i'm re-reading this series. bloody brilliant, deserves a pullitzer & funny too.
www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3762From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 6: When The Music Stops
From the desk of Takuan Seiyo on Sat, 2009-01-24 19:20
The sum of our fears
Question: What are these people doing in Europe? Who invited them? Who let them in? Who let them stay? What has allowed them to even dream about moving to Europe, let alone realizing a colonization plan?
In Great Britain alone, intelligence agencies are tracking 200 terrorists plots among Pakistani Brits, of whom some 2,000 are under observation. More than 400,000 Pakistani citizens of Great Britain travel every year to Pakistan – a country of 12,000 madrassas and, as of mid-2005, 55 terrorist training camps.
Why are there a million (1) Pakistanis in Great Britain? Just what has been going on in the brains of the British ruling elites these past 40 years? What has been going on in the brains of the ruled British people?
What are these people doing in the United States? We know how they came and who and what let them in, but why? The stock answer is: the left, to gain new voters; the right, to get cheap labor. But it’s not the real answer, except if this be a society of madmen.
You have to be a moron, an ignoramus with no knowledge of history, religion, philosophy, social psychology, economics, geopolitics, strategy, statecraft, higher [and ipso facto Western (2)] culture not to be aware that you have seeded a future civil war, an economic calamity, a cultural wasteland, a major devaluation of social capital, a destruction of your own mother, your nation. Yet the people who have inflicted all this on us have very high IQs (3) and have all been educated at the very best universities.
Why is Christmas in Sweden greeted these days with flaming mayhem by imported Muslim barbarians, rather than with flaming glögg by Swedes? Why are there 2 millions irredeemably alien “refugees” (4) in Sweden, including 600,000 Muslims, when there are only 7 million Swedes proper?
There are answers to this too: the politicians and the mass media are foisting this madness on the people, and the people have no power and no voice. But it’s a copout: the Swedish people do have the power and the voice – they just prefer not to use them.
All the answers are no answers. If we looked solely at the demographic folly of the West, the resultant fraying of the social fabric, the certainty of rapidly accelerating socio-political entropy, the inevitability of future internecine violence due to the infusion of 70 million Muslims (5) and growing, with many more to issue from those – that alone would qualify as the greatest catastrophe the West has inflicted upon itself since the Assembly of Athens, swayed by Alcibiades -- a glamorous fast-mouth of a type that entrances the demos of democracy to this day -- decided to send an enormous armada on its ill-fated mission to conquer distant Sicily in 415 BC.
For ours is not a disaster imposed from the outside, such as Hitler’s Germany inflicted on the rest of Europe, or Muslim jihad on Christendom. What we are witnessing is a voluntary self-destruction carried out by democratically elected political leaders on acquiescing populations that, largely, refuse to see The Emperor’s New Clothes even as his naked arse is at arm’s length from their faces.
To the contrary, gross, transparent lies such as “Our Strength is in Diversity, “All Whites are racists,” “Islam is a religion of peace” seem to have much traction with the general population, even though in the depth of their falsehood they equal the worst that the subjects of the Bolshevik Empire had to live under. The West has become an Orwellian tyranny of preferred lies, forcing the natural social preference for one’s own people into the same inhuman mold as the Bolsheviks applied to the natural preference for one’s family’s material wellbeing.
But that is just one of many symptoms. Why is the culture of Aristotle and Kant, Cervantes and Molière, Thomas Mann and Raymond Chandler, Mozart and Rachmaninoff, Velazquez and Bruegel, Charles Chaplin and Francis Coppola, Levi’s and Valentino now almost the exclusive province of Amy Winehouse and Rage Against the Machine, Booty Pop Panties and designer-torn jeans with rhinestone skull patches, Reality TV celebrating real repulsive imbeciles, and illiterate hoodlums with diamond-encrusted gold chains prancing on MTV ? Why are pierced eyebrows, green hair and Che Guevara the hottest fashion statement of Western man and woman?
Why is the idea of multiculturalism to not know any culture, least of all one’s own, rather than to know one’s culture plus at least one other?
