rather than being officially executed] there would be leaders saying they had it coming.” And this from a man who says Republicans talk “crazy.”

There are plenty of other colorful accusations here. Republicans would initiate “a neoconservative led and religious right backed holy war against Islam,” though this never happened under the Bush administration, who always made it perfectly clear that the “war on terror” was a war against “Islamofascists,” not moderate Muslims. For example, in 2005, president Bush said this:

Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism. Whatever it's called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam. This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment, by terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom. These extremists distort the idea of jihad into a call for terrorist murder against Christians and Jews and Hindus – and also against Muslims [my italics] from other traditions, who they regard as heretics.

Nevertheless, Huffington Post’s psychobabble expert RJ Eskow, diagnoses “narcissistic frenzy” and “contradictions” in the “’clash of civilizations’ crowd” (that would be you and me).

“Why, Eskow wonders, “are the people who've been insisting there's a monolithic evil called ‘Islamofascism’ suddenly backing one Iranian faction over another?”

Well, its because not every Iranian is an Islamofascist. And not every government, candidate, or leader is the same – that’s why we, and they, have elections. That’s right. It’s not all relative.

But let’s take a step back.

The Bush administration – and “the coalition of the willing” – invaded Afghanistan after the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, and, later, Iraq, replacing the governments of both countries.

The government of Afghanistan – though very far from perfect – is now more moderate (or less extreme) than the previous Taliban dictatorship. Girls can get an education, instead of being murdered for wanting to achieve. And women can protest, instead of being the mere mute property of their male relatives. But, no, it’s not perfect because, yes, Taliban remnants (or Islamofascists) still exercise some influence, and still attack little girls that want an education and a better life.

And, yes, it’s still a patriarchal and ultra-traditional society. Neither café latte nor cultural relativism are in big demand yet. But then maybe Afghans just aren’t as sophisticated and as smart as America’s “liberals”.

Then there’s Iraq’s government. Like the Afghanistan government, it’s essentially Muslim. And we back it as well. There have been elections since the Iraqi dictatorship was toppled. And given a choice between a government that might help usher in a stable democracy, and a dictator like that of Saddam Hussein, who ordered the torture of civilians (including with a human “meat grinder”), who ordered the poison gas attack on civilians at the city of Halabja, killing thousands, and who used mass rape as a weapon of control, then we should back the former and oppose the latter. Or am I just talking all “crazy”?

Back to Iran. Unlike the US, Mr. Schaeffer, it actually does execute homosexuals – by hanging – for being homosexual. It also sentences people to death by stoning. For example nine illiterate people (eight women and one man) convicted without proper trial in 2008. Or the two sisters convicted of adultery – also stoned to death last year. Then there’s the murder of political prisoners. The imprisonment of foreign reporters, such as Roxana Saberi. And the morality police who routinely arrest women for wearing clothes that backward clerical fascists deem too fashionable, too Western, or too attractive.

And Mr. Eskow, you might really believe that Obama’s robotic yet fluffy statements about the Iranian protests “[…] went as far as they could wisely go,” even if “opportunists and fantasists will both say it wasn't enough.” But, personally, I’m with Joshua Muravchik, who said in Commentary, that Obama’s “Failure to use the bully pulpit to give the Iranian people as much support as possible is morally reprehensible and a strategical blunder for which he will not be forgiven.”

I’m not suggesting that we bomb Iran, or do anything neoconish or “crazy.” But those “opportunists and fantasists,” Mr. Eskow, include the Iranian protestors risking their lives, fighting for the chance of democracy, and for the little things that Westerners take for granted, such as being able to wear what they want to wear without being arrested. And if they can’t count on us to stand up and to articulate why they’re right, and why we support them unequivocally, then shame on us.

(For up-to-the-minute info on the democracy movement in Iran, check out Anonymous Iran, Iranbaan and TehranBureau.)

Group Formation in the EP: Conservatives Team Up With Reformists. What Will UKIP Do?

