The Brussels Journal - The Voice of Conservatism in Europe

The EU’s Horrible Honeymoon

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:35:34 -0600

Last week, Barack Obama snubbed the Europeans by refusing to attend next May’s European Union summit in Madrid. The Europeans are very upset. But that is not the worst of their problems, and neither is the looming bankruptcy of Greece. Analysts fear that Spain might sink the euro, the EU’s common currency, and with the euro also the dreams of greater political integration.

At this point Europe is not even halfway its 100-day political “honeymoon” since the Treaty of Lisbon, which transformed the EU into a state in its own right, came into force. So far the honeymoon has been a nightmare. Since the beginning of the year, the EU’s currency, the euro, is on the brink of collapse; Greece has been placed under EU financial supervision to prevent it from going bankrupt. Now U.S. President Barack Obama has announced that he will not attend next May’s EU summit in Madrid. It was to have been Obama’s first visit to post-Lisbon Europe – the consecration of the new political order.

Washington informed Brussels last week that Obama is not coming because it is not clear who is his European counterpart. Since the Lisbon Treaty came into force on January 1^st, Europe has its own President, Herman Van Rompuy. This former Belgian politician chairs the European Council, the assembly of the heads of government of the 27 EU member states. However, there is also José Manuel Barroso, a former Portuguese politician, who is the president of the European Commission, which is the EU’s executive body. And there is José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister, who is hosting the Madrid meeting and as such co-chairs the summit meeting of the EU heads of government with Mr. Van Rompuy.

Messrs. Van Rompuy, Barroso and Zapatero all want to be the first to shake Mr. Obama’s hand and receive the deep bow which the American President is in the habit of making to foreign leaders. Because of the embarrassing intra-European squabble about who should have the honor, Obama has declined the invitation until the Europeans have figured out which of them is the most important.

Obama’s decision has come as an unexpected blow to the European leadership. It has upset them so much that they are considering postponing the summit to the autumn. Meanwhile, they have begun quarreling about who is to blame for the present debacle. The Europeans generally agree that the vainglorious Zapatero is mostly to blame, but others are damaged more. “The Spanish have made a mess of the summit but Van Rompuy and the post-Lisbon EU institutions will carry the can in the long term. The squabbling has damaged the EU in the eyes of the most powerful nation in the world,” a senior EU official said.

Although Obama’s snub hurts Europe’s pride, the euro’s monetary problems are far more serious. They not only affect Europe’s finances and economy, but may also tear down the political EU framework. When the European Commission placed Athens under EU supervision last week, Greece was almost bankrupt. Brussels has forced the Greek government to present a plan to drastically reduce its budget deficit from 13% to 3% by the end of 2012. The plan will cost the Greeks blood, sweat and tears. It includes a freeze on civil service wages and the postponement of the retirement age. Brussels has invoked new EU powers under Article 121 of the Lisbon Treaty, which allow it to reshape the structure of Greece’s pensions, healthcare, labor market and private commerce.

“The envisaged correction of the deficit is feasible but subject to risks,” says EU Commission President Barroso – an understatement. The Commission fears a backlash from the Greek unions, who might organize strikes and bring down the Greek government. Trade unions in other countries are nervous, too. They warn that it is unacceptable that the European Commission intervenes in setting national wages.

The EU’s Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia declared that the Greek targets will be enforced strongly and that, if necessary, even more draconian measures will be taken. “Every time we see or perceive slippages, we will ask for additional measures to correct these slippages. Never before have we established so detailed and tough a system of surveillance,” Almunia said. He has demanded quarterly updates on progress towards reduction targets, as well as a first report on 16 March. “This is the first time,” he said, “we have established such an intense and quasi-permanent system of monitoring.”

Much is at stake. In the coming weeks, the strength of the euro will depend on whether the markets believe that the government in Athens is strong enough to implement the reforms or trust that the other eurozone countries will bail out the Greeks. This year the eurozone governments have already borrowed a record €110bn from the markets, thereby forcing up the cost of borrowing for countries with the weakest public finances, such as Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy.

Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz warns that the plan to slash Greece’s budget deficit could end up stifling the country’s economic growth. He said that the whole eurozone should share responsibility for the Greek situation. This view is not shared by other economists. Otmar Issing, a German economist and a founding member of the European Central Bank (ECB), points out that successive Greek governments have falsified the Greek budget figures for years, in an attempt to deceive Brussels and the eurozone monetary authorities, such as the ECB. What is happening today is the result of “years of violating rules, cheating on figures, financing consumption, public and private by huge debts – this is a way which has to be stopped,” Issing told the BBC. “Any sign that help might come, would undermine the efforts which are needed to reform the Greek economy.”

For political reasons, too, a bailout would be counterproductive. “German and French taxpayers cannot pay for Greece,” Rainer Brüderle, Germany’s Economy Minister, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. A bailout would mean that the taxpayers in one country are liable for the failures and mistakes of a government in another country. This will not be accepted in countries such as Germany, who will have to foot the bulk of the bill. Axel Weber, President of the German Bundesbank and a member of the ECB Executive Board, told the German financial paper Boersen Zeitung: “Politically, it would not be possible to tell voters that one country is being helped out so that it can avoid the painful savings that other countries have made.”

Bailing out the Greeks will lead to a surge of anti-EU feelings in other countries. The alternative is to allow Greece to default on its debts. This, too, would have devastating consequences for the euro and affect all the countries in the eurozone. Hence, there seems to be only one way out: Greece must leave the eurozone. Legally, however, a country cannot be thrown out of the eurozone. Nevertheless, the British economist John Kay wrote in the influential German financial newspaper Handelsblatt that “if there is political will, it [i.e. throwing the Greeks out] might happen. Bureaucrats, lawyers and bankers would solve the technical difficulties. Central bankers cannot afford not to have an emergency plan for that.”

Even if the situation in Greece can be stabilized, the EU’s nightmare is far from over. The next eurozone dominos that might fall are Portugal and Spain. Portugal’s deficit reached 9.3% of GDP last year, Spain’s 11.4%.

Greece and Portugal are small countries. No matter what happens, they will not break the euro, writes Wolfgang Münchau, the associate editor of the Financial Times. The Greek situation may even be considered as something of a joke. “European farce descends into Greek tragedy” and “Spartan solutions from Brussels will be fought by Athens” are two titles of recent articles by Münchau. However, Spain, the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy, is another kettle of fish. “The clear and present danger to the eurozone is Spain,” says Münchau. “Spain, like Greece, has suffered from an extreme loss of competitiveness during a period in which it relied on a housing bubble to generate prosperity. While the Greek government is at least beginning to recognise the need for reform, perhaps too late, Spain’s political establishment remains in denial,” he writes.

His pessimism is shared by Professor Nouriel Roubini of the Stern School of Business at New York University. He says that Spain poses a looming and serious threat to the future of the eurozone. “If Greece goes under, that’s a problem for the eurozone. If Spain goes under, it’s a disaster,” he told the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos

If Brussels puts Madrid under EU supervision or forces Spain out of the euro, the repercussions for Zapatero will be worse than missing a photo-op with his political hero, Barack Obama. However, in this matter, too, the man who is to blame most for the debacle, is not the one who will suffer most harm from it. It is unlikely that the euro can survive a Spanish catastrophe. It looks as if 2010, which should have been the year of its triumph, is going to be an annus horribilis for the EU.

Liberalism and the Search for the Ground: Another Visit with Eric Voegelin

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 12:01:04 -0600

The Geert Wilders trial in the Netherlands reminds us how much the Western elites, those who currently control the society and wish to use their authority to alter and reconstitute the established order, have parted company with longstanding Western traditions. The mutation of classical liberalism into contemporary politically correct totalitarianism is not surprising, however, since liberalism began as the cautious younger sibling of the revolutionary spirit that found its emblem in the destruction of the Bourbons and the declaration of equality, fraternity, and liberty as the new mandatory themes of human order. Quite apart from the fact of their vain abstraction, those slogans implied from the beginning implacable hostility to custom and habit. The new republican-type nation-states that followed the model of France arose, as had the French Republic, through the violent disestablishment of the smaller, ethnic polities that characterized the long period of feudalism. Insofar as Western Society still exhibits coherency, much of that coherency derives from the period before the emergence of the modern republics. Western society is what it is, therefore, because it stands in a continuum of vital experience and articulate symbolization stemming from those oddly matched wellsprings, Greek philosophy and Hebrew morality, in their unlikely, long-term cultural dialectic as mediated by a thousand years of many local manifestations of Gothic Christianity.

Western society, including North American society, is, then, positively something, a “this” and not a “that,” whose plasticity, while ample, nevertheless falls short of the limitless and whose viability if not mortality corresponds to those limits. A successful attempt to “change” this society, such as the one currently being organized by Barack Hussein Obama and his political minions, will be indistinguishable from a successful attempt to destroy the society. We must not think that the recent electoral development in Massachusetts alters the long-range plan of the Obama regime. The consequence of “transforming America” (or any other Western nation) will not be the utopian dream world of the regnant radical usurpation, which remains unrealizable; it will simply be destruction in and for itself: Widespread misery compounded in equal parts of manipulative tyranny through bureaucratic regulation and the hedonistic chaos of entitlement-driven demands. Governments will exploit carefully created divisions to squelch dissent through “hate-speech” laws and programs of so-called anti-discrimination.

One important problem that stands in the way of our coming to grips with the current crisis – or with the current phase of the extended crisis – is the inadequacy of our vocabulary. Voegelin stands ready to serve us, for one reason, because he made it an important part of his task to set definitions straight and clear up obscurities that, in the centuries since the Eighteenth, have progressively muddied public discourse. I propose, in what follows, to summarize and comment on two of Voegelin’s independent essays from the 1960s – “Liberalism and Its History” (written 1960; published 1974) and “In Search of the Ground” (1965), the last originating as a lecture delivered in Montreal.

I. That “change,” alternatively “progress,” of the activist variety, as advocated by radicals, actually means destruction and that the identity of the two locutions goes largely unnoticed are two facts that together adequately characterize the delusional state of our contemporary politics. The term “liberal,” like the term “change,” lends itself rather more to mendacious abuse than to just employment, especially when adopted as a label by the Left, which likes to hide its havoc-making program of transforming the un-transformable beneath the “L-word’s” ointment-like blandness. That the term “liberal” had long since devolved into something meaningless or misleading struck Voegelin already in the 1960s as a hindrance to transparent discourse. A philosopher particularly of history, Voegelin naturally addressed the term in respect of its specific temporal origin and its subsequent varying usage in modern political oratory. Voegelin remarks right away, in “Liberalism and its History,” that as distinct items of discourse both “liberal” and “Liberalism” emerged quite recently and contingently in a locus little suspected by their current users.

“The word liberal,” as Voegelin notes, “appears for the first time in the second decade of the nineteenth century when a party of the Spanish Cortes of 1812 called itself the Liberales.” These Spanish liberals, constitutionalists who opposed restoration of the monarchy, welcomed the abolition of stultifying class-differences and the diminution of clerical influence on their national polity; their cause sprang from Napoleon’s peninsular campaigns, some effects of which they wished to preserve, and Napoleon’s campaigns sprang in turn from the French Revolution and its imperial metamorphosis. In Voegelin’s observation, “Liberalism is a political movement in the context of the surrounding Western revolutionary movement”; and then again “the new attitude is so tightly bound up with the attitudes it opposes that the entire complex of attitudes becomes a unity of meaning that overshadows each of its elements.”

In Spain, as elsewhere in Europe, Liberalism came to denominate a political position that endorsed selected results of revolution while disdaining – or at any rate claiming to disdain – the violent means utilized by the Jacobin insurrectionists in attaining them. Because the year 1789, the year of the Bastille, represented not the last but merely the first in an indefinite succession of revolutionary waves, the immediately post-revolutionary Liberalism, as instantiated for example by the Spanish Liberales, swiftly found itself surpassed by new pitches of revolutionary radicalism. Some self-denominating liberals, unwilling to ape the ever-more-stringent attitude of the rising revolutionary demand, became conservatives: they endorsed the abolition of monarchy; they preferred a constitutional order and representative institutions to despotic ones, but they resisted a violent attack on habit and custom and they increasingly understood themselves as not Socialists or Communists or atheist-crusaders against Christian doctrine, but rather as the resistance to these movements.

Some of these classical liberals continued indeed to call themselves liberals, while others, more carefully attuned to the relation between language and the existing political situation, began to use the term “conservative.” Other people, also calling themselves liberals, nevertheless used the term to denote something quite different from what men of cautious, constitutionally democratic outlook meant by the same gloss.

In France, Charles Comte, not a relation of Auguste Comte but, like his namesake, a man of the Left, used his periodical Globe to make manifest his agenda of la révolution permanente. This “permanent revolution” would bring about radical social change, not through direct upheaval and insurrection, as in active revolution, but rather through “peaceful change.” Voegelin writes: “The idea of peaceful change – a policy of timely adaptation to the social situation that, in the age of the industrial revolution, changes very quickly – has become today a constant in all shades of liberalism.”

When we examine the present scene in the United States, we discover just this conceit in the rhetoric of the sitting Democrat-dominated federal government. Vehement commitment to “progress” (“change we can believe in,” as Obama’s electoral slogan put it) differs hardly at all, perhaps only in a few small degrees, from vehement commitment to “permanent revolution,” quite as Leon Trotsky understood when he revived Comte’s coinage in his new Bolshevik context. Voegelin writes: “The radical revolutionary must make the revolution into a permanent condition… for as soon as a plateau of stabilization is permitted, the revolution is over.”

This is again precisely what even a cursory glance at American politics since, say, Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, will reveal. The “New Deal” itself steeply ratcheted up its radicalism until checked, temporarily, by the Supreme Court; and no Democrat regime has ever been satisfied with the FDR or the LBJ “Great-Society” status quo. Predictably, the Obama regime can take no satisfaction in merely stewarding the socialist achievements of the Clinton and Bush II regimes, but must proceed grossly and imprudently to abolish the market economy and replace it with a Marx-inspired centrally-planned economy and to increase governmental disruption of continuity in all non-elite-sanctioned habit and custom – in both agendas as fully and as rapidly as possible.

Wherever sympathizers of these agendas control institutions, they endeavor to bring about the same indefinitely deferred goal of radical reconstruction – in fact, deconstruction and annihilation – within the domains defined by their offices. Voegelin observes, as he does frequently elsewhere, that consummation of the process remains forever beyond possibility. The aspirants can never reach their utopian goal “because [utopia] requires the transformation of human nature.” The would-be alchemical-political transformers of human nature claim their schemes to be rational, as though that implied their full justification, but, as Voegelin writes, “man is not only rational but much else besides.” Ultimately, the liberal-revolutionary utopia requires that those who have grabbed power imitate the original act of creation, by which the God, in whom they disclaim belief, established nature, and human nature, in the first place.

Since none of the radical reformers is God, they all lack the superhuman potency requisite to the deed, but with a superbia so pronounced that none will admit it.

In the foregoing observation, we come to an essential point of Voegelin’s thinking, namely that political radicalism is fundamentally religious and apocalyptic – and at the same time extraordinarily anti-spiritual and resentful – or what Voegelin calls “gnostic.” That “everlasting peace” or utopia “might be achieved through a constant process of reform,” falls, for Voegelin, in the category of “gnostic-utopian” dementia. The original Gnostics appeared in the centuries of Late Antiquity in sharp reaction to Philosophical Judaism, Platonism, and Christianity, which share among other traits the tenet that the world is God’s creation and that, as such, it must be good, whether life entails sorrows or not; the sorrows being part of the reality, they must have justification at some level. The Gnostic, unable to square his existence with reality, experiences his disappointments as a colossal broken promise or as a conspiratorial betrayal. His mentality is one of world-hatred and world-rejection rather than reconciliation with nature and faith.

Typically, Late-Antique Gnosticism emphasized the imagery of destructive transformation in the most apocalyptic passages of Scripture and related literature while interpreting the story in Genesis as presenting a false or secondary creation that usurped an original creation in which men and women suffered no sorrows, but lived as Adam and Eve lived, bound to no tilth, in Paradise. The Gnostics sought to restore the supposed original creation, which, in their imagery – and in their practice – entailed the destruction of existing reality. For example, Gnostics eschewed procreation, on the principle that offspring merely added to the grossness of the world.

The Late-Antique Gnostics claimed that their knowledge of these matters belonged uniquely to them and elevated them to elite status; gnosis means “knowledge,” a type of knowledge not based on experience but vouchsafed to the knower exclusively and in a manner theosophical. Voegelin’s argument for a continuity of Gnostic rebellion from the Classical to the modern world involves a complicated genealogy based on recondite documents, but one can see in the array of shared traits a similarity, at least, between ancient religious and modern political ideology. Both erect social structures based on a principle of doctrinal fidelity, as distinct from competency or merit; both prohibit questions and demand non-deviation; both are anti-historical, directing great ire against custom and tradition; both seek an impossible restructuring of existence, which, if it were to succeed, would amount to the destruction of existence; both, pitting themselves in tension with reality, tend to impatient irritation – and both, on the justifying basis of such impatience, show a tolerance of brute force as an instrument of transformation.

What about the content of Liberalism? Voegelin argues, in “Liberalism and its History,” that politically, liberals, like revolutionaries, want the leveling of society (egalitarianism) and despise institutions even as they establish and defend institutions of their own. “Economically,” writes Voegelin, “liberalism means the repeal of limits to free economic activity.” We note, however, that liberals can come to claim that it is the market itself, rather than regulation, which impedes free economic activity (Obama adviser Cass Sunstein argues just this); thus originally, liberals were free-market advocates, but nowadays they favor a type of corporatism, which imposes itself, sphinx-like, on the free market. In religious terms, Voegelin characterizes Liberalism as “anti-clerical,” bent on repudiating “revelation and dogma as sources of truth”; liberal doctrine “discards spiritual substance and becomes secularistic and ideological.”

