We Need to Talk about Detroit.

Tags

london, Civilisation, Defend the modern world, Christianity and Islam, Europe, Cultural Marxism, United States, Detroit, Detroit decline, General Motors, Far East, Urban decay, Detroit Crime, Third World America

Blind egalitarianism leads to Detroit, Michigan. This once vital and impressive city is now a loosely connected network of shantytowns; its districts emptied of affluence and pockmarked with hives of crime.

If you’re not sad about this, you really should be. During World War 2, Detroit pretty much saved the Western world. This city was the armament factory on which democracy counted, and it delivered in that role to fine excess, not only matching the arms of the enemy, but producing weaponry of greatly superior speed, accuracy and power.

So you see, we all have reason to mourn what has happened to Detroit. And, perhaps more, we all have reason to fear its replication elsewhere.

The story of Detroit’s modern history is fast and cautionary. This once booming city had in 1945 an overwhelmingly Northern-European majority whose industry principally involved the construction of automobiles and machine parts. In the 50s, 60s and 70s, a huge economic migration of African Americans from the South occurred with thousands of Southern Blacks arriving, tempted by the promise of shovel-ready jobs and better living standards, as well as less callous race-legislation. As a result of the quick demographic shift and its accompanying imports of crime and drugs, racial tensions quickly began to surface, and eventually erupted as a civil implosion in 1967. After this, Whites began to abandon the city, leaving the economy behind to collapse.

There. That’s it. Simple enough but also devastating.

Conservatives across America shiver at the example of Detroit. When they see the wild, Zimbabwean grasslands developing a few miles from a modern skyline, they rattle with fear for their own city, and for their country.

And we should worry too.

The other day I was having coffee (regular readers must think I do little else) on Fulham Broadway. After I’d finished drinking, I decided to go for a walk outside the area familiar to me and headed up Fulham High Street.

London is noted for its sharp contrasts, but what I found surprised even me. Fulham High Street, once the glamourous preserve of ‘it girls’ and celebrity, now seems like a dingy African backwater, consisting in the main of fried chicken outlets, cloth markets (which spill anarchically into the road), and penny-pinching trinket stores. Everything present seemed run-down or damaged in some way. Halfway up the street I went to withdraw some money from a cashpoint, but when I approached it appeared the screen had been shattered. Knife marks were visible everywhere, intimating a mad effort to break it open.

Like Detroit, Fulham’s demographic profile has altered violently over the past decades. Not very long ago, as I say, this area was counted as extremely salubrious and local properties stood far beyond the means of most working people. For some time now though, (as with so many British miseries, this can be backdated to the assumption of office by Anthony Blair), Fulham has been a magnet for various kinds of third-world immigration. Somalis have provided the greatest number; other nationalities include Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Nigerians. And as these groups arrived, affluent residents left.

What has happened in Fulham is a micro example of a general London trend. Until now, perhaps naively, I had imagined this to be mainly an East-London phenomenon. Fulham however is located very close to where I live, in the heart of the wealthy West.

If you look as a detective would at these two scenarios – that of London and that of Detroit, you’d be motivated to ask how cities so far apart and dissimilar to each other could undergo the same process.

Something must connect them, but what? What is true in A that is also true in B?

For me the answer consists of two separate but interwoven failures;  the first is the failure – by government – to discriminate between sources of immigration. Who on earth walked through Fulham in 1997 and thought to himself – “Nice. Very nice. But not enough Somalis….”

We know immigration is of more economic benefit than the average voter realises, but this is only true (with a few rare exceptions) of immigration from economically competent regions like India, America, Europe and the Far East.

Logic alone should make this argument for us. If Somalis can’t create thriving businesses in Mogadishu, then what reason is there to assume they can in London?

The second failure has been to lamely assume that affluent residents will tolerate the degradation of their area and can’t (or won’t) move elsewhere. For years the Liberal-Left has turned a blind eye to the example of places like Bradford, in which Whites (by choice) live and work in one part of the city, and Muslims (by choice) live and work in another. Because this self-segregation violates Leftist doctrine, it is ignored completely in the relevant areas of policy, and with disastrous effect.

Back in America, the task of explaining Detroit has become a major liberal headache. One can only blame General Motors for so long and for so many things before people get wise to you. Even if it isn’t permissible to speak such things openly (yet), every American is aware that the African-American community of Detroit deserves most of the blame for the city’s downfall. All the worst elements of Black culture have come to fore here, - including victim-ideology, racism and aggressive criminality, all of which feed into and support each other.

Tiring of the hypocrisy, lies and misplaced emphases of the Detroit debate in America, Patrick Cleburne wrote the following on Conservative website Vdare: “Detroit’s history from fantastic boom to squalid collapse in barely half a century resembles that of an exhausted Klondike mining district–yet the underlying impetus, the Auto industry, has in fact gone from strength to strength. Detroit has become a laughing stock in Europe… The truth is quite simple: huge prosperity attracted an immense influx of American Blacks–whose habits of life made the city unviable. There are ways of dealing with this type of problem, but they were not adopted.”

This is as good an encapsulation of the Detroit phenomenon as you’ll find, but it isn’t universally accepted.