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 01:05:59 -0500

The British Conservatives have finally left the European People’s Party (EPP), the Christian-Democrat group in the European Parliament. The intention to leave the EPP was first announced at the “Congress of Brussels,” a two-day conference, organized by Daniel Hannan, a British MEP (Member of the European Parliament), in Brussels in December 2005. The 2005 conference was attended by politicians from the British Conservatives, the Czech Republic’s Civic Democratic Party (ODS) of President Vaclav Klaus, Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS) of President Lech Kaczyński, and others, such as Alexandra Colen, a member of the Belgian federal parliament for the Flemish-secessionist Vlaams Belang party. The second day of the conference coincided with the election in London of David Cameron as the party leader of the British Conservatives. Before his election as party leader, Mr. Cameron had promised Mr. Hannan to pull his party out of the EPP within weeks of his election as party leader. It took him three and a half years to do so. Yesterday, the British Conservatives, the Czech ODS, the Polish PiS, and a couple of tiny parties from five other EU member states, announced the formation of a new group with a somewhat contradictory name, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).

The ODS would have preferred to admit parties such as the Italian Lega Nord and the Danish People’s Party to the ECR group, but this was vetoed by Mr. Cameron’s party, which stated that it did not want to team up with “racists and extremists.” One of the things held against the Lega Nord was that Mario Borghezio, one of its MEPs, was arrested on September 11, 2007, at a Brussels rally to commemorate the 9/11 terror attacks in America in 2001. The rally, where several Vlaams Belang politicians were also molested and arrested, had been banned by the Socialist mayor of Brussels at the demand of Muslim organizations.

The Danish People’s Party, too, is regarded as “racist and extremist” by the British Conservatives, though the DPP cannot be called either racist or extremist unless one considers its opposition to the admission of Turkey to the EU and its demand that Muslim immigrants to Denmark assimilate and accept Danish freedoms, such as the right of cartoonists to caricature whomever they like, as racist or extremist.

Another party vetoed by Mr. Cameron’s party was the Reformed Political Party (SGP) from the Netherlands. The SGP is a small Calvinist party with only one MEP, which causes controversy because it refuses to put forward women candidates for election. The female voters of the SGP do not seem to mind, but Dutch feminists have taken the SGP to court for violating the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. For many years, the SGP formed one party in the European Parliament with the ChristenUnie, another Dutch Calvinist party. The CU was allowed to join the ECR group, but the SGP was asked by the British Conservatives to change its position on women in politics, which it refused to do, and was subsequently barred. As a result the CU-SGP alliance fell apart.

Other parties which the Conservatives allowed into their group are the Belgian Lijst Dedecker, the party of the maverick Flemish politician Jean-Marie Dedecker, who calls “Zionism as bad as Islamism,” the Finnish Centre Party, the Hungarian Democratic Forum, the Latvian Fatherland and Freedom Party and the Ulster Unionist Party. It is generally expected that the French aristocrat Philippe de Villiers, the only politician who managed to get elected on the list of the pan-European Libertas party, will also ask to join the ECR group, though Mr. de Villiers is opposed to granting Turkey EU membership.

With currently 55 MEPs (26 British, 15 Poles and 9 Czechs) from 8 countries, the ECR is the fourth largest group in the European Parliament, after those of the Christian-Democrats, Socialists and Liberals. While the three big groups are “Europhile,” meaning that they promote European federalism aimed at creating a genuine European state to replace the existing European nations, the ECR says it stands for “Euro-realism” or, as the ECR charter says, “the sovereign integrity of the nation state, opposition to EU federalism and a renewed respect for true subsidiarity.” The group can already prove to be a powerful player in the upcoming debate about whether José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, may prolong his presidency for another five years. Mr. Barroso is backed by the Christian-Democrats and the Liberals, but needs the support of the ECR if he wants to be reappointed.

It is important for MEPs to belong to a formally recognized group. MEPs who do not belong to such a group get less speaking time, may not table amendments in the plenary session, have fewer staff and less financial subsidies. The bigger the group, the bigger the perks and the more extra funding a group receives.