Liberalism’s “scientific position” consists largely in “the assumption of the autonomy of immanent human reason as the source of knowledge.” Thus, “Liberals speak of free research [only] in the sense of liberation from ‘authorities.’”

II. Voegelin felt considerable unease about the label “conservative,” which he preferred that his friends not settle on him. In “Liberalism and Its History,” Voegelin addresses this discomfort with the term through a pair of ironic attributions. “Raymond Aron,” Voegelin writes, “answered the question about his political attitude by saying he was a liberal, that is, a conservative.” And respecting Friedrich von Hayek: “He is a liberal, that is, a conservative with respect to socialism, Communism, or any other variant of the phase of revolution that has overtaken liberalism.” The ambiguity stems from the fact that in both Europe and North America, earlier and later, “the old liberals shifted toward the right and became conservative, occasionally with distinctly Christian overtones.” The Left, meanwhile, true to its logic as a movement, has, wherever it exists, shifted through increasing degrees of radicalism, as illustrated perfectly by the trajectory of the Democrat Party from Roosevelt II to Obama.

Yet if those who stand in opposition to the radicals were not adequately described as conservatives, as Voegelin strongly implies is the case, how then would one describe them? Or how, in this connection, is one to describe the current “Red-Blue” division in American politics?

Voegelin’s answer to such questions involves his identification of the radical-revolutionary mentality with Gnosticism, that is, with baroque, reality-denying doctrines, sprung from acute anxiety about existence, that bespeak the cause in the fashion of an unquestionable Koranic pronouncement, deviation from which constitutes a punishable offense. (Think: political correctness.) The opposite of Leftwing doctrinaire-ism, as we might call it, is not, however, some antithetical second doctrinaire-ism, equally baroque and locked in Manichaean agon with the first; it is what, in Voegelin’s discourse of the 1950s and 60s, goes by the name, among variants, of openness to existence. The Montreal lecture, “In Search of the Ground,” later appearing as an essay, offers one of the clearest expressions in Voegelin’s massive authorship of this concept.

An element in existence to which the mature individual maintains his “openness” is the cumulus of historic “differentiations in consciousness,” Voegelin’s term from Order and History. The phrase is not obscure: it refers to the fact that the prevailing knowledge of the world in any given cultural continuum – that of the West, for example – sometimes deepens and becomes richer through an individual insight; a “Leap in Being” can happen, as in Western thought when it jumped from mythic to philosophic ideas of existence. By example, in Hesiod’s Theogony, an early Greek myth-poem, Earth emerges from Chaos and the earliest Gods apart from Mother Earth, including Sky, spring from Her; and the procreative acts of all the early divinities then give rise to the later, increasingly anthropomorphic generations of gods, the Titans and Olympians.

In Hesiod’s view of existence, the world has no “beyond,” but everything that is, including the gods, is contained within the world. Call that the cosmic or mythic view of existence, as Voegelin does. In it, all causes are immanent, the question why is this so in any particular case being answerable invariably through reference to something else in the world, either mortal or immortal.

With the Hebrew Prophets and the Greek Philosophers, however, a key “differentiation” occurs: Instead of plural “intra-cosmic gods” the most sensitive and articulate men now commonly intuit one God who not only stands transcendentally beyond the world but also stands to the world as Cause or Creator, as in Genesis or Plato’s Timaeus. This one God, moreover, is identical with the principle that distinguishes human from animal existence – namely reason, but not the degraded, immanent, instrumental reason of Eighteenth-Century Illuminisme and Le culte de la Raison. This God is, for Heraclitus and the Gospels alike, the Logos, and for Plato and Aristotle, Nous, another term that passes into Christian usage.

It would be pointless to argue whether the Logos or Nous intuited by the philosophers and theologians “exists,” for the intuition itself is a fact of reality and therefore part of the fabric of existence in consequence of the philosophers and theologians originally having had it, having codified it, and having seen it accepted as the kernel of a new view of life and the world; had the intuition not been shared by others at the time and continuously thereafter for millennia, no alteration in the fabric of existence would have occurred, nor, be it said, has any subsequent differentiation occurred. That last clause is important because self-denominating modern thinkers, since the Eighteenth Century, have claimed repeatedly to overturn the Platonic-Jewish-Christian dispensation, which they denigrate, not seeing the irony, under the pejorative term of myth.

But, as Voegelin remarks, the theory of causality of the modern thinkers curiously resembles the “intra-cosmic” thinking of the pre-philosophical myth-poets. Ask Marx or Darwin why is this so in any particular case and he can only refer the questioner to “the mode of production” or to “random selection and the survival of the fittest” – in other words, to something else in the world.

Modern thinking actually shrinks back from the boldness of Classical thinking, most probably, as Voegelin argues, because awareness of the transcendent God, who constitutes an “ultimate ground” of existence, creates an unprecedented “tension toward the ground.” In this manner, “The experience of the tension toward transcendent Being is the experiential basis for all analysis [of values and purposes.]”

Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment doctrines, like Gnostic doctrines, represent a frightened and petulant reaction against the discovery that reality possesses an inalterable structure originating in a cause outside itself and that values and purposes, in their hierarchy, have therefore an objective quality that limits the range of rationally justifiable actions. The “immanent reason” so beloved of materialists is, as Voegelin remarks, “empty of content,” so that, to establish at least the appearance of rational discourse, he who spurns reality faces the desperate task “of filling up reason from various immanent sources.” Voegelin writes: “You find, therefore, as an example of the meaning of reason, the profit motive in the economic sense… or striving for power in competition… or [in] productive relations [that] produce all the so-called superstructure of culture in society.”

The variety of these “misplacements of the ground” remains limited, however, so much so that the extent of their variety already reached its completion in the period between the French Revolution and The Communist Manifesto. Nevertheless “the power of ideologies” is that “they last a long while, because there is a vested interest in them.”

Precisely because of human nature, there is always a “vested interest,” as Voegelin says, in easy theories over difficult ones, in theories of irresponsibility over ones of self-reliance, and in theories of the magical malleability of reality over ones of created, that is to say fixed, nature. Late-Antique Manichaeism and medieval alchemy dealt in grand ideas; contemporary Obama-type liberalism deals in paltry ones. (Think: Faust on the one hand and “Cash for Clunkers” on the other.) Despite the difference of imaginative scale, both react against the fact of natural limitation revealed in the intuition of the transcendent Being and both employ ideological “misplacements of the ground” for sneaky rhetorical purposes. The racial pseudo-theology of Reverend Wright’s Chicago congregation, in which Obama maintained his membership for twenty years, stands as a case in point.

Voegelin – who, of course, could have had no inkling of Wright or Obama – nevertheless describes the Wright-Obama race-ideology to the proverbial t. Wanting a narcotic replacement for the tension-generating “ultimate ground,” one could “look to race relations” and assert that, “people belong to this or that race and that makes for their general intellectual makeup; that is the cause, the ultimate ground, and will determine the whole course of history.” It is worth saying that Voegelin’s description is ample enough that it can take in Alfred Rosenberg and Frantz Fanon as well as Wright and Obama.

Voegelin writes that the transcendent vision in fact prevents such “misplacements of the ground”: “If the nature of man is to be found in his openness toward a divine Ground, you cannot at the same time see the nature of man in having certain kinds of passions or in having a certain race or pigmentation or something like that.” Openness toward existence and orientation to the Divine, on the other hand, removes certain problems that the genuine philosopher is obliged to solve. Voegelin observes that Plato and Aristotle, for example, both directly addressed the analytical problem that any contingent “end” that a person might identify can become a “means” by adjusting the context – and so on indefinitely.

How does one rein in the indefinite regress? Let us stipulate that man’s highest value is reason, while leaving the term undefined. When a man wants to build a building, in Voegelin’s example, he must “coordinate [his] means to that end… and if that is done adequately we say [he] has proceeded rationally.” Even so, “in a theoretical examination of the problem we cannot be satisfied with the simple coordination of means to end because every end can be conceived into a means by asking, for instance, ‘For what purpose have we built this building?’” When finally, Voegelin writes, we want to know in certainty whether we act rationally we can only determine the answer based on measuring actions against “an ultimate purpose.”

III. In the aftermath of the Montreal lecture that gave rise to “In Search of the Ground,” one of Voegelin’s auditors asked this question: “Is it possible that a synthesis of all the current theories on the structure and operation of the human psyche could produce a new concept of the nature of man? And would this not produce a new ideology?” Voegelin responded: “The nature of man is in principle known. You can’t produce by new insights a new nature of man. The nature of man is openness to transcendence.” The questioner returned: “If the nature of man is known, it doesn’t seem to be known well enough to be controlled.”

Voegelin responded again: “You can’t control openness toward transcendence, because that’s controlled by God.” And a bit further on, after the questioner has solicited the topic of “proof,” Voegelin says: “It has nothing to do with proof. Either openness is a reality and then you can’t prove it – you can’t prove reality; you can only point to it – or it isn’t. Well it is. We know – we have the documents of the experiences… Plato… Saint Augustine… the thornbush episode in Exodus.”

Voegelin’s examiner reveals the attitude – the anti-philosophical, repellently infantile attitude – of the Gnostic crusader, not least in a desire for control. Implicit in his question is the self-contradictory assumption that the nature of something can be changed. But what else, pray tell, is revealed in the assumption, lying at the basis of all radical political action, that a society, which also possesses a nature and is limited in its malleability by that nature, can be changed? This is not to assert that there is no discernible history of social development or that any given society continues to exist only insofar as it refuses to permit any internal alteration whatsoever. People tend, however, to exaggerate the extent of change.

I would argue, for example, that the abolition of slavery in the United States, while it abruptly and positively altered the condition of the ex-slaves, altered the larger society hardly at all, since only a tiny minority had ever owned human chattels; nor later on did the repeal of “Jim Crow” make much of a difference for the larger society even though it altered social conditions somewhat for American blacks in Democrat-dominated regions of the nation where anti-black feeling ran high.

In a slightly different way, Voegelin cites the case of Utah, when it petitioned for admission to the Union. The Union stipulated its condition: Membership in the federal polity or polygamy, one or the other for the Mormons, not both. The larger society would not assimilate change of that sort or the precedent it would set.

The limits of change for any society are much smaller than liberal or radical or Gnostic zeal ever admits. To be reconcilable with the society, such change as occurs must reflect a spontaneous consensus, because coercive change, as I have already argued, is tantamount only to annihilation. In the Eighth Century BC, Hellenic society was happy with the symbolism of the “intra-cosmic gods” and the world they implied; by the Fourth Century AD, Mediterranean humanity, by a long-gestating like-mindedness, found the old “intra-cosmic gods” no longer convincing or meaningful and began to reorient itself, either through Alexandrian Judaism and its offshoots, or through Neo-Platonism, or through Gospel Christianity to the later-emerging transcendent Divinity.

As country custom and as household ritual and as semi-comic superstition, the “intra-cosmic gods” lived on and they survive, attenuated in their potency, even to this day. As the image of divinity, wistfully, they perished, a new image replacing them that offered to its recipients a richer understanding of existence. That image, representing the discovery of a new depth in reality, has stood in place in the West for two thousand years.

It follows that sensible people should behave with extraordinary circumspection where it concerns cavalier, wishful, or resentful programs of “change” because, as Voegelin so poignantly shows in his essays, radical “change” based on passions is definitely not the “progress” that it claims itself to be: It is not the “Leap in Being” but the frightened, dangerous opposite – a lapse into primitive thinking and myth.

Opposition to “change” for the sake of change, and to “change” as goalless indefinite regress, which is what the vaunted “progress” really is, will likely take the name of Conservatism, the very label that Voegelin wanted not to descend on him as the sign of his political identity. Voegelin knew that words, like ideas, have consequences. Under this admonition, a number of cautionary remarks can be made about the word “Conservatism” and what it implies. For one thing, as soon as one posits Conservatism, one has created an inevitable verbal artifact – Conservatism versus Liberalism – that is structurally Manichaean. This should give us pause. Manichaean, dualistic structures are a characteristic Gnostic appurtenance, which philosophers should avoid.

I recall here my earlier argument that the opposition to ideological doctrine cannot be another ideological doctrine, for that would be ideological rivalry without meaning rather than engagement in debate for the sake of truth. It would be other than the dignified quest, as, to use Voegelin’s essay-title, “In Search of the Ground.”

What the organized Right-leaning opposition to the Party of Destruction does is, finally, more important than what it calls itself even though words have meanings and usages signify something. I am encouraged, slightly, by the way in which spontaneous demonstrations of popular ire against overweening big-government schemes – like “bailouts” and socialized medical insurance – have surprised and actually checked the dictatorial bullying of the Obama regime. When an amateur journalist-reporter, FOX News Channel’s Glenn Beck, publicized the curriculum vitae and words of Obama adviser Van Jones, a nutty Marxist-racialist, it led to the first departure-under-outside-pressure of an Obama appointee. It is a sign of the times that actual investigative reporting is now done by someone like Beck, who previously was little other than a radio-comedian whose main shtick consisted in making prank telephone calls to predictably dimwitted people in a recurring feature called “Jeopretardy.”

Far from being offended, currently one of the most offensive words in the political jargon, by the silently mouthed “That is not true” – uttered by Supreme Court Justice Alito when President Obama gratuitously insulted the court during his State of the Union Address – I take heart in it because Obama’s disrespect was rooted in a falsehood and Robert’s quiet but visible contradiction was rooted in truth. There should be a good deal more clear articulation of the fact that the deconstructors of society have doctrines, false doctrines galore, and that we, by contrast, have an interest in truth, to the objectivity of which we remain open.

Cultic doctrines kill freedom; they demand its immolation in the sacrificial flames of their causes. Truth and free will – truth and freedom – by contrast require and nourish one another. We must vigorously remind our friends and neighbors of these facts.

The Gleichschaltung of Global Taxes

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 07:20:48 -0600

George Handlery about the week that was. “Too big to fail” leads to “too big to be saved”. Ending privacy. The Gleichschaltung of global taxes: “IRS’ of the World, Unite!” The Korean War and the Alliance today. The responsibility for collateral damage.

1.World Economic Forum in Davos. Fortunately, the gathering that was rich in atmospherics and short on measurable results – at least for outsiders – is over. That means no more nostalgic fist waving demonstrators for peace and justice beyond the gates demanding the implementation of their favored dead systems. Equally nice is to be rid of TV reporters that have nothing to report and so resort to snow-flock counting. Sweetening the fare are cameras panning on mountains whose peak is hidden in a cloud. Presumably, the fog comes from the whipped up common places generated in luxury hotels. (These images the writer can beat without trying from his kitchen window.)

The discussion raging in Davos, regarding the wisdom of the bail out of undertakings that are “too big to fail” lacked a matching insight. This time firms tagged as “too big to fail” were saved from the consequences of their folly. In the next crisis, to which the rescue could contribute, we might encounter tottering businesses that are “too big to save”.

2. Davos intensified the noises made by the regulators in charge of the finances, fiscal policies and the tax take of states. The existing abuses call for an improvement of the framework within which the world economy is to operate. The solution of “more state”, however, is not one of the responses that the problems warrant. A result of the get together and its consensus is that certain projects have become fit to be discussed in the polite society of the sane. Essentially the “what if” talk now involves internationally coordinated taxes on fortunes, interests and dividends. It is coupled to making banking transparent (nastily put: no privacy) and to facilitate thereby the grab by the globalized IRS’s of the world. An unmentioned motive is to finance tax-and-spend policies. Do not count on deficit reduction emerging a consequence of unsound sovereign debtors. After a pause while skimming the milk, taxes are likely to grow. That will come about because the international competition for capital and the capable that are also high earners, will weaken.. The reaction to abolished alternatives will be higher taxes levied by states. Once we can look back at the past, we might be made to conclude that one of the main casualties of the crisis of 2008-10 has been the free movement of talent and capital to where their input would have led to the highest returns. Besides the reduced benefits derived from these factors of production, the corresponding reduction of venture capital backing pioneering projects might stand out. As a result, we will all get a bit less rich and innovating. But at least all will share the stagnation. No government run economy will be shamed for its incompetence through its comparison with better systems. The negatives of the sketched process will mainly hit the EU economies. The countries enjoying the greatest immunity from the over-response aimed at the wrong targets will be located in Asia. The USA will start out on the path and then a political turn around will stop the process.

More solutions. Attempts are made to respond to the existing exaggerations found in the incomes of leading bankers. Admittedly, millions in the elevated two-digit weight class might be a bit too much for anyone’s services. Even in cases when they operate(d) with state funding, banks defend the practice. Their claim: unless going wages are paid, the mobile talents will leave. The Left responds by wanting to limit incomes everywhere to the lowest employee wage multiplied by twelve. Anything as drastic as that, even if implemented, will drive talents out of banking. (Will they become public servants?) Here again, we might gain equality and lose the contributions of the gifted. Giving more power to stockholders over management might be better medicine. However, regardless of its virtues, the measure – and other sensible regulations that do not intend to shackle Gulliver to raise the stature of midgets – would not create the hot air, which some colorful political balloons need to soar.

3. Our present experience can confer upon past events a new significance, which we had missed when the occurrence and we were contemporaries. One such incident is that of the Korean War. Witnessing it as a sub-teen has been, in itself, an education. It seemed that with the war our liberation from Soviet servitude is approaching. It was therefore at first scary to see that Communist aggression was about to bring the entire peninsula under its sway as the front approached Pusan. Accordingly, at school we were ordered to display a big map of Korea. With red flags born by needles, we had to mark the daily progress of the “liberation” that kept us locally in slavery. Then came the Inchon landing and the red tide was reversed. Suddenly the maps disappeared and there were no more pushpins with little red flags for us to move. We delighted in this and had fun asking intentionally stupid questions of our embarrassed teachers who were under orders to explain the undesired reality away. This seems from today’s vantage point as cruel: we guessed that the instructors shared our wish to have those red flags recede from our place, to. Preferably from the Yalu to the suburbs of Moscow. Understandably, when Truman stopped McArthur I hit the set on which I got the news from an illegal station.

