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A real Diamond

Michael Hart’s Understanding Human History

27.02.2009. The following are excerpts from an article by Steve Sailer at Vdare.com:

The ambitious History of Everything book has been an important genre at least since Sir Walter Raleigh's The Historie of the World.

The most popular example of recent years: Jared Diamond's 1997 bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond attempted to explain the always-interesting question of who conquered whom over the last 13,000 years without mentioning differences in average intelligence among human groups—a factor that he ruled out, a priori, as too "racist" and "loathsome" even to think about.

Now, there's another entry in this genre: Michael H. Hart's Understanding Human History: An analysis including the effects of geography and differential evolution (Washington Summit Publishers, pp. 484, $24.95).

Hart's book serves as a comprehensive refutation of Guns, Germs, and Steel. It’s an impressive and insightful attempt to provide a more careful and powerful answer to Diamond's question about why some peoples came to rule other peoples.

Unlike Diamond, Hart is also interested in a second, less bloodthirsty question: who gave what to the entire human race in terms of science, technology, and the arts.

This is a fascinating topic—but one that the Diamonds of the world shy away from, since measuring contributions rather than conquests don't present an opportunity for the competitive moralism, the public white-guilt breast-beating afforded by the European expansion of 1400-1900.

Over the same period, as everyone knows deep down, virtually every advance that is now the shared patrimony of humanity was made by Europeans or their offshoots. These days, that’s a rather inconvenient truth.

Hart sums up:

"The central hypothesis of this book is that genetic differences between human groups (in particular, differences in average native intelligence) have been an important factor in human history."

Hart is a polymath: a rocket scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy who worked at NASA and was a physics professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Along the way, he picked up a law degree. Every decade or two, Hart publishes a book for a general audience.

Continue reading at Vdare.com.

Wilders in Washington

His speech in the U. S. Senate Capitol Building

27.02.2009. February 26th 2009, Geert Wilders gave a speech in the Lyndon B. Johnson Room of the U. S. Senate Capitol Building. The event was sponsored by The Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney and The International Free Press Society’s Lars Hedegaard. Both men were in attendance during the speech. Continue reading at Gates of Vienna.

From Meccania to Atlantis Part 8

Drenched to the Bone

21.02.2009. Another excellent essay in an ongoing series by Takuan Seiyo has been released. Here are some excerpts from Part 8 - Drenched to the Bone (emphasis added):

It is the founding premise of this series that the central undertaking of Western Society in the last 45 years – the attempt to “diversify” itself and to equalize by fiat all people and categories of people, cultures, lifestyles, ideas and religions – has caused a catastrophic misapplication of human energy, attention and resources. [...]

In 1963, perhaps the year in which the West took the decisive step on the road leading to the crumbling Babel of now, Bob Dylan released a song that would become a hymn of the irrationalists of the Left (i.e. Pods): The Times They Are a-Changin’. It’s been known ever since as the archetypical protest song, and has been recorded by every major leftoid singer with a big heart and a small left brain. There are versions by Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Tracy Chapman, videos by miscellaneous Obama worshippers and so on. This is the song’s opening stanza:

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Good poet though he is, perception and analysis of social reality have never been Mr. Dylan’s strong points. And so, the “Civil Rights” struggle on behalf of America’s blacks and egalitarian potheads that The Times are a-Changin’ has come to symbolize would metastize into a cult of fraudulent equality of all and everything, allowing not even the distinction between the host-civilization’s self-preservation and self-erasure.

[...]

The multiparty system of Western democracies no longer works in the interest of the societies that legitimize it. No matter which party is in power, it serves these primary causes to one degree or another:

(1) To rob the productive minority [...]

(2) To enlarge the voting franchise [...]

(3) To enlarge the pool of locked-in votes further by importing more tax-eaters from Third-World countries.

(4) To stigmatize or punish by law any public discussion of racial, ethnic, religious and gender differences with respect to mean IQs and behavioral traits. Such differences are the primary cause for the disparities in educational achievement, income, criminality, social acclimatization and even health indicators in the multi-racial Western society. Therefore, the anathema ensures that the system will continue showering ever-greater sums of money to “solve” disparities that are unsolvable. Likewise, the system will impose ever-more repressive restrictions on the whole of society, because applying them just to the preponderantly dysfunctional segments would explode the central taboo on discriminating reality from ideology (6).