Nor is the destruction demographic and cultural only. The madness of financial capitalism, of multiplying debt through reckless leverage and breeding funny money through out-of-control credit expansion, of making of consumption and borrowing rather than production and saving the holy grail of nouveau capitalism, have pushed America and capitalism itself under water. The shockwaves have swept through the West, bringing destruction in places ranging from Iceland to Bulgaria.
As reported by Reuters, in November 2008, the ten largest American financial companies had about $12.2 trillion of assets and only $406 billion of tangible common capital, or just 3.4%. The US financial system had $37 trillion of debt outstanding. According to some reckonings, the ten largest banks in America and Europe have a combined equity of 2.8 % of total assets.
That is rash mismanagement bordering on insanity. And where was America’s government in all those years when the hollowing out was taking place? It was too busy with gutting the merit system in order to “improve” the racial and gender “ratios” in the workplace, invading other countries for their own good, or importing itself a new, more primitive and malleable Third World electorate with a voracious appetite for consumption. Not the least the consumption of social services and tax money, hence multiplying the power of the government...
The United States, mankind’s best hope, has become a sad farce, a giant Titanic steaming ahead on waves of deluded triumphalism, inertial hubris, and consumption as the hopeful glue holding together its rent hull, even as it has already slammed into the biggest –and foreseeable decades in advance -- imprudential rock in history.
Weighed down by enormous debt levels and zero savings, a nation begat by thrifty Pilgrims has turned into a giant Ponzi scheme of successive bubbles inflated by phantom money, all burst in turn by unfoolable Reality. It’s also a Ponzi scheme – Rubato Land as I called it – in the sense of the government stealing from future generations in order to create illusory wealth for the present ones.
America is now veering from the capitalism of illicit gains to the socialization of the resulting enormous losses. $3.6 trillion in losses, actually, or 25% of U.S. Gross Domestic Product. It’s the greatest financial debacle – scandal, really – ever. The U.S. Government is frantically printing and packing trillions of dollars into holes and fissures in the collapsing hull.
This is a futile attempt to patch up an irreversibly shattered model based on runaway greed, foolishness, and moral corruption at all levels of society. It’s also a gross and demoralizing miscarriage of justice, for the government’s trillions in new money devalue the savings of its responsible citizens in order to save the reckless financial highflyers and irresponsible borrowers.
The specter of hyperinflation, of the fate of Rome and Weimar, is now hovering over the United States as well. The blame must ultimately rest with America’s government, and the people who always get the government they deserve. It no longer matters whether “the Left” or “the Right” run things in Washington. Under the terminally clueless “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush, federal spending grew 60%, much of it wasted in a misbegotten war, bureaucratic boondoggles, and unnecessary government initiatives in areas ranging from fake education, to fake mortgage loans to fake “minorities.”
After leading America’s largest bank and “financial supermarket,” Citigroup, to the edge of the abyss, Chuck Prince, CEO, retired in November 2007 with a “modest” golden parachute of $40 million. In July 2007, in a famous interview with the Financial Times, Mr. Prince had described his company’s financial game as follows:
“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing. "
To realize what sort of dance it was for this citadel of voracity and foolishness, one has to know that at the end of 2006 – the height of the real estate bubble – Citigroup had a stock market value of $274 billion and a $2.2 trillion balance sheet loaded with phantom derivatives and toxic mortgages. As of 20 January 2009, Citigroup’s shares had lost 95% of their market value and were selling for the price of a cup of bad coffee, $2.85.
In the past four months alone Citi has received $45 Billion of the unwilling US taxpayer’s money, plus U.S. government guarantees of impossible-to-keep-track-of-anymore hundreds of billions more to shore up its crumbling balance sheet. It helps to know that Citi is a primary dealer in U.S. Treasury securities. The U.S. Government, currently in debt for $13 trillion, needs Citi’s services to palm off additional U.S. sovereign debt on the increasingly reluctant treasuries of Asia.
The American justice system is broken too. 50,000 civil actions are filed daily. The more social capital and its array of norms and customs are broken through imported “diversity” and multiculti coddling, the more lawsuits multiply. Courts are now not interested in justice but, as a former-prosecutor friend puts it, "disposing of the backlog."
