Bayou Renaissance Man

 

Found on MeWe:

How do you say "Excuse me, sir, but your xenophobia is showing," in Welsh?

Peter

 

Friends, most of you know that the reason I instituted moderation of all comments on this blog was because spammers were becoming a bigger and bigger problem.  I couldn't rely on Blogger to catch them all, so I have to do it myself.  I'd rather not - it takes effort to do so, and time I'd rather devote to other things - but it was the only way I could stay on top of the problem.  (I've moderated 28 spam comments in the last five days alone.)

However, it looks like it was a worthwhile policy even without the spam problem, thanks to the increasing polarization of our society and the weirdness that's being reinforced by online echo chambers.  Too many commenters appear to be listening only to their own thoughts and those of people who see the world as they do, whether or not that perspective has anything to do with reality.  Trouble is, they insist on exporting those thoughts and that weirdness to everybody else, including forums such as the Comment sections on this blog.  This morning, when I woke up and sat down at the computer to moderate overnight comments, I had to discard several proclaiming that all the problems of the world are caused by the Jews, or the whites, or the blacks, or Democrats, or Communists, or women who refuse to be "traditional wives", or . . . you get the idea.

Folks, I try to allow most people to comment freely on what they think.  They, as we, have the right to speak their minds.  However, they do not have the right to use my blog as a propaganda outlet to beat me (and the rest of us) over the head with their particular schtick.  Therefore, I deleted all such comments, and I'll continue to do so.  The same applies to disjointed comments that make no logical sense, or have nothing to do with the topic under discussion.  Why inflict them on my readers?  We have better things to do with our time.

(Some comments don't make it to my inbox at all.  Every now and again I get complaints from people who allege that I've deleted their comment, only for me to check the files and find it didn't arrive at all.  Blogger does that sometimes - it's been a known problem for years.  I have no idea how to fix it.)

Rational, reasonable comments and discussion from people who've clearly thought about the subject under discussion are more than welcome, even if their viewpoint or perspective is the opposite of my own.  I can be wrong too, you know!  However, I won't allow this blog to become a forum for extremism in any form, or an echo chamber for way-out-there muck and murk that might stick to our metaphorical walls.  We don't need that here - and as the online janitor, I flush it away whenever I come across it.

That may offend some readers, particularly those with a particular ideological axe to grind:  but that's the way it is here.  If you want to do things differently, please start your own blog and have at it.

Peter

 

I was aware of a strong undercurrent of xenophobia in South Africa during my years there.  I think part of it was due to strong tribal identification in Africa - it's your tribe versus all the others, and anyone not of your tribe is an "other" by definition, regardless of whether you share a skin color, religion, or anything else.  (That's pretty universal in more primitive cultures around the world, by the way.  In an inordinate number of cases, tribes' names for themselves in their own language refer to themselves as "the people", meaning that any and all others are not "people".  For example, the Comanche tribe refer to themselves as "Nʉmʉnʉʉ" or "Nemenuh", meaning "the people".)

It seems nothing's changed in South Africa - in fact, xenophobia appears to be getting overtly political.

Operation Dudula was set-up in Soweto two years ago, the first group to formalise what had been sporadic waves of xenophobia-fuelled vigilante attacks in South Africa that date back to shortly after white-minority rule ended in 1994. It calls itself a civic movement, running on an anti-migrant platform, with the word "dudula" meaning "to force out" in Zulu.

Soweto was at the forefront of anti-apartheid resistance and home to Nelson Mandela, South Africa's first democratically elected president. Now, the township has become the home of the country's most-prominent anti-migrant group.

With one in three South Africans out of work in one of the most unequal societies in the world, foreigners in general have become an easy target.

. . .

Operation Dudula has ... now transformed itself from a local anti-migrant group into a national political party, stating its aims to contest next year's general election.

. . .

Ms Dabula says critics of Operation Dudula who maintain it is a collective of violent vigilantes are wrong.

"We don't promote violence and we don't want people to feel harassed," but adds: "We cannot be overtaken by foreign nationals and do nothing about it."

Hundreds of supporters travelled to attend its first national conference in Johannesburg in May, where members voted to register the group as a political party.

Waving South African flags, dancing and singing their way through the streets to the City Hall, it feels like a celebration.

However, the songs they are singing carry a threatening message: "Burn the foreigner. We will go to the garage, buy some petrol and burn the foreigner."

There's more at the link.

The BBC produced a one-hour documentary on "the rise of xenophobia in South Africa and the violent targeting of migrants".  It's worth watching, if the subject interests you - and it should, because the same phenomenon is increasingly visible in the USA as well.

