Is America no damn good? (cont.)

The discussion launched by Karen from England’s all out attack on the soundness and viability of the United States, which began on March 5 under the title, “Is Europe healthier (conservatively speaking) than the U.S.?”, has filled its original entry to maximum size and continues in this entry.

Rick U. writes:

Karen wrote: “You missed my point, the USA has bankrupted itself in the process of creating an Empire (or influence as you would say).”

The problem with this statement is that it simply isn’t true. America has bankrupted itself on the social policies and subsequent spending of the New Deal and the Great Society. These are the source of our insolvency, not some imagined American Empire building abroad. Thus, Karen has mistaken liberal talking points, I.e., excessive military spending, with reality. That is not to say that all military or foreign policy expenditures have been wise or provided the intended benefits, but compared to the social spending and the size of government more generally, it’s a pittance. We are bankrupt because of liberal domestic policy—period.

Thomas Fink writes from Germany:

Dear friends,

I love your love of Freedom. But as a conservative movement in the USA you have indeed some problems. And it is not that you miss a Royal Family, a aristocracy, an established Church, or whatever empty symbols of a glorious past there are. It is that your identity is coming from an idea how great it may be and not simply from being born somewhere. If you as conservatives in America oppose unrestricted immigration the liberal mindset can accuse you of being un-American and claim that diversity is what makes America great. In Europe they have to tell you that being Dutch, English, German is not so great, Europe is better . But nobody in Europe believes in Europe as an identity. They believe in being Irish, Bavarian, Danish. Does an American believe in being a Californian? Like the Terminator from Austria? In Europe mass immigration is a product of the welfare state. The ideas behind it are weak. When the welfare state in Europe collapses (and it just starts in Greece) the foreigners who live on it (and they are the vast majority) will disappear. In America it will be much more difficult. Getting your identity so much from ideas, makes you much more vulnerable to bad ideas, like white guilt.

LA replies:

I think there is truth in what you’re saying about Europe as compared with America, namely that the European openness to immigration is more like an extension of the welfare state, and therefore, as the welfare state collapses, so will approval of immigration; but that American openness to immigration expresses some fundamental idea of the country, and therefore cannot be given up.

But what you’ve said about Europe is unfortunately not the whole picture. Let’s take Britain, which I know more about than other European countries. The British openness to immigration is not just about an extension of the welfare state, it’s an expression of the idea that has become the ruling idea of modern Britain, which is that tolerance is the essence of Britain. It is the belief I tolerance as the value transcending all others that explains the systematic British openness to immigration, the permission to open enemies of Britain to remain in Britain and speak freely, the subsidization of terrorists in council houses, the non-punishment of violent criminals, and all the rest of the deeply sick phenomena that characterized Britain’s response to foreigners, jihadists, and criminals. So it turns out that Britain, just like America, believes in a supreme idea which is the source of its identity, and their respective ideas doom both countries. Therefore Britain is not so different from America.

I realized this about Britain in the immediate aftermath of the July 2005 terrorist bombing attacks in London. Perhaps you’ll say it’s different on the continent. But consider France. France now sees its essential identity as consisting of a universalism that involves the merging with the African and Islamic world. So France also is married to an idea that spells its doom.

It seems to me that your welfare state analysis of the European attitude toward immigration is part of the truth, but not the whole truth.

Van Wijk writes:

Karen wrote: “There is no evidence that the white population of the USA has the resilience or coherence to withstand the major shocks that it will have to face in the future.”

So what are we to do? Return to Europe? Does Karen have some solution that will save our skins, or should we be expected to curl up and die?

I think Karen harbors some genuine hatred for America for what it is, rather than for what it has done. She ignores points that don’t suit her purpose and aggressively predicts our demise because a part of her wishes for that end. Perhaps the death of America will vindicate her notions of superiority. It will be very difficult for me to take her seriously in the future, which is a shame.

LA replies:

I agree that Karen’s all out attack on America is troubling. She is not speaking as a friend to us, saying, “You’ve gone in the wrong direction, you need to straighten yourself out.” No. she’s condemning America as America, saying America is no good, period. It’s hard to know what she thinks we ought to do about her criticisms, other than complete the process of national suicide and rid the world of our bad presence.