The Liberal Left claim that the flight of industry from Detroit is the most obvious and relevant cause of its decline. The outsourcing of car-making jobs, unwise governmental policies, police brutality, failed social programs etc… All of these are more convincing to the Left than the two seismic race riots which set in motion the emptying of Detroit’s Caucasian majority….

I’ll leave you to make up your own mind as to which is more convincing.

So what can be done to prevent more Detroits from emerging? According to the vulgar (extreme) right, this must involve the creation of cities exclusively for Whites, or at least free of a large population of Blacks.

On the surface of it, this might seem a reasonable solution, but it nevertheless has a flaw. 

There already are almost exclusively White cities in America. Throughout the North-West, such cities are plentiful. They are also culturally barren, socially tedious, Meth-ridden and economically inferior to more diverse cities like Los Angeles and New York.

A solution therefore requires a compromise between Left and Right. It’s a question as yet without an answer. How do we create a genuinely pluralist city in which no ethnic group can predominate and in which all are held to the same moral standard of behavior?

Whichever country finds a convincing answer will hold the keys to the future.

D, LDN.

Fake Historical Echoes: The Nazis, the Jews and the Muslims of Europe.

Tags

Anders Behring Breivik, Antisemitism, Counter-Jihad, Counterjihad, Cultural Marxism, Defend the modern world, Demographics of Europe, Eurabia, Heinrich Himmler, Jew, Muslims, Nazi, Nazism, No to Turkey in the EU

When addressing the tone of right-wing reaction against Islam in Europe, liberals repeatedly suggest (in place of an actual argument) the same thought-experiment. Read an article criticizing Muslims in Europe, they say, and in your mind substitute the word “Muslim(s)” for “Jew(s)”.

The desired result of the experiment is to draw attention to a perceived similarity between anti-Muslim sentiment present in Europe today, and the atmosphere of state-sponsored Anti-Semitism under the Nazis.

Many have bought into this analogy, including friends of mine who are (although unsympathetic to Islam) understandably anxious to avoid being on the wrong side of a repeated history.

Superficially I suppose, the experiment does harvest a few causes for concern, but these are usuually only found at the wild extremities of the Counter-Jihad fraternity.

Anders Behring Breivik for instance, wrote (or copy and pasted) in his manifesto that many Europeans opposed the deportation of Muslims because they each had a ‘special Mustafa’ whom they felt affection towards; a kind of ‘Good Muslim’ who, as an exception to the vulgar rule, forbade them to support any more general movement against Islam.

Reading this, Liberals were hasty (and correct) to point out an eerie likeness between Breivik’s sentiments and those expressed during Heinrich Himmler’s Posen Speech of 1943, in which the SS chief said the following: “It is one of those things that is easily said. ‘The Jewish people is being exterminated’…. And then along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew.”

Here there is a clear similarity here between Breivik’s ‘special Mustafa’, and Himmler’s ”Decent Jew’. The echo suggested is real, disturbing and I cannot argue against it. Breivik and his ilk plainly are merely substituting (in their minds and words) “Muslim” for “Jew”, and this accords with a more general fascism in the Norwegian psychopath’s mindset. In the 1930s, the likes of Breivik would have been volunteers in the SS. He is of the same human type, transported through time into a different age.

Still, Anders Breivik does not speak for all of us, or indeed anyone that I know of. Nobody of note has excused his behaviour or signed up to his endorsement of political violence. If he sought through his efforts to bring Counter-Jihad sentiment into agreement with Hitler, he has completely failed.

ii.

The Nazi party was born into an age teeming with fear. Minus the thousand coincidences of the era, it would never have succeeded. Nazi ideology too, developed not out of one but many inter-weaving currents of early Twentieth century thought. Some of these were obscure, a majority however were very mainstream. The most notable of the latter were those scientific ideas concerning race.

Victorian Racial theorists managed to reduce the whole of humanity to a few giant sub-species, each with its own pattern of behaviour and allotment of talent. The Jews were considered to be, whilst not the stupidest race, certainly the most cunning and wicked.

Jewish ‘evil’ was thus considered genetic. They behaved in the ‘wicked’ way they did, because of an inbuilt desire to conquer the world, either via communism, or decadent liberalism. This wasn’t something rooted in Judaism therefore, but in biology. No Jew could become non-Jewish, even if they tried. Whatever they attempted to be, they would always be congenitally dangerous to the gentile population.

Such themes in Anti-Semitism are still with us today. Kevin Macdonald, one of the leading Anti-Semitic intellectuals of recent history, also argues that Jews are predictable and nefarious because of their genetics. In Macdonald’s theory, this is because of their high average IQ, aggression and verbal intelligence.

This kind of biological anti-Semitism seems to be very particular to Europeans. Little about it has changed over the years, except the scientific references.

What we see in the Modern age with respect to Muslims, is entirely distinct from the history described. People who wish to see Europe preserved as an independent civilization and not subsumed into a Muslim caliphate, are plainly not the same kind as the Nazis drew from.

For a start, we are not dull-eyed and heel-clicking authoritarians, but diverse, liberal, multi-coloured, and friendly. Some of us are religious, some of us atheist. Some of us are wildly conservative, some wildly Leftist. We all understand that these things don’t really matter when addressing a threat of such wide-ranging social import.

