More on the subject of forgetting and learning nothing

Yesterday I posted a link on the story about a man seeking to renew the Jewish community of Lybia after the fall of Ghaddafi. I admit I only casually glanced on the story and assumed that he had learned his lesson. Was I wrong about that!

You see, the man in question, a certain David Gerbi, even after the slap in the face he recieved has gone straight back to the dreamworld. Not only does he still believe the official slogan of the so-called rebels that harps on about "freedom" and "democracy" he actually wanted to be part of their "governement"! Whatsmore, he is actually amazed that they wouldn't have him!

As one of the commenters on the JihadWatch site, where this story appeared, wrote:"There is no nice way of putting this: the man is an idiot!" While one can excuse his blanket dismissal of warnings sober man have sounded about the "rebels" of Lybia, to persist in the erroneous ways even after paying the full tuition fee to the teacher called Experience is a hallmark of astounding stupidity. At this point, any sympathy one struggled to find for Mr.Gerbi should be foregone and in fact, replaced by a perverse sensation that anything that might happen to him he will have richly deserved.

Sort of tells you how the western establishment types came to be, does it not?

They do indeed play it

Someone once said that in international policy Americans play checkers while the Russians play chess. There can hardly be a better confirmation of this adage then the current events surrounding the upheaval in the Arab world.

Eyebrows were raised when Russia abstained from voting on the resolution on Lybia and many were disappointed with the move. In light of yesterday's joint Russo-Chinese veto on the sanctions against Syria the decision makes perfect sense. It was a calculated sacrifice of a pawn in order to protect the rook or the bishop. The Russians knew that NATO will exceed it's authority and turn the so-called mission to protect civilians into a full blown war against Ghaddafi and his supporters. Just like the scorpio from the famous story, they couldn't help it, it is in their nature. Russian ambassador to the UN Vitaliy Churkin said as much during the debate in the Security Council.

This, of course, drew a predictable hissy-fit from the west all with the standard cliches about "freedom, human rights and democracy". Just like the Burbons of France, NATO countries forgot nothing and learned nothing. Just like in Lybia, little is known about the so-called Syrian opposition. Just like in Lybia, some less then complimentary facts emerge from behind the wall of mystery. And just like in Lybia the warnings are ignored or shrugged off. Because, in any event they are not ignoring them at their own (immediate) peril but at that of the country in the region they proclaim to be allies with and to whose security they claim to be dedicated to.

Yes, that is Israel I'm talking about and yes that is the people in it longing for Assad's fall I'm warning here, because unlike their western counterparts, they might actually listen. The caution you displayed in the case of Egypt was admirable, as well as the same about Lybia(even if it was to a smaller extent). Don't throw it away because of personal animosity towards Assad, justified as it may be. You think anything is an improvement over Assad? Many of your people originating from Lybia thought the same about Ghaddafi and daydreamed of renewing the Jewish presence in that country but they were quickly slapped back into reality. Stay awake. You won't always have the Russians and the Chinese indirectly saving you from yourselves and your supposed allies.

It’s amazing where one can find trash

No, I’m not talking about the untidyness of my hometown, although that does warrant a blog post of itself. This one will be about hoe everybody seems to have his or her memories of 9/11 and how writing about them is not for everyone, especially not if you have major ideological monkey to get off your back.

Paul Krugman’s name is propably on everyone’s mind as they read the words above, but this is not about him. He is a certifiable nutjob, taken seriously only by his fellow nutjobs and I don’t understand why he’s generated so much undeserved reaction. Instead, I’d like to share a text that is in the same mould and in a way arguably worse.

Surfing around some tennis sites, for reasons you propably imagine, I came across, among other texts, of this diatribe against Republicans, conservatives, Tea-partiers and middle America in general by the site’s regular contributor Steve Tignor that purported to pass for a 9/11 rememberance column. Instead of this 888-word tripe, Tignor should have simply written „Thanks for the sympathy, but I still think you are ignorant, uneducated, inbred, low-life bunch of red-necks unworthy to tread on the same ground with us enlightened New York liberals.“ That would have at least been honest in it's intent and purpose. What amazes most of all is the article’s tone of bemusement as to why middle America is not too fond of people like Tignor! Honestly, after you read this condescending, holier-than-thou liberal pamphlet you can not help wondering what is there to like about them?

And in the typical hypocritical fashion, and just like his fellow liberal boor Krugman, Tignor declared he won’t take comments on this article instead inviting people to e-mail him about it. That’s right, conceal negative reaction and responses, in the perfect Soviet-era Pravda fashion.

A particularly low and sinister article, even by the gutter standards of New York liberal press corps.

10 years on

It's one of those days you remember what you did no matter how much time has passed. It was around 3 PM in Serbia and I was beggining to cap off my day at work(while the workday on the US East Coast was just about to begin) when I saw a hyperlink on one of Serbian news portals that simply said:"Plane hits World Trade Center in New York". I thought it was some cesna-type training or advertising planes that went out of control and did not even click on the link. It was my colleagues who alerted me about half an hour later of the extent of what was going on.