(5) To dumb-down public education in order to further disguise the racial and ethnic IQ differences and education-related cultural traits. An additional benefit of this dumbing-down is the politicians’ enhanced ability to bamboozle most of the electorate most of the time.

(6) To dumb-down the electorate yet further through scrupulous noninterference in “Freedom of Speech” when it comes to the giant stream of puerile, moronic, decadent and degrading “entertainment” washing away the Western peoples’ brains and culture, while interfering with the very same freedom of speech with an iron hand when it comes to people who speak the truth about the West’s dire condition and its causes.

Read the entire essay at The Brussels Journal.

Fleeing from South Africa

Fourteen years after apartheid, why are the best and the brightest leaving Africa's most successful state?

20.02.2009. No one should be surprised to read that Zimbabwe has suffered massive emigration in recent years, especially among its white minority. But much less expected is the fact that next-door South Africa, the continent's wealthiest and most developed country, is suffering a brain drain of its own (if on a smaller scale). Thus begins a report in Newsweek. The article later continues:

The primary driver for emigration among all groups, but especially whites, who still retain the majority of South Africa's wealth, is fear of crime. With more than 50 killings a day, South Africa has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world. The same goes for rape—ranking the country alongside conflict zones such as Sierra Leone, Colombia and Afghanistan. Future Fact polling indicates that more than 95 percent of those eager to leave South Africa rate violent crime as the single most important factor affecting their thinking. Lynette Chen, the ethnic-Chinese CEO of Nepad Business Group, is the only member of her family left in South Africa. Her parents departed in 2002 after being carjacked—twice. Her brother, also a victim of crime, followed suit shortly thereafter. "They're always getting homesick," she says. "But they won't come back unless the crime is reduced."

Another largely unnoticed problem is the growing number of attacks on South Africa's white farmers. As in neighboring Zimbabwe, some of the attacks appear to be racially motivated. Others seem simply opportunistic, but the result is that white farmers' numbers continue to decrease, leading to fears that despite the government's good intentions, a Zimbabwe-style crisis—where the flight of skilled farmers led to an agricultural collapse—is possible here too.

Then there's the problem of affirmative action, which many whites feel limits their opportunities for advancement and which keeps many émigrés from returning. "You can attract people home, but there are still the same concerns when they get here," Chen says. "Crime and lack of job opportunities if you're not the right color."

Read the entire article in Newsweek.

HonestThinking comments: No matter how you look at it, achieving peaceful coexistence of multiple races in a single country is a non-trivial task. The primary challenge has to do with people's sense of loyalty, identity, and belonging; the secondary challenge has to do with mental and intellectual differences. Whether the explanation for the IQ gap is hereditarian or environmental, the related challenges are still going to be enormous, and affirmative action just seems to aggravate the tensions. South Africa appears to be heading down the same path as Zimbabwe, and both Europe and America have just seen the beginning of their challenges in this area.

Multiculturalism

Time to face the truth

19.02.2009. About three years ago Professor Frank Ellis of Leeds University submitted the article Time to face the truth about Multiculturalism to the university newspaper Leeds Student. Because of this article, he was suspended from the university. Later that year he accepted early retirement. While I am somewhat uncomfortable with the tone of some of the paragraphs of this article, it does indeed hit the nail on the head over and over again.

Multiculturalism is doomed to failure for the simple and obvious reason that the whole thing is a big lie. We are not all equal. How could evolution over the life history of human beings possibly have caused us all to have the same physical and mental endowments? The odds against any such thing happening, are astronomical.

And even if we all were equal, human nature would still ensure that the multicultural experiment, at least the way it is currently managed, is destined for disaster.