More vitally, our arguments, unlike those of the Nazis, are entirely reasonable and consistent with established moral norms.

We don’t hate Muslims because they are brown, but because they oppress those of their fellow brown people with whom we might agree. We see what happens to secularists, free-thinkers and progressives in Muslim societies, and so we are determined to keep ours from gaining a Muslim majority.

As a general rule, Jewish suffering during the Holocaust should only really be brought up in political arguments when there is a clear and logical reason to do so, as when for example discussing Ethno-nationalist movements like the BNP, Die Unsterblichen and KKK.

Otherwise, I find it is better to be cautious around such matters, and to show a little respect.

D, LDN.

Terrorism and the English Defence League.

Tags

Community centre, Counter-Jihad, Defend the modern world, Demographics of Europe, EDL, English Defence League, Multiculturalism, Muslim, Muswell Hill

As news broke of a ‘racially-motivated’ attack on a Muslim community centre last Wednesday, sleep-deprived liberal journalists up and down the country will have been loading files they saved many months earlier.

The files being loaded will have had names like ‘Incaseofviolentbacklashagainstmuslims’, or ‘Norway part 2′ and will have brought onto their laptop screens lengthy diatribes against the right for ‘inciting’ social and political hatred.

Liberals, you see, are well prepared for this kind of thing. They’ve been predicting it since 9/11,  possibly even before. It has been to their great discomfort that so few actual events have occured after which their pre-prepared sentiments could be employed.

Until now of course. Well, we still don’t know if this was the work of an actual EDL member, but it might well be.

If confirmed as such, then expect to hear things like the following:

“The latest attack on a Muslim community centre demonstrates that extremism and terrorism are not distinct to Muslims alone, and that, if we are to be serious about tackling terror in all its forms, we must rightly treat EDL members no differently than we do Al-Muhajiroun.”

This is nonsense of course. The position of the EDL vis-à-vis Islam does not belong in the same moral universe as the position of Islamists toward the rest of us. The Islamists want us dead or subordinate. The EDL would rather preserve the status quo, not just for the sake of Christians, but Sikhs, Hindus and other minorities. In fact, contrary to the fake orthodoxy manufactured by rumour, the EDL are actually rather liberal relative to the views held by folk in more ‘respectable’ sections of society. The EDL do not propose, as others do, that Muslims be deported en masse from Western societies. Nor do its leading voices call for violence against Muslims, even against those convicted of terrorist offences.

The EDL can be best understood as a kind of crude pressure group, designed to encourage political and cultural leaders to address the problems caused by Islamic immigration. Just as UKIP will never actually attain office and thereby be able to withdraw Britain from the EU, neither will the EDL make up the totality of any solution to Islam in the UK. I don’t think Tommy Robinson, for all his gusto, believes himself to be destined for 10 Downing Street. More likely, he wants his voice, and those of his peers to be heard in 10 Downing Street. David Cameron, in keeping with a generally lacklustre approach to government, has so far had little of substance to say regarding the EDL. Famously, when once pushed for an answer, he described those who join the organization as being ‘sick’. This is offensive, stupid and clearly off the top of a very breezy mind.

Even if the arson of last Wednesday proves to be the work of someone acting in the name of the EDL, don’t be too quick to tar the peaceful majority. The EDL leadership (unlike the leaders of many Muslim organisations) have been consistent from the start in their opposition to terrorism and political violence. I hope they make crystal clear how little this kind of behavior represents them, or indeed any of us who share their ideology.

D, LDN.

 

On the Racism of Islamic Peoples.

Tags

Arab racism, Aryan, Black, Counter-Jihad, Cultural Marxism, Defend the modern world, Islamisation of London, Multiculturalism, No to Turkey in the EU, Pakistani, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Scotsman, South Kensington

Is it racist to say that some minority races are more racist than others? (try repeating that when you’re drunk). I would say that it wasn’t, but the official arbiters of what constitutes ‘racism’ would likely disagree.

According to the physics of the liberal universe, only White Northern Europeans can be actively racist. Behaviour which seems like ‘racism’ from other groups is either hallucinated or inapplicable.

We all know this conventional thinking to be absurd. We might not be open about it, but we all know it nonetheless. White Northern Europeans are plainly not the most racist ethnic group present in Britain today. They may be the majority, but that is something quite different and not a crime in itself.

So who (which ethnic group) takes the biscuit so to speak? I’ve narrowed it down to three non-White sections of society: Iranians, Arabs, and Pakistanis.

The first group to be discussed here, known variably as Iranians and/or Persians, require little introduction in a racism contest. Even within (and by the standards of) the Islamic world, Iranians are considered especially bigoted, and this includes against closely-related ethnic groups like Afghans and Pakistanis.

In Iran itself (a very divided ethnic state), the politics of racial appearance matter immensely. Nowhere has so much Europeanizing plastic surgery been expended on a population than in the Islamic Republic. Here, 40% of women under 40 have had some kind of surgery on their faces. Commonly, these procedures involve ‘de-Indianising’ native Iranian features by techniques like ‘nose sharpening’, hair-bleaching, and ‘lip streamlining’. And this isn’t just true in the motherland, but the diaspora too. It’s said (jokingly, I think) that if you light a match in the Persian area of South Kensington, you risk creating a fireball from the airborne residue of skin-lightening cream.