America’s inspired Constitution has been made into a handy gourd that the Imperial Judiciary and its Jacobin theorists in the top law schools fill with any brackish water of “progressive” causes that happen to inflame their passions. So many new and unnecessary laws are enacted, and so many new “victim” classes created and new government privileges arrogated, that falling afoul of the law can be a random process that can harm anyone irrespective of innocence. Raising one’s voice to a boorish flight attendant may result in a felony air terrorism conviction under the cannily named Patriot Act.
In Europe, alas, the picture is even uglier. While the American example shows the self-extinguishing nature of a populist democracy with a besotted and decadent demos, the European example is one of a bien-pensant oligarchy, driving the whole continent off the cliff while singing the praise of its own greatness, complete with a 2.4 billion euros PR – brainwashing budget.
Europe has been busy copying many of the worst features of the United States – from militant feminism, to Affirmative Action, to obsession with human rights rather than human obligations, to a toxic pop culture, to outsize greed and overleveraging of the main European banks. What is has not copied is what’s still healthy and commendable in America – Freedom of Expression, Freedom to Bear Arms, Constitutional protections from the state’s arbitrary power, strong Christian consciousness, ease in setting up and conducting a business, only moderately powerful labor unions, resistance to high taxes.
But America’s still-healthy features may not remain so for long. With state socialism implemented by the last Republican government the U.S. will know for quite a while, and the biggest blanket ever of reality-averse liberalism about to be tied around a somnolent, dumb electorate, America is going to wake up after four or eight years of Obama administration and Nancy Pelosi Congress to find, in the words of James Delingpole, “its pockets empty, its savings gone, its property trashed to virtual worthlessness, its streets rife with crime and its traditional liberties circumscribed by nannying bureaucrats and pettifogging regulation.” And— the most important topic that every “conservative” pundit tiptoes around carefully – a 33% Latino and African segment of the population that votes reflexively socialist and anti-white. That block will have been vastly augmented through a deliberate weakening of border security and endless ‘amnesty.’
Already, the Democrat machine is gearing up to squash freedom of expression through the “Fairness Doctrine,” to enshrine the imposition of chaos by “minorities” through various pro-Muslim, pro-Mexican, pro-homosexual and anti-“discrimination” initiatives, and to gut the freedom of armed self-defense. The government’s constant race-and-gender meddling in the workplace will escalate far beyond what even the most witless and liberal Republican administration in history has just wrought, and its labor union-coddling will reach levels not seen since before World War 2.
Hence the process we posited at the beginning of this series: the convergence and gelling of Europe and the United States as an oppressive, socialist, anti-white racist, redistributive and economically crumbling police state – Meccania. The recent disinvitation of Vlaams Belang by the American Embassy in Brussels, hours before Barack Obama’s inauguration as President, shows where Obamerica’s European sympathies will lie: with the unhinged Greens, the rioting Muslims, the Lefto-Jewhaters, and the S&M Social Dhimmicrats.
But America still has perhaps eight years to get there, while Europe’s slide down the chute of unintended consequences is already a singular spectacle. In September 2008, Geert Wilders stated in a speech that Europe is in the final stages of Islamization, with America that will remain as the “Last Man Standing.” Wilders cited multiple European cities that are already one-quarter Muslim, with the majority of the under-18 population that’s Muslim. School curriculums have been distorted to accommodate Muslim sensibilities, and Western culture has receded before the Islamic one – from shop signs in Arabic script to sharia courts.
As per Wilders, 54 million Muslims now live in Europe and 25% of the population will be Muslim just 12 years from now. Muslims will have reached a European voting majority by the end of this century. In every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. “Clearly,” said Wilders, “the rather obvious, and ominous, signal is: «here WE rule»; right 'in your face'.”
What’s thrust in Europe’s face can be seen in these photos.
