Fjordman’s manifesto for Western defense and renewal

Fjordman, the Norwegian blogger, offers the most thoroughgoing set of proposals I have seen for saving the West from Islam. I and others have come up with elements of a such an approach, but Fjordman’s ideas, which draw on those of Hugh Fitzgerald and others, are more comprehensive and could serve as the basis of a political program both practical and visionary. Since it is a long article, 3,500 words, I have created below an abridged version (a little over a third the original length) to bring out its political platform-like quality.

Fjordman’s recommendations for the West—abridged

I would suggest that one thing we should fight for is national sovereignty and the right to preserve our own culture and pass it on to future generations.

Although Leftists tend to be more aggressive, perhaps the dividing line in the internal struggle in the West is less between Left and Right, and more between those who value national sovereignty and Western culture and those who do not. End the nonsense of “celebrating our differences.” We should be celebrating our sameness and what binds us together. We should clean up our history books and school curricula, which have been infected with anti-Western sentiments.

Those who don’t want to uphold national borders are actually tearing down the very foundations of our democratic system, which is based on nation states. The fight for national sovereignty is thus the fight for democracy itself, since nobody has so far made any convincing model of a supranational democracy.

Westerners need to adjust our self-image to being less dominant in the 21st century. As such, we also need to ditch Messianic altruism: The West must first of all save itself. We have no obligation to “save” the Islamic world, and do not have the financial strength nor the demographic numbers to do so even if we wanted to. We are not all-powerful and are not in the position to help all of the Third World out of poverty, certainly not by allowing all of them to move here.

We should take a break from massive immigration, also non-Muslim immigration, for at least a generation, in order to absorb and assimilate the persons we already have in our countries.

The best way to deal with the Islamic world is to have as little to do with it as possible. We should ban Muslim immigration. This could be done in creative and indirect ways, such as banning immigration from nations with citizens known to be engaged in terrorist activities. We should remove all Muslim non-citizens currently in the West. We should also change our laws to ensure that Muslim citizens who advocate sharia, preach Jihad, the inequality of “infidels” and of women should have their citizenship revoked and be deported back to their country of origin.

We need to create an environment where the practice of Islam is made difficult.

Given sharia’s inequality between men and women, Muslims and non-Muslims, it is de facto a religious apartheid system. Calling this struggle a self-defense against apartheid would make it more difficult for Western Leftists to dismiss it.

People should be educated about the realities of Jihad and sharia. Authorities or groups of dedicated individuals should engage in efforts to explain the real nature of Islam, emphasizing the division that Islam teaches between Believer and Infidel, the permanent state of war between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb and the uses of taqiyya and kitman as religious deception.

Fitzgerald also suggests exploiting the many fissures within the Islamic world: Divide and conquer. Divide and demoralize.

Both the sectarian and economic divisions within Islam are best exploited by Infidels doing nothing. If the Western world stops giving Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, and the Palestinians “aid,” which has in reality become a disguised form of Jizyah, this will clear the psychological air.

We need to drive home the utter failure of the Islamic model by making sure that Muslims should no longer able to count on permanent Western or infidel aid in their overpopulated, self-primitivized states, whose very unviability they are prevented from recognizing by this constant infusion of aid.

We also need to deprive Arabs and Muslims as much as possible of Western Jizya in other forms, which means ending foreign aid, but also institute a Manhattan Project for alternative sources of energy, in order to become independent of Arab oil.

And as Mr. Fitzgerald asks: “What would the rich Arabs do if the Western world decided to seize their property in the West as the assets of enemy aliens, just as was done to the property owned not only by the German government, but by individual Germans, during World War II? And what would they do if they were to be permanently deprived of easy access to Western medical care?”

Yes, we should implement a policy of containment of the Islamic world, but for this to work we will sometimes have to take military action to crush Arab pretensions to grandeur. The Buddhists of Central Asia undoubtedly held the “moral high ground” in relations to Muslims. They are all dead now. At the very least, we must be prepared to back up our ideological defenses with force on certain occasions. Holding a higher moral standard isn’t going to defeat an Iranian President with nukes, threatening another Holocaust.

I have heard several objections to the containment option. Some claim that it is too harsh and thus won’t be implemented; others say that it is insufficient and won’t work in the long run.

It’s true that in the current political situation, expulsion of sharia-sponsoring Muslims isn’t going to happen. But the current political situation isn’t going to last.

I understand this objection. No, it won’t be easy, but we have to at least try. Containment is the very minimum that is acceptable. Perhaps the spread of nuclear technology will indeed trigger a large-scale war with the Islamic world at some point. The only way to avoid this is to take steps, including military ones, to deprive Muslims of such technology.

I have also been criticized because my talk about containment and the need to limit even non-Muslim immigration smacks of the siege mentality of a friendless West.