I remember once over-hearing a group of Iranians talking about President Obama in an SK coffee shop after his first election to office. They were excitedly inferring that the American IQ was being steadily reduced by interbreeding with ‘Niggers’ (who, incidentally, had made a pact with ‘Zionists’ to promote their assimilation). In Iran, they boasted, such people would never even be allowed to settle.

Iranian racism may derive from a long-held misunderstanding of the linguistic term ‘Aryan’, as in the term ‘Indo-Aryan languages’. The name Iran itself means ‘Land of the Aryans’ and was chosen to display sympathy with the regime of Adolf Hitler. Iranians, Afghans, Western-Indians and Pakistanis are members of an extended ethno-linguistic family with historic links to the development of European languages. If one really (and I mean really) stretches this, one can make Iranians, Indians, Pakistanis and Afghans part of the European definition. As a result, there is a notable movement among the Iranian diaspora seeking to align Iran with the extreme-right, and specifically those groups self-identified as Neo-Nazi.

Secondly, let us consider the Persians’ traditional ethnic rival, the Arabians. Some Arabs (although less racist on the whole than Iranians) are guilty specifically of anti-Black racism. In Syria and Lebanon, this chauvinism is deeply entrenched and rarely condemned. Black people in the Levant (almost always immigrant workers from East Africa) are frequently subject to verbal and physical abuse by employers and provided with lesser human rights than the majority. Even in Africa itself, such behaviour is commonplace. The genocide in Darfur, although not featuring a racial divide, was carried out by Arabic speaking Blacks against those who spoke native dialects, and was often framed in explicitly racist terms.

A more famous and less ambivalent case of race-hatred in the Arab world concerns the Jews. Long before the re-establishment of Israel, Jews were treated with suspicion by Arab populations, and many Arab leaders established favorable relations with Nazi Germany. Books like ‘Mein Kampf” and ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ became bestselling volumes shortly after their translations into Arabic. Both continue to do well to this day.

Finally, Pakistanis, being the most disliked group in modern English society, have also been known to seek comfort in racism. In their case, the targeting of the White majority.

On the 15th March 2004, Scottish teenager Kriss Donald was set upon on in Glasgow (for no other reason than his ethnicity) by a group of Pakistani Muslim men. After abducting him and driving him to a secluded location, they proceeded to torture him, repeatedly stabbing and slashing him with a kitchen knife and then finally setting his body on fire. According to The Scotsman newspaper, he died after having been set alight.

There have been many other cases of Pakistani-on-White murders, as well as innumerable cases of intimidation and harassment. All this is before we include the only recently revealed ‘grooming scandal’ which has seen young White (exclusively White) girls plied with alcohol and sedatives by Pakistani gangs and then pimped to a wide network of similar creatures.

So you see, dear reader, a case can be made that Islamic immigration not only imports the familiar curses of misogyny, homophobia and Anti-Semitism, but racism too. I should be clear in finishing that not every Iranian, Arab or Pakistani is guilty of racial hatred, and that is not the argument being put forward. I am merely pointing out that the Islamic world is infected as badly with ‘racism’ as anywhere else, and is possibly even worse. The Western world has made huge leaps forward to the point where racism is only possible underground or in private; A situation markedly different to that of modern Tehran, Cairo, and Karachi.

D, LDN.

“If you don’t like it here….?”

Tags

Anjem Choudary, Christianity and Islam, Counter-Jihad, Defend the modern world, Demographics of Europe, Deport Muslims, English Defence League, Islam, Multiculturalism, racism, Western world

“If you don’t like it here, then why don’t you f**k off back to where you came from!”

It’s a taunt as old as multicultural society itself, but this – the oldest and most basic expression of xenophobic discomfort is still one of the most effective available.

There was a time when this phrase was directed against all kinds of people with immigrant-origins - from African pensioners to Asian shopkeepers to Mixed-race schoolchildren. Nowadays (thankfully) it seems reserved exclusively for use against the Muslim population of the Anglophone West.

I’m not sure precisely how we ought to deal with this, morally-speaking; a phenomenon that began as lazy and randomly (mis)directed, and yet which now seems so neat and reasonable. I suppose it depends on whether something originally racist can become non-racist in a different context.

Racial hatred, at least of an explicit kind, has long gone out of fashion in the Western world and few openly espouse it. Consequently, when someone uses a phrase like the above, it sounds like a reversion to something every immigrant knows they no longer have to put up with.

This is understandable, but a shame nonetheless. As phrases go, this one is actually quite helpful, especially in todays context of Islamisation.

When applied against Muslims, this taunt manages to get to the heart of Islamist hypocrisy but at the same time bypass any reference to their race and/or appearance. It’s worth repeating to consider again….

“If you don’t like it here, then why don’t you fuck off back to where you came from!”

The first part of this insult (if it is one) presupposes that the Muslim in question has made a complaint about Western society, and has suggested that his (Islamic) way of living would make a superior replacement. This is becoming ever more regular, and will only carry on increasing alongside the numbers of the Muslim population itself. I no longer feel any surprise when I am told by Muslim proselytizers that Britain (and the West) is a moral sewer and that “Islam is the answer”.