The following are excerpts from Professor Ellis' article Time to face the truth about Multiculturalism:

Multiculturalism (multiracialism) is doomed to failure—and is failing—because it is based on the lie that all people, races and cultures are equal; that no one race or culture is better (superior) than any other. I see no evidence for the view that all cultures are equal, but vast amounts against it. To believe that all cultures are equal—and ultimately in the absence of any evidence for, it is the psychology of political fanaticism with which one is dealing here—requires the same hatred and wilful refusal to confront evidence, logic and history that characterised the individuals who believed that Stalin had built paradise on earth when in fact he had exterminated millions of so-called class enemies. When you point out to these people, as I have over the years, that, as a consequence of Uncle Jo’s Final Solution of the Peasant Question, some 11,000,000 (yes 11,000,000!) peasants were slaughtered so as to break the rural way of life and to impose collectivization, all you get are despicable, cowardly evasions along the lines that such numbers are CIA propaganda. Cowardice, evasions, lying, hypocrisy and censorship of views they do not like, all typify the range of responses from what I call the Guardian-reading classes to any evidence that multiculturalism, their Neo-Marxist fantasy, is not working. Indeed it never will work, but when it starts to unravel, as Yugoslavia eventually did, we will all suffer.

Crucial to the multicultural experiment is the assertion that there is no such thing as race; that race has nothing to do with genetics or biology. Here, for example, is what Bhikhu Parekh, the editor of a very nasty anti-white tract, The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (Profile Books, London, 2000), has to say on the subject of race: ‘Race, as is now widely acknowledged, is a social and political construct, not a biological or genetic fact. It cannot be used scientifically to account for the wide range of differences among peoples’ (Parekh, 2000, 63).

In a letter dated 6th September 2001—a mere five days before we were given a demonstration of what happens when multiculturalism displaces sensible immigration policies in the USA—I wrote to Parekh. Referring to his assertion about race’s being a social and political construct, I sought clarification. ‘I must’, I wrote, ‘confess that it is not at all clear to me that race is “widely acknowledged” to be “a social and political construct”. By whom exactly is this assertion “widely acknowledged”? In the hope of being enlightened I checked your list of secondary literature on pages 378-399 but I could find no reference to any recent study, article or monograph, that would support your assertion (possible of course that I missed the sources). For example, I found none of the following major studies in the field in your bibliography: Jared Taylor, Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America (1992); Michael Levin, Why Race Matters: Race Differences and What they Mean (1997); Arthur Jensen, The g factor: the Science of Mental Ability (1998); J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution and Behaviour, 3rd edition, (2000); and Jon Entine, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About it (2000). The Bell Curve is cited, though without the indicative sub-title, Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, but no attempt is made in the report to refute the Murray & Herrnstein thesis, which, had it been made, might well have provided some basis for your assertion on page 63. Assuming that I have not missed the source(s) in the bibliography, what exactly are the primary scientific sources on which you rely to assert that race is a social and biological construct, as opposed to its being a biological and genetic fact?’ Needless to say, I received no reply from Parekh. I had called his bluff. He knew it and he ran away. (For a comprehensive analysis of the Parekh Report and its anti-white racism, see Frank Ellis, ‘Race, Marxism and the “Deconstruction” of the United Kingdom’, The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, vol 26, No 4, Winter 2001, pp.691-718).

Now the people who believe that race is a social and political construct are like the Marxists who preached “the brotherhood of man” only to see it all unravel in 1914. They remind me of the professional, serial liars who went to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, at the very time when Stalin was killing and killing again, returned to the comforts of the liberal-democratic societies they purported to despise, and then had the repulsive effrontery to insist that Stalin was building a new civilization. So we know the sort of people with whom we are dealing.

One of the high points of 2005 was the publication of a superb article in which the world’s two greatest experts on race and race differences, Professors Arthur Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton, summarised and analyzed the findings on the subject over the last thirty years (see J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur R. Jensen, ‘Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability’, Psychology, Public Policy and Law, Volume 11, Number 2, June 2005, pp.235-294. For background detail on the history of the physical and bureaucratic terror used to silence these pioneering scholars see my entry, ‘Race and IQ’, in Derek Jones, ed., Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, vol 3, Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001, pp.2008-2010). [...]

Meanwhile the Labour government, aided and abetted by cowardly and despicable Tories, will push through ever harsher legislation to silence critics and where that fails, they will subject them to legal and bureaucratic intimidation. This is the context to the Griffin and Collet trial. Indeed, the process of turning Britain into some kind of Peoples Democracy, along the lines of the old German “Democratic” Republic, is well under way. My freedoms, among them the all important free speech, are only secure when my fellow citizens can exercise the same freedoms. An attack on their freedoms is manifestly an attack on mine. Regardless of what one thinks of the BNP’s leader, if Griffin can be treated in this manner, none of us is safe from the Police. In the words of Martin Niemöller: ‘First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist; then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist; then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist; then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew; then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me’. You have been warned.