… I’m advocating isolating the Islamic world, not the West. Even if we cannot allow all non-Muslims to freely settle in our lands, this does not mean that they have to be our enemies. Jihad is being waged against the entire non-Muslim world, not just the West. We should stop trying to “win the hearts and minds” of Muslims and start reaching out to non-Muslims.

The United Nations is heavily infiltrated by Islamic groups. We should starve it for funds and ridicule it at any given opportunity. As an alternative to the UN, we could create an organization where only democratic states could become members. Another possibility is an expansion of NATO. The most important principle at this point is to contain the Islamic world. We simply cannot allow our enemies to have influence over our policies, which they partly do through the UN.

For Europe, the most important thing to do right now is to dismantle the European Union in its present form, and regain national control over our borders and our legislation. The EU is so deeply flawed as an organization, and so heavily infiltrated by Eurabian and pro-Islamic thinking that it simply cannot be reformed. And let’s end the stupid support for the Palestinians that the Eurabians have encouraged, and start supporting our cultural cousin, Israel.

We should use the money instead to strengthen our border controls and rebuild credible militaries. Western Europeans have lived under Pax Americana for so long that we have forgotten how to defend ourselves. This needs to change, and soon.

Europeans should adopt legislation similar to the First Amendment in the American Constitution, securing the right to free speech. The reason why European authorities are becoming increasingly totalitarian in their censorship efforts is to conceal the fact that they are no longer willing or able to uphold even the most basic security of their citizenry, far less our national borders. Europe needs free speech more than ever.

Baron Bodissey’s two cents: Europe needs a Second Amendment, too, and for the same reason.

We need to strike a balance between defeatism and denial. Yes, the situation in Europe is now very serious, but it is not totally lost. Not yet. [LA: tell that to Mark Steyn!] The Danish Cartoon Jihad has demonstrated that their Islamic arrogance encourages Muslims to become too aggressive, too early, and thus overplay their hand.

It is highly likely that the coming generation will determine whether Europe will continue to exist as a Western cultural entity. However, just as Islam isn’t the cause of Europe’s weakness but rather a secondary infection, it is conceivable that the Islamic threat could have the unforeseen and ironic effect of saving Europe from herself. Europe will bleed but she won’t die.

Muslims always claim that Islamic influences triggered the Renaissance. That’s not true. But maybe it will be this time. Perhaps this life-and-death struggle with Islam is precisely the slap in the face that we need to regroup and revitalize our civilization. Is there still enough strength left in Europe to repel an Islamic invasion once more? If so, Muslims could indeed be responsible for triggering a Western Renaissance, the Second Renaissance.

- end of initial entry -

Mladen A. in Israel writes:

I am surprised that in your review of Fjordman’s Manifesto for Western Defense and Renewal you fail to mention Serge Trifkovic’s book Defeating Jihad where many of Fjordman’s recommendations have already been put forward. Fjordman’s Manifesto may be long and consist of 3.500 words but Trifkovic had devoted a whole book to the subject already six months ago .

LA replies:

First, I provided an abridged version of Fjordman’s article so that it would stand out as a series of proposals that could be more readily grasped.

Second, I haven’t read Trifkovic’s book. Fjordman several times gave Hugh Fitzgerald as a source for his ideas, but not Trifkovic, so I mentioned Fitzgerald by name but not Trifkovic. However, I see that Mladen’s review of Trif’s book at Amazon (linked above) says the following:

The way out of this bind that Trifkovic proposes is the following: Just as for decades immigrants were obliged by US law to sign in their application papers that they are not members of the Communist Party (not by way of gratuitous political discrimination but because Communists parties world-wide in their charters called for the violent overthrow of democratically elected “capitalist” governments), so also in likewise manner Muslims should be monitored for their adherence to those political principles of violence that stem from - and indeed are stipulated in - the Koran and pronouncements of Muhammad the Prophet. “The precondition is to accept that a practicing Muslim who comes to the United States cannot be “absolutely and entirely” loyal to the United States by definition”. Emigration laws [sic] would be reformed to exclude Jihadists and citizenship would be refused or rescinded to all Islamic activists.

According to Mladen, Trifkovic’s strategy for defeating jihad consists of excluding Islamic activists from U.S. immigration and stripping the citizenship and removing jihadists from the United States. Trifkovic has made the same proposals prior to his book, and they are sound and important. I’ve made similar proposals for removing not only outright jihad supporters but most Muslims from America, numerous times, in considerable detail, particularly in my 2004 article, “How to Defeat Jihad in America,” yet I didn’t feel it was necessary to mention myself as a source for Fjordman’s ideas. Fjordman’s article, by contrast with Mladen’s summary of Trifkovic’s book, provides a sweeping, comprehensive program of Western defense, including ways of making the Muslims leave the West, but many other things as well. So I don’t see what Mladen is complaining about.


Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 12, 2006 01:54 AM | Send
    

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