Whose Ox Is Being Gored?

For years I’ve been in stubborn denial every time the Left accuses conservatives of sowing hate. Now I’ve learned the Left has been correct in its charge. In fact I’ve rarely found as much inflammatory hate speech as turned up in a column (May 30) by a Murdoch media empire superstar, who writes for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post and is frequently on The O’Reilly Factor, Debbie Schlussel. The column was titled “Poles were complicit in Holocaust: Outrage over Obama Gaffe is Fraudulent, Ignorant.” And the diatribe gets even nastier as one reads on. Schlussel rages against Obama for apologizing for an apparent mistake when he described Nazi death camps as “Polish.” The columnist is even more strident against Rush Limbaugh, that “self-hating Jew Matt Drudge,” and other Republican luminaries for suggesting that German Nazis, not Poles, were responsible for the Holocaust. 

A few hours ago, Geert Wilders spoke at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, Colorado. What follows is the complete transcript of his speech.

Thank you, dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, for inviting me to the Western Conservative Summit. It is always a pleasure to come to America. I was here a few weeks ago to meet with my dear friend, congresswoman Michele Bachmann, to talk about Islam and the threat to America and Europe.

It is also a pleasure to be in Denver, the gateway to the West. This is America’s conservative heartland where the spirit of the pioneers still lives.

I know that I come at a sad moment. Many of you have been affected by the enormous wildfires raging not far from here. Thousands have been evacuated and some of them are even staying in this hotel. Few things are as terrible as losing your homes. I want to express my deepest sympathy with all the people affected by this disaster. And I want to offer my condolences to the families of those who lost their lives in the fires.

An era of pleasing self-deception is ending.   

An economic collapse, to be followed by a political one, is threatening Europe. The global economy and your share of it might not remain immune. The problem is self-generated. Thereby, the entire, economically industrialized and politically democratic, world’s economic fundamentals are endangered. The trigger is seemingly negligible. Greece is only a small apple in the large basket. Its rot, however, is due to the interrelationships created by the “political class” and regardless of denials, a process that affects all. The crisis managers and the means of those in charge of repairs are dubious quality. Adding more borrowed apples will hardly work. Impolite and unkind observations follow.

Shifting positions that duck reality.

Remembering old times has a purpose. Recollection can be help to escape the present. The other is to recall the failings of erring opinion makers. Those that write the official record prefer to suppress the reminders of their causes. The purpose is to recycle old, tried, and failed snake medicine. With an updated sales pitch, the illusion of a better future reappears for consumption by gullible amnesiacs. Such a recycled theme is about growth, progress, and austerity in the context of the global economic crisis.

Evolution and Conversion and Battling to the End by René Girard

René Girard

History, and increasingly the mere daily record of events, are together apocalyptic, laying bare human nature for what it is primordially before the agonizing laboratory of the millennia creates the Christian society that its beneficiaries, swiftly taking it for granted, petulantly reject that they might go “forward” into a liberated horizon beyond the one defined by the Gospel. “Progress” names that particular folly. A blood-drenched folly it is, beginning with the religious wars of the Seventeenth Century and reaching fullness with the mobilization of the whole society fomented by the Jacobins and institutionalized by their superman-successor, Napoleon Bonaparte. From the guillotine henceforth, modernity blurts itself sanguinely in the Commune, Leninism, Stalinism, Hitlerism, and resurgent Islam (Jihad), which continues belatedly the sparagmatic trend of the late and unlamented Twentieth Century. Yet despite the academy’s authoritative three-decades-long declaration of Dionysiac “postmodernism,” despite the polysyllables of doctrine-inebriated intellectuals, modernity in its lynch-mob vehemence has not succeeded in realizing its rainbow utopia. No fulfillment of the destructive quest heaves in prospect. Modernity spirals dizzyingly to its destined abyss, dragging with it those who know full well its madness but who find themselves sucked with the lunatics into the maelstrom.

The use, overuse and neglect of power.

Arguably, a Great Power is one that, while it acts rationally, can afford to consider the local consequences of her move and mulls only thereafter the reaction of the world. The word “afford” is the critical term of the attempt to formulate a rule. 

Presently everybody is talking about variants of austerity measures regarding public expenditures imposed on us by the financial crisis. Most Western governments are running huge debts and there is no relieve in sight unless we cut spending and - if we follow free marketers - thoroughly de-regulate the economy. But it is entitlement reform that has been long ago established as the pivotal tool for mending unsustainable economics in most Western governments. Growing resources needed to serve entitlements according to some are even to blame for the loss of confidence with many investors. The projected future runaway train of entitlement costs refers to the whole range of social security, including such things as food stamps, income support, rent assistance, health care and state pensions, the bulk of which is absorbed by the middle class. 

How birds of the same feather protect each other.

Totalitarians are good at propaganda. Effective marketing is rooted in the ideology of such movements. Both leftist and rightist totalitarians have good selling points manufactured out of superficially plausible simple slogans. These exploit existing and fashionable prejudices that are made to relate to an ongoing crisis. Such sentiments are extrapolated and connected. Thereby they add up to a worldview that interprets conditions which are difficult to fathom in their real complexity. Examples are “property is theft”, or a secret, therefore improvable, “conspiracy”.

In pointing out recently that Geert Wilders confounds Americans with his fearless clarity, one of the incidents I had in mind was an interview he sat for in May with The Daily Caller's Jamie Weinstein (photo above).

Some ignored contributory causes of unemployment.

Youth unemployment represents a growing problem. One response is to create jobs by the government for the involuntarily idle. In this connection, the condition of the national economies that produce negative records is listed as a causative factor. True is that thriving businesses create a demand that reduces unemployment. Government interventions, whether by using their taxing power or through their central banks, can enhance employment. Regulations affecting hirings and firings will also determine who will have a job and who will not. The harder it is to fire the privileged, the less likely it is that new talent is offered positions. The over-protection of those already working resists the employment of new arrivals on the job market.