We're seeing the same xenophobia develop in our own communities, and it's entirely understandable.  People who have relied on "their" government to help and support them are finding more and more that "their" supports are being diverted to the illegal aliens flooding across our southern border - and they're getting very angry about it.  Consider these headlines:

Chicago Mayor Tells Residents To Make ‘Sacrifices’ To Benefit Illegal Immigrants

Chicago residents upset resources are going toward immigrants as more Texas buses arrive

Suing. Heckling. Cursing. NYC Protests Against Migrants Escalate

Eric Adams Says Migrant Crisis Will ‘Destroy New York City’

‘You’re free’: Hundreds of illegal migrants released onto San Diego streets

El Paso among border cities seeing migrants dumped onto streets: ‘We will run out of capacity’

Video shows train filled with migrants heading toward US southern border from Mexico

I could have cited many more reports, from many more cities.  Those merely illustrate the trend.

I keep my eyes and ears open to local reactions to the immigrant crisis.  It's far from a "white problem".  Many local (i.e. North Texas) black and hispanic residents are even more resentful of the alien invasion than whites are.  I've heard a number of them go so far as to voice threats against any migrants who try to settle here and "take our jobs" or "fool with our women".  They're not mild threats, either.  People here are well aware of the "alien barrio" that's being erected near Houston, whether locals there like it or not (they weren't consulted).  That's just a few hours' drive from here.  Our locals are determined to prevent anything similar happening in this area - and public sentiment around here seems to be solidly behind them.

I wonder if the Democratic Party has shot itself in the foot, politically speaking, with its outright, outspoken support for illegal migration?  It's historically relied upon black communities - and, to a certain extent, hispanic communities - for a lot of its electoral support.  Now both those communities are feeling threatened, indeed overwhelmed, by the illegal alien problem.  Will they withdraw their support from Democrats?  If they do, will they merely stay at home instead of voting, or will they actively support another person or party?  If they can't bring themselves to vote Republican, could they become the core of a new, anti-illegal-alien party like Operation Dudula is becoming in South Africa?

Another important question is how Mexican crime cartels are likely to respond if xenophobia gains ground in America.  The cartels are currently making as much money, if not more, from getting illegal aliens through Mexico and into the USA as they are from drug dealing.  If their income from that source is threatened by anti-immigrant sentiment in the USA, can they afford to tolerate it?  Will they try to impose migrants on communities by violence?  It's not a far-fetched question, because the cartels have shown willing (in Mexico) to use violence as a tool of policy under almost any circumstances, and even to take on the government and armed forces in open violent confrontation if they think it necessary.

This is going to get more and more "interesting" (in the sense of the fabled Chinese curse), particularly as the 2024 election campaign gets under way.

Peter

 

In two long and thought-provoking articles, John Waters gives us his understanding of what's going on in Europe and Africa right now, and how the latter is about to explode over Europe in a wave of desperate migration invasion that's going to swamp the Old World altogether.  They're unpleasant reading, but I think - knowing Africa and the Third World as I do - there's a lot of truth in them.

To whet your appetite, here are a couple of short excerpts.  From the first article:

Within months, or even weeks, in response to the escalating food shortages and hyperinflation now coursing through the world economy in the manner of flash flooding, new waves of immigrants will begin to arrive in Europe from Africa, the Middle East, and other places, as people voyage forth in search of food, imagining that they will find it more easily in Paris or London or Dublin. In truth, parts of Europe will be more or less as desperate as any of the places these people have evacuated, because the already scheduled consequences of the disastrous lockdown policies of 2020 will be augmented by the effects of the catastrophic sanctioning of Russia in the context of the Ukraine war. These migrants, therefore — who will arrive in numbers far exceeding the influx of 2015 — will find themselves in a situation at best little better than that which they have left behind. The results are likely to include the radical destabilisation of European societies already in disarray due to the self-imposed difficulties arising from diminishing supplies of food and fuel. These circumstances are likely to provoke widespread outbreaks of social unrest and conflict throughout Europe, leading to the breakdown of the social order in many countries, which is likely to be met by the imposition of martial law.

. . .

All this is planned. It will not be an unforeseen, happenstance outcome of random events. Social chaos is baked into the cake of Covid disruption and tyranny ... This will be the denouement of a process that has been nurtured for many decades, with the precise intent of looting the homelands of all concerned. This two-part article is an attempt to describe the events and conditions that have taken us to this calamitous point.

And from the second article:

Although conventional wisdom in the West has it that the issue of mass migration out of Africa (and by extension other ‘developing’ countries — for which read ‘the undeveloping countries’) is one of absolute need on one side and a ‘duty’ to step up and deliver ‘compassion’ on the other, the reality, as we have seen, is rather different. The vast majority of migrants are not ‘the poorest of the poor’ of popular bleeding-heart spin, but the relatively better-off.  They are ... the ones who have managed to up sticks and come to the West as a direct result of Western aid that was, nominally at least, intended to provide Africans with a jumpstart in their own countries, but is instead functioning to suck the most intelligent and creative human life out of Africa and deposit it in Paris, Dublin, Berlin and London.  The point of this has to do with neither the dreams and desires of the migrants nor — even less — the betterment of poorer countries, but is entirely about achieving certain outcomes in Western societies, the first among which is to drive down wages so as to make the world even more congenial to corporate interests. And there are other motives also, as we shall see.