The Euro ruling elites don’t even try to disguise anymore that they deploy the immigration and naturalization of alien Muslim primitives, as a means to dilute and replace the vote of the autochthon population. “Muslim immigration is even a source of pride within ruling liberal parties,” said Wilders. “Academia, the arts, the media, trade unions, the churches, the business world, the entire political establishment have all converted to the suicidal theory of multiculturalism. So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as 'right-wing extremists' or 'racists'. The entire establishment has sided with our enemy. Leftists, liberals, Christian-Democrats are now all in bed with Islam.”
Mr. Wilders is now under an indictment of a Body Snatcher Inquisition Tribunal in Amsterdam, for his “hate speech.” And one should not forget in this context the tax-funded plan to invite more than 50 million African workers into the European Union (hat tip, Tiberge), with a job recruiting center already opened in the African state of Mali. Those who speak out against it will share Geert Wilders' cell in prison or in the poorhouse.
The average European’s reaction to such goings-on ranges from evasion to incredulity. But the ruling oligarchy is no longer a part of the people. It’s a class of Body Snatchers (6) with an altered consciousness programmed on Destroy, except Destroy is mislabeled as Renewal. No Stop or Reverse buttons are incorporated into their synthetic carapaces. And so, a Nicolas Sarkozy, who happens to be the President of France, would retort to the question “What on Earth are you doing?” with a proclamation – pulled at random from his most recent “gems” -- that Arabic is “the language of the future, of science and of modernity that expresses great civilizational and spiritual values." (Hat tip, Tiberge)
And in Europe too, the destruction has economic dimensions. Pundits in Great Britain, Ireland and Iceland are talking about a “national bankruptcy.” As to the continent, “A great ring of EU states stretching from Eastern Europe down across Mare Nostrum to the Celtic fringe,” writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, ”are either in a 1930s depression already or soon will be. Each is a victim of ill-judged economic policies foisted upon them by elites in thrall to Europe's monetary project - either in EMU or preparing to join - and each is trapped.”
In just the 2nd week of January, in Latvia, protesters enraged by austerity cuts smashed up Latvia's finance ministry and attempted to smash its Parliament. In Lithuania, riot police fired rubber-bullets on a trade union march. In Bulgaria, a demonstration outside the parliament in Sofia turned violent.
In Greece, wrote Prof. Cornelia A. Tsakiridou, “The spectacle of young people (and assorted criminals, leftwing extremists, and self-proclaimed anarchists) on a smash-and-burn spree wrapping themselves in the mantle of justice, martyrdom, and victimhood is only rivaled by that of a government incapable of making a clear and effective distinction between political grievance and thuggery, lawlessness and the rule of law.” (7)
We shall return to the incapability of making clear distinctions as the true disease not only of the Greek government but of the entirety of contemporary Western Civilization. But to revert to Evans-Pritchard, Ireland's economy will contract 4% this year and the deficit may reach 12% of GDP by 2010. Spain lost a million jobs in 2008 and has 16% unemployment that may grow to 25%. Italy's treasury awaits each bond auction with dread, trying to offload €200 billion of debt just in 2009. Greece no longer even tries to sell long bonds to fund its debt.
Evans-Pritchard relays how investors are dumping their “Club Med” and Irish debt on the European Central Bank, forcing it to provide a stealth bail-out for Europe's governments. “Liabilities are being shifted quietly on to German taxpayers. What happens when Germany's hard-working citizens find out?”
He answers too. “Don't expect tremors before an earthquake - and there is no fault line of greater historic violence than the crunching plates where Latin Europe meets Teutonia.”
To translate into plain language: the contours of a European war show in Evans-Pritchard’s crystal ball. And he has not even mentioned the 54 million Muslims and 50 millions-to-be Africans in Europe. That kind of “racist” concern might have cost him his job.
Western Snapshot, early 21st century
The West has finally settled where the hearts and hormones of its ruling elites have lain for generations. France, led by a gangly ghost whose name is Mon General, is following his bony steed toward the mythical land of La Gloire de la Patrie, with patrie defined as a Franco-Arab Empire and the French interested only in what selection of gourmandises the hopeful empire provided in today’s picnic basket.