Long before I got to America, I had a strong sense that the management of the Korean conflict represents an unacknowledged seminal event. In the case of the earlier Berlin Blockade and the Airlift, America marked her territory and drew the limits of her patience. The credibility created prevented much trouble and blocked challenges while these were still in the thinking-about-it phase. In the conduct of the Korean War, the seeds were planted that undermined the full credibility of the USA during the Cold War. Even today, albeit coupled to “Viet Nam”, American reputation, credibility and deterrence continue to suffer. Naturally, soon this could prove to be an understatement in case one of unpleasant scenarios involving Little Kim when his Big Bomb materializes. America might see itself as defined by its record at Corregidor, Iwo Jima or the Bulge. Her foes recall official withdrawals registered as defeats due to her failing will. It is a long list and includes items such as the Korean “armistice” or the Vietnamization that turned over the country to an invasion by Hanoi. The prize still being paid in installments for the impression of fickleness created by dropping of Korea and rewarding an aggressor for his stubbornness. Korea again comes to mind as it is made relevant through another association. The record the “Alliance” is forging now in Iraq and Afghanistan is the issue that makes the observer to think of Korea. In the Korean War, the US acted practically alone as even from Nato countries only nominal support has trickled. The same is the case in Iraq and Afghanistan. The threat from the radicals whose base is challenged in these countries might be directed against all members of the US-led alliance. The military participation, even the political support given, tells another story. Keeping politely silent regarding the discrepancy between implied promises and actual performance aggravates the perennial problem. It would seem that the US’ system of alliances might need some re-thinking and its terms would benefit from adjustments.

4. Mr. Kellenberger who heads the Red Cross argues that the “by far stronger party” is to be nudged not to deploy weapons that effect civilians. The problem that the demand ignores is that terrorist today, as did states at war in earlier times, likes to hide behind the principle of the protection of civilians. Here “hide” is meant literally. The attempt to avoid civilian casualties converts pure civilian targets into ideal protected hiding places that are out of bounds. This applies both to the making and storing of war related material as well as the use of weapons. This use of civilians to protect fighting capacities favors not only the underdog with whom we are to sympathize. The principle can be applied to become the best defense of terrorists enjoying guaranteed immunity. The norm of the inviolability of civilians is applied fairly only if we insist that all parties, even the Jihadists, must respect it. This implies that in the event of the consequent non-observance, consequences need to be implemented. Those using civilians to enhance their ability to wage war must be declared war criminals. The same principle should be applied to movements that murder civilians to paralyze their humanist-minded foes. Lastly, the responsibility for civilian casualties should be assigned to the party that exploits civilians as a cover. Once non-combatants lose their utility as shields, their misuse by fanatics will also abate.

A Dutch Politician. A Sharia-Compliant Court. Assassination by Trial

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:48:20 -0600

A few years ago Britain’s Channel 4 TV broadcast a documentary exposing a number of hate preachers. These were shown variously praising Osama bin Laden, denouncing non-Muslims, or “kuffar,” calling women “deficient,” and inciting violence, including the murder of Jews and homosexuals. Much of what was said, and broadcast in Undercover Mosque, was patently illegal under British law. Instead of acting against the preachers, the police filed a complaint against the filmmakers, who they accused of taking things “out of context” – it’s just that easy to do, when imams call for murder, apparently.

The filmmakers were later vindicated. But the message had been sent loud and clear: Shine a light on the growth of radical Islam, expose the extremists, and you – not they – will be prosecuted.

Britain’s police weren’t the only ones to defend the fanatics. Equally surreal, when he interviewed David Henshaw, the producer of the documentary, MP George Galloway refused to even mention the Koran by name, even though it was he who introduced it in defense of the hate preachers. When Henshaw brought up preachers inciting the murder of gays, exposed in Undercover Mosque, Galloway barked [video]:

“Were they calling for killing or were they referring to a text – a remarkably similar text to that that you would find in the Old Testament.”

Which one? Galloway wouldn’t say, but continued: “The mere reading of the Old Testament [or “a remarkably similar text”] would be to make a pronouncement about the impermissibility of homosexuality, for example.” Galloway’s point, of course, was that that would be hate speech, at least, that is, if it wasn’t now protected speech in Britain and continental Europe.

Ironically, if Galloway had have used the word “Koran,” while suggesting that “the mere reading” of it might inspire the kind of hate on display in Undercover Mosque, he himself might well have stepped over the line into the realm of hate crime. Galloway, though, a friend of Islamic extremists everywhere, is perfectly happy to use this kind of Newspeak. And plenty of mainstream British and European politicians are only slightly less craven.

Dutch parliamentarian, and head of the Party for Freedom (PVV), Geert Wilders is one of those who is not. As you can imagine, this gets him into all kinds of trouble, from media trashing to death threats. This week he was back in court in Amsterdam to answer charges of violating articles 137c and 137d of the Dutch Penal Code, which prohibit “inciting hatred” or “discrimination” against anyone because of their religion, race, gender, etc., and carry up to a two-year prison sentence.

Wilders has repeated ad nauseam that he has nothing against Muslims, but only against the ideology of Islam, and in the pre-hearing, once again reiterated that he was not “out to offend people. I have nothing against Muslims. I have a problem with Islam and the Islamization of our country because Islam is at odds with freedom.”

The transformation of Amsterdam from the world’s most liberal city to one where gays are now frequently attacked, is just one of the aspects of “Islamization” that Wilders has a problem with. And for this, the court apparently has a problem with Wilders. His statement, “Those Moroccan boys are really violent. They beat up people because of their sexual orientation,” is included in the summons, despite the fact that the rise in the number of attacks on gays, perpetrated largely by Moroccan youths, is well known to the Dutch, and has been widely reported, not least of all by Radio Netherlands and American author Bruce Bawer.

The summons also documents Wilders statements against Islam, including his call to ban the Koran, which he has described as a “fascist book.” Whatever one thinks of Wilders’ position here – and I’m no fan of banning – it’s worth remarking that his accusations are in line with Galloway’s defense of Islam, i.e., that “the mere reading” of the Koran – or “text,” to use the euphemism – should, or would, be a hate crime. If so, we might wonder why that would be protected speech under Dutch or any other law, while criticizing or even condemning it means running the risk of being dragged into court?

Then there’s the summons’ scene-by-scene breakdown of Wilders’ 17-minute movie Fitna. Similar to Undercover Mosque, Fitna is largely a compilation of documentary footage – again of hate preachers inciting violence against non-Muslims, Jews, and so on, as well as scenes of actual violence committed by Islamic militants and terrorists, and extracts of the Koran.

The suras shown in writing throughout the film are those such as surah 8, verse 60 (“Prepare for them whatever force and cavalry ye are able of gathering, to strike terror, to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies, of Allah and your enemies”) which are used by Islamic militants to justify, and indeed to inspire, terrorist attacks and other atrocities.

This is obvious to anyone who has spent even a few hours perusing extremist Muslim chat rooms (including those run by and for those living in the West), has the slightest knowledge of al-Qaeda or other terrorist networks, or has read the Hamas charter, which so neatly sums up the Jihadist’s raison d’etre in article eight:

“Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.”

Because of the death threats he received for claiming that Islam was a violent, intolerant religion, Wilders has been forced to have 24-hour protection, and to sleep each night in a different location, including occasionally in prison cells. When he visited Britain recently to meet with Lord Pearson, head of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), inside the House of Lords, extremists gathered outside with placards proclaiming “Geert Wilders deserves Islamic punishment – sharia is coming.” In an interview with the press [video] one protestor even said that they were there to “warn him,” and that, “obviously he knows that in Islam the punishment for the one who insults the prophet is capital punishment, and he should take lessons from people like Theo van Gogh.”

Van Gogh was the Dutch filmmaker behind Submission [video], a movie critical of Islam’s treatment of women, released in 2004 and starring Aayan Hirsi Ali. He was murdered later in the year by Islamist Mohammed Bouyeri, who shot him eight times, slit his throat, and pinned a letter, threatening Hirsi Ali, to his chest with a dagger. She left for the US. Wilders carried on, with protection.

Wilders has so far escaped “Islamic punishment,” yet he is now forced to answer to a court in a supposedly liberal democracy for criticizing Islam. The court itself seems determined to stack the deck against Wilders, allowing him only three of the 18 witnesses he had requested.

The Dutch authorities, however, like those of other European states, appear almost to have sided with the terrorists and extremists – not merely over non-Muslims, but over moderate and reformists Muslims as well. As Salim Mansur said in the Toronto Sun, “the Amsterdam Court of Appeal has conceded space to the Islamists by accommodating, in practical terms, their demand for acceptance of Shariah (Islamic law) within secular society.” Filip Dewinter, a leader of the Flemish political party Vlaams Belang put it rather more pithily, calling the trial, “an assassination attempt on a democratic party” – and, by extension, on democracy itself.

How Do You Say “Kangaroo Court” in Dutch?

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 02:17:15 -0600

Behold (courtesy Tundra Tabloids) the very image of Dutch "justice." After yesterday's "judicial" proceedings in Amsterdam, Holland itself is forever besmirched, its "judges" having made it clear that no semblance of fairness will enter into their proceeeding against Geert Wilders. As noted below, the "judges" slashed the roster of witnesses the Wilders defense team planned to call to the stand from eighteen to three.

John L. Work writes at Newsreal:

Even if you have never been involved in a criminal prosecution wherein your very freedom is at risk, I want you to now imagine that you and your attorney have prepared a defense that includes a list of witnesses that will provide a mountain of exculpatory evidence. Then, imagine that the Court summarily and arbitrarily decides that it will not listen to nearly ninety percent of your case.

“This court is apparently not interested in the truth." Wilders told De Telegraaf (translations from Gates of Vienna). "I cannot conclude anything but that the court does not award me a fair trial.”

“I have no respect for this,” Wilders added. He pointed out that in a typical criminal case there are often dozens of witnesses heard.

But this is not a typical trial. This is a rigged game, a fixed fight, a show trial that is premised not on Dutch law but on Islamic law. Indeed, the trial of Geert Wilders is a test case for sharia in the Netherlands, the grafting onto a free Western country the repressive cage of Islamic rule.

Discussing Muslim progress against "Islamophobia" at the 35th meeting of foreign ministers of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Kampala, Uganda in 2008, Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu made the following statement:

In confronting the Danish cartoons and the Dutch film “Fitna”, we sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed. As we speak, the official West and its public opinion are all now well-aware of the sensitivities of these issues. They have also started to look seriously into the question of freedom of expression from the perspective of its inherent responsibility, which should not be overlooked.

One reading doesn't convey the chilling import of these words.

As Stephen Coughlin has pointed out to me, "we," in the definition at the OIC website, are, of course, "the collective voice of the Islamic world" – the "ummah" as represented by the heads of state and foreign ministers of the 57 Islamic nations of the OIC. In other words, as Coughlin puts it, "real state actors" using "real state power" to further real state objectives.

The objective of the ummah? Always and eternally, the greater and wider and deeper imposition of Islamic law. The ummah indeed sent its message to the West regarding "red lines that should not be crossed" – namely, the Danish cartoons and Wilders' film "Fitna." Official protests, statements, riots, boycotts, murders, death threats, assassination attempts -- a clear Islamic message, all right. And:

As we speak, the official West and its public opinion are all now well-aware of the sensitivities of these issues.

Yes, and to the craven point where "the official West and its public opinion" are paralyzed and silenced by these same "sensitivities."

They have also started to look seriously into the question of freedom of expression from the perspective of its inherent responsibility, which should not be overlooked.

When the OIC speaks about "freedom of expression," it means freedom of expression as governed by the laws of Islam – sharia. When the OIC says we in the West have "started to look seriously into the question of freedom of expression from the perspective of its inherent responsibility," it means we in the West have started to regard expression from the perspective of sharia – from the perspective of the totalitarian Islamic system.

Trying Geert Wilders, a once-valiant Holland is leading the way, forsaking the freedoms of the West for the objectives of the ummah.

Geert Wilders vs. The Multicultural Inquisition

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:37:35 -0600

(Illustration from the Gates of Vienna website)

Some observers have compared the ongoing trial against the prominent Dutch Islam-critic Geert Wilders in the Netherlands to the case against Galileo Galilei in seventeenth century Italy. There is no question that the trial against Galileo represents a dark chapter in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, but there are some popular misconceptions regarding it.

The Italian philosopher and occultist Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was a supporter of the Sun-centered model of Copernicus and championed the idea that the universe is filled with an infinite array of stars similar to our Sun and that life exists elsewhere in this vast universe. He was embroiled in a long trial with the Roman Inquisition and burned at the stake in 1600. His case remains controversial to this day. In author John Gribbin’s view he was a religious heretic rather than a “martyr for science”, and his execution, while certainly deplorable, happened mainly because of his unorthodox theological ideas, not his scientific ones:

"But after 1600 Copernicanism was distinctly frowned upon by the Church, and the fact that Bruno was a Copernican and had been burned as a heretic was hardly encouraging for anyone, like Galileo, who lived in Italy in the early 1600s and was interested in how the world worked. If it hadn’t been for Bruno, Copernicanism might never have received such adverse attention from the authorities, Galileo might not have been persecuted and scientific progress in Italy might have proceeded more smoothly."

In 1624, Galileo was assured by Pope Urban VIII that he could write about the Copernican theory as long as he treated it as a mathematical proposition. However, in his 1632 book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems he clearly sided with Copernicanism by ridiculing the Aristotelians who clung to the Ptolemaic theory. Because of this he was called to Rome in 1633 to face the Inquisition. He was interrogated for 18 days and threatened with torture. The Pope eventually decided that he should be imprisoned indefinitely.

According to Robert Spencer in his book Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t, “Jesuit astronomers were among Galileo’s earliest and most enthusiastic supporters. When Galileo first published supporting evidence for the Copernican heliocentric theory, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini sent him a letter of congratulations. When Galileo visited Rome in 1624, Cardinal Barberini had become Pope Urban VIII. The pope welcomed the scientist, gave him gifts, and assured him that the church would never declare heliocentrism heretical. In fact, the pope and other churchmen, according to historian Jerome Langford, ‘believed that Galileo might be right, but they had to wait for more proof.’ And that was the ultimate source of Galileo’s conflict with the church: he was teaching as fact what still at that time had only the status of theory. When church officials asked Galileo in 1616 to teach heliocentrism as theory rather than as fact, he agreed; however, in 1632 he published a new work, Dialogue on the Great World Systems, in which he presented heliocentrism as fact again. That was why Galileo was put on trial for suspected heresy and placed under house arrest. Historian J. L. Heilbron notes that from the beginning the controversy was not understood the way it has been presented by many critics of the church since then.”

Here is what author James Evans says in his book The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy, page 424:

"Copernicus’s book did not produce an immediate upheaval. However, it certainly did offend the sensibilities of conservative religious thinkers, as well as professors of Aristotelian natural philosophy. With the crackdown on freethinking associated with the Catholic Counter-Reformation, any heterodox opinion became more dangerous than it had previously been. But it was not until 1616 that heliocentrism was officially declared erroneous. De revolutionibus was placed on the Index of books that were prohibited ‘until corrected.’ In principle, De revolutionibus could be circulated and read only if erroneous passages (asserting the mobility of the Earth) were removed. Four years later, a list of ten specific corrections was issued. Owen Gingerich has examined nearly all the surviving copies of the 1543 and 1566 editions of De revolutionibus, which total more than 500 books. The majority of copies in Italy were censored in conformity with the decree. But the decree had almost no effect elsewhere. Not even in Catholic Spain or Portugal were copies censored. The condemnation of De revolutionibus had very little impact on the acceptance of the heliocentric hypothesis. Even the famous trial of Galileo for continuing to advocate heliocentrism after the condemnation only served to popularize the new cosmology."

The case against Galileo may have had a negative impact on Italian science, but its long-term impact on Europe as a whole was quite meager. One of Europe’s greatest comparative strengths has always been that no single authority, secular or religious, could successfully censor the flow of ideas throughout the entire continent. This was very different from, say, Imperial China at the same time. Yet today we have the European Union, which has powers of censorship and indoctrination that the Roman Inquisition could only dream of.

Galileo faced the possibility of torture during his trial, which Wilders currently does not. It was also possible to be executed for heresy in the seventeenth century, as had happened to Bruno a few years before. Many people will say that this is not the case with Wilders today, but the truth is that he risks his life every single day by saying what he is saying, and the security at the Dutch trial is not good. The trial itself exposes him to an elevated risk of assassination, in a country where several critics of Islam have been assassinated. In my view, the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was executed as a Multicultural heretic. The political elites killed him by whipping up hatred against him, even if they didn’t physically pull the trigger.

Another major difference is that as bad as the case against Galileo was, he was at least allowed to talk about the Copernican hypothesis as long as he presented it as a mathematical hypothesis only. Wilders isn’t even allowed to say, hypothetically speaking, that Islam might be an unusually violent religion, which arguably means that there is even less freedom of speech under the Multicultural Inquisition in 2010 than there was under the Roman one in 1633. Also, the stakes are far greater now than they were back then. The trial against Galileo didn’t change physical reality or threaten the survival of European civilization; the forces that Wilders is warning against could indeed destroy European civilization if left unchecked.

Galileo was found guilty of heresy and remained under house arrest for the remainder of his life, but he nevertheless managed to publish a masterpiece in 1638, the Discourse on Two New Sciences, of a history of physics in which he presented the laws of accelerated motion and falling bodies. Symptomatically, it was smuggled out of Italy and published in the Netherlands. Could Italians return the favor and publish the defense from the trial against Wilders, in the spirit of Oriana Fallaci? Perhaps the Vatican itself can make up for its old sins?

Unfortunately, I fear that the Roman Catholic Church is currently too dhimmified to do such a thing, but it would undoubtedly have a tremendous symbolic value if the Church dared where the secular and so-called liberal authorities of the Netherlands and the EU dare not.

Duly Noted: Obama Needs To Spend

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 10:40:18 -0600

George Handlery about the week that was.