Frank Ellis was a speaker at the 2000 AR conference. His subject, all too appropriate in retrospect, was "Racial Hysteria in Britain."

Read the entire article here at HT.

What’s up with white women?

Thought provoking observations from an American Indian

18.02.2009. “Look, Dr. Yeagley, I don’t see anything about my culture to be proud of. It’s all nothing. My race is just nothing.” Thus begins David Yeagley his article What's up with white women?. He continues:

The girl was white. She was tall and pretty, with amber hair and brown eyes. For convenience’ sake, let’s call her “Rachel.”

I had been leading a class on social psychology, in which we discussed patriotism – what it means to be a people or a nation. The discussion had been quite lively. But when Rachel spoke, everyone fell silent.

“Look at your culture,” she said to me. “Look at American Indian tradition. Now I think that’s really great. You have something to be proud of. My culture is nothing.”

“You’re not proud to be American?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m happy to be American, but I’m not proud of how America came about.”

Her choice of words was telling. She was “happy” to be an American. But not “proud” of it.

On one level, I wasn’t surprised. I knew the head of our American History department at Oklahoma State University-OKC, and I recognized his hackneyed liberal jargon in Rachel’s words. She had taken one of his courses, with predictable results.

Yet, I was still stunned. Her words disturbed and offended me in a way that I could not quite enunciate.

I could hardly concentrate the rest of the day. I lay awake that night thinking about what she had said.

On the surface, she was paying me a compliment. She was praising my Indian culture, at the expense of her own. Why, then, did it feel so much like a slap in the face?

As I lay awake that night, I thought of an old story by Kay Boyle, written in 1941, called “Defeat.” It’s about the French women in the German-occupied village of Pontcharra. All the French men were away at war. It was the 14th of July, Bastille Day, when Frenchmen were usually proud to be French. The village women, however, chose that day to give in to the German men.

They did it innocently enough. The women just wanted to wear their fancy holiday dresses. They wanted to drink and dance. And the Germans were the only men around with whom they could do it.

So they gave in.

The Cheyenne people have a saying: A nation is never conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.

That’s what I thought about as I lay there, with Rachel’s words running over and over in my mind. “My race is just nothing…. ” she had said. “My culture is nothing.”

After class, one older white student, a husband and father, had exchanged glances with me on the way out. He said to me in a low voice, “I don’t want her on my team!”

I understood what he meant. Frankly, I wouldn’t want her on my team either. A woman who won’t be true to her own people certainly won’t be true to someone else’s. Continue reading at badeagle.com.

See also his more recent article: What’s Up With White Women—And White Men?.

HonestThinking comments: Westerners should heed the Cheyenne saying quoted above: A nation is never conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Part of the reason we continue to race towards extinction, is that many of our women no longer identify, or feel any loyalty towards, their own people.

The House of Lords speech

What Wilders would have said If Britain allowed free speech

18.02.2009. Below are excerpts of the text of the address that Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders was invited to deliver at the House of Lords on Thursday, February 12, 2009. Instead of making this address and showing his film Fitna, he was detained by UK immigration officials on his arrival at London Heathrow airport and sent back to the Netherlands as a risk to “public security” (the entire text is available from The Brussels Journal):

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much.

Thank you for inviting me. Thank you Lord Pearson and Lady Cox for showing Fitna [see it here], and for your gracious invitation. While others look away, you seem to understand the true tradition of your country, and a flag that still stands for freedom.

This is no ordinary place. This is not just one of England’s tourist attractions. This is a sacred place. This is the mother of all Parliaments, and I am deeply humbled to speak before you.

The Houses of Parliament is where Winston Churchill stood firm, and warned – all throughout the 1930’s – for the dangers looming. Most of the time he stood alone.

In 1982 President Reagan came to the House of Commons, where he did a speech very few people liked. Reagan called upon the West to reject communism and defend freedom. He introduced a phrase: ‘evil empire’. Reagan’s speech stands out as a clarion call to preserve our liberties. I quote: If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.