Great Britain wakes up daily to a routine of sexual perversion that may be the answered prayer of generations of under-loved and over-privileged public schoolboys in cold dormitories. For breakfast, it’s sodomized by a gang of its formerly-inferior colonials. For lunch, it enjoys a session of self-flagellation for the sins of Empire and fox-hunting. For dinner, it watches through peepholes in the MSM bordello.
In one bug-eyed vista, the Royal Family – Becks, Posh and their perfect children – eat tofu burgers and sip Evian while dressed in Armani underwear. Through the more risqué peephole, the nation thrills to an orgy of Roman proportions in London, with nine-figure Albanian investment bankers ravishing hourglass-figure Lithuanian beauties to the beat of Jamaican rap and the snap of Italian paparazzi flashes.
The poor Germans too are at long last where their hearts have been for 100 years. They now have a dialectically progressing Marxist Republic, with wild-eyed political, cultural and environmental comrades barking Prussian orders to enforce equality on all except supermodels, football players, and other exemplars of Aryan beauty and robustness.
The rest of Western Europe falls somewhere between France and Germany, from the socialist caliphate of Spain, finally able to repeal the reconquista and kick out the Jews again (this time, from Israel), to the feminist utopia in Norway, staging the ultimate Henrik Ibsen play.
And in the United States, the robber barons have at last realized their maximum dream that even ole’ J.P. dared not hope for. They have achieved the global fungibility of labor, access to unlimited, magic capital, privatization of their earnings and socialization of their true labor costs and business losses. And, by means ranging from television to open borders, they have created a citizenry too dumb to notice the ruse. What could possibly go wrong? What then is to be done
There comes a time when cataloguing malfeasance and complaining is no longer enough. The sharpest shots of satire ring hollow. Casting ‘nay’ ballots becomes a symbolic gesture, with the empty signifier dangling in the wind of ill will and derision of a mentally altered majority, as a memorial to the signified.
We live at such a time. And so, this series will now leave the safe harbor of critique, satire and status quo analysis, and venture into the speculative field of what to do about it all.
It’s not that that there is a dearth of writers with a penetrating Right-based insight into Western society’s problems. Some even offer salutary advice. But they usually highlight a few ugly facets, and the facets they have omitted preclude the solutions that they offer. Or, the merit of their insight is tainted by their ego-driven attacks on people who have different insights.
Those who write about the evil of our Islamization rarely write about the evil of our deracination. For Islam works reasonably well in countries ranging from Qatar to Kazakhstan. Its repulsive features notwithstanding, Islam in those societies is devoid of self-denigration, self-extinguishing reverse racial discrimination, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, infantilism as the guiding principle in culture, females as the driving force in politics, out-of-control taxes, state welfare, therapeutical society, militant feminism, militant homosexuality, state suppression of the majority religion, street violence, gangbangers.
Body Snatcher Society has seeded and sprouted all these calamities that Islam doesn’t have, while also importing Islam’s afflictions by importing Muslims. If only judicious discrimination, ethnic self-confidence and reasonable morality had been maintained, the West would have not needed to pay attention to Islam. Islam would have remained in the diminished and solipstistic haze where Jan Sobieski’s winged hussars left it on land in 1683, and the U.S., British and Dutch Navies left it on the sea by 1815.
Those who write about the demographic decline – i.e. massive Third-World immigration – don’t write about the cultural decline, entirely self-engendered by the West. But those who write about the cultural decline, don’t write about the demographic decline.
Those who write about racial differences rarely write about the political differences. And those who write about politics and society would rather touch a yellow scorpion than the issue of racial differences – even though the social and cultural rot is a direct consequence of the lunatic pretending that such differences don’t exist, and the current recession is a “diversity recession”.
Those who justly decry the epidemic of abortion, rarely consider the back-alley wire coat hanger jobs before abortion was legalized. Those who bemoan the lack of Western procreation, fail to consider the toxic culture that foils parental efforts to raise decent progeny. Those who want to go back imagine that in their past lives they were country squires and cardinals.
