The post-democratic EU

In keeping with their one-vote, one-time philosophy the Eurofascists have openly turned against democracy:

Alexis Tsipras believes the existing deal is a disaster and says he has a democratic mandate to demand changes. And this exposes democracy’s limits within the European Union. The German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble says: “Elections change nothing. There are rules”.

The president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker said “there can be no democratic choice against the European treaties. One cannot exit the euro without leaving the EU”.

A German Euzi named Juncker speaking out against democracy. Greece is doing exactly the right thing; leaving the EU is hardly a threat, it is the restoration and recovery of national sovereignty from a gang of fascists who have learned to use banks instead of tanks.

Niles Farage of UKIP understands what is at stake here:


A succinct argument

A debate on free speech in Denmark ends abruptly:

One dead in shooting at a Copenhagen cultural centre, where a meeting about freedom of speech was being held – organised by a Swedish artist who had caricatured the Prophet Muhammad. Police hunt for lone Danish-speaking gunman behind attack.

• 40-yr-old Danish man killed in shooting at cultural centre
• Three policemen reported injured
• Police hunt for lone Danish-speaking gunman
• Danish PM says attack was terrorism
• French ambassador to Denmark inside but unharmed
• Meeting about freedom of speech was being held at the time
• Gathering organised by controversial Swedish artist Lars Vilks
• Lars Vilks caricatured Prophet Muhammad in 2007

Well, I guess that is one way to reach consensus.

UPDATE: A man, aged 40, has died after masked gunmen opened fire on the
Krudttoenden cafe in Copenhagen during a meeting
entitled Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Speech. Two people were taken
away on stretchers after the attack after the cafe
was sprayed with 200 bullets. The French ambassador, who was present at
the debate on free speech, has said it was an attempt at a Charlie
Hebdo-style attack in the Danish capital.

200 shots and one kill? It certainly sounds like jihad. By way of comparison, Anders Breivik required 121 shots to kill 77.


Of course they folded

The EU has never been anything except one giant bluff coupled with constant appeals to Ragnarok:

Did Europe just fold?

Moments ago Bloomberg blasted a headline which has to be validated by other members of the European Commission as well as Merkel and the other Germans (and may well be refuted, considering this is Europe), which said that:

    COMMISSION TO PROPOSE 6 MONTH EXTENSION FOR GREECE – SOURCES.

So did Greece just win the first round of its stand off with Brussels? It remains to be confirmed, but congratulations to Greece if indeed it caused Merkel and the ECB to fold.

Once Greece leaves, the EU is a walking corpse. So they will do absolutely anything that will be less immediately destructive than a nation leaving the Euro, or more significantly, the EU.


The real fear of the Eurocrats

Daniel Hannan observes that it isn’t a Greek bankruptcy that would be the real catastrophe as far as the EU is concerned:

A default and devaluation would offer a fresh start. Although the economy has been pummelled by six years of Euro-austerity, some of the fundamentals have improved. The bureaucracy has been slimmed, taxes are now collected and, if debt repayments were taken out of it, the budget would be in balance. In truth, this is what EU leaders fear. Not that Greece will leave the euro and collapse, but that Greece will leave the euro and prosper.

A competitive Greek economy, exporting its way back to growth, might inspire Spaniards and Italians, who have also been paying the price of the euro, to follow. For those Eurocrats who see the single currency as a component of political integration, that prospect is too horrible to contemplate.

We’ve been here before. Two years ago, when it looked as if Cyprus might leave the euro, Brussels went so far as to lift money directly out of private bank accounts to pay off the country’s creditors.

The extreme measure was necessary, the European Central Bank admitted, ‘to prevent worries over the reversibility of the euro resurfacing’.

I observe that Iceland, which rejected the EU’s bank-first dictates, is doing considerably better than Italy, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal, which obediently followed the EU’s instructions. I tend to doubt this observation has escaped the new Greek government.


Grexit looms

Election results in Greece don’t bode well for the Eurocrats:

Catastrophe’ warning as anti-austerity party looks set to win Greek election with up to 38 per cent of the vote. Exit poll shows 36 to 38 per cent for anti-austerity party Syriza. Ruling New Democracy party predicted to receive 26 to 28 per cent. Syriza set to win 148 to 154 seats – and it needs 151 to rule outright. In third place is ultra right-wing party Golden Dawn on up to 7 per cent.

Not a bad result for Golden Dawn considering that their leadership is in jail on what look like suspiciously trumped up charges.


Rumblings of tech war

This article is amusingly incoherent concerning the growing fears of US technology companies concerning Europe:

One message so far from the corridors around the World Economic Forum
in Davos: U.S. technology companies are very worried about the backlash
they are now facing in Europe. From their standpoint, Europe
risks shooting itself in the foot by rejecting the cutting-edge
technologies they have brought to the continent. But they would say that, wouldn’t they? Look at it from the European point of view.

Europe
once led the world in mobile technology: The Global System for Mobile
Communications, developed in Europe, became the global standard. But
that was a long time ago. Now, most innovation in information and
communications technology comes in waves from across the Atlantic.