1. While writing this, the news spread that US federal spending outside the security and entitlement area is to be frozen for three years. Regardless of the laudable intention, some skepticism is warranted. The weaker the President gets – the vote in Massachusetts suggests that Obama is losing ground – the more he needs to spend. Spending buys support. The more is spent, the greater the influence of the administration will be. Stopping spending for the duration of a speech is possible. Beyond that time limit, however, we discover a major problem. It is that spending is not caused by discovering new holes into which money can be stuffed. The core reason for spending is that there is a philosophy according to which the allocation of dough heals problems – or at least it will shut the mouth of complainers. Therefore, the need of priority is not a case-by-case reduction of some marginal expenses. What the situation demands is the abandonment of the philosophy behind the process. The one is meant that regards the throwing of money at problems as statecraft.

2. Regarding the threatened minor spending cuts: Discussing cosmetic cuts might not necessarily limit the Administration’s might. The size of threatening cuts to be negotiated, and the possibility of exemptions for the deserving, can be swung like a baseball bat. The hope of not being hit where it hurts is likely to be the motor of obedience.

3. Massachusetts elected a Republican. That amounts to giving the Papacy to an Imam. No wonder that the occurrence continues to inspire commentaries that tend to repeat what we know. Our commentators agree that, as the result of the vote, Obama will have a difficult time because of the loss of his hither “super majority”. Surprisingly, even if this is generally shared wisdom, the analysis holds water. Embedded in the agreed upon estimate is an implication. It is a virtual admission that Obama needs a Supreme Soviet-style and programmed majority to govern. This in the system of American federalism that, by the design of its creators, likes to split the control of the legislature and the presidency between parties. The “super majority” is a multiple of the usual majority the system can produce. It is required now because behind the scene created by the Chief Fog Maker’s clever phrases, there is a hidden reality. The administration is uninterested in the opposition’s advice, in consulting skeptics and is not inclined to cooperate with the “other side”. This condition tells a lot about the pursued programs. Also about the weakness of their executors who do not trust their ability to create a consensus.

4. Any society has the need and the right to be governed by the very best of its constituent members. Regarding this principle, it is hard to anticipate serious disagreement. If then we accept the principle as a standard to be applied then an examination of the process that is designed to implement that notion is warranted. In doing so, the reader, not unlike this writer, is likely to arrive at a disturbing insight. It is that the selection and election process is structured in such a manner that those that stand out by their record, intellect and ethics, are unlikely to be selected for a candidacy. And once nominated, the system by which we elect, especially the campaign‘s rules that determine the parameters of the election, are likely to work against the desirable candidate. These tend to make those persons electable that are not the best-qualified individuals to govern.

5. Eons ago, a sizeable fraction of the American Left and the Progressives of those times – the writer belonged to them – demanded the unhindered rise of talent. Equality had been part of the program only in the sense of giving all an equal opportunity to elevate themselves to the level of their proven competence. The rise of the talented was to be unhindered by race, ethnic background, the social class of the parents, or whatever. However, in time, the motive for this element ceased to be what the original noble goal of their project has been. The passage of time also erased the pursuit of the justice it was to deliver. Much rather the project’s purpose became the attainment of power. The “equality” component, which the adjusted project‘s realization implies, gives clout to those that are put in charge of its implementation. The more so since, once the plan is to be carried out, hurdles emerge. Demolishing these is a duty inherent in the laudable purpose of the original project. In proceeding accordingly, a right to coercion, depicted as a duty of those administering the mission, is discovered.

6. The conceited attempt to liberate mankind from the force of its traditions demands that the influence of the past be shattered. This in turn implies that that coercive violence is elevated to a touted tool. Implicitly it is assumed in this context that, duress applied by the anointed agents of the “good”, is not oppression. Much rather it is the education of man to become receptive to new freedoms brought to him from a level to which he cannot even extend his glance. Violence appeals to an instinct. It happens to be a drive of which we intuitively know that it is wrong. The function of ideologies is to deal with such moral restraints. Accordingly, they generally suggest that in the pursuit of noble and ennobling aims, the otherwise forbidden shedding of blood is a sign of the virtue of the one that uses the muscle. These are the reasons why, regardless of the excuses that assert the contrary, violence in the service of ratio and thereby the of the „good” is necessarily rare.

7. Observed. Frequently, those who like to describe themselves as “revolutionaries” either covet power for themselves or they wish to ignore those rules that not they have invented. At the same time, the claimed service for the improvement of mankind allows them to insist that others respect their rules and even more, to show deference to the rank and power the ruling revolutionaries have attained.

8. A society’s level of future achievement is determined whether, and to which extent, it is able to cling to its ideals as it attempts to implement them.

9. The simplest and apparently most plausible answer that can carry away the enthused listeners must not necessarily be the most valid one.

10. Nothing is easier than to convince someone that he is exploited, abused, underestimated, and deprived of what would be allocated to him under a just order.

11. It is easy to be completely committed to the principle of equality of power and wealth when you feel that you are poor and weak. Once you attained the power to implement policies that express your will, your perspective might change. Its consequence will be that you begin to find convincing reasons to put conditions on your original premises and especially on the one regarding the equality of all.

12. Revolutions like to claim that they represent the beginning of a new era that breaks with the past. (An expression of this is a revolutionary calendar.) In doing so, they claim to bring justice to all those who had been held back by the previous regime which will be equated – with or without reason – with injustice made into a system. Some, but not all revolutions, have accomplished at least several but not all of their promises. The discrepancy between performance and the promises embodied in the program are inevitable. Ideals are not fully realizable. Whether the difference alluded to will condemn the failing new rulers depends on how practical the proposed changes are and how much of the old needs to be torn down to start to build the new. The practical men that led it explain the success of the American Revolution. Furthermore, the needed changes were limited in their extent: the cast-off British system was the best one of its time. From the writer’s “different” perspective an added factor, one that facilitated future achievements, deserves mentioning. The architects of change wanted stability and an orderly, therefore organic development. They also realized a fundamental truth, namely that where there is no security for all there cannot be liberty either.

From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 14 (²): Freiheit 451

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:36:53 -0600

Freedom on fire

Freedom is no more than a piece of combustible paper: a forbidden book, a speech draft in longhand, a film no longer printed on combustible stock but still setting minds aglow. All tyrannies in recorded history have sought to burn, confiscate and banish that paper or other media that carried the ideas of liberty, and to burn or banish the authors. Nowadays, such tyrannies exist primarily in Dar al Islam and in its lesser franchises of elective dhimmi socialism (abbrev. dhimmisocialism) in Western Europe and Canada and in nascent forms in the United States and Australia.

Paper, of course, has less wholesome uses, such as receptacle for sanctimonious twaddle, self-congratulatory schadenfreude, ignorant grandstanding, and solipsistic verbal onanism. What used to be called the “great” newspapers (and magazines) of the world all too often misapply precious wood pulp to such ends.

So does the New York Times. Its recent article wasted many column inches on a marginal lightweight, Charles Johnson, but casually dismissed a European party of major importance in the history of freedom, the Flemish Vlaams Belang, as a quasi-fascist entity with an “unabashed record of inflammatory rhetoric and hateful, opportunistic verbal viciousness.”

Diana West has written an article setting the record straight, but I suspect that for the Pravda-on-the-Hudson and its core readership, it will be futile (1). The soi-disant “antifascist” Western elites have veered so far into a delusional dreamscape that they themselves have become enablers of open Socialist fascism acting as a pathfinder for its Islamic kin.

Pictures are always worth a thousand words. And these pictures from Vlaams Belang’s 11 September 2007 anti-Islamization protest rally in Brussels obviate the necessity of debating whether the functionaries of fascism are the ones wearing face-stomping footwear and crippling peaceful citizens in ju jitsu holds, or the ones hoisted by torqued limbs and writhing in pain on the ground, in suit and tie.

Frank Vanhecke, leader, Vlaams Belang Party

Filip Dewinter, leader, Vlaams Belang Party

Vlaams Belang’s anti-Islamization rally will go down in history as one of the first major instances where the Eurabian branch of The New World Order exposed its overtly fascist nature. For what the interNational Socialist pan-Eurabian junta manifested here via the orders of its Brussels gauleiter was not an inhibition of an unjustly unauthorized rally. Rather, it was the brutal suppression of critical ideas relative to the junta’s imposed transformation of Brussels into an outpost of Eurabia colonized by imported Muslims.

It’s instructive to compare some moving images from the 2007 pogrom of Vlaams Belang with footage from François Truffaut’s 1966 film, Fahrenheit 451. The film was a flawed but highly original adaptation of Ray Bradbury's 1953 classic novel about a dystopian future. In that future, a radically egalitarian society prohibits critical thinking and outlaws all books as catalysts to such thinking. Government goons looking and acting quite like Brussels’ police rampage about, brutalizing dissenters and burning all books they can find without regard to property, limb or life.

Here is Brussels’ treatment of Vlaams Belang: (watch the fragment between 1:45 and 4:09)

Truffaut’s/Bradbury’s “firemen” in action can be seen at this link (from 0:58 to 2:25).

There are other parallels in the Truffaut/Bradbury vision of a homogenized, decadent and despotic future West, conceived over half a century ago. People spend much of their time slouching in front of wall-sized TV screens, immersed in state-approved (i.e. politically correct) entertainment, stripped of any joy in art or nature or deeper human contact, and content in their mindless lot. Dehumanized individuals crash cars into beast and man for thrills, just like they do now (everywhere, famously in Apeldoorn, April 2009). As the book-burning protagonist Guy Montag starts questioning his and society’s assumptions, massive television coverage makes a spectacle of his persecution, to distract the people from an imminent and eventually erupting nuclear war.

Another parallel: dissenters risk and lose their lives to preserve the soul of their culture. It may be books in Fahrenheit 451, Vlaams Belang street demonstrations in 2007 Brussels, or films by non-PC Dutch patriots like Theo Van Gogh or Geert Wilders – but it’s the same thing. And let there be no doubt: the Flemish and Dutch leaders of this peaceful resistance and the few others like them in Eurabia are risking their lives at the hand of their kakistocratic ruling oligarchy, no matter who may actually wield the weapons of assault.

In a typical Lenin-Alinsky ruse, the dhimmisocialist (3) pan-Western tyranny that has already hatched calls the other side fascist, and prosecutes it as such. It’s emblematic that the extreme leftoblob Michael Moore has even hijacked the title Fahrenheit 451 to call his own “progressive” piece of libelous Westphobia “Fahrenheit 9/11”.

In the Belgian version of this counterfeit, the dhimmisocialist mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans, justified his planned pogrom with the assertion that Vlaams Belang’s demonstration was “incitement to discrimination and hatred which we usually call racism and xenophobia” that is “forbidden by a considerable number of international treaties and is punished by our penal laws and by the European legislation.”

Now, 29 months later, the next stage of the toxic toads’ assault on the peoples of the West is taking place in Amsterdam. Geert Wilders is standing before a kangaroo court on charges of, mirabile dictu, “incitement to discrimination and hatred.” An old trick of any dark oligarchy with respect to extirpating inconvenient ideas. Already used against Socrates and seen in the West more recently in the 1945 Nazi trial and execution of the nonviolent resister and bearer of a distinguished German surname, Helmuth James Graf von Moltke.

But there is more to Geert Wilders’s trial. The chicaneries that preceded it, the 70-page rap sheet, the bizarre comments by the Pharisees in charge, the disproportionality between the offense and the prescribed penalty, connote in one’s mind the prosecution’s charges in the most famous trial of them all. Those were charges of blasphemy.

The blasphemy on trial in Amsterdam is not against Allah, though if Eurabia proceeds on course such blasphemy and whatever else the Organization of The Islamic Conference dictates will be proscribed at Dutch law within years, if not months (4). Rather, it’s blasphemy against the religion of multiculturalism, diversity, appeasement, cowardice, treason and vain hopes of 30 shekels of perpetual profit from the Islamglobal economy of The New World Order.

Numerous well-informed observers have noticed the demonstrable truthfulness of Mr. Wilders’s statements for which the Netherlands justice system proposes to fine and jail him for two years, presumably stripping him of his parliamentary immunity first. Wilders’s opening statement in court was itself predicated on the question, “If something is true, how can it be punishable?”

But truth, empirical evidence, justice or the public good have nothing to do with it. This is lawfare – an asymmetrical war by the racially and culturally Europhobic neosocialist oligarchy on the people it governs. A war to squash ideas and the political parties that embody them and therefore jeopardize the oligarchy’s hold on power and the perks of power.

The depths of obscenity

“It is irrelevant whether Wilder’s witnesses might prove Wilders’ observations to be correct”, stated the Dutch Public Prosecution Service (Openbaar Ministerie). “What’s relevant is that his observations are illegal”.

The four paragraphs of the Dutch Penal code under which Geert Wilders is being tried may be found here, but a writer interested in the marrow of things would condense them as follows:

He who publicly, verbally or in writing or image, deliberately expresses himself in a way insulting of, or incites hatred or discrimination or violent behavior against, person or a group of people or their property because of their race, their religion or belief, their gender or hetero-or- homosexual nature or their physical, mental, or intellectual disabilities, will be punished with a prison sentence of up to one year or a big fine, except if he does so in his professional (i.e. Geert Wilders) or avocational (i.e. bloggers, freedom activists) or group (i.e. organized nonviolent resistance) capablity, he will get up to two years in prison and a bigger fine.

In the symposium The Trial of Geert Wilders, the American attorney David Yerushalmi found that this law he calls “fascist” contains a prepackaged guilty verdict against Wilders. What’s most telling to me is that that the law does not discriminate between insulting and advocating violence. Moreover, it expresses the fatwa of the West’s ruling elite against discrimination. That is a death sentence -- for Western civilization.

Without discrimination, neither physical existence nor a moral or intellectual system can obtain, except as miasmatic pap. Without wise discrimination between the inside and the outside, any society is destined for the flush hole of history.

The writer Nidra Poller [ibid.] quotes the Dutch Law Professor Fokko Oldenhuis:

“…the statements of Wilders are un-Dutch, they don’t belong to our Christian-Judaic culture…. He discriminates Moroccans because of their race and causes hate against them…. His desire to ban the Koran brings fear and terror into peoples homes… The laws against hate crimes were made in 1934, to protect the Jews in a reaction to what was happening in Germany.”

Poller asks, “What could be more obscene than enrolling 6 million exterminated Jews in a battle to deprive one honest upstanding legitimate popular Dutch MP of the freedom to oppose the spread of an ideology [i.e. Islam] that blatantly plans the extermination of the remaining Jewish population of the world?”

But what Dutch Body Snatchers (5) like Professor Oldenhuis are saying and what the Dutch state is doing to Geert Wilders is more obscene than that. For Netherlands in World War 2 was complicit in the murder and expropriation of 104,000 Dutch Jews (6) -- over 74% of that country’s total – because of punctilious obeisance to the prevailing laws of that era’s version of fascism.

The evil laws streamed from the German occupiers, but they were executed obediently and efficiently by Dutch functionaries. Dutch Jews were registered, tabulated and expropriated by Dutch administrators (timetable here), rounded up largely by the Dutch police, often via the good offices of Dutch informers. They were interned mainly in Camp Westerbork and Camp Vught, and guarded there by the Dutch Federal Police, though as of Summer 1942 subordinated to a small contingent of German SS overseers.

From Westerbork, the Jewish internees were transported by 93 trainloads over two years directly to German liquidation camps: primarily Auschwitz, Sobibor, Terezin and Bergen Belsen. Those trains were sourced, scheduled, operated, driven and meticulously logged by the Dutch Railways.

We need not omit the involvement of Jewish organizations at the lower end of this process, from conducting the internal affairs of Camp Westerbork to compiling the lists of names for deportation upon German orders. Moreover, the Dutch did not actively participate in the killing of Jews, and a minority of them performed exemplary acts of compassion, even heroism (e.g. here and here) to help their Jewish co-citizens.

Furthermore, while hundreds of thousands of Dutchmen supported several Dutch National Socialist Parties (primarily the NSB), were active collaborators or just plain antisemites, the majority was untainted by such rot. But precisely that is the quandary.

In his inquiry into the Dutch Holocaust, G. Jan Colijn, a Dutch-born American professor and genocide scholar, inverted the Daniel Goldhagen “Hitler’s willing executioners” thesis. Colijn asked the question, how is it possible that the Netherlands, a country with a deep-rooted and integrated Jewish minority, and with a low rate of antisemitism, also had the highest percentage of Jewish Holocaust victims in all of Western Europe. (7)

The main answer is that the Dutch were, and are, a law abiding people. Most of the wartime Dutch bureaucrats, the police, railway personnel etc. just wanted to obey the law and avoid trouble (8). People simply looked away when Jewish neighbors were under attack. The attacks were lawful, and laws were there to be implemented and obeyed. And it’s mostly because of that, rather than the current and fraudulent shibboleth of “racism” that 104,000 Jewish citizens perished in one of the least antisemitic countries in the world.

When the small number of surviving Jews started trickling back to their homeland from assorted death factories or camouflaged holes in walls, the Dutch government again used the cover of grossly misapplied laws, this time to loot the dead and the surviving.

During the occupation, Dutch banks had implemented German orders to transfer the accounts of their Jewish clients to LIRO. A researcher of these things, Manfred Gerstenfeld, defines LIRO as “a looting bank instituted by the Germans to expropriate money from the Jews.” The Dutch government assessed taxes on the looted accounts, including inheritance taxes on the assets of Jews whom the government’s functionaries had collaborated in dispatching to their demise.

The government refused to return most of those taxes to the heirs or survivors, hiding under the legalism of its laws’ legality. Gerstenfeld calls it “a paradigm of how a normal law in a democratic country can become a perverse tool if applied in an extreme situation” [ibid.]

Hiding behind “the law” is an old and odious trick. In a country in which such hiding had such terrible consequences twice in recent memory, the promise of “never again” ought to include not hiding behind tyrannical laws to smash loyal patriots deemed undesirable by the regime. Let alone when such patriots struggle to contain the ideology that wants to complete the job Hitler and the Dutch NSB left unfinished.