Those who preach a return to orthodox Christianity, fail to see that the one group upon which God’s Providence most shone in modern history – America’s Founding Fathers – were unorthodox deists and thorough children of the Enlightenment. Those that lambast “godless atheists”—as though atheists could not be moral, spiritual and conservative -- are ignorant of the great moral leaders and their uncountable followers for over 3000 years in East Asia, the cradle of “godless atheism.” Who could be more ethical than Confucius, or more conservative than Sun Tzu?
Many of those who feel the sum total of the West’s decline most acutely, blame the Jews while worshipping a Jewish Messiah, drawing their faith from Jewish apostles, using hospitals built by Jewish charity and pharmaceuticals invented by Jewish scientists, sending hate e-mail by computers programmed by Jewish code-writers, and disregarding the 10% -20% of Jewish genes that their own ancestors’ DNA soaked up in Europe over the ages.
Those who preach conservatism fail to notice that conservatism as a political force has died by its own hand. Those who preach capitalism, fail to notice that capitalism has just hanged itself, ignominiously. Those who preach libertarianism seem to have no clue either about the depth of baseness that resides in the human soul or the geopolitical forces built of such baseness.
Hardly any of the above connects the dots into economics, even though “follow the money” has much to do with tracing the West’s social ills. And if they write about economics from a Right perspective, e.g. The Wall Street Journal, they are liberal and hypocritical in matters of immigration, racial and gender differences, the implosion of the white ethny. They are blind too to the built-in flaws of the supply-side model they usually advocate.
Thinkers on the Right are conspicuous as well in having taken conservation out of conservatism. The best observer of the fault line where moral decay breeds the maleconomy that breeds an unsustainable depredation of the Earth and of its resources is a social liberal Obamaniac by the name of James Howard Kunstler. Mr. Kunstler’s naïveté in so many socio-political areas of great consequence does not take away from the depth of his insights into some issues where true conservatives ought to develop depth as well.
Perhaps the name of James Kunstler’s website, Clusterfuck Nation, is what the Right ought to reflect upon most deeply. For our civilization is in a cluster situation far direr, and in many more ways, than our analysts have dared string together.
Among the many damages that the tenure of George W. Bush in the White House inflicted on conservatism was the concept of “faith-based community.” In reaction, “progressive” liberals started calling themselves “reality-based community.” That was even more ludicrous, for no group of people on Earth is as intent on denying reality as precisely those liberals. But reality does count, and is the supreme sovereign.
The West is now a brakeless bus rolling toward the abyss. It has already crashed the economic guardrail, and it will crash the other guardrails too before the g-force of reality launches it onto a parabolic course. There is a giant legume pod, a pre-programmed robotic alien, at the steering wheel. For the passengers to survive, the first step is to recognize and observe this situation with no blinders -- to become a reality-based community again.
The second step is to orient the conduct as per that observation, after which come the stages of decision and action (8). But most of us have already progressed to decision and action, without having done enough of the prerequisite observation and orienting. Therefore, conservatives are trying to convince the driver to turn the steering wheel, without recognizing that all they will get in response is more pedal to the metal. Or, they try to persuade the other passengers to vote the bus driver out of his seat. But most of the passengers are already Pods, snatched a long time ago and of one programmed will with the driver.
Yet a different group of conservatives tries standing athwart the road, yelling stop. But what worked for William Buckley in the 50s does not work anymore. For one, all of us are on the bus now, so how can anyone imagine he is standing on the road? In the 50s, Body Snatchers were only in the universities and among the intelligentsia. Now, hundreds of millions have been turned into Pods too, currently all in rapture, for Messiah hath returned. The Pods are now within our closest families.
We have to figure out how to get off this bus, hoping that other passengers will follow. And to that, the rest of this series will be devoted.
See also: From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 1: The March of the Body Snatchers, 28 October 2008, Part 2: From the Clenched Fist to the Raised Middle Finger, 1 November 2008, Part 3: From Encirclement to Breakout, 27 November 2008, Part 4: Tribe, 12 December 2008, Part 4½: Darkness in the Cranium, 14 December 2008, Part 5: From Screeching Cats to SDG, 19 December 2008, Part 51⁄2: Music We Can Believe In, 26 December 2008.
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