With America’s vibrant capital markets giving them billions of dollars in risk capital, they can absorb the successful European tech enterprises—look at Skype Technologies, swallowed by Microsoft Corp.

These U.S. companies— Google, Facebook , Amazon and others—are disrupting industry after industry. Publishing, telecoms and retailing have already been convulsed. Now, the companies, and Google in particular, are turning their gaze from consumer-oriented to business-oriented platforms.

That is a big deal for growth-starved Europe and for its biggest economy, Germany, which leads the world in high-quality engineering. Europe’s car industry is a leading employer, its suppliers reach through the continent, and it is one of the biggest spenders on research and development. Germany’s machine-tool manufacturers are deservedly renowned.

But much of the future profit for these industries won’t flow from punching metal but from the networks they will use to manage information—for example, taking the cars where they want to go, catering to passengers with entertainment and retail experiences as they travel—and it’s a strategic question who owns them.

Isn’t it good of those US technology executives to worry so much about Europe shooting themselves in the foot? They must have tremendous empathy! Or could it be that they are not telling the truth and it is something else that worries them?

Such as, perhaps, the possibility that they will be legally locked out of Europe due to their enabling of US goverment espionage and their continued disinclination to show any respect for various European privacy laws?


Anti-Europeanists

This celebration of Islamic expansion in Europe may explain why the French and British people haven’t been shedding many tears over Jews targeted by Muslims in Europe:

Rabbi Baruch Efrati, a yeshiva head and community rabbi in the West Bank settlement of Efrat, believes that the Islamization of Europe is actually a good thing.

“With the help of God, the gentiles there will adopt a healthier life with a lot of modesty and integrity, and not like the hypocritical Christianity which appears pure but is fundamentally corrupt,” he explained.

Rabbi Efrati was asked to discuss the issue by an oriental studies student, who inquired on Judaism’s stand toward the process Europe has been going through in recent years. Following the election of a hijab-wearing Muslim woman as the mayor of the Bosnian city of Visoko for the first time in continent’s history, the student asked the rabbi on the Kipa website: “How do we fight the Islamization of Europe and return it to the hands of Christians and moderates?”

Efrati wrote in response that the Islamization of Europe was better than a Christian Europe for ethical and theological reasons – as a punishment against Christians for persecuting the Jews and the fact that Christianity, as opposed to Islam, is considered “idolatry” from a halachic point of view….

“Europe is losing its identity in favor of another people and another religion, and there will be no remnants and survivors from the impurity of Christianity, which shed a lot of blood it won’t be able to atone for.”

One would have thought the Jews might have learned from the Granada Massacre and the Reconquista that betting on the Mahometans isn’t the smart thing to do. Meanwhile, David Goldberg declares that he has nothing to say to anyone in Europe:

It’s been so long since Europeans took their own national identity
seriously that it’s hard for them to remember why it is that they can’t
stand the sort of Jew who represents the Jewish future. One has to put
them on the proverbial couch and coax it out of them: Europeans hate
Jews because European national identity from the outset was a dreadful
parody of Jewish identity…. I speak three European languages apart from English and have nothing to say to anybody in any of them.

I used to like reading Goldberg back when he was Spengler. Now… what is he even trying to say?


Britain wants OUT

80 percent polled want Great Britain out of the European Union:

The biggest vote on this country’s ties to ­Brussels for 40 years saw 80 per cent say they no longer want to be in Europe, the ­Daily Express can reveal. It marks a huge leap forward in this news­paper’s crusade to get Britain out of the EU.

Some 14,581 people voted – 11,706 of them want the UK to quit compared with 2,725 who want to remain part of the EU.

The mini-referendum – the first on the issue since 1975 – was organised by two senior Tory backbenchers and a prospective Tory MP.

They believe the overwhelming result, which will be presented to David Cameron today, will force him to bring forward his planned in-or-out vote on the UK’s future in Europe to next year instead of 2017.

If Cameron still won’t commit to leading the UK out of the European Union, the Conservative Party is going to have to replace him. The EU has failed in literally every possible way. It has absolutely no credibility anymore; the usual threats and promises and electoral shenanigans are not going to keep the British in.


The strategist’s warning

George Friedman, the head of StratFor, sheds additional light on the long-term European situation:

Europe’s hidden secret: The Europeans do not see Muslims from North Africa or Turkey as Europeans, nor do they intend to allow them to be Europeans. The European solution to their isolation is the concept of multiculturalism — on the surface a most liberal notion, and in practice, a movement for both cultural fragmentation and ghettoization….

The European inability to come to terms with the reality it has created for itself in this and other matters does not preclude the realization that wars involving troops are occurring in many Muslim countries. The situation is complex, and morality is merely another weapon for proving the other guilty and oneself guiltless. The geopolitical dimensions of Islam’s relationship with Europe, or India, or Thailand, or the United States, do not yield to moralizing.