The second part, “Why don’t you fuck off back to where you came from!”, should be properly understood as a question, even if it was meant originally to be rhetorical. It is one worth asking repeatedly…..

Why don’t Muslims, who say they dislike the licentiousness of Western life, move to a state run along Islamic lines?

Evasive answers to this – for example, “I was born here” should be discounted. Being born somewhere is not a tether which cannot be cut. I too was born here, but I often consider moving.

The real answer, and the one Muslims will never provide, is that they know (deep-down) that Western society is superior to the societies of their ethnic homelands; that the West is richer and happier, as well as more advanced and free and allowing of difference than Pakistan or Qatar.

They don’t leave because they don’t want to leave.

There is a yawning disconnect here, between what Muslims are told by religious elders to believe, and what their life-experience has shown them. When the tension between these two realities becomes unbearable, then the Western Muslim usually does one of two things – he either becomes an extremist, or (more rarely) he leaves Islam. Both occasions present ways of getting rid of the Muslim in question, either by replacing him with a prison-number, or else with a newly formed Christian/atheist.

Consequently, the harvest of “If you don’t like it here…” usually rewards the labour (and risk) of planting it.

D, LDN.

Still Shining: London Despite Islam.

Tags

Counter-Jihad, Counterjihad, Defend the modern world, Demographics of Europe, Feminism, Islamisation of London, Islamization, london, Multiculturalism, Piccadilly Circus

“Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
— Samuel Johnson

I decided to write this post after a commenter on this blog appeared to confuse my worry over the Islamisation of parts of London with a negative diagnosis of the city as a whole. More specifically, he/she wrote…

“I knew Paris was bad these days, but I had no idea London was a dump too!”

That word – ‘dump’, got to me a bit. I knew perfectly well what he/she was referring to and how I might have given that impression, but I nevertheless felt somewhat traitorous to my home for having given it.

Now, of course it’s true (and after the murder of Lee Rigby, even liberals won’t deny) that London has a problem with Islam. There are more Muslims as a proportion of population in Greater London than in Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, New York, Washington DC, Boston, Rome, Moscow or Berlin. A great mass of historic land has been culturally paved over with something entirely foreign and historically hostile. 

Even away from recognized ’Islamic areas’, this presence makes itself known in countless ways, almost all of them negative. Most of the heroin trade in London is now attended to by Turkish gangs. Pakistanis and Bangladeshis monopolise organized paedophilia, low-level thieving and terrorism. The Albanian mafia is feared throughout central London by businesses, indigenous criminals, and newly smuggled immigrant workers alike. Most visibly, the diet of the general population is being constantly degraded by an ever-expanding number of kebab stores which themselves have displaced traditional British eateries throughout the inner city.

But… And it’s a big ‘but’ (and I cannot lie), London remains by any measure the greatest city in the EU, and one of the most interesting, vital and exhilarating in the world.

At 7pm, on any day of the week, if you place yourself somewhere in Piccadilly Circus say, with about 100 pounds cash in your pocket; then from that position, with those means, and without ever having to travel more than a subway or taxi ride, you can experience almost anything. London has it all – good and bad, legal and illegal, loving and hateful, healthy and lethal.

You might say, ‘Well, that’s nothing special. Most cities are like that’….. But you’d be wrong.

Paris for example has become notorious across the continent for its lack of nightlife, over-enthusiastic police, and draconian licensing laws. Berlin hasn’t been a city of pleasure since the Weimer Republic and Rome is more an open-air museum than a living environment.

London – by contrast – is the capital of the EU for pretty much everything; Sex, art, business, pleasure, music, violence, sport, history, drugs, conversation, fine-dining, luxury etc….

I still remember the moment I decided to devote my energies to moving here. I was on a day-trip to the city with my parents. We went to see a West-End musical and did some shopping on Oxford Street. Both the shopping and the musical bored me to tears, but the rest of the experience enthralled me. I found the buildings and atmosphere quite magical. Everything was bigger here. Everything was brighter, louder, and more important than in Bristol or my parental hometown. I began to dream of setting up a life within the M25.

My favourite part of the Capital has always been the connected but various districts of South Kensington, Earl’s Court, Hammersmith and Fulham. These aren’t the kind of places which attract tourists (the exception being Exhibition Road in SK), and on first sight, they don’t seem to be particularly interesting, but it is the gift of experience that one grows fond of small trees, rough stones, and local faces, and these streets are now far more impressive to me than Charing Cross or Westminster. If one walks down Exhibition Road on the opposite side to the Science Museum, one can notice small craters in the marble along the walls. A small plaque informs the visitor that this damage was achieved by the Nazi Luftwaffe during the Blitz, and that they have been preserved to remind us of the national sacrifice of that period. It’s little things like that which endear me more than Elephentine monuments or crowds of pigeons.

The only real rival to London in the Western world is, of course, New York. For at least 100 years, these two cities have been both hard-hearted rivals and good-natured siblings. Both are centres of global finance, and both usually make up the alternating No.1 and No.2 positions in global rankings for the best place to eat, holiday or study etc… Still, despite any similarities, I have no desire to live in New York as long as London remains standing.