For a group to be formally recognized in the European Parliament, it must consist of a minimum of 25 MEPs from at least 7 of the 27 EU member states. The parties which have been barred from joining the ECR group are currently negotiating with the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) about forming their own group. UKIP, which became the second largest party in Britain in the European elections earlier this month, after the Conservatives, advocates the withdrawal of Britain from the European Union. It is “Eurosceptic,” rather than “Euro-realist.” Lega Nord, the Danish People’s Party and Vlaams Belang also tend to be Eurosceptic rather than Euro-realist because they believe the EU cannot be reformed and is a danger to the democratic nation-states in Europe.

UKIP has 13 MEPs, the Lega Nord 9, the Danish People’s Party 2, the Vlaams Belang 2, the Greek Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS) 2, the Austrian Freedom Party 2, the True Finns party from Finland 1 – which makes 31 MEPs from 7 countries. Such a group could become a strong voice in the fight to dismantle the EU, oppose the Islamization of Europe and, given that the Danish People’s Party and the Vlaams Belang are outspoken supporters of Israel, support for the Jewish state. If Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party (4 MEPs) should reconsider his principle not to join any group, he could even play a prominent role in such a constellation. The Italian neo-fascists will not join this group. They have been admitted to... the Christian-Democrat EPP.

Sex Crimes On the Rise

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:59:10 -0500

A recent article in the French newspaper Le Figaro reveals that sexual violence is on the rise in France. Rapes constitute three-quarters of the crimes committed by young persons under the age of 18. In Nº 40 of his weekly journal, available through subscription, Yves Daoudal analyzes the problem from a different perspective than that of the Le Figaro: “Today rapes represent three-quarters of the crimes committed by those under 18. And more than half of those under 13 who get into trouble with the law are indicted for acts of a sexual nature (yes: under the age of 13). One thousand adolescents are implicated every year in matters relating to sexual assaults or rapes: the figures have increased 50% in ten years.”

Daoudal quotes from the Figaro article the explanations of the so-called experts, who attempt to explain the behavior of these young persons through the usual psycho-babble. But who never get close to the crux of the problem: “It is noteworthy that the ministry of justice, Le Figaro and its ‘specialists’, all follow assiduously a politically correct line, and consequently do not allow themselves to see what this is really about. Since no diagnosis can be made, no remedy can be found. An observer from Mars might be led to think that these articles and the ‘experts’ from the ministry have no idea what is happening in our society, particularly in the ‘neighborhoods.’ Moreover, we are told from the start that ‘this reality spares no milieu’. As if the gang rapes were not a specialty of the ethnic neighborhoods and marked by racism: for this is really about humiliating a ‘white woman’. But as everyone knows racism is a one-way street. So mum’s the word.”

Daoudal points out that statistics leave no doubt as to the ethnic origin of a great many criminals, especially sex offenders: “That is not the only explanation, but if you refute it from the start, you are condemning yourself to an absence of will to take action (but it does seem to be the case that no one wants to take action).”

Another explanation mentioned by Daoudal is the fact that pornography and extreme violence affect large layers of our society, while society no longer offers the young a set of standards to live by. “Viewed from this angle,” he writes, “the triumphant election of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, preceded by his altercation with François Bayrou is significant. Daniel Cohn-Bendit is the personification of the 1968 ideology: it is forbidden to forbid. Which means: it is forbidden to set standards. And while François Bayrou became indignant at the erotic games of pedophilia that Cohn-Bendit boasted about, it was Bayrou who was subjected to public vindictiveness...”

“When you have reached that point, and at the same time, as in schizophrenia, any summer camp counselor must be on his guard against the slightest gesture of tenderness or consolation for fear of being dragged into court, it is obviously the society as a whole that has lost its standards. And crime cannot help but increase, punctuated by the empty and soothing lamentations from the authorities.”

Iran’s Pro-Democracy Protestors Call for Our Help

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:31:23 -0500

A cartoon on TehranBureau.com depicts Iranian pro-democracy protestors bloodied and beaten by president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s thugs. As they scream for “help” in the background, France’s president Sarkozy remarks “I feel someone is calling us!?” US president Obama – his face awash with characteristic dreaminess – responds, “my friends, we should think positive.”