I'll readily admit that I felt no sympathy at all for America. The US/NATO war of agression was still fresh in memory. Still, I knew it was inappropriate of a civilized human being to feel joy or satisfaction, so I did not succumb to that, even though many around me did(yet a great many of those gleefully casted up until recently, at least, their votes for the treasonous pro-NATO parties that form the current governement of Serbia. Go figure!). You know how they say that the real oposite of love is indifference? Well, that is what I felt about 9/11 back then: indifference. Indifference about the act, the perpetrators, the consequences, everything, even the victims...

Later, of course, I learned much more and better. I've seen that there is much more to America then it's ruling ideology and establishment and that this other part is not necessarily ill-disposed towards the Serb people. Due to history, recent and otherwise, I did have a reflexively negative view of islam before 9/11 but it was only after that I learned extensively about it from various sources. All this and much more made me a substantially different person then the one 10 years ago.

Which is why I can not agree with the assesment that nothing has changed. While it is true that the establishment is authistically trying to continue to hold the course, they are having more and more trouble in doing so. It is because us regular people have changed. I certainly am not the only one who has gained new, previously concealed knowledge of the world. Yes, we may look irrelevant now, but in the long run we are the ones that truly matter. Just as Hans Sachs sings in "Meistersingers von Nurnberg", what remains is the holy art, i.e. the spirit of the people(and in case you are wondering, yes, I am a Wagnerian). Or if you dislike the master of Bayreuth, here's a quote from George Orwell:

"If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated."

I do not believe, for various reasons, that I should apologize for my sentiments 10 years ago, but I will say this: knowing what I know now, I most certainly would not have felt as I did.

This time maybe nothing will be left

Imperialism is eventually a self-defeating strategy since sooner or later an empire comes across a culture it can not hope to dominate, assimilate or eradicate. Such an event shakes it right down to the core because the one thing an empire can not imagine is that there are groups that it can not explain and/or mould it it's own ideological terms. Thus begins their decline that leads to the inevitable fall.

Daniel Greenfield explains how both former Cold War empires reacted to islam in the past and now.

The Soviet Union and the Pax Americana both attempted to win the allegiance of the Muslim world with money, weapons and technology.

Micheal York in "Cabaret" springs immediately to mind:"You still think you could control them?" Apparently they still do because:

...And they are still at it today internationally and domestically. America, Russia and Europe all keep dividing ‘good’ Muslims who are loyal citizens or allies from ‘bad’ Muslims who set off bombs in schools and buses.

And the joke is, in fact, on the empires:

Russia’s ‘good’ state controlled mosques preach Jihad against the West, just as our ‘good’ Muslims were the ones who killed Russians. But we’re not the ones playing divide and conquer, they are.

But the delusion that they will be able to control islam is by no means the worst part, according to Greenfield, but rather the extent to which both empires are ready to go in order to prove that it is in fact attainable:

Russian leaders, like their European counterparts, act as if the rising Muslim population is nothing to worry about. So long as they remain loyal citizens of Mother Russia, it will make no difference if Moscow ends up with more mosques than churches. But what exactly is Russia, if it is not the land of the Russian people?

...What exactly are Russian Muslims to give their allegiance to besides the broken symbols of the Czarist and Soviet eras that have become kitsch in a vulgar oligarchy? The same question can easily be asked of the United Kingdom or America who have discarded their heritage and culture for political correctness and cheap consumer goods.

Can there be a Russia without Russians, or an England without the English or France without the French? In the same way that there can be a Constantinople without the Greeks. The buildings can remain, but without the people, there is no nation. National cultures are elastic, but not infinitely so. Immigrants can be absorbed or accommodated, but it is a two way street, and when the majority is too different from the people who defined the nation, then Constantinople becomes Istanbul.

Usually, even falling empires left behind them a nucleus, however tiny, of a people that lives on in a different form of a state buth with it's culture mostly intact. Greenfield is not optimistic when it comes to what will remain once contemporary empires crumble:

If the Cold War tested our determination to exhaustion, then the exhaustion has left us too weak to stand up for ourselves anymore. One empire has fallen and the other is falling swiftly into the ocean. And when it’s gone there will be nothing but the ragged edge of civilization, fallen skyscrapers, burning books and mosques on every corner.

We haven’t lost yet, but that’s only because of the weight of resources on our side lends us an inertia that will not last forever. But the real problem isn’t that we’re losing, it’s that we have forgotten how to fight. Worse, we have forgotten what fighting even means.

There are other topics discussed in Greenfield's article, some of which you might agree or disagree with, but he gets the fundamental point spot on. Civilization will not survive this disastrous course because on it it destroys everything of value it has created all allegedly in it's own name and in the name of misguided quasi-altruism.