Karen writes:

There is nothing personal about the facts and views I expressed. They have been expressed by others in Europe and yet they have not permeated the American psyche. I make the simple point reiterated by your German reader that a nation founded on an ideology rather than a concrete ethnic people is unlikely to survive in times of adversity. But it seems to be Europeans alone who can understand this reality and anticipate its consequences. You and each one of your readers have taken the fact as a personal attack on good old Uncle Sam. And yet these responses are exactly as I predicted. They show an insecure identity beneath the superficial bluster, a tendency to readily take offence, and a manifest lack of insight and consequent inability to find any appropriate action. This indeed demonstrates that the USA has the problems to which Thomas alluded. The rest of the world can see that plain as day. Does this not demonstrate the insularity of the American mind? [LA replies: “superficial bluster”? We traditionalists live in the troubled consciousness that our nation is being severely damaged, is under great threat, and will be destroyed in the absence of a radical change of direction. So what the hell are you talking about when you portray us as blusterers concealing our insecurity? Of course we’re insecure. Expressing that insecurity, that fear, that anguish, arising from the realistic apprehension of the threats that face us, was the starting point of my own work on immigration many years ago, is a part of this site, and is continually expressed by commenters. As I’ve often said, quoting Plato, without fear of an actual threat to one’s society, one will never have the courage to oppose that threat. Also, almost every time someone at this site points out how bad things are in Britain, he adds, “And we in the U.S. are just a few steps behind.” Is that bluster, Karen? Your portrayal of me and other VFR participants as blusterers is one of the most absurd things ever said at this site. What do you think we are: establishment Republicans touting the Reaganite Conservatism of Optimism? I can’t believe the misconceptions you are propagating here.]

[The commenters in this discussion who responded to you were not blustering, but sensibly and forcefully pointing out the good sides of America that you in your anti-American diatribe were ignoring.]

Now lets look at your comments:

Let’s take Britain, which I know more about than other European countries. The British openness to immigration is not just about an extension of the welfare state, it’s an expression of the idea that has become the ruling idea of modern Britain, which is that tolerance is the essence of Britain. It is the belief I tolerance as the value transcending all others that explains the systematic British openness to immigration, the permission to open enemies of Britain to remain in Britain and speak freely, the subsidization of terrorists in council houses, the non-punishment of violent criminals, and all the rest of the deeply sick phenomena that characterized Britain’s response to foreigners, jihadists, and criminals. So it turns out that Britain, just like America, believes in a supreme idea which is the source of its identity, and their respective ideas doom both countries. Therefore Britain is not so different from America. I realized this about Britain in the immediate aftermath of the July 2005 terrorist bombing attacks in London. Perhaps you’ll say it’s different on the continent. But consider France. France now sees its essential identity as consisting of a universalism that involves the merging with the African and Islamic world. So France also is married to an idea that spells its doom

Now this is not true. Britain and the European countries allowed immigration to acquire cheap labour for specific industries. It was not intended that the immigrants stay or become in any way British. But they did stay for various reasons and politicians soon grasped that they were an easy supply of votes and let more in. In Europe we have politicians and officials who espouse tolerance and promote mass immigration in a duplicitous manner for their own political purposes, principally the destruction of the individual European identities. This is what you hear and you assume that the European people accept it. They don’t. They live under this regime until it collapses but they resist the change in their identity. There are low grade civil wars in parts of Britain now. You won’t hear of it in the media but there are regular clashes between ethnic Brits and Asians in East London and other parts of Britain. [LA replies: I hope you’re right, and that the whole immigration/multiculturalism regime collapses like a house of cards and the British people regain possession of their Island. But it’s absurd to say that Britain let in millions of immigrants with the right to remain in Britain for their lives, and thought that these people would not remain. That’s just pure bleeding escapism, Karen, the same kind of escapism we hear from the likes of Melanie Phillips and Janet Daly who express their outrage at finding out that the Labor government secretly expected the immigrants to change Britain but didn’t tell the cuontry about it. Daly’s and Phillips’s implication is that in the absence of the government’s belief or hope that mass immigration would change Britain, mass immigration somehow would NOT have changed Britain! Daly and Phillips want to make the Labor government responsible for an immigration policy that Daly and Phillips never opposed, and never said should be changed. And now you’re doing a similar thing, falsely exculpating the British people for passively allowing the mass immigration, by claiming that the immigrants who were admitted weren’t really expected to stay, and it’s only through the trickery and self interest of politicians that they have been allowed to stay. What a crock. The truth is that the immigration happened, which everyone had to know would transform Britain, but no one publicly opposed it, because after the Powell affair the whole country of Britain caved. In America there was always some vigorous public criticism of immigration policy, as inadequate as it was. In Britain, there was, as far as the public life of the society was concerned, total surrender.]