It is a damning indictment of the West, and most especially of Obama and his dreamy incapacitating liberalism. The Iranian youth in particular has been the most pro-American of all Muslims in the Middle East. The enemy of the pro-democracy protestors is not only an Islamofascist regime, it is an enemy intent on wiping Israel off the face of the earth, and the ideological enemy that we now face in the West. Their enemy is our enemy.

A few days ago, Ahmadinejad gave a speech decrying the demonstrators as “khas o khashak” (‘dirt and dust’ or ‘trash and dust’). The phrase has rebounded on him, however, becoming a rallying cry against the Islamic dictatorship.

“Dirt and dust is you [Ahmadinejad], it is you who are the enemy of Iran,” runs one chant.

According to the Guardian, the reformist Etemad-e Melli newspaper also carried a picture of protestors holding a banner bearing the words “Epic of Dirt and Dust.” Various blogs have appeared under that title, and I have also seen one video with this name. (The British-based, Tehran-financed Press TV however translated Ahmadinejad’s insult as “dust and pebbles” for its target – gullible, Leftist, Western – audience.)

The authorities have brutally cracked down on the protests. A Google Map appeared in response, pinpointing the locations of embassies supposedly accepting the wounded, although most of these (including the Belgian, Dutch, German, Irish and probably also the British) appear to have been blocked by the police and Basij (a paramilitary force founded by Ayatollah Khomeini).

According to The Daily Mail, at least 17 protestors were killed and 100 injured over the weekend, although this would seem to be very much an underestimation. The mainstream media is lagging behind events, but you can get up-to-the-minute information from Anonymous Iran. The site also has a list of Twitter accounts that are posting information on events the second they occur, and you don’t need to be signed up to get that information. Here are just a few from Twitter account iranbaan:

Ghalamsnews asks for those injured in recent violence to leave their names and contact number. This is a trap

Choppers continue to hover over Tehran. It is unclear whether they belong to the Army, Basij or Sepah (Revolutionary Guard)

3 people killed in Mashhad over the last few days

Police reports they arrested 475 people yesterday

Iran’s democratic dissidents are also using Tor software (which was originally developed for the US Navy) to remain anonymous on the web, and get information out to the rest of the world. It’s possible to sign up to Tor, no matter where you live in the West, and to run a relay on your computer to help keep the Iranian dissidents anonymous.

A petition addressed to the Prosecutors of the International Court of Justice has also been posted online, calling for an “investigation into crimes committed by Ali Khamenei.”

Duly Noted: Whose Crisis, Whose Rescue?

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 04:45:55 -0500

George Handlery about the week that was. Bail outs, even for the cadaver class. Fleeing high taxes. Minimalizing taxes is a basic right. Respect criminals: get their consent for actions against them. Never say never unless it always pays. Crime, exposure and tolerance. The common denominator. Lip service rejecting past crimes frees from acting to fight their current version. Revelations, redeemers and repression.

1. The story is a widely circulating and, due to its relentless repetition, widely accepted. According to it, state intervention has saved capitalism from failure. Actually, even in the USA, capitalism did not exist in a pure form. Government-by-the-Clintons has interfered in the market system massively. With devastating ultimate consequences, government meddled in the process by which credits were granted and real estate prices evolved. Huge profits awaited those playing along. (Mortgages to those who could not afford them and the resulting house prices unrelated to value are meant.) Now the government is fixing wages for the employees of financial institutions. Will this interference be more beneficial than the one that originally regulated credits, mortgages and real estate prices?

2. Lest we manage to conveniently forget. Some recent bailouts with government money might have made sense. This was the case if a payback and an ultimate refund, expressing the risks taken, could be assumed to conclude the action. At the same time, the unpleasant truth for the free-lunch-crowd that all of us would like to join, must be brought up. Subventions sap the power of healthy undertakings. Being ordered to stand at the giving end milks their power – to the point at which they themselves might need to be rescued. Subventions do not only have a recipient. Besides the gainers, there is also a forgotten unwilling donor as the loser of the deal.

