Murderous Morlocks run amuck among Eloi
(See my exchange with Fred below, where we talk about the liberal rejection of generalizations.)
This is not barbarism, this is pure savagery, released into the heart of Europe by pure liberalism. The report comes from the Brussels Journal:
On Saturday afternoon Guido Demoor, a 54-year old Flemish train conductor on his way to work, was kicked to death by six “youths” on a crowded bus near Antwerp’s Central Station….
Guido Demoor, a father of two, intervened when six “youths” got on bus 23 in Antwerp and began to intimidate passengers. There were some forty people on the bus. Demoor asked the “youths” to calm down, whereupon they turned on him, savagely beating and kicking the man. At the next stop thirty passengers fled the bus. The thugs kept beating Demoor. They then pulled the emergency brake and jumped from the bus leaving their victim to die.
Three Moroccans, two of whom are minors, were arrested today…. Witnesses had described the culprits as immigrant youths of between 18 and 21 years of age….
Belgians do not have a constitutional or legal right to bear arms, not even purely defensive arms such as peppersprays….
* * *
Russell W. writes:
As equally troubling (if not more so) as the actual presence of murderous third-world thugs beating people almost at random is the fact that FORTY Belgians saw fit to just sit there. Forty against six.
For my own part at least, I found the latter even more horrifying for what it portends. Savages have always been with us, and will always be with us in some form or another. But a confident and unashamed Western civilization has nothing to fear from them. This herd of “Eloi,” as you appropriately put it, wholly pacified, enervated and resigned to look away while a fellow citizen is beaten to death, are made lambs for the slaughter solely because their culture has decided that it must be so.
Seriously, how much longer can this go on? I always knew that Europe’s insane obeisance to multiculturalist white guilt would cause them to not do anything until things got very very bad (and then likely react in an overly heavy-handed way), but I’m starting to become worried by stories like this. These people are like hostages in their own country. Have they become so inured that they accept it as normal?
LA replies:
We don’t know who the other psssengers were. They may have been women, older people, kids. We don’t know that there were men on the bus, or enough men, who might have been able to take on these murderers. [LA adds: See below. It’s likely most of the passengers were Muslims.]
Fred writes:
Russell seems to suffer from what I call “Mark Steyn syndrome”: that is, the ascription solely to Europe of ills that are ubiquitous in the white world. I ask Russell, does the proliferation of murderous gangs of Hispanic descent cause the government (or American people) to question mass Hispanic immigration (quite apart from the question of illegal immigration)?
There are about 400,000 Muslims in Belgium (4 percent of the population), as compared to Hispanics in the U.S., who make up 14 percent of American inhabitants. I imagine that if the majority of Americans are able to shut their eyes to Hispanic crime (with the usual anodyne characterizations of the Hispanics as hard workin,” Virgin Mary worshippin,” but with a few bad apples), then the Belgians certainly can do it. This has less to do with white guilt than with the unwillingness, constantly voiced during discussion of immigration, not to generalize nor condemn an entire group because of the actions of some of its members. This unwillingness to hold groups accountable for the activities and beliefs of substantial minorities of their members is the root of many problems, both in terms of immigration and combatting terror.
LA replies:
“This unwillingness to hold groups accountable for the activities and beliefs of substantial minorities of their members is the root of many problems.”
Well stated. Thus liberalism tells us we can’t say that Islam demands sharia or jihad or that Islam is a threat to non-Muslims, because that would tar every individual Muslim, which we must not do; as a result, we’re left not being able to make any general statement about Islam, and our minds—and the world—turn to mush.
If we were to discuss liberalism as a religion, as Ann Coulter does, this would be one of the top commandments of the liberal religion:
Thou shalt not make general statements.
Or, more precisely:
I am NOT the LORD thy God. Thou shalt not make general statements.
If liberalism is a religion, then nominalism—the denial of the reality of general categories and concepts—is its Holy Place, even its Holy of Holies. Liberalism began in the 17th century by removing substantive religious and moral beliefs from the public square, and replacing them by neutral procedures, all for the purpose of avoiding social conflict. Well, nominalism would seem to serve the same function in the liberal order as the removal of religion does: the rejection of general truths or concepts, because they create conflict or are “not fair.”
When Alan Colmes interviewed me he gave me the impression that his main passion, his main mission in life is to attack and invalidate any generalization about a group, so long as the generalization did not literally apply to every single last member of the group. It’s as though he doesn’t have anything to say about the world; instead, he lives for the purpose of preventing anything from being said about the world, because that would be unfair to somebody, somewhere.
LA gets a further thought:
Not only do liberals, being nominalists, reject any general statement about the Other, they reject any general statement about OURSELVES. And that is the reason why they fail to grasp that their nation and civilization are currently threatened (as I discussed with Russell here): they have no CONCEPT of their nation and civilization, because, being nominalists, they are incapable of grasping the existence of any larger whole, including the larger whole of their own nation. The very idea of a larger whole is morally and metaphysically repugnant to them, because it would impose a truth which would crush people’s freedom in some way, or would prevent all people everywhere from being treated absolutely equally.
Jim Kalb adds:
I suppose an additional point is that the abolition of essences in favor of specific observable properties and their consequences in particular instances is very much in line with modern natural science. That’s another source of the view that liberalism is simply rational and everything that deviates from it depends on invented irrational oppositions (i.e., “hate”).
Steve R. alerts us to this comment that was posted in the
Brussels Journal thread. It appears the bulk of the bus passengers were probably Muslims.
Submitted by Al Shaheed Al Kuffar on Tue, 2006-06-27 22:11.
To all,
Well, you have to take my word for it, but I took this bus for almost a year when my mother was in hospital. This piece of track (between Carnotstraat and Kerkstraat) is 100 percent populated by Muslims. Each time, when I was going through that piece of track the bus was populated by +90 percent muslims. So it is almost certain that no more than something like five non muslim (and certainly unarmed) people were present at the time of the beating. It suffices to contact somebody living in Antwerp to confirm my statements. This should explain why “nobody” reacted, and why they were eager to get off the bus at the next stop, not wanting to be involved in the murder.
As a small reminder, this event happened +- 100m from where, a few years ago, an elderly non muslim man got harassed to the point he killed an imam at point blank. I remember this created days of rioting (instigated by the Arab European Union leader Abu Jaja). Do you think there is going to be rioting now? All what is going to happen is that, under a heavy police escort, some flowers will be deposited at the place the murder took place.
Sage McLaughlin writes:
The description, in the Brussels Journal, of contemporary Belgium to which you linked this morning reminded me of the distopian depiction of London in Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. Unfortunately, Kubrick’s absurd film version of the book has made it hard for some people to take the imagery very seriously.
Rampaging youths; adults terribly fearful of young people (even their own children, to whom they bow and acquiesce); sadistic gangs babbling an incomprehensible tongue amongst themselves, having nothing to say to the wider society—except through expressions of violent disdain.
The correspondent who had sent me the news story on the murder in Antwerp had put it under the subject line, “Europeans probably aren’t worth saving.” Another correspondent had replied:
No, Europeans are worth saving. It is the European elites, like ours here in North America, that must be bulldozed into the sea.
I replied:
Well, imagine this situation. A pro-Western civilization government gets into power in the U.S. or some European country and sets about policies that will save the country. Imagine how the entire left, at every level of society, would react. They would use all their power to stop this from happening. It would be civil war. In order for the country to do the things it would need to do to save itself, it would first have to defeat the powers of the left in something like a civil war.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 27, 2006 11:53 PM | Send