Educated conversation in London these days involves a variety of dystopian predictions about the future. For Liberals, the Thames is rising perilously, alongside national debt and economic inequality. For the Right, the skin-tone of the city is ‘browning’. None of these fears interest me. I don’t particularly care about the ‘ethnic balance’ of my town, and I would never believe a word from anyone self-described as ‘green’. It is Islamisation alone that concerns me, and gives me cause to worry for the future. Everything else appears compatible, even synergistic.

Anyway, this is just a clarification. In spite of everything, London remains a wonderful place to be.

D, LDN.

Appreciating Mark Steyn.

Tags

America Alone, Christianity and Islam, Christopher Caldwell, Christopher Hitchens, Counter-Jihad, Defend the modern world, Demographics of Europe, English Defence League, Eurabia, Mark Steyn, Oriana Fallaci, Pamela Geller, Paul Berman, Sam Harris, United States, Zionism

The Counter-Jihad movement (and its underlying intellectual tendency) originated in different places, depending on who you ask. 

For some, ‘Counter-Jihad’ sentiment is merely the delayed reaction to 9/11 by the Western moral majority, with the delay usually attributed to political correctness and a lack of organization in the years following the attack. 

For others, it was the work of the ‘New Atheists’ which first prepared the ground for popular ‘Islamophobia’, and by this they usually intend the work of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris.

For me though, the real turning point, and the one which has enabled the loud, confident voice now afforded to us, was the publication in 2006, of a polemic entitled ’America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it’, by Canadian author Mark Steyn.

Outside of actual events (like 9/11, 7/7 etc..), this slim volume ranks as one of the most commonly cited reasons for independent conversions to the anti-Islamist cause both in Britain and America. Time and time again, I read or hear people say something like the following -

“I was absolutely convinced by the whole Left-wing argument. I opposed the war in Iraq. I thought the West was evil and trying to steal the oil and that terrorists were just reasonably angry people fighting back…. But then I read this book called ’America Alone’, and I switched sides overnight.” 

That’s quite something. Great polemical books are known to make you question your beliefs, but it usually take a few of them to spin you exactly around.

There are, of course, a great many other talented authors within this tendency. I’ve mentioned elsewhere the work of Oriana Fallaci, Fjordman, and Paul Berman. Steyn’s book however, unlike the work of these authors, does something more than convince you of a certain position; it makes you pity those who aren’t convinced, embarrassed that you were ever aligned differently, and desperate to go out and persuade others …

The explanation for the book’s quasi-religious power is simple: Mr Steyn is a very funny man indeed.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like the other authors mentioned immensely, but they all - to varying degrees – neglect the resource of humour as a means of potentiating their arguments, and this is a shame. It makes for a rather one-dimensional experience. One can read their books (the content of which addresses precisely the same topic as Steyn’s) and be nothing but depressed, shocked and occasionally stirred to action. By contrast, one can guiltlessly relish reading about pretty much any subject - terrorism, mass-murder, Fascism, American decline etc… so long as it is Mr Steyn describing it.

I am currently reading the follow-up to ‘America Alone’, which is called ‘After America: Get Ready for Armageddon’. In this volume, the author turns away from Europe to consider the prognosis of the American economy should it continue with the Socialist experiment initiated by President Obama. As with the previous book, there is much ‘laughter in the dark’ to be had here, as well as some substantial arguments worth pondering further. Also as in ‘America Alone’, Mr Steyn slips regularly in and out of the comedic voice in order to perfectly frame each argument. The resulting narrative hits the target perfectly.

It might sound like an insult, but Steyn is not just an involving writer, but a very skilled propagandist; his writing is instructive for anyone wanting to learn the art of persuasion, whether for an ideological or personal cause. Consider this nicely phrased and gently stirring excerpt:

“Micro-regulation is micro-tyranny, a slithering, serpentine network of insinuating Ceaucescu and Kim Jong-Il mini-me’s. It’s time for the mass rejection of their diktats. A political order that subjects you to the caprices of faceless bureaucrats or crusading “judges” merits no respect. To counter the Bureau of Compliance, we need an Alliance of Non-Compliance to help once free people roll back the regulatory state.”

That’s so much better than the dry, mechanical, graduate language of the modern press, don’t you think?

On his website, Mr Steyn is not advertised as a strictly comic voice, but more as an independent journalist, similar in kind to those popular on the American radio circuit. I suppose this is accurate enough; the author can be drab and serious when it serves his argument to be so. 

But it’s the ability to make people laugh when they should rightfully be crying that has won Steyn global acclaim. 

His work provides valuable evidence of the power of comedy to carry a political message to greater distances than sobriety and exactness alone.

D, LDN.

In Defence of the ‘Backlash’.

Tags

BBC, BNP, Christianity and Islam, Counter-Jihad, David Cameron, Defend the modern world, English Defence League, Help for Heroes, Islam, Lee Rigby, Multiculturalism, Woolwich

The word ‘backlash’ is a curious one to apply to the mood of English society following the events of last week. Nevertheless, the BBC, Daily Telegraph and numerous other media outlets invariably chose to label the atmosphere of disgust created by the slaying of Lee Rigby, an ‘Anti-Muslim backlash’, as if it were a change of heart, or an irrational misunderstanding.