Oddly enough, as I was typing this I was listening to the finale of Wanger's opera "Meistersinger von Nurnberg" which contains this warning from the main Character Hans Sachs:

Beware! Evil tricks threaten us:
if the German people and kingdom should one day decay,
under a false, foreign rule
soon no prince would understand his people;
and foreign mists with foreign vanities
they would plant in our German land;
what is German and true none would know,
if it did not live in the honour of German Masters.
Therefore I say to you:
honour your German Masters,
then you will conjure up good spirits!
And if you favour their endeavours,
even if the Holy Roman Empire
should dissolve in mist,
for us there would yet remain
holy German Art!

This part had sinister conotations in the past, but still it's appropriate in this moment, maybe more then ever. Here's the clip, if you're interested, Bayreuth prodiction of 1984 with Bernd Weikl as Hans Sachs:

Wilders goes one step further

Whether emboldened by his acqiutal bofore Dutch courts in spite of the deck being stacked against him or by realization that reflexive rhetoric that just speaks "against" something(whether it's multiculturalism or islamisation) can only get you so far, Geert Wilders has decided to go where hardly a politician in Europe dared go in the past two decades, namely to take on the idea of the EU itself. His speech in Berlin on September 3rd is the most riveting condemnation of the Brussels Leviathan told by a significant mainstream politician. Here are some noteable excerpts:

...Last year, I urged you: Stop being ashamed of Germany. It is unfair to reduce German patriotism to national-socialism, just as it is unfair to reduce Russia to Stalinism. Be proud of your country. Only if the Germans have pride in Germany, they will be prepared to stand for Germany and to defend Germany. And you must stand for Germany, just as the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands stands for the Netherlands. We must all stand for the survival of our nation-states because our nation-station states embody the democratic liberties which we enjoy.

Without the nation-state there can be no real national political freedom. That is why we must be good patriots. Patriotism is often branded as fascism. But patriotism is no fascism. On the contrary. Every democrat and defender of freedom must by definition be a patriot. A soul needs a body. The spirit of political liberty cannot flourish outside the body of the nation-state. The nation-state is the political body in which we live. That is why we must preserve and cherish the nation-state. So that we can pass on the liberty and the democracy which we enjoy to our children.
...
Dear friends, we urgently need a new blossoming of the German spirit. For decades, the Germans have been ashamed of themselves. They preferred to be Europeans rather than Germans. And they have paid a heavy price for it. We have all paid a heavy price for it.

Europe is not a nation; it is a cluster of nations. The strength of Europe is its diversity. We are one family but we live in different bodies. Our cultures are branches of a common Judeo-Christian and humanist culture, but we have different national cultural identities. That is how it should be.

It is doubtful that any man has spoken of "Germans taking pride in Germany" in such a context since 1945. These words will either cause a storm or the establishment, in light of the recent Wilders trial fiasco, will go out of it's way to cover the whole thing up.

Further on, Wilders is unambiguous in it's assesment of the EU not as a noble idea gone awry but as an entity rotten to it's core right from the beggining:

When I was here last year, I spoke a length about the threat of Islam. Today, I want to draw your attention to the threat of Europeanization. By Europeanization I mean the ideology which posits that our sovereign nation-states have to submerge in a pan-European superstate.

The European Union’s Founding Fathers held that in order to avoid a future war in Europe, Europe’s nations, and especially Germany, had to be encapsulated in what the Rome Treaty called “an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe.” Robert Schuman said that the EU’s aim was – I quote – “to make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible.” – end of quote.

The Eurocrats think that nation states in general – and especially Germany, Europe’s largest nation-state – are the problem. They are wrong. The real cause of the Second World War had not been the German nation state – it had been Nazi totalitarianism.
There is nothing wrong with Germany. The cause of the war was the Nazi ideology. The remedy against totalitarianism is not building a superstate. The remedy is introducing more direct forms of democracy at the lowest possible levels. Instead of depriving Germany and other nation-states of their sovereignty, the post-war leaders should have introduced a Swiss-like system in our countries. Small units should have a large degree of local sovereignty. The individual citizen should be given a direct democratic say over his own fate and that of his community.

Instead, the peoples of Europe were robbed of their sovereignty, which was transferred to far-away Brussels. Decisions are now being taken behind closed doors by unelected bureaucrats. This is not the kind of government we want!
We want less bureaucracy! We want more democracy!
We want less Europe! We want to hold on to our sovereignty. We want home rule! We want to remain independent and free! We want to be the masters in our own house!

Read it all! And make sure that these truths that are supposed to be self-evident are heard all over.

Not over until it's over

While the so-called rebels managed to deal a great blow to Gaddafi, one should not be too quick to declare Lybia a finished article. As long as Gaddafi is at large the war will go on, since it is by now clear he will fight to the bitter end and that the base of his support is much wider then previously thought.

And save for the usual US governement sycophants and star-eyed, head-firmly-in-the-clouds ignoramuses, there is little jubilation going on about the fall of Gaddafi. It seems, amazingly enoguh, that people outside the governement circles have actually learned something from the past cases of Afganistan, Iran, Egypt...Took them long enough, mind you.

As for the establishment, they are like the old Burbon dynasty of France, they have forgotten nothing and have learned nothing, just as the above cartoon shows.