What Reagan meant is that you cannot run away from history, you cannot escape the dangers of ideologies that are out to destroy you. Denial is no option.

Communism was indeed left on the ash heap of history, just as Reagan predicted in his speech in the House of Commons. He lived to see the Berlin Wall coming down, just as Churchill witnessed the implosion of national-socialism.

Today, I come before you to warn of another great threat. It is called Islam. It poses as a religion, but its goals are very worldly: world domination, holy war, sharia law, the end of the separation of church and state, the end of democracy. It is not a religion, it is a political ideology. It demands your respect, but has no respect for you.

There might be moderate Muslims, but there is no moderate Islam. Islam will never change, because it is built on two rocks that are forever, two fundamental beliefs that will never change, and will never go away. First, there is Quran, Allah’s personal word, uncreated, forever, with orders that need to be fulfilled regardless of place or time. And second, there is al-insal al-kamil, the perfect man, Muhammad the role model, whose deeds are to be imitated by all Muslims. And since Muhammad was a warlord and a conqueror we know what to expect.

Islam means submission, so there cannot be any mistake about it’s goal. That’s a given. The question is whether the British people, with its glorious past, is longing for that submission.

We see Islam taking off in the West at an incredible speed. The United Kingdom has seen a rapid growth of the number of Muslims. Over the last ten years, the Muslim population has grown ten times as fast as the rest of society. This has put an enormous pressure on society. Thanks to British politicians who have forgotten about Winston Churchill, the English now have taken the path of least resistance. They give up. They give in.

Continue reading at The Brussels Journal.

Too Christian for academia?

A four-volume encyclopedia gets pulped in the name of PC

14.02.2009. Wiley-Blackwell, a major academic press, was set to release its four-volume Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization this month. According to the encyclopedia’s editor, George Thomas Kurian, the set had been copy-edited, fact-checked, proofread, publisher-approved, printed, bound, and formally launched (to high praise) at the recent American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature conference. But protests from a small group of scholars associated with the project have led the press to postpone publication, recall all copies already distributed, and destroy the existing print run. The scholars’ complaint? The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, they have reportedly argued, is “too Christian.” “They also object to historical references to the persecution and massacres of Christians by Muslims,” Kurian says, “but at the same time want references favorable to Islam.”

Political correctness in academic publishing is nothing new, but it would be unusual, to say the least, for ideological pressure to lead a publisher to reverse itself so late in the process, especially given the significant financial losses involved in pulping a print run of a gigantic four-volume encyclopedia. As Kurian puts it, “This is probably the first instance of mass book-burning in the 21st century.” Continue reading Edward Feser's article in National Review.

Who rules the UK?

Geert Wilders sent back to the Netherlands

12.02.2009. The far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders was turned away from Heathrow today after testing the Home Secretary’s ban on him entering the country. Immigration officials denied the Dutch MP entry to the country after the Government decided he should not be allowed to attend a screening of his controversial anti-Islamist film tonight. Mr Wilders said: "I am in a detention centre at Heathrow ... I am detained. They took my passport. I will not be allowed to enter the country. They will send me back within a few hours.” Continue reading in Times Online. See also The Telegraph.

The Home Secretary may consider Geert Wilders too much of a threat to public safety to be allowed into Britain. But by contrast, these are some of the characters who have been let in (Daily Mail).

HonestThinking comments: This clearly demonstrates that if you allow immigration to outpace integration, you destroy democracy and ultimately the entire society. Tony Blair was determined to dismantle the British nation once and for all. Now he is experiencing a success disaster, as anti-intellectual and totalitarian radicals are gaining power by the hour.

The decline of the West

And in particular the English-speaking world

12.02.2009. I will defend all Western countries but I feel especially close to Britain, which makes it all the more sad to see how humiliated this once-great nation currently is. The English language once conquered the world. Now the rest of the world is conquering the English-speaking countries. If current trends continue, people in Singapore will know English while the nation that created the English language will cease to exist.

