An unkind  reminder of what is ignored by common consent.

New documentaries are about to hit us. Some of these are already running. What is the occasion? We prepare to remember the outbreak of World War One, for long known as the “Great War”. That nametag did not outlast the eternal peace naively proclaimed after a conflict waged to make the “world safe for democracy”. 

While you smile, remember an unpleasant circumstance. It is that the follow up encounter, which we call “WW2”, has also been about freeing the world from servitude, itches, twitches and other bad things. With the destruction of Nazi tyranny in Germany and Fascist authoritarianism in Italy, the stated war aim of the Anglo-Saxons was fulfilled. Due to the real goals of Stalin, -Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s totalitarian partner-, the crucial completion of the project failed. At least what concerns ridding the world of totalitarian dictatorship in general. Because of the war, the leftist-national version of totalitarianism expanded over what had been German-occupied central and east Europe. There, with the help of the new occupier, the Red Army, communism filled the vacuum left behind by the crash of national socialist rule. Almost concurrently, in the Far East, the areas exposed to Japan’s conquest followed the example set in Europe’s center and became “People’s Democracies”. 

Classical liberals, and especially the current of thought we today call “libertarianism”, accept as an article of faith the notion that peace and well-being are brought about through economic developments. The pattern of thinking is very understandable in itself: since capitalism and free trade are the only internal and international economic and political systems capable of preserving propitious circumstances for the great mass of people, classical liberals tend to believe that all beneficial economic and political developments have indeed been brought about by commerce and free trade, and secondly, that all people in all situations inherently strive towards the establishment of a free society, and will readily adapt the moral assumptions needed to bring it about. Primitive moral and economic codes, in this view, are simply the product of corrupt institutions, the coincidences in history, or repressive foreign intervention. Lift these restraints on human development, and it is only a matter of decades before the world will live in the unlimited peace of a universal free market. 

There is a connection between political and material advancement.

In its last posting, Duly Noted reacted to a new catchphrase of the Left. The words that provoked the riposte were “can democracy survive capitalism?” 

The response emphasized that the suggested incompatibility is a verbal trick. Freedom, as a system, cannot prevail without a matching economic order. That means laissez faire. Attempts to abolish the capitalism of individual holders will not produce a capital-free order. State capitalism is the achievable alternative. With the added economic means that order will complete total dictatorial control. Elites convinced of their moral superiority are tempted to welcome such an arrangement. 

Imposed equality pushes ambition and the longing to differ to the underworld.

Following the gang rape of Jyoti Singh in Delhi and the mass shooting of Sandy Hook many people of ordinary walks of life are getting increasingly worried about the escalating culture of violence and rape in the West and beyond – probably not the last convulsions of the exhausted sexual revolution. However another force driving sexual excesses and violence that might be staying with us is the Enlightenment furor with eradicating difference or the polity of equalizing everything: West with East, men with women, heterosexuals with homosexuals, humans with animals, old with young etc. Rebecca Solnit’s shocking and comprehensive report over at the Asia Times, claims that every 6.2 minutes a woman is being raped in the United States and every nine seconds a woman becomes a victim of violence with 149 000 per year ending up in hospital there. In addition America saw 62 mass shootings in three decades and many more modern abominations.

About an imaginary conflict.

The international Left and its double agents work tirelessly as clandestine surrogates of the noble cause collectivism. This crowd has found a new phrasing to support their combat against individualism and the welfare of the striving in free markets. 

The clever catch-question is something like “can democracy survive capitalism”? 

The inquiry launched is propagandistically genial as it injects a not-too-subtly imbedded answer. It simplifies an involved topic to rally the confusable that are already misdirected in their search of easy secular salvation. 

Up till now, it has been quite easy for conservatives to point to the obvious mistakes, not to say outright blunders, made by American and EU foreign policy in the Islamic world and specifically in the Middle East. Instead of safeguarding our interests and making sure Islamic fundamentalism, or simply the growing self-confidence of Islamic culture, would not gain power or be significantly promoted in any country, the Western policy makers have not only silently stood aside while Islamist groups gained the ascendancy in the Arab world, but even supported these groups directly or indirectly. Libya and Tunisia our examples of Islamic extremism coming to power through western default, as a consequence of naive western opinions; Egypt is the shameful example of a totalitarian revolution being bankrolled by the west, like the Bolsheviks in the past. 

Europe’s dubious union and the democratic deficit.

On this side of the line, that separates us from nutsville, we agree on certain postulates. One is that in the modern world large markets are advantageous. Another assumption is that national means provide less security than committed communities can. With this in mind, we turn to Premier Cameron’s recent analysis of the European Union (EU). In a letter, a German reader called him a “British hero” for his stand that recalls Churchill’s in 1940 during Western Civilization’s moment of peril.

Before discussing Mr. Cameron, his speech, and the reaction of the European elites to it, let us clarify the situation in case the increasingly pro-European mainstream media has also confused the issue for the present reader. First of all, it was perfectly clear what David Cameron and a large segment of the British conservatives desire, and understandable to any mentally capable human being why Britain’s membership of the EU is no longer feasible as it is today: European regulations, and more generally, the habit of increasing centralization in the union, has proved unworkable and destabilizing to the British economy as well as destructive to its political independence and traditional position of aloofness from the European continent. No further discussion needed, there. 

Notions prejudiced by experience.

There is a relationship between “weapons” and “liberty”. That is because “arms” and “liberation” are also linked. The matter fuels debates that reflect semantics, hidden agendas as well as pre-conceptions. Not often enough are the facts discussed. In the writer’s case, the bias is clear. It comes from running in Budapest bearing a pistol with six shots in the magazine with a Soviet T34 tank in pursuit.  If one looks carefully, the legal access to weapons is not singularly an American controversy. However, the debate is defined and skewed by conditions said to be uniquely American.

In the blog magazine Dagelijkse Standaard, Joost Niemöller writes (15 december 2012, “Het Marokkanenprobleem is geen islamprobleem”, “The Moroccan problem is not an Islam problem”) that the reduction of all problems to Islam is stupid: “Look, this kind of thinking is not just dumb, it is also dangerous. Whoever can only think of Islam as the root of all evil, moves through the world blind with anger and has lost all ability to correct himself.” He calls this thinking “hysterical”.