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How could Marine Le Pen have lost in a landslide?
Why, after the Brits chose Brexit, and Americans chose Trump, did the Dutch fail Wilders, and the French fail Le Pen?
How could a country that has been hit by several major terrorist attacks in recent years, and that has undergone a more profound social transformation owing to Islamic immigration, vote for business as usual?
Wilders, buoyed by the Brexit and Trump victories, said that 2017 would be a “Year of the Populist.” So far, alas, it’s not turning out that way.
Yes, there are positive signs. The Sweden Democrats are on the upswing. And Wilders did gain seats in the Dutch Parliament.
But if you’ve witnessed the reality of Islamization in cities like Rotterdam and Paris and Stockholm, you may well wonder: what, in heaven’s name, will it take for these people to save their own societies, their own freedoms, for their own children and grandchildren?
I’m not the only one who’s been obsessing for years over this question. I’ve yet to see a totally convincing answer to it.
One way of trying to answer it is to look at countries one by one. For example, the Brits and French feel guilty about their imperial histories, and hence find it difficult to rein in the descendants of subject peoples. The Germans feel guilty about their Nazi past – and the Swedes feel guilty about cozying up to Nazis – and thus feel compelled to lay out the welcome mat for, well, just about anybody. The Dutch, similarly, are intensely aware that during the Nazi occupation they helped ship off a larger percentage of their Jews to the death camps than any other Western European country, and feel a deep need to atone.
Postmodernism, of course, is a factor. According to postmodern thinking, no culture is better than any other – and it’s racist to say otherwise. No, scratch that – other cultures are, in fact, better than Western culture. Whites, by definition, are oppressors, imperialists, and colonialists, while “people of color” are victims.
And Muslims are the biggest victims of all.
Not that that makes any sense. Over the centuries since the religion was founded, Muslim armies have gained control over much of north Africa, the Middle East, and large parts of Europe. Islam itself, by definition, is imperialistic. And whenever Islam has conquered non-Islamic territories, it has proven itself to be profoundly oppressive, offering infidels exactly three options: death, subordination, or conversion. But to say these things has become verboten.
Living in a Muslim neighborhood of Amsterdam in early 1999, I read up on Islam and realized very quickly what Europe was up against. Two and a half years later, when the terrorist attacks of 9/11 occurred, I assumed pretty much everyone else would get it, too.
But it didn’t work that way. Yes, some people did get it almost instantaneously, in both America and Europe. They caught up on a lot of reading, did a great deal of soul-searching, and underwent a major philosophical metamorphosis.
But even after other horrific attacks occurred – in Madrid, London, and elsewhere – a lot of people refused to accept the plain truth. The plainer the truth got, in fact, the more fiercely they resisted it. And as skilled propagandists began to represent Muslims as the mother of all victim groups, many Westerners were quick to buy into it all.
How, again, to make sense of this?
Yes, the mainstream media have played a role, routinely whitewashing Islam, soft-pedaling the Islamic roots of jihadist terror, and staying silent about the dire reality of everyday Islamization. But no one who actually lives in western Europe has any excuse for ignorance about these matters. The truth is all around them. Even in the remotest places, however dishonest the mainstream media, the truth can be found on the Internet.
But – and this is a fact that some of us are thoroughly incapable of identifying with, and thus almost thoroughly incapable of grasping – some people don’t want to know the truth. And if they do know the truth, they want to un-know it.
Orwell understood. He called it doublethink. You can know something and yet can will yourself not to know it. And thereby give free rein to totalitarianism.
For those of us to whom the truth matters, and who wouldn’t be able to live with ourselves if we didn’t face the truth, however difficult, and try to act responsibly on it, it can be hard to conceive that not everything thinks about these things in the same way that we do.
And I’m not talking about people who are just plain obviously rotten through and through. I’m taking about people who, in everyday life, come across as thoroughly good and decent – but who, when push comes to shove, just don’t want to rock the boat. That’s a lot of people. Maybe most. People who are nice so long as it’s easy to be nice. The sort of people who – if they’d been, say, Christians living in the pre-war Netherlands – would’ve been the best of friends to their Jewish neighbors next door; but who, when those neighbors came to them and begged to be hidden from the Gestapo, would’ve refused.