At the same time as sharia law has gained official recognition as a part of the British legal system and Muslims proudly talk about conquering the Western world, a British woman was arrested because of a supposedly "racist" doll she kept in her window. In al-Britannia a Muslim man can claim benefits for children with multiple wives and brag about subduing the country and reducing its traditional inhabitants to second-rate citizens or worse, but you cannot have a "racially insensitive" doll in your own home, at least not if you're white.

Continue reading Fjordman's essay at The Brussels Journal.

IQ in the UK

British teenagers have lower IQ today than 30 years ago

12.02.2009. Teenagers in Britain have lower IQ scores than their counterparts did a generation ago, according to a study by a leading expert. Tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points over the period.

Among those in the upper half of the intelligence scale, a group that is typically dominated by children from middle class families, performance was even worse, with an average IQ score six points below what it was 28 years ago.

The trend marks an abrupt reversal of the so-called "Flynn effect" which has seen IQ scores rise year on year, among all age groups, in most industrialised countries throughout the past century.

Professor James Flynn, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, the discoverer of the Flynn effect and the author of the latest study, believes the abnormal drop in British teenage IQ could be due to youth culture having "stagnated" or even dumbed down. Continue reading in The Telegraph.

UK demography

Muslim population rising 10 times faster than rest of society

09.02.2009. The Muslim population in Britain has grown by more than 500,000 to 2.4 million in just four years, according to official research collated for The Times.

The population multiplied 10 times faster than the rest of society, the research by the Office for National Statistics reveals. In the same period the number of Christians in the country fell by more than 2 million.

Experts said that the increase was attributable to immigration, a higher birthrate and conversions to Islam during the period of 2004-2008, when the data was gathered. They said that it also suggested a growing willingness among believers to describe themselves as Muslims because the western reaction to war and terrorism had strengthened their sense of identity.

Muslim leaders have welcomed the growing population of their communities as academics highlighted the implications for British society, integration and government resources. Continue reading in Times Online.

Vikings and victims

White-guilt in context

05.02.2009. From an article By Raymond Ibrahim in American Thinker (italics in original):

All-permeating "white-guilt" did not appear out of thin air. It has taken a sustained propaganda effort, a wide-ranging mobilization of education and culture, to inculcate and sustain self-loathing among American Caucasians. Like the Coca-Cola TM brand, white-guilt needs endless repetition to remain struck in the thought and behavioral processes of the masses. [...]

This "noble-victimized-non-white" paradigm has further come to be applied to almost all non-whites. For example, early sub-Saharans are always portrayed as a peaceful people who simply wanted to live and let live-until warlike white man came along. (Pointing out that it was fellow Africans who sold their kinsmen into slavery is unpopular in polite -- that is, white-guilt laden-conversation).

The most recent rehashing of the "noble-other vs. evil white-man" paradigm is based on the U.S. response to the Islamic world post 9/11. Following al-Qaeda's lead, academia and the media have been quick to portray George Bush as a ravenous brute (like the Vikings, also speaking an unintelligible tongue) who mindlessly attacks the peaceful others -- this time Muslims -- in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

What seems to be missed by all, however, is the simple fact that, if whites have been traditionally aggressive or exploitative of non-whites, that is not because the former are intrinsically violent (a racist point, incidentally) but simply because they were able to. And that's the bottom line of all history: Capability. Did whites defeat and uproot Native Americans, enslave Africans, and colonize the rest because they lived according to some sort of unprecedented bellicose creed alien to non-whites? Quite the contrary; they did so because they -- as opposed to natives, blacks, et. al. -- were able to do so.

Had 10th century Native Americans developed galleys for transoceanic travel, or advanced fire arms, or compasses, or organized military structures and stratagems -- or any of those other things that have made the Western way of war supreme -- and had they arrived on the shores of Dark Age Europe, is there any doubt that they would have done the same exact thing?

Would they have conquered and subjugated in the name of empire, or would they have looked at the inferior pale savages and "respected" them, in the name of "diversity," leaving them wholly unmolested? What if 18th century sub-Saharan blacks were technologically or militarily more advanced than their northern neighbors and could have easily subjugated and enslaved them? Would they have done so, or would they have left them in peace in the name of "multiculturalism"? These are the hypotheticals that no one seems interested in asking, since the answer is not only clear as day but immediately places whites and the rest of humanity on the same moral grounding.