The word ‘backlash’ is usually employed when talking about something that has previously been over-praised. The television series ‘The Office’ for example was praised so much and so often, that within weeks of the final episode being broadcast, pop-culture scribblers began to predict a ‘backlash’ against it. For me this isn’t what we’ve witnessed after Woolwich.

There has not been so much a backlash as a sequence of natural responses to evil by a morally healthy population.

The day before last, some hot-headed liberal emailed this blogger to accuse me of taking pleasure in the Woolwich tragedy. He charged me with being ‘excited and delighted’ by the event and the way it would bolster my ‘prejudiced worldview’…

He’s wrong about ‘delight’, but I won’t lie and say he is entirely wrong regarding ‘excitement’. Something within me was undeniably excited when news broke of the attack. It was the urge to take the battle to the enemy. I knew this particular atrocity would prove more socially explosive than the usual assaults on our transport infrastructure. The victim was a young, rosy-cheeked soldier wearing a ‘Help for Heroes’ sweater. His killer was a Qur’an-quoting thug showing zero remorse. How could people not be angered by something like that?

Still, I’m far from justifying everything that has occurred since then. According to the BBC, there have been arson attempts on Mosques, Death threats sent to Islamic community centres, and racist graffiti painted on the walls of multicultural enclaves. Most famously, a Muslim woman in Woolwich was rumoured to have had her Hijab ripped off by a passing youth.

I won’t defend the breaking of the law. But as to the people who commit these actions, they are not without legitimate grievance. Our elected leaders are plainly doing nothing to address the conditions which led to the murder. David Cameron spoke, ludicrously, of the attack as being a ‘betrayal of Islam’, and not, as a braver leader might have put it, an ‘application’ of the faith. With leaders like these, how are young people supposed to feel?

The exception to all this moping about has been – predictably – the English Defence League. Just hours after the murder occurred, EDL activists were in Woolwich, chanting and making themselves known. They were filling a void left by our police, our politicians and our media.

Lamentably, the same old classist rhetoric has come forth from those who should know better. Yes, yes, we know most EDL members are (gasp!) ‘working class’, and that consequently they sound different to the people who read the news. That doesn’t make them any less human, or any less English, or their patriotism any less valuable.

The poor are always more essential in times of conflict than the rich. It’s been that way in this country for centuries. Shakespeare wrote these lines in ‘Richard II’:

‘The pale-face’d moon looks bloody on the earth
And lean-look’d prophets whisper fearful change;
Rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war.’

What was true in Shakespeare’s age is true in ours. The chattering classes in London want to deny that war is upon us because they fear the conditions of war; they fear ’losing what they enjoy’. The ruffians by contrast, with nothing to play with but abstract ideals like Queen and country, are joyfully stepping up to the plate. Good for them, I say!

Soon, the dust will settle on this particular tragedy. Anger cannot last forever and grows weary like any other emotion. But from what I’ve seen during this ‘backlash’, the people of this country are louder, braver and more morally confident than ever before. We may not be there yet, but we are getting closer to the event which finally brings the country, young and old, into concert.

For now, let’s wish the EDL well. I hope they succeed in making clear to the Muslim community that England is not a faint or negotiable concept – and that once roused, its people do not fall quickly back to sleep.

D, LDN.

Can Finland Rescue Scandinavia?

Tags

Counter-Jihad, Cultural Marxism, Defend the modern world, FInland, Islamization, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, Rape, Sweden riots, True Finns

Much to the bemusement of friends, I’ve long been fascinated with the nation of Finland. So strange is it apparently considered to admire this country in particular that some people - upon hearing of my interest for the first time - reply with…

“Are you sure you don’t mean Sweden?”.

I’m perfectly sure, I tell them, but my affection does broaden out to Scandinavia as a whole. Like many others in Britain, I’ve often been taken in by the magical propaganda of the Nordic tourism industry, according to which Sweden is a glistening socialist paradise replete with green fields, cut-diamond fjords, and blonde temptresses emerging from clearwater lakes.

It’s not like that of course, and nor is Denmark or Norway, sadly. While it’s true that these were once very coherent and unusually peaceful societies, they have over time succumbed to the same programme of ethnic displacement and eventual Islamisation as everyone else.

But there are gradations to this general malady. Finland remains the most well-preserved of Nordic societies, and currently has a better (by which I mean lower) Muslim population percentage than New Zealand, America, Australia and even Japan. Naturally I’m keen to visit the country, if only to see what has been lost in its neighbouring states.

Part of what fascinates me about Suomi is the famed resilience of its population. Finland was the only nation in the world to successfully defend itself against both Nazism and Communism. The victory of the Finnish ‘ghost army’ against the Soviet Union has now become legendary. A small yet brilliantly talented country saw off the full-might of the Red Army, unaided, and in the most extreme physical conditions imaginable.

So splendored and morally clean is modern Finnish history, that Finnish Marxists have never been able to degrade let alone wipe out Finnish patriotism. In Finland, it is still considered perfectly rational and non-’hateful’ to be proud of ones ancestors. Compare this to the situation in Sweden, Denmark or (especially since 2011) Norway.