No, come to think of it, you don’t even have to take it to the point where the Gestapo is on your tail. There are kind people who, the minute there’s any hint of trouble – which means, way before the death-camp round-up begins – prefer to lie low. Their highest value isn’t truth or virtue or beauty or even long-term security for them and their families but the ability to buy another day without major trouble.
You’d think they’d be able to look forward at least some distance into the future and dwell on that grim prospect. Able to see their children, their grandchildren, and so forth, living under sharia law. If, indeed, lucky to be living at all.
But I think it needs to be recognized that for some people, seeing that far into the future is just beyond their intellectual grasp. Or beyond what they dare to envision.
Yes, they see Islam taking over. Bit by bit, here and there. Everything in their lives, everything familiar to them, is being transformed, in some cases at a terrifying pace. Perhaps their own lives haven’t been turned upside down – yet. But they know people who have suffered greatly because of these changes.
Yet they’re terrified to speak up about it, let alone do anything about it. Viewed through American eyes, it may seem a European thing (although it’s not as uncommon in America, alas, as it used to be).
Part of what I’m saying is that these people don’t have much of a sense of ownership in their own countries, their own communities. They’re used to being ruled over. They’re used to the idea that there are people above them in the hierarchy whose job it is to think about, and take care of, the big things while they – the citizens, the mice – take care of their own little lives.
Over and over again, they’ve been given the message, explicitly or implicitly, that their countries don’t belong to them – the whole thing about democracy to the contrary – and that to assert any sense of ownership in any way would be a manifestation of the worst kind of bigotry.
You might think that, once in the voting booth, these people would be able – and not just able but eager, desperate even – to stand up against the powers above them that have turned their countries upside down and assert their power as citizens. But everything around them has conspired all their lives to render them incapable of feeling that power – or, perhaps, has rendered them incapable of feeling that they have the moral right to exercise that power in the way that their gut is begging them to.
That still, quiet voice in their heads, which I would describe as a voice of plain reason and common sense, is up against the resounding voices of all the higher-ups shouting in unison – the leading voices of politics, business, the academia, the media, and so on – that they’ve been bred from infancy to respect and take seriously. To, indeed, obey.
In America we’re taught (or, at least, used to be taught) that our leaders work for us; we learn (or used to) that it’s not only our right but our duty as individuals to stand up to those leaders when we think they’re wrong – especially when we think they’re exceeding their powers and infringing on our rights. But Europeans aren’t brought up that way. Not really. Yes, there’s lip service to the idea of freedom. But when it comes right down to it, they’re raised to bow down to the state – to prioritize not themselves, not the individual, but the society, the commonweal, that abstract ideal known as “solidarity.”
So it is that even in a secret ballot, it takes European voters a remarkable amount of nerve to resist the thunderous chorus of voices from above urging them to vote against their own interests; it feels like nothing less than an act of treason to heed the meek little voices in their own heads begging them to do the opposite – to do what’s actually best for themselves and their loved ones. They’ve been psychologically manipulated to the point where they truly believe, on some level, at least in some Orwellian doublethink kind of way, that acting in clear defense of their own existence, their own culture, their own values, and their own posterity, is an act of ugly prejudice.
These, for what it’s worth, are the places my mind has wandered since the vote from France came in. At this point I’ve lived in Europe for just short of twenty years, and have spent every day of that time observing Europeans and trying to understand what makes them tick when it comes to such matters. It helps to be an outsider, even after you’ve been an outsider so long that you’re not really an outsider any more. Frankly, Le Pen’s devastating loss doesn’t really surprise me. But I still can’t say that I get it.
Philosopher Ayn Rand understood the sinister nature of collectivism and and wrote extensively about socialism/communism and how it persuades the individual to stop being an individual. “Socialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.”