Alas, inconceivably, the persecution of Geert Wilders is more obscene even than that. Two additional participants in the symposium, the Canadian lawyer David B. Harris, and Mark Steyn, pointed out that despite the manifest risks to Wilders’s life, the Dutch government is refusing to hold the trial in a secure courtroom, even though it provided one for the trial of the Dutch-born Muslim murderer of Theo van Gogh. Steyn remarked further that in the Low Countries politicians who challenge the Eurabian arrangement are either banned (Belgium’s Vlaams Blok), forced into exile (Aayan Hirsi Ali) or killed (Pym Fortuyn) – and that the authorities are indifferent as to which of these fates befalls Geert Wilders [ibid.].

But that too does not exhaust the depth of the obscenity. The two prosecutors in the Wilders trial, Paul Velleman and Birgit van Roessel, also work for the Dutch National Discrimination Expertise Center [LECD]. Velleman is the head of LECD. As Gates of Vienna has reported, “Paul Velleman was the prosecutor who had the [offensive to Muslims and anonymous] cartoonist Nekschot picked up in a raid by ten police officers in the middle of the night, and kept him locked up for more than two days. Quote from H. Numan: ‘After release, he was told: You can forget about anonymity now. They know who you are.’“

Alias Gregorius Nekschot is a regular citizen. He cannot afford the security arrangements that the Dutch state must provide for Geert Wilders – one surmises, reluctantly -- due to his parliamentary status. So the declared purpose of Nekschot’s arrest and “outing” was, first, to silence him or get him killed, and second, to send a message to all dhimmitude resisters: Mütze ab! Ve know vho you are, and ve know vere you are too. Therefore, they know it too. Shut up or be killed. Mütze auf!

The Dutch National Discrimination “Expertise” Center has finally bagged the big fish. Everyone knows who he is. But now everyone also knows where he is. And once he is jailed, his parliamentary immunity and security detail stripped, they can finally do the work the dhimmofascist regime would like to do itself.

The Road to Castrated Serfdom

Socialism is a road to serfdom, as F.A. Hayek has famously diagnosed. It is only the arrogance and greed for power of the socialist elites ruling the West -- excepting only a Liechtenstein here and there, or a Thatcher/Reagan once in a half century -- that the serfs themselves don’t know it. That’s because their state-fashioned schooling and mental laundry by mass media enforce an omertà on the brilliant Austrian and his ideas.

But neosocialism, of which dhimmisocialism is a sub-category, does the original concept one better. It’s the road to castrated serfdom.

Peter Brimelow highlighted the most salient feature of neosocialism in a prescient 1993 article about the racial demagoguery destroying America’s mortgage banking:

“Classical socialism called for direct state ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Neosocialism just aims at political control. Socialism claimed to be more efficient. Neosocialism claims to be more equitable. Above all, neosocialism professes to combat "racism," since this magic word cows all opposition. Apparent neosocialist objective of the season: commandeering the banking system and forcing it to subsidize key client constituencies.”

Brimelow concluded (in 1993!) with these words:

"Neosocialism, however, is not science. What's going on here is a witch-hunt, conducted by the religious Left and aided by key elements of the civil service. The innocent victims will be the banking system, the savers of America, the economy, and ultimately liberty itself.”

Now comes the Russian blogger Stanislav Mishin (9) with an opinion piece that the other Pravda – the one on the Moscow River— published under the title, “Western Race Hatred Laws: Keep the Caucasians Down”. After quoting just a small sample from a long, everyday list of horrors that America’s blacks inflict on its whites and various imported Muslims do on Europe’s descendants everywhere, Mishin concludes:

“When the director van Gogh is brutally murdered by an Islamic assailant, not a hate crime. However, his Dutch film, showing the plight of the women under Islam, [snip], that is a hate crime [snip] supported by the Western femiNazis [snip]. Luckily, in [Eastern Europe] this idiocy does not exist. Murder is murder [snip], and defense of the local culture is paramount. Westerners [snip], you deserve this, since the vast majority of you take it and swallow it, like the good little castrated serfs you are. Enjoy your extinction, as you loaf around on your Chinese couches.”

And that is the essence of the dhimmisocialist oligarchy’s lawfare against Filip Dewinter and his Vlaams Belang party, and Geert Wilders and his PVV party, and Pro-Köln in Cologne, and so on.

In Belgium, Vlaams Belang itself rose in 2004 under a new name from the ashes of its destruction by the Snatchers’ lawfare. Its political delegates Bart Debie and Frank Vanhecke were stripped either of their jobs or their parliamentary immunity, prosecuted and outlandishly punished on risible – yet devastating under the Eurabian code – charges of “racism.” The idea is to break them and their parties that channel dissent.

That is too how the American “rainbow”-socialist oligarchy conducts its lawfare against America’s taxpayers, employers, “tea-baggers,” “racists” and the like. Trials are still rare, but career capping and banishments from jobs and livelihood are common. The goal is to keep the lid on the good little castrated serf coffin that whitey has resigned himself to be shoved into, albeit reclining on his Chinese-made couch in front of his Chinese-made TV and watching Fahrenheit 451 programming produced in Body Snatcher factories (10).

Just like it was in 1993 in America’s banking industry, it’s still a witch-hunt conducted by the religious Left and aided by key elements of the civil service – but it encompasses all the countries of the world where Europe’s autochthons or their diaspora descendants are still holding on to a diminishing majority.

The well-oiled machinery of repression is vast and global. The working of the interlinking cogs may be glimpsed in any “news” (i.e. agitprop) item, e.g. like this report that appeared in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir on the day when 57.5% of directly polled citizens of a sovereign country, Switzerland, decided to prohibit the construction of further Islamic minarets:

“Switzerland votes massively [for] the prohibition of minarets”, reads the headline (in French), under which almost every sentence includes words indicating disappointment, disapproval and condemnation or a negative opinion about the legitimacy of the Swiss people’s sovereign voice.

One is informed that the Green Party plans an appeal before the European Court of Human Rights, for violation of religious freedom. Likewise, the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism (CECLR) – the Orwellian name alone merits a short pause -- in Belgium, naturally, opines that the victory of 57.5% of the Swiss citizenry is not a victory for democracy. The lawfare of progressive dhimmitude is trotted out too:

“A prohibition that has no effect but on a single religion is contrary to the Belgian Constitution, to the European Treaty of Human Rights, and to different declarations of the United Nations.” [ibid., my translation]

One would wait in vain for the pompous neosocialist frauds running either Le Soir or CECLR or the UN or EU or Switzerland’s Body Snatcher government or the Barko regime in the United States to express equally strong or any opinions concerning the treatment of Christians and Christianity (11) in every Muslim country in the world, or the treatment of whites in South Africa, Zimbabwe and much of the rest of Africa.

Coda

The short-term future of the West and of its courageous defenders like Wilders, Dewinter, Vanhecke, Blocher and others is grim.

This cartoon by D.T. Devareaux could be conjugated visually to portray each Western country in its peculiarity, yet sharing the same awful plague. For the Netherlands, it might show the boy Hans Brinker with his left hand’s finger in a dike named Western Civilization. The right hand and its accessories would remain unchanged. A variant related to Geert Wilders’s trial might substitute the word Liberalism on the Magnum .357 with the names of the Dutch Dodges and Inquisitors who have instigated and are running this shameful farce.

But it may be the last act of Fahrenheit 451 that may provide a ray of hope for the first act of Freiheit 451.

Unable to live in his fascist and book-less society, betrayed by his Body-Snatched wife, hunted by his government, the protagonist, Guy Montag, escapes to the countryside. There, he meets a group of dissidents who call themselves The Book People. Every one of them has memorized an entire book, preserving it orally until better days come and civilization with its historical culture can be rebuilt.

Granger (12), the leader of the Book People, tells Montag, "We're a minority of undesirables, crying out in the wilderness. But it won't always be so. One day we'll be called on one by one to recite what we've learned. And then books will be printed again.”

Meanwhile, nuclear war has ravaged the urban centers; civilization is destroyed (13). Granger tells Montag the legend of the Phoenix. Society has collapsed and must be rebuilt from the ashes, as it has repeatedly in the past. The Book Lovers – the rebellious, despised holdouts – will be there to transmit the remembrance of things past.

Eurabia and the entire neosocialist project will crash and decompose under reality’s gravity even if no one does anything to precipitate it. It will crash for it must -- like a bridge designed by junkyard architects, built with imagined struts, recycled Third World cables bought on ruptured credit, incompatible materials and exploding bolts hailed as the last word in social engineering.

The task is to be ready for the aftermath.

Previous articles in this series can be read here.

---------------------------------------------

(1) The Vlaams Belang record has been set straight many times before: in The Brussels Journal, Gates of Vienna and in Diana West’s, Lawrence Auster’s and Pamela Geller’s blogs, but also in many other venues by writers such as Michelle Malkin, Marcus Epstein and others.

(2) This chapter of “From Meccania to Atlantis” appears out of order. Part 13 (3) is still being written, but due to the timeliness of the issue Part 14 is being posted first. This chronology will be reversed in the dead-wood version.

(3) The Europeans’ anger at their betrayal by their ruling elites is such that I have seen this term used in more pejorative permutations such as “Dhimmi-Socialist Vichy NAZI French”

(4) Incidentally, as of 1 January 2010 the Irish government has enacted a new blasphemy law, punishable by a fine of up to 25,000 euros. (Petition here) .

(5) The basic analogy reverts to Part 1, where we cited the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the film, alien “Body Snatchers” produce giant legume Pods in “factories,” “i.e. hothouses and other sheltered places. The developed Pods become Body Snatchers who replace living people while appearing to be identical to them. The new Body Snatchers then grow new Pods from which new Body Snatchers develop – until the whole population has been “snatched.”

(6) The numbers in various sources range from 100,000 to 108,000, with 104,000 most commonly cited. There were also several thousand German Jewish internees and a few hundred Roma.

(7) G. Jan Colijn and Marcia Littell (editor), The Netherlands and Nazi Genocide: Papers of the 21st Annual Scholars' Conference, Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Also G. Jan Colijn, “Review Essay: Anne Frank Remembered”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1996 10(1), pp. 78-92. Other scholars must have written about it too but in Dutch, a language inaccessible to this author.

(8) Additional sources for constructing this wartime and post-war tableau were “Wartime and Postwar Dutch Attitudes toward the Jews: Myth and Truth,” Manfred Gerstenfeld, and personal accounts here and here.

(9) Mr. Mishin cannot be read for his opinions of his country, his culture and his religion, for they are widely skewed by triumphalism devoid of introspection. But like other Eastern Europeans, he is a sharp diagnostician of the ailments of the West.

(10) The Western purveyors of mass media entertainment are central in the Podization process because of presenting a Body Snatcher version of reality that gradually alters the minds of almost all people who consume this software.

(11) Not Jews and Judaism, for that which has not escaped has been extirpated and exists no more.

(12) In the film, Granger is called The Journal of Henri Brulard, a book by Stendhal, as each one of The Book People is known by the name of the book he (or she) has memorized.

(13) In the book, but only hinted in the film.

Will the Euro Survive the Greek Crisis?

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:35:04 -0600

A decade ago, the introduction of the euro, the common currency of 16 of the 27 EU member states, was a political decision – not a monetary one. When the euro was introduced in 1999, Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman wrote to his friend, the Italian economist Antonio Martino: “As you know, I am very negative about the euro and I am very doubtful about how it will work out. However, I am less pessimistic about it now than I was earlier simply because I never expected that the various countries would display the kind of discipline that was required in order to qualify for the euro.”

One decade later, the euro is in serious trouble. The problems result from the recent economic crisis which have badly affected the economy of Greece, one of the countries of the eurozone. Analysts doubt whether the government in Athens is able or willing to address Greece’s financial problems. If not, the other 15 nations using the euro will suffer the consequences, which is something they are not likely to accept.

Thomas Mayer, the chief economist of Deutsche Bank, warned last week: “The situation is more serious than it has ever been since the introduction of the euro. […] If the Greece situation is handled badly, the Eurozone could break down, or face major inflation.”

The problems of the euro affect the entire world. The EU currency was not introduced because of economic considerations, but because the European Union is pretending to be a genuine state and states are expected to have single national currencies. Hoping to become a powerful political force in its own right, the EU adopted the euro as the common currency of some 327 million Europeans, so that the currency’s economic power would prefigure the political power to be. The eurozone represents the second largest economy in the world. During the past decade, the euro became the second largest reserve currency after the U.S. dollar. With banknotes and coins in circulation for more than €790 billion, the euro has surpassed the U.S. dollar’s circulation. The euro appeared to be very strong, with the value of the U.S. dollar, the British pound, and other currencies dramatically falling in comparison to it – one of the causes of Greece’s problems. Tourism is a major economic sector in Greece. For tourists from outside the eurozone, such as the Americans and British, the country became too expensive as a holiday destination. Last year, when the world economic crisis also affected Europe, with a huge drop in the numbers of EU-citizens, such as Italians, that headed for Greece, the Greek economy collapsed and the Greek government was no longer able to pay the country’s public debts.

With Greece facing bankruptcy, the fears about Greece’s financial situation has led to a drop in value for the euro. Last week, the finance ministers of Germany and the Netherlands – the two eurozone countries which in pre-euro days had the strongest currencies in the EU: the German mark and the Dutch guilder – announced that they will not help Greece solve its problems. Polls indicate that 70% of the Germans oppose using their taxes to bail out other countries. Despite the EU propaganda line that EU citizens share a common European national identity, this is simply not true. As a leader in the Financial Times Deutschland noted earlier this month: “Spain believes in ‘more Europe’. Whether that’s the case for Germany as well one cannot be so sure any more.”

Moreover, the German economy has also been badly affected by the crisis. Last year, Germany’s GDP fell by 5%, the biggest drop since the war, with a drop of 15% in exports and 20% in sales of German manufacturers. The German people are not prepared to lift countries such as Greece, Romania, Spain, Portugal and Ireland out of the recession at its own expense.

There is also a lot of anger towards the Greeks in the other EU countries: for some years Greece seems to have covered up its bad economic performance by officially presenting better economic figures than was the case. The promise of the Greek government to reduce Greece’s budget deficit from 12.7% of GDP in 2009 to 2.8% in 2012, is being met with scepticism. Many doubt whether the government in Athens will be strong enough to resist the domestic pressure from the powerful trade unions against the radical deficit-cutting efforts which are needed, while others doubt that the Greeks will refrain from manipulating the economic data again.

Unwillingness to help the Greeks is huge within a eurozone currently facing an unemployment rate of 10% of the workforce, the highest figure since the single currency was introduced eleven years ago. Under EU rules, however, all the 27 member states of the EU, not just the 16 member states of the eurozone, are obliged to help the Greeks if the EU decides to bail them out. Article 122 of the EU Treaty, which went into force last December, states: “Where a member state is in difficulties or is seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control, the council of ministers, on a proposal from the European Commission, may grant, under certain conditions, Union financial assistance.”

This decision is taken on a majority vote. Consequently Britain, which always refused to join the eurozone, might be forced to help save the euro. The British press has already reported that if an EU rescue fund for the Greeks matches the Greek budget deficit, and if the EU decides that member states have to contribute in accordance with their own share of the total EU economy, Britain might be forced to pay a £7 billion bill to bail out Greece – or perhaps even more, if other bankrupt eurozone countries, such as Spain are excused their share.

British Eurosceptics fear that if Greece, which represents 3% of EU GDP, is bailed out, other eurozone countries facing financial difficulties (Spain, Portugal, Italy) might claim the same treatment. This, they say, would saddle Britain with a bill of £50 billion to save a currency in which the Brits have never believed.

Even though European public opinion is opposed to a bailout plan for the Greeks, Irwin Stelzer wrote in The Wall Street Journal recently that he expects European politicians to present just such a plan. “There is so much political capital invested in the euro by the political class,” he wrote. “that even the stern and parsimonious [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel will in the end contribute to a bailout fund if necessary.”

However, there also are indications to the contrary. Greek politicians might feel that the only way to avoid civil unrest in Greece may be to drop the euro and re-establish their own national currency, the Greek drachme. This will allow the Greek government to devalue the currency in order to stimulate exports and economic growth – a political-monetary tool which Athens lacks if it remains in the eurozone. It seems that some people at the European Central Bank (ECB), which controls the euro, are in favor of such a move.

On Jan. 17, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote in the London Daily Telegraph that at the ECB headquarters in Frankfurt the legal ground is being prepared for a euro break-up. A major problem, however, appears to be that once a country has accepted the euro it cannot get rid of it unless it leaves the EU altogether. “This is a warning shot for Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain. If they fail to marshal public support for draconian austerity, they risk being cast into Icelandic oblivion.” Apart from Britain and Denmark, two countries which obtained opt-outs in the EU treaties, all EU member states are obliged to join the eurozone or peg their currencies to it. Former IMF analyst Desmond Lachman is quoted in CityAM warning: “There is every prospect that within two to three years...Greece’s European membership will end with a bang.”

Evans-Pritchard reports, however, that the dominant view in financial circles in the City of London seems to be that “if a rescue [a bailout of Greece] turns out to be necessary, a rescue will be mounted.” This is a bet, says Evans-Pritchard, that Berlin will do “what it did for East Germany: subsidise forever. It is a judgment on whether EMU is the binding coin of sacred solidarity or just a fixed exchange rate system like others before it. Politics will decide.”

Which brings us back to Milton Friedman. When politicians decide to rule economic and monetary issues, the results are usually catastrophic.

How Muslims Defeated the United States

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 02:53:46 -0600

Today, I am posting an extraordinary letter from a soldier currently stationed in Iraq, a sometime penpal of mine to whom I sent my three-part series on the aftermath of the surge to elicit his opinion. Knowing how thoughtful he is, I expected a substantive response. Given his time constraints alone, I did not expect an essay of this scope and I decided, with his permission, to present it here. It is unlike any commentary I have read from Iraq; it is both coolly reasoned and deeply passionate, and certain to challenge and disturb readers across the political spectrum: PC-believing liberals, Iraq-as-success-believing conservatives, Islam-as-a-religion-of-peaceniks of both Left and Right.