Something must be done. I don’t know what needs to be done, but I suspect I know what is coming. First, if it is true that Islam is merely responding to crimes against it, those crimes are not new and certainly didn’t originate in the creation of Israel, the invasion of Iraq or recent events. This has been going on far longer than that. For instance, the Assassins were a secret Islamic order to make war on individuals they saw as Muslim heretics. There is nothing new in what is going on, and it will not end if peace comes to Iraq, Muslims occupy Kashmir or Israel is destroyed. Nor is secularism about to sweep the Islamic world. The Arab Spring was a Western fantasy that the collapse of communism in 1989 was repeating itself in the Islamic world with the same results. There are certainly Muslim liberals and secularists. However, they do not control events — no single group does — and it is the events, not the theory, that shape our lives.

Europe’s sense of nation is rooted in shared history, language, ethnicity and yes, in Christianity or its heir, secularism. Europe has no concept of the nation except for these things, and Muslims share in none of them. It is difficult to imagine another outcome save for another round of ghettoization and deportation. This is repulsive to the European sensibility now, but certainly not alien to European history. Unable to distinguish radical Muslims from other Muslims, Europe will increasingly and unintentionally move in this direction.

The fact that the Europeans view nationality in a fundamentally different matter than Americans is hardly hidden. They have never bought into the myth that paperwork determines nationality. I’ve lived in Europe for more of my adult life than I’ve lived in the USA and I’ve been pointing this out to my American readers for years.

Forget nationality. One of my neighbors had lived in our town for 30 years and she still considered herself, and was considered by the other townspeople, as a resident of the next town over. As for us, we have been “gli americani” for more than 15 years; for the last decade “nostri americani”. And this is despite our being fully integrated into the community, speaking the language, attending the church, and so on.

Now, imagine how those townspeople regard even second- or third-generation Muslims, who look, act, think, believe, and behave differently. To believe that they will be able to distinguish radical Muslims from non-radical Muslims, much less bother to do so, defies all credibility.


Cracks in the narrative

The transnational establishment is deeply worried about the way the most recent Muslim murders are upsetting the electorate:

Farage cannot divide us: Fury at ‘sickening’ attempt by Ukip to use Paris shootings to score political points on multiculturalism. Britain must stand united against attempts by Nigel Farage to use the Paris terror massacre to score political points, senior politicians said today. Tories including David Cameron, Eric Pickles, Theresa May and Grant Shapps joined Labour’s Ed Miliband and Dame Tessa Jowell and Lib Dem Nick Clegg in condemning the ‘sickening’ attempt to exploit the atrocity in which 12 people died.

The reason the atrocities can be effectively exploited by UKIP is because they only happened due to the immigration policies of the French parties that happen to be very, very similar to the policies of the Tory, Labour, and Liberal Democrat parties. The European establishment parties are afraid, and rightly so, that the attacks are assisting the gradual redrawing the European political lines where they rightly belong: between the pro-EU, pro-Muslim, pro-immigration forces and the more numerous nationalist, anti-Muslim, anti-immigration forces:

A day after terror struck Paris, Europe’s resurgent far-right and anti-immigrant parties trumpeted a unified message: I told you so.

Populist movements warning of the “Islamization” of Europe have been gaining ground across the continent, in small countries like Denmark and large ones like Britain, Germany and France. The attack on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo could win more supporters to their cause.

Fears of precisely the kind of commando-style attack that struck the newspaper on Wednesday, killing 12 people, have risen sharply in recent months as home-grown fighters return from Syria and Iraq. Such warnings have been aired across the political spectrum, but it’s the anti-immigrant parties that have reaped the biggest benefits. 

What has been ruled out of bounds for more than three decades is finally becoming the political fault line. And the line is not going to be drawn in the favor of those with blood on their hands, in the favor of those whom history will one day damn far more fervently than the Chamberlains and Quislings of a previous generation. Names like Merkel, Hollande, Cameron, and Blair will be reviled across Europe as long as they are remembered.

At the train station, I heard one schoolgirl telling her friends that World War III has started and she doesn’t care if anyone calls her racist. There is a perception that something has dramatically changed in the last week, and indeed, the way in which people are not being hysterical about it over here, but are speaking out rather calmly, strikes me as being all the more ominous for the establishment. As is the fact that #JeSuisCharlieMartel is beginning to trend.

The more the politicians of the major parties attempt to pressure the people into accepting the unacceptable, the more likely it is that the major parties will be replaced by true people’s parties. And I suspect Marine Le Pen’s protests at Front National being excluded from tomorrow’s French “unity” rallies are about as serious as Bre’r Rabbit’s pleas not to be thrown in the briar patch.

All of the nationalist parties will do well to turn their backs on the false, antinational unity being offered by the champions of diversity. Consider the PEGIDA statement leading up to what looks to be a record rally on Monday: The Islamists, which PEGIDA has been warning about for 12 weeks, showed France that they are not capable of democracy but rather look to violence and death as an answer,” it said. “Our politicians want us to believe the opposite. Must such a tragedy happen here in Germany first???” 

“61 percent of non-Muslim Germans said Islam had no place in the West according to the study released by the Bertelsmann Foundation think tank.” And that was prior to the Paris murders.