Ayn Rand compared communism and socialism. “There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism – by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.”
The Islamization of Europe and the West demonstrates how mass social indoctrination toward collectivism leads to cultural suicide. “When you consider socialism, do not fool yourself about its nature. Remember that there is no such dichotomy as “human rights” versus “property rights.” No human rights can exist without property rights. Since material goods are produced by the mind and effort of individual men, and are needed to sustain their lives, if the producer does not own the result of his effort, he does not own his life. To deny property rights means to turn men into property owned by the state. Whoever claims the “right” to “redistribute” the wealth produced by others is claiming the “right” to treat human beings as chattel.”
Macron’s socialist victory is a victory for collectivism, postmodern moral relativism, and historical revisionism designed to destroy democracy and its incomparable individual rights and freedoms. The question is WHO benefits from Macron’s victory?? The globalist elite of course. Socialism (total government control) is the death of democracy and is the prerequisite for internationalizing nation states and the imposition of one-world government.
One-world government is the big lie of the 21st century. It promises redistribution of wealth and social justice. What it will deliver is unapologetically described in chilling detail by globalist elite Bertrand Russell in his 1952 book The Impact of Science on Society.
The left-wing liberal agenda seeks to destroy the socio-political democratic infrastructure of America and transform it into a dependent socialist state with cradle to grave control by the government. Their strategy is to destroy the traditional American institutions of family, religion, and education that promote independence, adulthood, individualism, and ego strength – the same qualities that made America great and support American sovereignty.
The entire narrative of the Left is designed to promote collectivism and induce regression through educational indoctrination and the media – as Hillary Clinton famously remarked they need “an unaware compliant public.” Unaware and compliant are the hallmarks of childhood. The pitch might sound good to a childish mind who is seduced by candy from a stranger but the adult mind understands the sinister end-game. Once the public is entirely dependent on the government they lose all individual rights and national sovereignty as the socialized state becomes part of the internationalized one-world government.
The left-wing liberal lemmings are the useful idiots who are too arrogant to understand that they are participating in their own destruction. They have been indoctrinated to believe they are altruistically fighting for “social justice” when in fact they are helping to establish the dystopian nightmare of one-world government where there is no middle class, no upward mobility, no national sovereignty, and no individual freedoms. There is only the ruling elite and the enslaved population who service them.
The left-wing liberal lemmings in Europe and in America should take a break from marching and “resisting” and start reading Bertrand Russell’s The Impact of Science on Society written in 1952. They will learn that their script was written 65 years ago by the globalist elites who dreamed of one-world government – a binary socio-political system of masters and slaves.
The globalist elite’s New World Order was their self-serving answer to the Malthusian problem of the earth not having enough resources to sustain the population growth. Tavistock Institute was exported to America with the purpose of indoctrinating Americans via education and the media – particularly television – the greatest vehicle for mass social engineering ever invented. The Hollywood glitterati and the protesting hoards should take a pause and understand there is no place for them in the New World Order – they are simply useful idiots who will be destroyed.
The aristocratic Lord Bertrand Russell and the late David Rockefeller had no moral problem with eliminating the useless eaters any more than Hitler with exterminating Jews, Islamists with exterminating infidels, or the Chinese Emperors with burying their concubines alive to service them in the afterlife. The point is elitism is supremacist – there is no egalitarian respect for human life only the pretense of humanitarian considerations. The Left and the Islamists have common cause in trying to destroy Europe and America from within – but it is the globalist elites who finance and disingenuously facilitate both groups because the social chaos they each engender is a prerequisite for imposing globalist elite one-world government. For the globalist elite whether in Europe or in America, the Left and the Islamists are BOTH useful idiots.
@ Birdalone:
i read it. i couldn’t help but take notice of the author’s referring to le pen’s economic platform as “nationalistic socialism” not to be confused with “national socialism” or anything.
@ Birdalone:
i read it. i took note of the author describing the economic platform of le pen as “nationalistic socialism.” not to be confused with “national socialism.” as we all know, “nazi” is short for “national socialism” in german.
to lessen the shock of all caps by another poster, i have decided to post in all lower case for a while.