Nor can the argument be made that non-whites did not reach such a militarily advanced state because they were a peaceful and content people. If so, why then did they also constantly war, kill, rape, plunder, and sell each other into slavery -- as history so unambiguously records? If this is how they treated, and often still treat, their own kin, what would they have done to the "other," such as the white man? As for Muslims, history attests that whenever there has been a caliphate on the ascendancy, it had no compunctions whatsoever about launching devastating wars of conquest. Approximately 85% of the "Islamic world" today was subjugated during the Islamic conquests (or, according to the white-guilt lexicon, Islamic "expansions").

None of this is meant to exonerate the crimes of the white-man, but rather to put them in context by indicating that all people -- white, black, yellow, red, whatever -- are the same; they war, and, when capable -- keyword -- go on the offensive in search of conquest and hegemony. Depending on scope, it could be either tribal or international hegemony. Some religions incite these innate "passions," others mollify them. Yet these passions-which, according to that astute philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, "carry us to partiality, pride, revenge and the like [e.g., war and conquest] -- apply to all of humanity. To say otherwise is to be racist.

Read the entire article in American Thinker.

Brave New Netherlands

The picture is getting clearer

03.02.2009. The court case against Geert Wilders is intended to change the democratic rules of the game, end the separation of church and state and abolish free speech.

The brute facts, grim consequences and apparent incongruity clearly baffled the author of last week’s Wall Street Journal’s column: “Silencing Islam's Critics: A Dutch Court Imports Saudi Blasphemy Norms to Europe”. After all, in June 2008 the Dutch Public Prosecutor had decided after viewing Fitna. The Movie and reading several writings of Geert Wilders MP in which he compared the Koran with Mein Kampf and Islam with fascism, that these comments belonged to the realm of free speech. Wilders, leader of the Party For Freedom (9 seats in the Dutch Parliament, and 20 in the latest polls) did not address individuals or called for violence, he attacked a religion, so his comments were legal.

Clearly, his statements outraged Muslims around the globe, but “if freedom of speech means anything, it means the freedom of controversial speech. Consensus views need no protection”, the Wall Street Journal pointedly concluded. However, on the 21st of January 2009 the Amsterdam Court decided exactly the opposite. Wilders has to stand trial for the expressions and comparisons that are so insulting to Muslims. Perplexed the Wall Street Journal noted that “this is no small victory for Islamic regimes seeking to export their censorship laws to wherever Muslims reside”, and the writer chillingly concluded that after the court has accepted the free speech standards of, “say, Saudi-Arabia”, Geert Wilders is correct in his observation that “Muslim immigration is eroding traditional Dutch liberties”.

What the writer, like most journalists, failed to recognize, is that this course of events has neither been accidental, sudden or spontaneous, but planned and orchestrated. Again, the proof is in the timing. A day before sending Wilders to trial, on the 20th of January 2009, a majority in the Dutch Parliament backed Ernst Hirsch Ballin, secretary of Justice, key member of the Christian Democrat Party (CDA) and orthodox Catholic, in his desire to outlaw every expression that insults any religion and ideology, and/or any of its members. Formally only in effect after its passing by the First Chamber, this bill revived a ‘dead’ law on blasphemy (article 137d) and an old criminal law (article 137c) that was aimed to curb the hate campaigns against Jews by the Dutch Nazi’s in the 1930s (Elsevier, 31/01/09).

The Amsterdam Court, in its 33 pages Wilders-dossier openly sympathetic to the multi-cultural ideology of the Social Democratic Party (Elsevier, 31/01/09), immediately seized the opportunity. “Flaunting the fair trial principle”, professor Afshin Ellian of Leiden University’s Law Faculty stated, “the Court claims that Wilders has intentionally and consciously invoked discrimination, intolerance, contempt against Muslims, to cause fear and hatred. The Amsterdam Court has already sentenced Wilders”(De Volkskrant, 26/01/09). The real sentence by the lower criminal court will merely be “an official rubber stamp of already proven guilt”, Mr. Gerard Spong, leading lawyer and denunciator of Wilders, happily declared (De Volkskrant, 23/01/09).

Continue reading this article by Arthur Legger in Sappho. See also Holland’s Systematic Campaign against Free Speech by the same author.

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