So be it.

He writes:

I apologize for the delay in my response. I have been putting in long days ... lately and I hadn’t had the time to put the thought and effort into writing this until now.
Your three-part column series wonderfully analyzes Iraq and reaches the correct strategic assessment that no one in power wants to acknowledge.
I have many things that I want to say but I do not wish to waste your time and I therefore put an executive summary at the beginning of this e-mail so you can skip the expanded version if you wish.
*****
You correctly assessed that we have not gained anything positive from our efforts in Iraq and that the nation is not our ally. (The same is true for Afghanistan.) I will go as far as saying that the Iraqis are our enemies—enemies better equipped to wage jihad against us than they have ever been. We will regret what we have done. We will regret that we created this officially Islamic nation. And we will regret that we created an officially Islamic Afghanistan. We will regret that we have placed ourselves in the service of Islam, waging jihad worldwide as we advance the Religion of Peace and eliminate Christians in the process. (So much for the accusation that the U.S. is on a “Crusade.”) It is a shame that so many people refuse to recognize how horrible Islam is, and that the U.S. made a fatal mistake when it refused to declare war against Afghanistan and Islam—when it refused victory by binding the greatest military force of all time.
*****
The Full Analysis:
Parts 1 and 2 of “The ‘Surge’ and ‘Success’” correctly identify that we have gained nothing positive for our efforts in Iraq while the Iraqis have betrayed us. I do not trust any Iraqi or Middle Easterner. I do not care if anyone calls me a “racist” or “bigot” anymore. Those words have lost their meaning. Do I think that every single Iraqi or Middle Easterner is bad? No. But I think it is difficult to tell. An Iraqi or Middle Easterner will smile to your face or be your best friend one moment, and cut your head off in the next. It is odd that so many people cannot comprehend this. It is even weirder that those who pride themselves on being “culturally aware” cannot grasp that Middle Eastern culture and thought, and Islamic behavior and thought are completely different than ours (than ours on the Right, at least). Perhaps this ignorance partially explains why the U.S. had no reaction when Maliki declared victory over the U.S. when we moved out of the major Iraqi cities. But even if it is a partial explanation it still is no excuse.
The Iranian War in Iraq is a travesty and has been since it started under Bush. I still cannot believe that a nation can war against us and murder Servicemen, and not pay the price of oblivion for it. Our nation sits back and apologizes, and defends itself constantly from accusations of an “illegal” and “unjust” war yet Iranians, other foreign terrorists, and even Iraqis go about murdering American troops without any consequence whatsoever. We should war back against them. But we won’t.
I remember when people said that we had brought on the September 11 attacks because “we created Bin Laden.” I never understood that. In fact, that we had helped the Afghanis defeat the Soviet Union should have been even more reason for us to kill Bin Laden and destroy Afghanistan. We had saved their lives and they repaid us for it by murdering us on our own soil. Yet our government refused its God-given duty to its people to mete out punishment and justice. History repeats with Iraq. The Iraqis lived under oppression for decades and when we liberated their nation they repaid our unimaginable mercy and sacrifice with betrayal. It is sickening.
Part 3 (“Victory” in Iraq? Really?) perfectly summarized where the U.S. is now in our “war” in Iraq. Once we made Iraq an officially Islamic country I knew that it would become among our worst enemies. (The same is true for Afghanistan.) I said years ago that the end result of our efforts will be that Iraq will be a rebuilt nation better prepared than ever to wage jihad against us. You cannot create an officially Islamic nation and expect anything less. Regrettably, our leaders and our nation cannot identify Islam for what it is: evil. And so we continue our suicidal practice. The Iraqi betrayal of the U.S. started sooner than I expected it but I expected it nonetheless. This is outrageous. Yet the situation is even more unjust than this.
Muslims have waged jihad against the West since their insane, pedophiliac founder started their cult; they have waged jihad against the U.S. since our inception. But what is worse about our policy of establishing officially Islamic nations and pouring money, technology, weapons, and training into them is that we have been labeled as “occupiers” being on a “Christian crusade to wipe out Islam.” Think about that. We have been demonized as “occupying Christian crusaders” (if only!) even as we have waged jihad in the service of Islam, helped Muslims spread Islam and wipe out Christians, and died for ungrateful Iraqis even as terrorists from all over the war invaded and occupied Iraq, and slaughtered and oppressed Iraqis. (And don’t even get me started on the fact that we—the United States of America—are truly being invaded and occupied by illegal aliens warring on us!)
I am woefully understating the situation when I say that the U.S. has no clue how to fight wars any longer. We have allowed our enemies to control this war and make it one of media and information—information warfare / information operations . We have chosen not to win by refusing to reject the enemies’ preferred warfare; we have chosen not to wage a kinetic warfare where we could easily defeat our enemies in months if not weeks with our superior technology, tactics, and Servicemen. And through it all we seem not the least bit embarrassed that a “coalition” of dozens of nations cannot beat a primitive bunch of troglodytes. I no longer can express my outrage about this or any of the myriad horrors which plague our once great land. Every day there is something new which is more perverse and inequitable than the last day’s wickedness. I sit here in Iraq and do all I can do to stomach the disastrous excuse that passes for “strategy” in this war—a strategy where our leaders openly say that the lives of our Islamic enemies are worth more than ours; a “strategy” where the Army Chief of Staff openly states that the “death of diversity” would be a larger tragedy than the slaughter of Soldiers (and get away with it with but a whisper of outcry from the American people). I pray that I get out of here alive so I can complete my Army contract and get away from this nonsense and betrayal.
Two final things.
First, I wonder how many people have considered how successful the September 11, 2001 Islamic attacks were. Think about what they accomplished. They thrust Islam to the center of the world; they undoubtedly caused more people to learn about Islam than would have prior to their attacks. And the attacks combined with the near non-response of the U.S. doubtlessly gained them converts. Furthermore, what response the United States did produce resulted in the establishment, enrichment, and training of the officially Islamic nations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the enrichment and training of countless other Muslim nations around the globe. Islam now stands better suited than ever to wage jihad across the world. The September 11 attacks also resulted in Muslims being portrayed as victims around the world (thanks to their leftist allies) and helped them (again, with an assist from their leftist allies) advance their jihad even as Muslims and leftists further vilified Christianity, America, and Western values. And finally the crowning achievement of the September 11 Islamic attacks: eight years after them the United States places as its leader a person whom can at best be described as an anti-American, racist, Islamic sympathizer (and who has the same name as an infamous Islamic dictator). This is stunning. It is bizarre. It is incomprehensible. Yet it is our nightmarish reality. The Islamic attacks on September 11, 2001 achieved success beyond the wildest dreams of the Religion of Peace cultists.
Finally, I would like you to know that I am willing to comment on other posts and articles that you publish, including some of your other posts that mention the debate that your three-part column on the Surge started. I am willing to comment for two reasons.
The first reason is that everyone on the Right needs to fight back against the Islamic War on the West and stop the jihad. And one of the ways to fight back is to speak out against it. The second reason is that I want to establish for posterity that I am firmly against this evil and every other evil. I will explain why this matters.
Leftists always rewrite history so as to demonize what is Right and so as to cover their real nature. They abhor the truth as much as the vilest of Muslims. And as a way to enable their rewriting of history they use political correctness to silence opponents; to vilify them so that they have no place in society. We have allowed leftists to use political correctness to emasculate us. In fact, political correctness is the leftist weapon of choice in paralyzing the Right and aiding their Islamic allies who also advance an anti-Christian, anti-Foundational America agenda. Political correctness is what prevents us from fighting back against the left, and what prevents us from fully fighting back against the jihad and ending the Islamic threat. Political correctness makes us acquiesce to the left so as to be “moderate” and “bipartisan.” Our capitulation to the left will doom us physically by allowing the Muslims and left to eliminate the last vestiges of the West and it will doom us historically as our enslaved descendants will look back and ask how we could have allowed the twin insanities of Islam and the left to control and destroy us when we easily could have defeated them both. Our descendants will condemn us for remaining idle in the face of evil . . . and the leftists of the future will use our submission and our descendants’ condemnation to manipulate history and blame us as the originators of the horrific agenda that they instituted. The future left will use our sinful surrender to pave the way for them to control and destroy civilization once more (all in the name of “progressivism” of course).
I do not want leftists to be able to do this. I do not want them to easily rewrite history in the future. I want to be a loud voice (wherever I may be) that opposes everything Islam and the left want. I want there to be no doubt that I, a Right-wing Christian, utterly reject them and their core beliefs. I want to make it all but impossible for future leftists to say that, “It was the Christian Right who enabled and supported the worldwide jihad (not to mention the global warming hoax, the sexual perverts, and the freedom hating communists)! It was the Christian Right who wanted them to take over and destroy the world!” I want to make it all but impossible for future leftists to say that atheists, humanists, and secularists (like Bruce Bawer, Christopher Hitchens, Tammy Bruce, and a few others) tried to oppose the Islamic War on the West but “could not convince the mentally inferior but numerically superior Right-wing Christians to join them!” I want to counteract the in-name-only Christians and conservatives who have bought into the “Religion of Peace” and leftist nonsense, and who will do untold additional amounts of damage to civilization and our good name with their cravenness and rejection of Truth. And that is why I am willing to comment on more of your posts.
I know I am in the minority with my beliefs but I do not care. I want to be like the 300—not just the ones who fought at Thermopylae—but the 300 who fought with Gideon against the Midianites. I want to stand for the Truth.
Keep up the good work.
Sincerely,
A US soldier in Iraq

Pius XII: Much-Maligned Pontiff

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:08:41 -0600

Some things never go away. The controversy over Pope Pius XII's actions during World War II was recently reignited when Pope Benedict XVI signed a decree affirming that his predecessor displayed "heroic virtues" during his lifetime. When the pope visited the Great Synagogue of Rome on Sunday, Riccardo Pacifici, president of Rome's Jewish community, told him: "The silence of Pius XII before the Shoah still hurts because something should have been done."

This was not the first time the wartime pope, who is now a step closer to beatification, has been accused of keeping silent during the Holocaust, of doing little or nothing to help the Jews, and even of collaborating with the Nazis. To what extent, if any, does the evidence back up these allegations, which have been repeated since the early 1960s?

On April 4, 1933, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, the Vatican secretary of state, instructed the papal nuncio in Germany to see what he could do to oppose the Nazis' anti-Semitic policies. On behalf of Pope Pius XI, Cardinal Pacelli drafted an encyclical, entitled "Mit brennender Sorge" ("With Burning Anxiety"), that condemned Nazi doctrines and persecution of the Catholic Church. The encyclical was smuggled into Germany and read from Catholic pulpits on March 21, 1937.

Although many Vatican critics today dismiss the encyclical as a light slap on the wrist, the Germans saw it as a security threat. For example, on March 26, 1937, Hans Dieckhoff, an official in the German foreign ministry, wrote that the "encyclical contains attacks of the severest nature upon the German government, calls upon Catholic citizens to rebel against the authority of the state, and therefore signifies an attempt to endanger internal peace."

Both Great Britain and France should have interpreted the document as a warning that they should not trust Adolf Hitler or try to appease him.

After the death of Pius XI, Cardinal Pacelli was elected pope, on March 2, 1939. The Nazis were displeased with the new pontiff, who took the name Pius XII. On March 4, Joseph Goebbels, the German propaganda minister, wrote in his diary: "Midday with the Fuehrer. He is considering whether we should abrogate the concordat with Rome in light of Pacelli's election as pope."

During the war, the pope was far from silent: In numerous speeches and encyclicals, he championed human rights for all people and called on the belligerent nations to respect the rights of all civilians and prisoners of war. Unlike many of the pope's latter-day detractors, the Nazis understood him very well. After studying Pius XII's 1942 Christmas message, the Reich Central Security Office concluded: "In a manner never known before the pope has repudiated the National Socialist New European Order ... Here he is virtually accusing the German people of injustice toward the Jews and makes himself the mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals." (Pick up any book that criticizes Pius XII, and you won't find any mention of this important report.)

In early 1940, the pope acted as an intermediary between a group of German generals who wanted to overthrow Hitler and the British government. Although the conspiracy never went forward, Pius XII kept in close contact with the German resistance and heard about two other plots against Hitler. In the fall of 1941, through diplomatic channels, the pope agreed with Franklin Delano Roosevelt that America's Catholics could support the president's plans to extend military aid to the Soviet Union after it was invaded by the Nazis. On behalf of the Vatican, John T. McNicholas, the archbishop of Cincinnati, Ohio, delivered a well-publicized address that explained that the extension of assistance to the Soviets could be morally justified because it helped the Russian people, who were the innocent victims of German aggression.

Throughout the war, the pope's deputies frequently ordered the Vatican's diplomatic representatives in many Nazi-occupied and Axis countries to intervene on behalf of endangered Jews. Up until Pius XII's death in 1958, many Jewish organizations, newspapers and leaders lauded his efforts. To cite one of many examples, in his April 7, 1944, letter to the papal nuncio in Romania, Alexander Shafran, chief rabbi of Bucharest, wrote: "It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the warmth and consolation we experienced because of the concern of the supreme pontiff, who offered a large sum to relieve the sufferings of deported Jews ... The Jews of Romania will never forget these facts of historic importance."

The campaign against Pope Pius XII is doomed to failure because his detractors cannot sustain their main charges against him - that he was silent, pro-Nazi, and did little or nothing to help the Jews - with evidence. Perhaps only in a backward world such as ours would the one man who did more than any other wartime leader to help Jews and other Nazi victims, receive the greatest condemnation.

Dimitri Cavalli is an editor and writer in New York City. He is working on books on both Pope Pius XII and Joe McCarthy, the late manager of the New York Yankees.

This article was first published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Duly Noted: Lessons From Haiti

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 04:34:49 -0600

George Handlery about the week that was. Crushing crises and the culture of improvisation. Close your eyes and the troubles are gone. Intellectuals and tyrannies: Persecution is a form of coveted recognition. Present perils and the downgrading of the Soviet threat. The ostrich-test.

1.Haiti. The tragedy behind the crisis will be hijacked to prove pet peeves. This writer’s perspective and experience is with war between men, and not with nature against man. From this personal perspective, the ability of the locals to improvise and to bear deserves recognition. People that live in the kind of perfected systems in which everything works as it is supposed to, are subject to two errors. One: They underestimate the ability of some societies to cope with unanticipable cataclysms. Second: They overestimate their own skills to cope with the kind of devastation that leads to a total collapse. Closely related to this is that advanced societies are skilled in the art of circumnavigating and avoiding turbulence. Nevertheless, some crises are unavoidable and the breakdown caused is inevitable. The earthquake would have severed the sinews that bind together optimally structured societies. Overall, the Haitians, conditioned as they were by their badly functioning system, coped well with the collapse of the state, the economy, the infrastructure, social institutions and the disappearance laws.

2. Another lesson of the Haitian quake’s aftermath is that American involvement has been crucial. Once again, the USA emerged as the only power able to project its effective reach beyond her own fence while demonstrating a willingness to help massively. Even so, as could be assumed, there was carping by Monday morning quarterbacks about real and assumed errors. Some of the charges are absurd. Such as the US’ presumed, wish to occupy Haiti. Or to deprive Brazil of its leadership role. In the context of a lacking infrastructure, everything had to be improvised and so, given the demands created by the full wipeout, some complaints are reflections of a lack of understanding for total chaos’ imperatives – and of political opportunism. At the same time, one wonders what sense the political tourism of the prominent made. Outstanding here is Ms Clinton’s visit. The case reminds one of the “Hair Force” affair of Bill’s early Presidency. (No, the centerpiece of that affair is a haircut blocking LAX, not a female.) Hillary’s dropping in put needless pressure on the airport’s limited capacities and so hindered rescue efforts. Did the Secretary of State wish to negotiate about something with someone in Port-au-Prince? Or was this a fact-finding mission? Perhaps to ascertain whether there has been a quake, estimate the destruction and to seize up Bush’ responsibility for this and everything else? Unlikely. We are left with the impression of a damaging way to get TV exposure.

3. The recent attack on Westergaard – the Danish creator of the Muhammad cartoons – might prove several things. One of them is that the war of cultures is on. Well, at least for one side. That party pursues the struggle relentlessly and injects its entire means into the fight. Meanwhile the target of the attack tries to ignore politely and naively that it is being beleaguered. If acknowledged, the hordes gathering around the walls continue to be depicted an assemblage of upset fans. The hope is that non-reaction will be interpreted as proof of good will that is substantiated by unconditional tolerance. Thus, an improvement of the relationship and a lessened physical aggressiveness is expected. While waiting, the refusal to retaliate should prove that non-violent approaches might ultimately confer upon the goal of conversion a chance. Passivity is also deemed a strategy that prevents further radicalization by making it unnecessary. Meanwhile the slogan remains: “With my eyes closed I see no trouble”.

4. Eastern Europe in the post-Soviet age. Note how the accustomed term “post-Communist” has been avoided. This to suggest that, while the USSR might be gone, her operators are still around. Thereby the influence of camouflaged Communist apparatchiks remains decisive. Admittedly, the comportment of those local majorities that hinder a consistent settling of the accounts with the past is odd. The abnormality suggests that these populations might have been genial in circumventing local tyrannies and could make the best of these. However, in the context of freedom, the same people are clumsy and thus incapable to exploit liberty’s potential to improve their lives. Many Western intellectuals, perhaps reflecting their old appreciation for Soviet “achievements”, are equally at a loss to respond to the new situation. Local and Western intellectuals are inclined to claim that freedom implies that the masses do as they wish. (We should be governed by philosophers.) Nevertheless, the West’s thinkers become rather parsimonious when it comes to defending the freedom of others in still existing direct and covert leftist dictatorships.