I read it. I like the way the author refers to the party’s economic platform as “nationalistic socialism.” So we won’t confuse it with “national socialism” which is what “nazi” is short for in german.
To lessen the shock of a post in all caps by another poster, i have decided that this post will be posted all lower case.@ Birdalone:
Best to also read this, also at PJM today, because, the French election was also about jobs and the economy:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/05/08/marine-le-pen-lost-because-front-national-is-a-bad-party-with-bad-ideas/
Let’s start from the facts then several interpretations are possible:
Demography in Europe : negative trend since the early eighties; less than 1,3 children per women , in age of procreation . The career urge has taken a huge toll, no woman desire anymore to raise 2 or 3 children for 20 years at home, while she misses a professional career and her husband enjoy money-power + hedonism with younger women .
Upward mobility : the top 5% socio-economic strata has enough clout to divorce and set up a new family while paying alimony to the former wife . So you see ” blender families ” ‘ turbo families ” ” mismatched families ” ; the top 5% set the tone for the rest of society.
Mainstream media mantra : Cool – relax – open mind – let’s give a try – accept -tolerate – be nice – think different – do not judge – take it as it comes –
Social engineering : the new economic elite has three sources of power ; Economic capital + Social capital ( capacity to shape the ” actual behavior ” ) by ruling the new norms into law + Cultural capital ( culture is nowadays an amusement park theme ; go to a museum + make a selfie near the Joconde. A new pair of Nike shoes gives an immediate upgrade much faster than a books library ) The new elite is therefore an oligarchy . The oligarchy has deeper power than the plutocracy ( Money alone is unsuffcient to shape behavior ).
What are the aims of the oligarchy ?
The economic-social model is what I call the ” Qatari-Emirati ” model .
Let’s look at those two tiny and very rich countries. They are sub-contract countries ( as opposed to the J.J.Rousseau” Contrat Social” european model )
A few hundreds of thousands of locals princes and their brethren rules over several millions of newcomers . The newcomers are payed at low wages , near slavery conditions , no social rights at all , at the lowest strata ; those arms who bear the heavy jobs in construction are Pakistani-Bangladeshi-chinese workers – at the upper strata the engineers are from Asia ( Korea – Singapore ) . In the suburbs the shops-trade-services are manned by indians ; In the hospitals and more vital services the doctors are europeans the nuns are from central europe . In th financial services the white collars are westerners , in the boardroom gather the rulers ad their strategic advisors .
All the subcontract workers up to the boardroom door are expendable ; The qatari-emirati are the owners-annuitant beneficiaries of the oil-gas dividends.
So the aim of the oligarchy is to reproduce in western europe this model ; by inviting millions of muslim immigrants , some voluntarily and since the ” arab spring + syrian crisis failure through ” humanitarian emergency “, the oligarchy will supply the weak western demography – create a new strata of very flexible workers – lower the request of social protection at large that was the quality mark of western democracies in europe .
The islamization of europe is aimed at depriving the local of their rights , since they will have to share less jobs with newcomers .
All the excuses of repentance versus the colonial past of Great-Britain , France , Belgium are smokescreens ; Why would Angela Merkel invite a million and a half syrians since Germany has no colonial past to excuse of ?
Overall , europe is 7% of the world population, it produces 25% of the world output BUT it spends 50%,of the world social protection budget . For the globalist oligarchy this is overspending . So you have the key to islamization ; create a working ” aboveground” population, put it in concurrence with the locals , then lower the wages and erase the social benefits of all of them .
In Israel , we were proud of Avoda Ivrit ; now we subcontract to chinese-thai the menial jobs ; same story .
I think the Europeans, who have rejected God, are looking for someone to take care of them, a “Big Mother”. They will vote for anyone who promises that, including Macron. LePen was calling upon them to be adults, which they cannot be.
That’s the way it seems, based on the polls. The British have proved themselves otherwise, and I admire them.