3. The Germans are not coming! They are already here. I have called an old school mate from the 7th grade. He complained that he couldn’t afford to move to a home with features that match the needs imposed by his age. He went on to explain that the Germans are bidding up prices in his area. The better off flee the high taxes of home for the low tax country where their language is understood. To get the entire picture, you need to know that the old boy lives just across the right side of the German border. His plight is caused by the fact that many Germans have given up on voting in a frugal government that consumes only what it has and not what it can confiscate. What blocks the switch to sanity? Organized groups have become dependent on free lunches. Everybody is against the free meal the others get. However, this is not so if stopping hand-outs implies that they will not be served for no charge either.

4. It is OK for an American to move from a high-tax state to a low-tax state. In that case, one wonders why it is “wrong” for a person to move from a high tax country to a low tax country. Furthermore, why is it proper to blacklist such states as crooked by those that overcharge their subjects for the services states perform. Several centuries ago, a principle was established. What the people judged to be a “bad state” could be dismissed. The right to leave a system that the individual considers not to act in his best interest, for one that is more efficient in serving his needs, is a personalized assertion of the right exercised in the former case

5. The worse the case, the more hilarious the reactions tend to be. Here is a good one. Peking made recommendations regarding the inspection of North Korean ships to implement the sanctions approved by the SecCouncil. The arms and trade embargo are to be executed cautiously and without the threat or the application of force. Just try to imagine this scene. A suspicious ship is sighted, A vessel instructed to determine whether the cargo is embargoed approaches it.
“We wish to check your cargo”.
“We do not want our cargo inspected”.
“Oh, sorry, in that case, you may proceed”.
Indeed, such draconic measures would scare the daylights out of any hardened criminal regime.

6. Pyongyang has announced that it will “never” give up her nuclear weapons’ policy. You might have heard that the word “never” is never to be used in any context. Why does North Korea practice the opposite without much damage? Because we make it pay. Perhaps, as far back as 1953, the Kims had reason to discover that in their case that “never” always works. It does so because they have to do with entities whose moral relativism and crisis management technique is that everything, and really everything, is negotiable at all times. Accordingly, they never say “no, never” to anyone. Given this softness, “never” is never a mistake but, as in the case of the tantrum of the kid at the checkout counter, a key to get the candy bar.

7. Observers were surprised by the results of the elections for the EU’s parliament. In numerous safe districts, the voters abandoned the Socialists they used to support. In doing so, they voted not for the right-of-center but for the radical right. Part of the explanation is simple. In some instances, a poor district is likely to be physically exposed to zones in which, as Marx put it, the “lumpen” element dominates. In case that the inhabitants can be identified by their characteristics, furthermore, if a large minority within the minority declares crime to be a part of its unalienable way of life, the victims respond by supporting radicals. Physical proximity exposes working class districts to areas where outsiders excuse crime by bringing up “culture”. In such cases, ethnic rights are twisted to imply immunity. The liberals are unaffected because they live in protected areas. Therefore, they like to tell the victims of transgressions that tolerance has a higher priority than their safety. Criminality being a cultural product, it is to be tolerantly understood as a manifestation of ethnic identity. Such mantras are quickly unmasked as a farce. After all, the preacher of generosity is not forced to live by the norms he advocates.

8. After the Cuban crisis, besides a direct telephone connection between the White House and Red Square, there were several “secret channels” connecting Washington and Moscow. This reduced the probability not of crises but of these getting out of hand in 1914 fashion. The links express a consciousness of communality between foes that was based on rational projections and on the calculable commitment to the national interest of the global rivals. Such channels, articulating the missing common denominator, do not exist between Washington and Tehran. The un-atoned attack on the US’ Embassy is a formal expression the lack common denominators.

9. Israel is becoming a test case. Here not the sincerity of retroactive outrage provoked by the past and the commitment to principles made at a time when the going was easy is meant. Standing up now for Israel’s existence is also a test of current Western resolve. To what? To defend itself regardless of the fashion devastating its political culture of the moment. A case in point is the quickly leveled charge of Israeli extremism once her government raises questions regarding the terms determining a Palestinian state. In discussing this issue, references to the radical record of Palestine’s advocates are declared to be politically incorrect.