There might be a rational explanation for the lack of concern of the class that claims to embody virtue and wisdom. In genuine democracies, intellectuals are free to act. The drawback is that others, including those not anointed by the select to membership, are also free to, heaven forbid, disregard certified intellectuals.. In dictatorships, the intellectuals get official esteem if they make their peace with the system and work for it for pecuniary rewards. Even in this case, as Romania's case demonstrates, they might not be held responsible for the consequences of their prostitution when the theory fails and the idol, whose glory they sang, is removed. In the realm of liberty, everyone is allowed to criticize anybody. Furthermore, where freedom rains, the forgers of ideals may be reminded of their failed punditry.

Dictatorships take their intellectuals seriously. It shows the significance attributed to the intellectuals that tyrannies support some, tolerate others and persecute the rest. Even the maltreatment of the unbending demonstrates backhanded appreciation. Where liberty is practiced, there might be no censure and no prison for the advocacy of the politically deviant. There is there, however, something that is worse than the pattern of persecution for non-conformity and the rewards for servility. Being ignored by an uncaring majority that does not take the nattering class seriously is a form of death sentence. Indifference by a public that pursues private pleasures can hurt more than the vigilant attention of a ruling class that bothers to read you, censure you, and that acknowledges you by handing you medals or jail.

5. It is revealing how the Soviet threat is retroactively depicted. The term “threat” is deserved. Moscow exported by violent means its system into what Hitler had softened up for it by his conquest. Stalin, the killer of many more millions than Hitler, planned a war before his demise. His successors, while of lesser ability then the Leader, have most wisely shifted their tactical emphasis from Europe to its encirclement through the Third World. The Soviet Idea had an ideology claiming scientific validity. Therefore, it was proclaimed to be predestined to become the world system. This march toward destiny was headed by an “infallible” leader with access to overwhelming conventional and nuclear arms. Added up, this hardly amounts to a scarecrow as some that used to advocate softness toward the USSR now like to insinuate. Nonetheless, if one has no independent knowledge of the strengths and intentions of Soviet Communism, an odd conclusion can emerge from its after-the-fact depiction.

Those that once advocated weakness toward an “ irresistibly powerful” Kremlin, are now pandering a retouched image. The attempt to downgrade might be more than the result of bad history. The obvious purpose of this downsizing is to cover up personal records and to pursue old approaches by belittling past and current security threats.

This revised version of the past alleges that the threat to freedom and free men had been grossly exaggerated at the time. The proof of the thesis is that the USSR collapsed without a major war. This retroactive dismissal of a peril is voiced by those who, at the time, did more than to underestimate the Kremlin. They regarded Moscow and Washington as equals and generally suggested that resisting the Soviets is not worth the efforts and is also predestined to fail. On this level, the dismissive interpretation is useful: it washes the dirty linen that is stored in the closet out of which normally skeletons pounce on you. That leaves us with distorted history. Fighting this presentation is a matter of an intellectual duty. In this case, however, ignorance is more damaging than is ignorance in general. The implications are damaging in the light of the current struggle with Islamism. Let us backtrack. Those who once argued that there is nothing to defend that can be protected, now like to claim that there was no need to make an effort. Retroactively this endorses the „treason of the clerks“. The same sources belittle and deny the threat of our present. In doing so they can insinuate that, the concern with the professed threat in the past has been an exaggeration that bordered on extremism. Therefore, resisting the fanatics of our time is analogous. Nothing needs to be done, nothing should be done, and nothing can be done. Beyond that, if no provocative defense is mounted, the alleged storm will just fade away. Just ask any ostrich.

The Experimental Method and the Rise of Modern Science

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 04:09:41 -0600

The Chinese made promising beginnings in the secular observation of nature, but never completed a full ideological framework for the scientific project comparable to Greek natural philosophy or developed an organized program dedicated to promoting the scientific method.

We should be careful about projecting a too modern understanding of “science” onto the activities of ancient scholars. As the eminent historian Edward Grant reminds us, “Science in the ancient world was a tenuous and ephemeral matter. Most people were indifferent to it, and its impact was meager. It was a very small number of Greek thinkers who laid the foundations for what would eventually become modern science. Of that small number, a few were especially brilliant and contributed monumentally to the advancement of science.”

This is not said to dismiss them or downplay the significance of what they did. On the contrary, we should be all the more impressed by their achievements given how few they were and the limited resources they had at their disposal. Nevertheless, while the ancient Greek contribution was substantial and important it was only one of the major components of what would become modern science when this was finally created in early modern Europe.

Hipparchus, with his star catalog from the second century BC, was the first to introduce a system for measuring the brightness of stars with six levels of magnitude and the brightest ones in class 1. Today’s system essentially follows the same logic. Some stars are so bright that they even have negative magnitudes, for instance Sirius with a visual apparent magnitude of −1.46. Apparent magnitudes do not take into account the distance of the star in question from the Earth. Absolute magnitude is when you directly measure a star’s luminosity.

Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1170-1253) was a talented English scholastic philosopher, Bishop of Lincoln and commentator on the works of Aristotle. Grosseteste introduced Latin translations of some Greek and Arabic philosophical and scientific writings and around 1230 he was probably teaching at the then very young University of Oxford. He composed a number of short works regarding optics and experimented with mirrors and lenses. He proposed that a theory can only be validated by testing its consequences with physical experimentation.

This deviation from traditional Aristotelian philosophy has earned him, with some justification, the reputation of being a pre-modern supporter of the scientific method. Grosseteste’s student Roger Bacon (ca. 1220-1292) doesn’t deserve the label as the “founder of experimental science” that is sometimes bestowed upon him, but he was an influential advocate of gathering empirical evidence in the sciences and he practiced what he preached.

Another pre-modern pioneer from the thirteenth century was the French natural philosopher Peter Peregrinus of Maricourt, who used an unsophisticated version of the experimental method in his work Epistola de magnete from 1269. This was the first extant written account of the polarity of magnets and proved exceedingly popular in the generations that followed.

One of those who quoted it was the English scholar and theologian Thomas Bradwardine (ca. 1290-1349), who was educated at Merton College, Oxford. Bradwardine was a noted mathematician as well as theologian and died in London of the plague during the Black Death after having served briefly as Archbishop of Canterbury. Later in the fourteenth century the author Geoffrey Chaucer would rank him next to Saint Augustine and Boethius in importance.

The English Franciscan friar William of Ockham (ca. 1287-1347), sometimes spelled Occam, was among the most prominent philosopher-theologians of the High Middle Ages, next to John Duns Scotus (ca. 1266-1308) and a handful of others. He studied theology at the University of Oxford before 1320 and was called to the Papal court at Avignon, France in 1324 to answer charges of heresy. In 1328 he moved to Munich where he remained until his death. Around 1320 he developed what has become known as Ockham’s Razor. He was not the first person to mention the principle of parsimony but he championed it so systematically that it has been named after him. Briefly formulated it says “Don’t multiply entities beyond necessity,” in other words use as few assumptions as possible and prefer the simplest explanation that fits the available data. This remains a crucial principle in scientific logic.

Aristotle’s ideas were not always treated uncritically in ancient times. Strato of Lampsacus (ca. 335-269 BC), the third head of the Lyceum after Aristotle himself and his successor Theophrastus, criticized Aristotle’s lack of attention to the speeding up and slowing down of bodies as they begin or end their motion. The sixth-century Eastern Roman natural philosopher John Philoponus added to this debate regarding Aristotle’s theories of motion.

Galileo’s dynamics and kinematics of motion drew substantially from fourteenth-century developments at the Universities of Oxford and Paris. The great French mathematician Nicole Oresme did notable work on projectile motion and was critical of some of Aristotle’s views on the subject. He was taught by the highly influential French priest and philosopher Jean Buridan (ca. 1300-1358) at the University of Paris in the early 1340s. They followed in the footsteps of John Philoponus, whose impetus theory was reaffirmed by Buridan and Oresme.

In the eyes of David C. Lindberg, a few breakthroughs often attributed to the seventeenth century had ancient or medieval roots. In some cases we can find that “revolutionary achievements in many disciplines were built on medieval foundations and out of resources provided by the classical tradition. Revolution does not demand total rupture with the past.”

The mechanical philosophy, a centerpiece of the Scientific Revolution, was aided by a revival of Epicurean atomism from ancient Greece which had been preserved through the writings of Roman authors, passed down with the Classical tradition and Christianized. It was employed in the seventeenth century by men such as Pierre Gassendi, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.

Another important branch of science where there was some continuity was optics. Mr. Lindberg has successfully demonstrated that while Kepler in the early 1600s formulated the first modern optical theory, he built it on the foundations of optical studies dating back to Ptolemy and developed further by medieval scholars such as Alhazen, Kamal al-Din, Theodoric of Freiberg, Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon. All of these men had at least some rudimentary understanding of the experimental method, even Ptolemy in the Roman era, yet this did not then evolve into a methodical use of it or become widely adopted by others.

It is almost certainly possible to find isolated cases where Chinese, Indian or other thinkers employed unsophisticated versions of the scientific method; what was entirely novel in seventeenth century Europe was a sustained program of experimentation successfully promoted by influential men such as the English philosopher and writer Francis Bacon. That was new and revolutionary. David C. Lindberg writes in The Beginnings of Western Science:

“Peter Peregrinus of Maricourt manipulated magnets in order to gain an understanding of their properties and behavior – discoveries that anticipated many of those that would subsequently be made in the seventeenth century by William Gilbert, often identified as one of the founders of experimental science. And who could deny the status of experimental scientist to the thirteenth-century Franciscan friar Paul of Taranto, who initiated an alchemical tradition characterized methodologically by laboratory manipulation of substances in the attempt to discover the pathway to transmutation? ... If all of this is true, what credit is left for Francis Bacon (1561-1626), popularly celebrated as the founder (or a founder) of experimental science? This Bacon (no descendent of Roger) argued, in books filled with references to empiricism and experiment, for the experimental interrogation of nature. However, what he and the Baconian tradition of the seventeenth century gave us was not a new method of experiment, but a new rhetoric of experiment, coupled with full exploitation of the possibilities of experiment in programs of scientific investigation.”

Edward Grant, on the other hand, chooses to emphasize that “Science in the late ancient and medieval periods, was, however, radically different from modern science. Although some interesting experiments were carried out, they were relatively rare occurrences and certainly did not constitute a recognized aspect of scientific activity. Few claims were tested objectively. The experimental method did not yet exist. The mathematical sciences, however, were presented with the same kind of vigor as a modern treatise in mathematical physics.”

In mathematics it is not at all difficult to find certain elements of continuity. Euclid’s Elements from around 300 BC incorporated even older Greek, Egyptian and Babylonian geometry and has been studied by Western students of mathematics until the present day.

Before 200 BC, the Conics by the great Hellenistic Greek geometer Apollonius of Perga introduced ideas and terminology that influenced later scholars from Ptolemy to Newton. As John North states, “He did for the geometry of conic sections (parabola, hyperbola, line-pair, circle, and ellipse) what Euclid had done for elementary geometry. He set out his own work, and much of that done by his predecessors, in a strikingly logical way. He also showed how to generate the curves using methods strongly reminiscent of those used in modern algebraic geometry. Those methods were to prove enormously important to astronomy, in the century of Kepler, Newton, and Halley – who studied Apollonius’s text closely.”

According to author Stephen Gaukroger in his book The Emergence of a Scientific Culture it is wrong to compare the totally unprecedented efforts of the Scientific Revolution in early modern Europe, which is the Scientific Revolution, to the more limited creative periods in other civilizations and time periods. The difference is not merely one in degree, but in kind:

“Scientific developments in the classical and Hellenistic worlds, China, the medieval Islamic world, and medieval Paris and Oxford, share a distinctive feature. They each exhibit a pattern of slow, irregular, intermittent growth, alternating with substantial periods of stagnation, in which interest shifts to political, economic, technological, moral, or other questions. Science is just one of a number of activities in the culture, and attention devoted to it changes in the same way attention devoted to the other features may change, with the result that there is competition for intellectual resources within an overall balance of interests in the culture. The ‘Scientific Revolution’ of the early-modern West breaks with the boom/bust pattern of all other scientific cultures, and what emerges is the uninterrupted and cumulative growth that constitutes the general rule for scientific development in the West since that time….This form of scientific development is exceptional and anomalous. The question is, then, not why the Scientific Revolution didn’t occur in any of the other cases of rich, innovative scientific cultures, but why it occurred in the West.”

De Magnete (“On the Magnet”) from the year 1600, written by the English physician and natural philosopher William Gilbert (1544-1603), became the standard work on electrical and magnetic phenomena at a time when Western European nations were engaged in long sea voyages and needed knowledge about the workings of the magnetic compass. Gilbert likened the polarity of the magnet to the polarity of the Earth itself. His work included descriptions of some of his own experiments as well as data that had been obtained by others. Galileo was very interested in Gilbert’s magnetic researches as well as his experimental methodology.

The Italian natural philosopher, astronomer and instrument maker Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was educated at home and with monks before he enrolled at the university in his native city of Pisa in 1581. He left without a degree, but continued to do independent research. He had to make a living by teaching and tried to generate additional income by inventing various devices, among them an early thermometer which was only a limited success. He was appointed professor of mathematics at Pisa in 1589. From 1592 to 1610 he held a similar position at Padua. During these years he studied falling bodies but did not publish his findings at that time. Had Galileo died in the early 1600s he would have been virtually unknown today.

Whether he literally dropped weights from the Leaning Tower in Pisa, as legend has it, is debatable, but the Flemish scholar Simon Stevin had conducted similar experiments in 1586. His results were published and may have been known to Galileo. Galileo demonstrated that heavy and light objects, aside from the effects of air resistance, fall at the same rate. Aristotle claimed that heavy objects fall more rapidly than lighter ones. Galileo showed that a falling object increases its speed in a steady fashion, or undergoes uniform acceleration. At sea level on our planet this gravitational acceleration roughly equals 9.8 m/s² for all objects. He established the principle of inertia whereby a moving object in the absence of external forces will continue to move with undiminished speed. Aristotle claimed that it would slow down.

What set Galileo apart from most scholars of ancient and medieval times and clearly separated him from Copernicus a few decades earlier was that he embraced the philosophy of the “experiment” as a controlled situation in which specific phenomena could be produced and studied at will. This was, as we have seen, not necessarily an entirely new idea, but it was taken up with a new enthusiasm in the late 1500s and early 1600s. A greater emphasis on empiricism and experiment could be detected from Italy via the Low Countries to England.

William Harvey (1578-1657), a physician from Elizabethan England who studied at the University of Padua after 1598 under Galileo’s anatomist colleague Hieronymus Fabricius (1537-1619), was the first person to correctly describe the circulation of the blood. Jan Baptist van Helmont (1579-1644), a Brussels-born Flemish physician, in the early 1600s carried out a famous experiment by growing a tree in a pot for five years. Through careful measurements he deduced that its increased mass came from the water, which was partly correct; it also came from atmospheric carbon dioxide and sunlight through the process of photosynthesis.

After 1609 Galileo became heavily involved in astronomy with the newly invented telescope. The sensational observations he published in 1610, including his discovery of the four largest moons of Jupiter, brought him instant fame. His Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems from 1632 with its favorable view of the Copernican system got him into the famous controversy with the Roman Inquisition. While under house arrest near Florence he completed his final masterwork, Two New Sciences (1638), which was published in Leiden in the Netherlands. Here he summarized investigations he had conducted decades earlier regarding the strength of materials and the motion of objects and anticipated Newton’s laws of motion.

Galileo was a firm believer in the application of mathematics to physics, not only for heavenly objects such as planets but for the study of motion of everyday objects here on Earth. It was his instinct for mathematical modeling of physical phenomena combined with his groundbreaking experiments and systematic use of the scientific method that earned him the well-deserved reputation he now enjoys for being a, if not the, founder of modern physics.

There is an immense gulf between societies in which science was the domain of a handful of wise men and our society with thousands of specialists seeking to contribute to a coherent understanding of all natural phenomena. Modern Europe contributed a unique institutional invention in world history: a large, organized body of scholars seeking explanations of all natural phenomena by a common method based on observation, experiment and reason. Europeans were aided in this by better scientific instruments, physical as well as mathematical ones. Authors Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell Jr. explain in How The West Grew Rich:

“What made the difference to the creation of organized science was that the experimental method was adopted by a number of researchers, and their common method united them in a community of working scientists. Post-Galilean natural science could specialize and departmentalize into physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, biology, and a host of narrower specialties because all of them shared a common method of determining scientific truth. A geologist or biologist could use the teachings of physics or chemistry in geological or biological research without feeling the need (or even the possibility) of checking their validity. The general acceptance of the experimental method made it possible for hundreds and even thousands of specialists to build the results of their individual research into a single store of information, usable across all sciences. The introduction of the printing press greatly speeded the cumulation of this body of knowledge….Thus the West, alone among the societies of which we have knowledge, succeeded in getting a large number of scientists, specialized by different disciplines, to cooperate in creating an immense body of tested and organized knowledge whose reliability could be accepted by all scientists.”

In his 1996 book The Scientific Revolution, professor of sociology Steven Shapin questions whether there was such a phenomenon at all. Most historians hold that a new pattern did emerge during the seventeenth century. Scholars questioned and occasionally ridiculed some of the ancient wisdom that had been inherited from previous ages. Many “new men” were critical of the established universities, which were seen as having invested too much faith in past authority, particularly in Aristotle. This was in sharp contrast to the Renaissance, which was preoccupied with Antiquity and had relished ancient knowledge; the older, the better.

A new pattern of organized science based on experiment emerged, less tied to Aristotelian natural philosophy and open for reports from non-academics. This development found its institutional basis in the scientific societies. During the 1660s the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, the longest continuously enduring scientific society in the world often known simply as the Royal Society, was created. Similar set-ups followed from Berlin to St. Petersburg. European scholars developed networks and created increasingly sophisticated descriptions of their experiments for others to trust in or duplicate and verify for themselves. Here we find the seeds of what would gradually evolve into scientific journals.