French politicians promote universalism. The people reject it. Your opinions are formed from the media and not from real life experience in France. If you go around France you will see that the French people have a strong ethnic pride. You as a white non French man would be treated with hostility in parts of France. British people who have gone to live in France have been driven out of small towns by various means. France is not an easy place for the non French. You would find the legal system totally biased against the foreigner should you try to sue any Frenchman as the Frenchman is truly the King in his country as far as the judiciary is concerned. As for the Musilmans, blacks and Arabs, they live in ghettos like the blacks in South Africa. These ghettos can be sealed off readily by the French military and the Third worlders isolated and enclosed. When the Muslims riot, they foul their own nests. If they started to cause major mayhem to the French they would be swiftly dealt with. The Muslims and blacks are tolerated officially because of the political regime of the EU. On a personal level it’s a different matter. In reality the position of the Muslims in Europe is very vulnerable and the Muslims themselves know that which is why their extremists will never fly a plane into any French or German building. Nor will they torch the Porches and BMWs in Germany. Their leaders have said that they know they can do nothing serious in France because they could be swiftly annihilated should the French forces seal off the ghettos and start attacking them. When the EU collapses, and with Greece it has begun, the position of the Muslims and blacks in Europe will be precarious. If they don’t leave voluntarily as Thomas has suggested then the French and Germans would not hesitate to eliminate them. No one should underestimate the capability of the French and Germans (and the Dutch and Scandinavians I would add) to do just that with swift efficiency. [LA replies: again, I devoutly hope that you are right that the French and other nationalities do not at all accept the Muslims among them and are ready to throw them out. But a lot of evidence suggests otherwise. It shows continual passive acceptance of Islamization. And I think there is a large measure of escapism in y our vision of a resurgent Europe just waiting for the chance to throw out the Musulman.]

As an aside, I was in a French airport recently and an immigration officer told a Russian woman to go into the non EU line for passport control. She replied that she was British and produced a passport. The officer looked at it and replied “you have a British passport, I see but you are certainly not British”. This sums up the attitude of most Europeans. [Sure, those attitudes exist alongside the official liberal universalist ideology. But, as I’ve written, it is the explicit ideas to which people publicly subscribe, not their private, inchoate feelings, that ultimately rule in politics. The fact that people privately don’t believe in the liberal ideology will not stop that ideology from destroying the country, so long as the people don’t publicly oppose it.]

James P. writes:

Karen writes,

“You and each one of your readers have taken the fact as a personal attack on good old Uncle Sam.”

This tells me Karen is not even reading the responses, or is incapable of understanding them, or is simply unwilling to address them. You, I, and several other of your readers have pointed out serious errors in her facts and logic, but she chooses to interpret this as delusion and emotionalism.

One thing I find interesting is that she thinks the Europeans would “eliminate” the blacks and Muslims with very little provocation. Apparently she’s been channeling Ralph “Europeans are natural-born heartless killers and ethnic cleansers” Peters.

LA replies:

Hah, yes, I thought of ol’ Europe-hating Ralph when I read that.

How about an anti-European-conservative triumverate: Charles Johnson, Ralph Peters, and Glenn Beck? Ayaan Hirsi Ali can be their media spokesperson.

March 11, 12:30 a.m.

Van Wijk writes:

Regarding Muslims, Karen said:

“Their leaders have said that they know they can do nothing serious in France because they could be swiftly annihilated should the French forces seal off the ghettos and start attacking them.”

Would these French forces be the ones controlled by the officially multicultural French government? Or are there other French forces just waiting in the wings to bring about a traditionalist revolution in France? A government which a) venerates non-discrimination and b) controls virtually all of the country’s armaments needn’t feel threatened by the supposed conservatism of the people. It can do what it will, and indeed it is doing it.

Karen wrote:

“In Europe we have politicians and officials who espouse tolerance and promote mass immigration in a duplicitous manner for their own political purposes, principally the destruction of the individual European identities. This is what you hear and you assume that the European people accept it. They don’t.”

Listen to this telephone call made by BBC radio personality Sam Mason to a taxi company in Bristol. She needs a car for her 14-year-old daughter but, quite reasonably, requests a white, female driver so that the girl would not be made uncomfortable. The working-class female dispatcher, far from agreeing with Mason, acts like a good little apparatchik and immediately denounces Mason as a racist. This same dispatcher would later release the taped call to the media, resulting in Mason’s termination from her job.

Anecdotal? Possibly. But I think the attitude of the dispatcher is much closer to reality in Britain than Karen’s scenario of a chest-thumping jingo around every corner. I’m active on a forum where many Britons are present. With few exceptions they hate the West, they hate their white skin, but most of all they hate America.

Finally, if what Karen says about the ethnic core of Europe was true then The Camp of the Saints would never have been written. It’s funny how Jean Raspail, a Frenchman and world traveler, could in such exacting detail summarize the ultimate nightmare of a bunch of benighted, provincial Americans (and in 1973!).

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 09, 2010 12:37 AM | Send