10. Movements, whether secular or religious, tend to assume that they have access to the truth embedded in a revelation. That revelation is only accessible to their founding members. Once this happens, the limited echo from a yet un-coerced and uninterested majority convinces the redeemers that not the defects of their creed are to be blamed. The “incorrect” reaction is a sign that the dull-witted majority cannot fathom the truth. As soon as this interpretation becomes part of the movement’s spin and dogma, a new stage is reached. Now it will be alleged that the movement, especially the inner circle of the guiding enlightened, are acting to better mankind as they make their next move. It is to apply educating coercion to elevate the masses. These need tutelage until they accept what the wise consider to be their true interest. (The generalization fits numerous secular and theocratic tyrannies of the past, the present and, most regrettably, of the future.)

Britain, From Parliament to Police State

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:56:12 -0500

I am aware of the fact that some British people speak of Europe as “somewhere else,” to which they do not belong. In my opinion, Britain is very much a part of European civilization whether they want to admit so or not, but I am willing to grant them a special place within the European tradition. There is a reason why English became the first global lingua franca. While I focus mainly on the history of science in my essays these days, let us have a brief look at some of the political ideas and concepts championed by the British in the modern era.

The famous English legal charter known as the Magna Carta, issued in the year 1215 and written in Latin, limited kingly power in England and had major long-term political consequences when combined with later events. King John (1166-1216) had signed the Magna Carta unwillingly, and the heavy spending and foreign advisers of his son and successor Henry III (1207-1272) upset the nobles, who once again acted as a class under the leadership of the nobleman Simon de Montfort (1208-1265), Earl of Leicester. In 1258 they took over the government and elected a council of nobles which was called parliament or parlement, a French word meaning a “discussion meeting.”

This “parliament” took control of the treasury and forced Henry to get rid of his foreign advisers. Henry died in 1272 and his son Edward I (1239-1307) took the throne. He brought together the first real parliament. Simon de Montfort’s council included only nobles and had been able to make statues, written laws, and make political decisions, but the lords were less able to provide the king with money. Several kings had made arrangements for taxation before but, as David McDowall writes in An Illustrated History of Britain:

“Edward I was the first to create a ‘representative institution’ which could provide the money he needed. This institution became the House of Commons. Unlike the House of Lords it contained a mixture of ‘gentry’ (knights and other wealthy freemen from the shires) and merchants from the towns. These were the two broad classes of people who produced and controlled England’s wealth. In 1275 Edward I commanded each shire and each town (or borough) to send two representatives to his parliament. These ‘commoners’ would have stayed away if they could, to avoid giving Edward money. But few dared risk Edward’s anger. They became unwilling representatives of their local community. This, rather than Magna Carta, was the beginning of the idea that there should be ‘no taxation without representation’, later claimed by the American colonists of the eighteenth century. In other parts of Europe, similar ‘parliaments’ kept all the gentry separate from the commoners. England was special because the House of Commons contained a mixture of gentry belonging to the feudal ruling class and merchants and freemen who did not. The co-operation of these groups, through the House of Commons, became important to Britain’s later political and social development.”

Merchants and country gentlemen were anxious to influence the king’s policies, as they wanted to protect their interests. When France threatened the important wool trade with Flanders they supported Edward III (1312-1377) in his war. During Edward III’s reign Parliament became organized in two parts: the Lords and the Commons, which represented the middle class; the really poor had no voice of their own in Parliament until the middle of the nineteenth century. Many European countries had similar kinds of parliaments in medieval times, but in most cases these institutions disappeared when feudalism died out. In England, however, the death of feudalism helped strengthen the House of Commons in Parliament.

Like the Civil War of 1642, the Glorious Revolution, as the political results of the events of 1688 were called, was completely unplanned. It was more a coup d’etat by the ruling elites than a revolution as such, but the fact that Parliament made William king, not by inheritance but by their choice, was indeed revolutionary. Parliament was clearly more powerful than the king and would remain so in the future. Its power over the monarch was written into the Bill of Rights in 1689. The king was from now on unable to raise taxes or keep an army without the agreement of Parliament, or to act against any MP for what he said in Parliament.