As I viewed the news yesterday, and saw the flickering embers of what used to be called ‘Stockholm’, my thoughts were drawn to Sverige’s Eastern neighbor, and to the question of what Finns think about when they see these riots. Are they sympathetic or chauvinistic? Do Finns feel an innate affiliation with other Scandinavians, or do they view themselves as a Finno-Ugric nation apart? Throughout this piece, I have referred to Finland as a ‘Nordic’ country. But this in-itself is controversial with many ethno-nationalists. Adolf Hitler, that humourless Austrian meth-head, believed that Finland wasn’t even part of Europe and only granted it ‘honorary Aryan’ status in his foreign policy. Since I despise ethno-nationalism and all its confusions, I’ll stick with ‘Nordic’ just to confuse them further.

Sweden, unlike Suomi, has a much-advertised problem with Neo-Nazism. As ever with claims originating from Left-wing publications, I can’t be sure whether these are always true, but I have seen some disturbing (photographic and literary) evidence of Swedish affection for the National Socialist idea online. In Finland this is rarer, and for good reason. For the majority of Europe, common memory of the Nazis has them as reprehensible but nevertheless impressive conquerors; something quite easy, then (if one sees nothing wrong with doing so) to romanticize. Not so in Finland. For Finns, the Nazis were both despicable and militarily inferior. The Finnish army drove the Nazis out of Lapland in 1944.

But it’s not just bravery that sets the country apart. Finland’s culture too is worthier of note than countless examples of greater fame. The Finnish language is (or should be) a European treasure, being one of those rare Western dialects that not only sounds seductive and intelligent, but also looks as or more beautiful when written down.

I notice that in the midst of the Islamisation of Europe, people often try to console themselves by mentioning fake ‘sanctuaries from Islam’ like Switzerland, Belgium and even Russia, to which presumably Europeans could flee in a time of crisis. As you’ll know, educated reader, these places are in even worse straits than Britain or France.

Finland by contrast, remains today what it was in World War 2, an island of strength and refusal, a relic of archaic health;

And, in the context of the future, perhaps a spacious lifeboat for those fleeing less courageous nations.

D, LDN.

On the EDL, the BNP and the Difference Between Them.

Tags

Counter-Jihad, Defend the modern world, English Defence League, BNP, Eurabia, Tommy Robinson, Demographics of Europe, Nick Griffin, Jessica Ennis, Far-right politics

I’ve loved the English Defence League from the moment of its inception. After years of the anti-Islam cause being copyrighted by the ‘blood and honour’ lunatics of the Far-Right, here at last was a collective to stand just as ferociously against the Islamist tide as the BNP, but at the same stroke commit themselves to Britain in its modern, multiracial, capitalist reality.

This was a first in British, and arguably European political history; a splintering of the ‘far-right’ away from biological nationalism towards the grander domain of culture.

Since then, I’ve done my best to support them, writing about them frequently and defending them from the (predictable yet incessant) accusations of the Liberal-Left. I’ve never been part of an EDL procession myself, but I’ve witnessed them from the sidelines many times. They seem to be wonderful affairs, loudly despised by everyone I oppose. True to its ideals, the EDL on parade contains quite a mixture of social types. Just go along and see them and you’ll find young and old, Black and White, straight and gay, Christian and Sikh, Jew and Gentile etc… all united for a common end. Not since the early days of Communism could such a phenomenon have organically occurred so often.

The EDL leadership is preferable to that of the traditional Right too. Tommy Robinson/Stephen Lennon may not be an eloquent, academic type, but he seems perfectly sincere in his beliefs and pleasant in their expression. He’s never denied the Holocaust, or involved himself on matters of race-relations, or called into question the validity of the Capitalist system. He’s just a patriotic, affable young man who wants Britain to go back to how it once was, by which he means how it was in the 1980s and 1990s before the Blair-wave of immigration, and not, like Mr Griffin, back to the Victorian era.

Every time Tommy Robinson is interviewed on Newsnight, I like to imagine Nick Griffin sitting at home with his rottweilers and a large glass of scotch, seething at the screen. He must loathe the attention heaped on this young man, and more than this, he must resent the ability of his organisation to get boots on the street in a way the BNP could never do.

But it isn’t just personalities that divide EDL and BNP, but principles too. The ideological differences between the two groups are worth returning to again and again. Despite the myths and fables put about by Liberal crazies, they really are nothing like each other.

To understand why, consider two cases of modern British ‘diversity’; first, the mixed-race athlete Jessica Ennis, and secondly, the British-based Jordanian preacher Abu Qatada. These aren’t two names you’ll often read in the same paragraph as each other let alone sentence, but stay with me on this one….

According to BNP ideology, the former, as a product of Black-White miscegenation, represents as much of a threat to British survival as the latter, perhaps even more. The latter by contrast could even be considered an ally against the famous ‘Jewish conspiracy’  deemed responsible for the very climate of ‘race-mixing’ in which beautiful creatures like Ms Ennis are created.

For the EDL, the second is an anti-Semitic crank and national-security threat who should be immediately deported, while the first is the opposite of a threat; she is a reason to hoist the flag higher and sing the anthem with greater enthusiasm.

Do you understand? The BNP is a blind alley. Only fools are still found running up it. The EDL, together with parties friendly to it like Liberty GB, are a surer bet, and though I don’t like to invest much hope in any political force, perhaps together they can be the answer we’ve been waiting for.

D, LDN.