The universities eventually caught up with this, too. The influential Dutch professors Willem Gravesande (1688-1742) and Pieter van Musschenbroek (1692-1761), the inventor of the Leiden jar, at Leiden University gave the first sustained university courses in natural philosophy illustrated with experiments. By 1750 many professors were introducing experiments into their courses. Charles-Augustin de Coulomb used long, thin magnetic needles with well-defines poles to establish the law of magnetic force. Antoine Lavoisier used his self-made apparatus for experiments on gases, respiration and heat in the 1770s and 80s.

The word “scientist” was not seriously used much before 1840, and not widely used until the twentieth century. “Man of science,” “thinker” or “scholar” should be considered preferred labels for those who worked with natural philosophy and what we call science prior to this. By the mid-eighteenth century, probably no more than 300 people in the world could be classified as scientists. By the year 1800 there were perhaps a thousand, by the mid-nineteenth century 10,000 and by 1900 maybe 100,000. The overwhelming majority of these were still Europeans or people of European origins. The European population itself grew rapidly at the same time, but the percentage of scientists grew even faster. Science during this period finally made the transition from being a gentleman’s hobby to being a well-populated profession.

The Rotten Heart Of The Union

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 06:59:29 -0600

There's a lot invested in the European Union. Not only money (to the tune of €100 billion a year), also massive amounts of confidence from Europeans towards the Union, assuming that it will protect citizens / consumers from the evils of dangerous products, exploitative business and the dangers of the independent nation-state, all while protecting democracy and citizens' rights. Former Chief Accountant Marta Andreasen has a discouraging tale to tell.

First, a bit of history. Marta Andreasen was hired in January 2002 as Chief Accountant responsible for the EU budget at large, with the specific additional task of initiating reform of an obviously deficient system of accounting that each year permitted billions of euros to vanish, pure and simple.

A case of corruption had in 1999 brought down the European Commission led by Jacques Santer, and the clear message from the European Union was that now it was time for zero tolerance of irregularities and waste. After all, it is taxpayer money we entrust the European Union, not money earned by the Union directly. We should expect that money to be spent responsibly, or not spent at all.

Marta Andreasen was hired to put the required reforms into effect. However, she was dismissed after less than five months in office, a dismissal that led to a lengthy legal process, but no reform. This book is her account of what happened.

For the benefit of those who do not want to read the complete essay, my opinion is:

Well worth reading, 4 of 6 stars.

The main upside of the book is that it provides a candid view of a world not frequently exposed to scrutiny or criticism, a view with a long sequence of disturbing events of neglect and miuse of power. This is not a healthy situation for the organisation that, more or less visibly, runs things throughout Europe. The downside is that the book is lacking in structure, has few references, and has the narrative laced with countless judgements, making it much more subjective than need be, and thus subtracting from its quotability and impact.

Then, for the book essay proper:

Accountants bring accountability

Marta Andreasen

What Marta Andreasen was hired to do was a task of immense responsibility. Reforming the accounting system of an organisation with a € 100 billion budget is huge. The problem, of course, was that accountability was lacking throughout the union, which led to not only missing billions, but also to the embarrassing case of Édith Cresson that eventually brought down the Santer Commission.

Such cases are usually symptomatic of deeper problems, which were amply demonstrated by the fact that the EU accounts had not been properly approved since 1996. Paul van Buitenen had filed a report about the problems, stating in his conclusion:

I found strong indications that . . . auditors have been hindered in their investigations and that officials received instructions to obstruct the audit examinations . . . The commission is a closed culture and they want to keep it that way, and my objective is to open it up, to create more transparency and to put power where it belongs - and that's in the democratically-elected European Parliament.

Predictably, he was suspended from his position, for the offense of disclosing facts to the public.

After the fall of the Santer Commission, Romano Prodi made a public pledge that henceforth there would be zero tolerance of fraud. The European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) was created, to make it visible that the European Union was taking effective measures against fraud, and to send a strong signal to the public of problems being addressed, that the Union would self-correct.

The problems run deeper than that.

Now, one of the problems in dealing with this material is that it contains severe allegations against public figures and the way the European Union is conducting its affairs. Many of the allegations made by Marta Andreasen cannot be independently verified, as employees of the European Union have a pledge of loyalty towards the organisation and will not publicly confirm or deny the problems indicated by Mrs. Andreasen.

However, the fact that a decade has not brought convincing progress towards fulfilling the promise of zero tolerance given by Romano Prodi, is a clear indication that the problems reported by Marta Andreasen are substantially correct. Not only that, it also proves that sufficient measures have still not been taken to eliminate fraud and waste in the Union.

There are those who say that the European Union should adhere to the same level of accountability as public companies. They are wrong, for a simple reason: Private companies are accountable for only their own money. If they waste them, they will eventually go out of business.

The European Union, on the other hand, is spending money of other people, the European citizens and taxpayers. Each EU citizen contributes an average of € 200 a year to keep the Union running. As citizens, we have every right to demand that the money is spent in a disciplined and transparent way, understandable to anyone interested.

A distinct, equally important reason to expect much more discipline and transparency than a private company is the fact that the European Union cannot go bankrupt. Wasting € 10 billion a year, 10 percent of the budget, would quickly kill off a business entity. This makes good accounting and accountability a must for a commercial business. The European Union is not subject to this market-induced responsibility, and must therefore provide that at its own initiative.

Honesty and flawless accounting, mercilessly transparent to the press and the public, should be expected from the Union.

Enter Marta Andreasen

It was a somewhat unclear hiring process that led Marta Andreasen to assume the office of Chief Accountant in January 2002. Her predecessor had resigned for somewhat unclear reasons, and Marta was expected to pick up the work in a speedy fashion. First and foremost she was to sign off the accounts from 2001, and launch a plan for throughout reform of the system. Seemingly a perfect match for a high-level accountant like her.

Now, a key feature of a professional accountant is accountability, that she will not sign off accounts or authorize payments without certainty that they are sound and well documented. The official numbers showed an impressive 'margin of error' of € 5 billion, yet her own investigations led her to conclude that the true figure was a staggering €15 billion unaccounted for. The Director General and the Commission expected her to take responsibility for this, which she refused, pointing out that not only could she not put her reputation on line for such massive deficits, but also that it was really the responsibility of her predecessor to sign off the accounts for the previous year.

About the relations between Director Generals and Commissioners a lot can be said, and Marta Andreasen does so. Power struggles play out between the DG's, who are in permanent positions, and the Commissioners, who are in theirs on 5-year terms. That gives the DG's unofficial power in the bureaucracy, which in a large, complex organisation is difficult to expose and rectify. While problematic, it's by no means a situation we should expect to improve.

A distinct problem quickly identified by Marta Andreasen sounds too simple to be true: The accounting software used was inadequate. While spreadsheets are great for calculations and analysis, they are not usable as accounting systems, for the simple reason that no user logging takes place. If desired, anyone can change figures in a spreadsheet without setting electronic trails. Thus, fraud can happen undetected to various degrees, as auditors will have little chance of figuring out who would have fudged the numbers. She received many reports of this taking place.

Simple problems sometimes do have simple solutions, and this one looked straightforward: If the accounting software is not providing the required accountability, change it to something that does. Better yet in this case: Appropriate software had already been purchased, licenses in sufficient numbers, and had been adopted to the purpose. Little was left to do than putting the program to use for its intended purpose. That would be at the heart of the accounting reform efforts.

Competence, meet Bureaucracy

A key problem of hiring a person of competence is that she may point out incompetence. While that is ideally the reason of hiring competence in the first place, if the incompetence is too widespread and honesty too scarce, competence and honesty does not automatically win. Powerful civil servants can obstruct progress in highly diverse and creative ways, and the dungeons of bureaucratic procedure are most certainly daunting for a newcomer with few, if any, friends inside.

When Marta Andreasen insisted that her predecessor either sign off the 2001 accounts or provide a formal transfer of the accounting to her, that didn't go down well. The Director General and the Commission would much rather that she simply signed off the accounts herself, lending her credibility to the System as it was, rather than undertake the Herculean efforts of bringing the accounts up to a reasonable level.

An alternative proposal was that she would sign off her responsibility to the Director General. But that would eliminate the whole idea of having a distinct, supposedly independent, position as Chief Accountant. It is a testament to the integrity of Marta Andreasen that she refused. But it sure didn't win her any friends in a system where everyone apparently were complicit in substandard conduct. Her basic choice was this:

Sign off the unsound accounts, which would constitute complicity to fraud, or face a charge of 'disloyalty'.

As if refusing to sacrifice personal integrity and professional honesty would somehow be ”detrimental to the honour of the persons” pressing for her signature on the books. As she phrases it:

This pretty well confirmed not simply the hopelessness of my case, but the near-impossibility of anyone effecting real change within an undemocratic and essentially lawless institution: The European Union.

The Chief Accountant should, in principle, be independent of the organisation she oversees, that she is free to field relevant criticism without fear of being suspended or fired. That is, in principle. In practice there is a kafkasque twist to this, in that everyone seems bendable and subject to various forms of pressure, in order that they do not forfeit their loyalty to the System and cause devastating public scandals.

Suspension is always an option, for one reason or another, and Marta Andreasen was suspended in May 2002 on grounds that she had not forwarded her reform proposals in a timely manner. That she had only been in office for slightly over four months, and had made her proposals for reforms clear to everyone involved, made no difference. There is always a rule to break – actually one of the main purposes of having too many rules is that some will inevitably be broken – and in spite of her being formally independent and employed for 2 years, she had her duties relieved on May 23rd 2002.

The Rotten Heart of the Union

What follows, the Byzantine proceedings of legal battles, is less interesting to most. It shows again how a great bureaucracy can deal with problematic persons with impunity, but is really less important than the core issue:

The system is not only corrupt, but corrupting.

That is a harsh statement. The evidence is simple, actually: That the books are still not in order, that the accounts are still not signed off without major reservations. The yearly loss of billions of euros to unknown purposes is sufficient proof. That does not lay the responsibility squarely on any specific person(s), it merely goes to show that the system is still not working properly.

What makes this not merely corrupt, but also corrupting, is the fact that this siphoning off of money is rewarding and encouraging fraud. The exact kind of fraud has great variety, be it Greek farmers overreporting their livestock or Luxembourg farmers reporting more land than physically exists. Significant and very rewarding opportunities exist in this system.

Money is the lifeblood of any large organisation, and the European Union is no exception. Responsible and transparent accounting is crucial to uphold public confidence in the system, yet something is still severely amiss. Dishonesty cannot be tolerated at such a deep place of the European Union.

Accounting in the Union is still billions of euros from perfect, but since the trials and tribulations of Marta Andreasen, no significant whistle-blower has stepped up to provoke the impetus to actually deliver on the promise of Romano Prodi: No tolerance for fraud.

One of the problems is that in a private company, incompetent staff would report lacklustre results or even deficits, leading to demotion to give way for persons of greater competence. No such mechanism exists in a publicly funded bureaucracy. The larger the system, the more individuals become complicit to malpractice and eventually sacrifice their integrity to the System, rendering it unreformable.

The back cover of the book has several endorsements, including this by Lord Pearson of Rannoch:

If you want to go on hoping that the EU can be ”reformed from within”, don't read this book.

Personally, I don't hope it is this bad. I would love to see a European Union back on the democratic track, respecting the sovereignty of the nation-states and – as a matter of cause – provide complete and transparent accounting of the money and the confidence we have in this grand institution. It is vital, for it rules our lives and our countries more than most people are aware.

The Wilders Trial: Voices From Europe

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 01:13:22 -0600

In the summer of 2008, as many readers know, I traveled to six European countries to interview politicians dedicated to breaking, halting and/or reversing the Islamization of their countries (here is a collection of some of the writings inspired by the trip).

One of those politicians was Geert Wilders, then the little-known (outside of the Netherlands) leader of a very small party, PVV, the Party for Freedom. Only a year and a half later, Wilders is the most famous Dutchman in the world, and his party rivals the current ruling party in popularity. Wilders is also now on trial for his political life and liberty – hardly a coincidence.

But Wilders is not the only politician in Europe fighting Islamization. In my travels, I learned there were other countries where extremely courageous men and some notable women had entered the democratic arena to defend Western liberties against the onslaught of sharia (Islamic law), and with electoral success. In interviewing such politicians, I was much impressed with their political and, in these times of jihad violence, physical courage. Sadly, it remains the case that no US politicians speak with either the candor or understanding of the Islamic threat besetting the West that at least some of their European counterparts do.

With Wilders' trial begining today, I contacted three of the politicians I interviewed on my trip and asked them for their thoughts today. They have obliged – and in English, which is worth noting. In alphabetical order, they are Filip Dewinter, leader of the Vlaams Belang party in Belgium, Oskar Freysinger, a member of Swiss parliament for the Swiss People's Party (lately in the news for the recent victorious Swiss referendum banning minaret construction in Switzerland), and Morten Messershmidt, a member of European Parliament for the Danish People's Party.

Filip Dewinter wrote:

“Loquendi Libertatem Custodiamus”.
“Let us safeguard the right to speak”, the inscription reads on the statue of Pim Fortuyn. The Dutch politician was murdered in Hilversum, and a statue in his honor has been erected in the Korte Hoogstraat in Rotterdam. It seems though that the Dutch government has not drawn any conclusions following the murder of Pim Fortuyn. The trial against Geert Wilders is a murder attempt as well! Premeditated murder of democracy and freedom of speech. According to the summons, Geert Wilders is guilty of “insulting the Muslim population by insulting Islam, hatemongering against Muslims and inciting discrimination against Muslims, Moroccans and other non-Western immigrants.” The trial against Geert Wilders is very similar to the judicial procedures that have led to the conviction and the dissolution of Vlaams Blok. It concerns also a so-called opinion offence, in which a court judges and possibly convicts certain political beliefs. A successful political party – like Vlaams Blok – is being criminalized and silenced when convicted. What cannot be achieved by democratic elections, happens in court. However, a possible conviction of Geert Wilders will not only be harmful to his PVV party. A negative verdict will not just make any form of Islam criticism impossible. There is a real chance that a conviction will shut the door on any form of criticism on an ideology or a religion. Each time someone feels insulted by strong criticism on an ideology or a religion, things get out of hand. The permanent threat of trials, judicial procedures and convictions leads automatically to auto-censorship.
Auto-censorship based on repression leads to one-way thinking and indignation, because freedom of speech – the cornerstone of democracy – has to make way for the newspeak of a politically correct, fake democracy. The boundaries of freedom of speech are clearly defined: whoever calls to violence or makes slanderous statements, needs to be prosecuted. However, expressing an opinion can never be a criminal offence. Eventually, parties and politicians with dissenting opinions threaten to become the victims of a judicial witch hunt and media lynching. The trial against Geert Wilders does not only endanger freedom of speech, but gives free play to radical Islam. A possible conviction of Geert Wilders will be an excellent precedent for several Muslim organizations in Europe to silence Islam critics and to continue the process of Islamisation.
Undoubtedly, the trial against Geert Wilders will give his party a brief electoral boost. However, on medium term, the establishment wants to put up a cordon sanitaire around Geert Wilders, on the moral basis of a conviction of racism. Geert Wilders needs to be politically liquidated, that is the only intention of this trial. Europe has to make a choice: a democracy in which freedom of speech is guaranteed, or a return to Middle Age society.

Oskar Freysinger wrote:

A democratically elected member of the Dutch parliament shall be forced to silence because his critical words on Islam could disturb the noise made by those who preach hate and war against freedom and democracy.
Previously, he has been denied entry into Great Britain where some preachers propagate jihad without restraint.
Is there a justice for religious extremists and another for democratically elected citizens?
As a member of the Swiss parliament, I support the right of Geert Wilders to speak freely about all problems his fellow countrymen are facing. Even if this indisposes a religious group.
The end of the freedom of speech is the end of democracy!

Morten Messerschmidt wrote:

A conviction of Wilders is a conviction of free speech
The trial against Geert Wilders, MP, leader of the Party for Freedom, is not a trial in the ordinary sense of the word. It is a political trial, and there is much more at stake here than catches the eye. If Geert Wilders is convicted of using his freedom of speech, which should be guaranteed by the constitution in the democratic Netherlands, it is an attack on freedom in general and on the right to speek freely in particular. What does Mr. Wilders crime consist of? He has made a short film which combines the words of the Koran with horryfying pictures of – among others – women vicitimized by the rigid sharia-laws. Furthermore he has been advocating that the Koran should be banned – but he has done so in a country where Hitler´s "Mein Kampf" has been banned since the end of the Second World War on the ground that it represents a violent ideology. And so does the Koran. I don´t share the view that certain books should be banned, however, I respect Geert Wilder´s right to publish his views in the media.
If Geert Wilders is convicted a whole new standard of democracy will be seeing the light of day in Europe. Europe will have taken another step towards islamization, and attacks – even physical – against men such as Geert Wilders – and as we saw recently on the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard – will have a kind of backing from the courts. Once the islamists know that the judicial system has bowed down to the claims of the islamist, we are not likely to reduce religiously induced violence, but to further it even more. Geert Wilders has not only risked his life, he also has to live in a reduced world under the strict surveillance of his security guards – and in case of a conviction he would become an outlaw and would eventually fall prey to the hatred of the islamists.
In Denmark the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard on the first day of this year escaped his death by a breath. A young islamist of Somali origin broke into the home in Århus where Kurt Westergaard was enjoying the company of his 5-year old granddaughter, armed with an axe and a knife, and with his mind set on slaying the cartoonist in an act of vengeance because Westergaard had insulted the Prophet by drawing an innocent cartoon for a Danish paper. Fortunately, Kurt Westergaard managed to escape into his bathroom which had been transformed into a fortress. From there he managed to push the alarm button and he and his granddaughter were saved in the last moment. If Kurt Westergaard had been convicted of using his freedom of speech, people would have looked differently on this incident. The aftermath, however, showed that the united Danish population and media backed up behind Westergaard. When Wilders is standing trial this coming Wednesday the judge should bear in mind that in convicting Geert Wilders he will end up fueling the hatred of the islamists – and the cost of free speech.