England was by the seventeenth century emerging as a great power whose influence increasingly stretched far beyond Europe. It was also one of the most intellectually creative regions in the world. After Isaac Newton had published his Principia in 1687, probably the single most influential text in the history of science, the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), a friend of Newton, in 1690 published his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, proclaiming the doctrine eventually known as the tabula rasa, where humans come into the world as blank slates. This was perfect for a world in which reason ruled and everything was possible. Human nature itself could be improved by applying reason, and history could take the direction of eternal progress. Locke published his Second Treatise of Government, stating that government is the servant of men, not the other way around, and that men possess natural rights, expanding on Thomas Hobbes’ concept of the social contract.

In the early 1700s, England's combination of economic prosperity, social stability and civil liberties had no equivalent anywhere in Continental Europe, at least not among the larger states; smaller states such as Switzerland is a different matter. The French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) lived in England for several years in the 1720s and knew the English language well. He preferred British constitutional monarchy to French absolute monarchy. Voltaire praised England's virtues in Letters on the English from 1734 when he returned to Paris. This caused great excitement among French intellectuals for the ideas of Newton and Locke and the plays of Shakespeare, but their own philosophies went in a different direction.

That an important European city such as Paris was the home of a major intellectual movement is not too strange. It is more surprising that the smaller city of Edinburgh was so as well during the second half of the eighteenth century. What came to be known as the Scottish Enlightenment, whose effects were felt far beyond Scotland or Britain, produced a series of prominent intellectuals and scholars, including the pioneering modern geologist James Hutton (1726-1797), the philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), the brilliant, but famously eccentric economist Adam Smith (1723-1790) and the historian Adam Ferguson (1723-1816).

Adam Smith from the University of Glasgow in 1776 -- at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, although he did not realize this at the time -- published his Wealth of Nations, widely considered the first modern work of economics. Smith stressed meritocracy and introduced the principle of competitive advantage and the metaphor of the Invisible Hand. Above all he championed the idea that trade is not a zero-sum game but a win-win situation; he challenged the ancient assumption that wealth is a pie of fixed size over which everybody has to fight to get their share by showing that the size of the pie itself can grow through trade.

Scotland at this time had a good education system and very high literacy rates, as did the emerging Scandinavian nations. The American polymath Benjamin Franklin, who visited Edinburgh in 1759, remembered his stay as “the densest happiness” he had ever experienced. By 1762 Voltaire was writing, with a touch of malice, that “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening.” In England and the Netherlands, where political power was already in the hands of the merchant middle class, intellectual activity was directed toward analyzing the practical significance of this change.

In contrast, according to scholar Bruce G. Trigger, “The continuing political weakness of the French middle class in the face of Bourbon autocracy stimulated French intellectuals to use the idea of progress to reify change as a basis for challenging the legitimacy of an absolute monarch, who claimed to rule by divine will and protected the feudal economic privileges enjoyed by a politically moribund nobility. By proclaiming change to be both desirable and inevitable, Enlightenment philosophers called into question the legitimacy of the existing political and religious order. Beginning as an intellectual expression of discontent, the French Enlightenment gradually developed into a movement with revolutionary potential….The Scottish interest in Enlightenment philosophy reflected the close cultural ties between Scotland and France but also was stimulated by the unprecedented power and prosperity acquired to the Scottish urban middle class as a result of Scotland’s union with England in 1707. Southern Scotland was experiencing rapid development but the highland areas to the north remained politically, economically, and culturally underdeveloped. This contrast aroused the interest of Scottish intellectuals in questions relating to the origin, development, and modernization of institutions.”

Scottish intellectuals made very important contributions to science and to our understanding of the modern world, but it was the more revolutionary version of Enlightenment philosophy which developed in France that would become popular among the middle classes seeking more political power for themselves in Europe and in North America.

The sad part when writing this is that while Britain was once admired for its political system and was rightfully hailed as a beacon of liberty, today Britain is one of the most politically repressive countries in the Western world, which is saying a lot given how bad Politically Correct censorship is in the entire Western world these days. Britain today is a Multicultural police state where sharia, Islamic law, is quite literally treated as the law of the land. I suppose there is a strange sort of symmetry in this: Britain was one of the first countries in the West to embrace political liberty and is now among the first to leave political liberty behind.