I highly recommend that you click over to both articles and read them carefully.  They're a harbinger of what's coming to the USA as well, because migration - or, rather, invasion by illegal aliens - is a weapon that's being turned against this country as well.  It's likely to have similar consequences, unless we can shut it down before it's too late.  We can be certain that the Biden administration and those behind it will do all in their power to stop us from doing that, by any and every means at their disposal.

Peter

 

All the current talk about threats of war with Russia over Ukraine are about the stupidest thing I can imagine . . . except that the Biden administration has painted itself into a corner with its incompetence and buffoonery, and the oligarchs that are pulling its strings realize that their exploitation of COVID-19 to increase their control over the citizens is in tatters, and Russia sees in our weakness an opportunity to assert its status as a "recovering superpower", if I may use that term.

There is no, repeat, NO reason for Americans to lose their lives to defend a corrupt, incompetent regime in Ukraine.  We have no compelling or vital national security interest to defend there.  Anyone who disagrees with me is free to identify such an interest and explain it in a comment to this blog post.  I'd love to read it.

Tucker Carlson and his guest put it well yesterday.  The segment is only about five minutes long, and is worth watching.

We've seen this tactic used time and time again in multiple countries over many centuries.  Are things getting out of hand for the powers that be in their own country?  Then, quick - let's make the citizens focus on an external threat, something around which they'll feel duty-bound to unite and ignore anything else.  While they're focused on that, we can get away with whatever we like internally.

China's doing that right now over Taiwan.

Russia's doing that right now over Ukraine.

The USA's doing that right now over Russia.

No war is necessary in any of those examples . . . but given the rhetoric of the leaders concerned, and the need they all share to distract their citizens from internal problems and the manufactured (in every way) threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, they'll grasp eagerly at any and every available straw.

Afghanistan wasn't worth the thousands of American lives it cost to conquer and occupy it.  Ukraine isn't worth even one American life, because there's nothing there that we need or want, and nothing that's of direct and immediate importance to us.  Let the Ukrainians and the Russians sort it out.  It's their business.  If Europe wants to get involved, let them.  They're near enough to the problem for it to be their business.  We aren't.

Peter

EDITED TO ADD:  See CDR Salamander's views for an interesting insight into how and why Russia is reacting as it is.

 

I was pleased to see this article at Quillette.  The author, Jonathan Kay, is clearly of mid-left-wing political sympathies, but he's also clearly a thinking man, who's realized that we're headed like lemmings towards a cliff from which there's no return.  I can only wish more people of good will, on both sides, could realize this, and do something about it before it's too late.  The former is happening.  The latter . . . not so much.

When you have lived long enough in a foreign country, you eventually begin to realize that the one you left behind, once accepted as utterly unique since it was all you knew, is not particularly different from anywhere else. One can call this perspective, but it is more a recognition of the essential contingency of any nation.

This is especially true when observing a country like the United States, which raises its children to believe that it is exceptional and, being exceptional, also immortal. Indeed, living in a country like Israel, which must be ever-vigilant about existential danger, I am struck by America’s extraordinary sense of invulnerability. An unthinkably bloody civil war did not break it, nor did Pearl Harbor or even 9/11. America and Americans, by and large, think they are going to live forever. Like most Americans, I grew up reflexively believing this. It was never said or taught outright, but it was a kind of cultural assumption. America was born of the virgin Liberty, and like the son of God in which it still largely believes, will always rise from the dead.

From afar, however, you eventually realize that, just as no man is immortal, nor is any nation. It is possible, of course, that it may survive for a very long time—much longer than the lifespan of any individual citizen. But even Rome fell, and while the Jews and perhaps India and China appear to prove the possibility of perpetual existence, it is in the nature of existence itself that survival is by no means inevitable.

This disillusion has been much on my mind lately, as I gaze from this great distance at the country of my birth. Because ... it looks like America is in the midst of a crack-up.

I doubt that it is necessary to present a complete list of the symptoms of this collective nervous breakdown, but there were certain inflection points that seem important in retrospect. Over the past 20 years, America threw itself into two wars, one necessary and the other wholly not. It saw the rise of an anti-war movement that asserted, quite stridently, that a relatively innocuous president was the equivalent of Hitler. It watched as its overclass, through greed and short-sighted pursuit of profits, nearly destroyed the economy. It elected a messianic leader who proved all too human and followed him with a narcissistic, bloviating, entirely unscrupulous incompetent who was indifferent to the basic conduct required to sustain a democracy. It witnessed a direct attack on one of the great institutions of that democracy, now defended by a great many who ought to know better. It fostered an opposition composed of radicals prone to censorship and street violence. It has been riven by racial divisions that appear to admit of no obvious solution. And now it must contend with the fact that approximately half the country believes that a presidential election was stolen because their mendacious leader told them so.

The results of all this are not too difficult to discern: A significant segment of the American Left and Right have both, to a great extent, given up on the republic and its institutions. Something like a low-intensity race war has broken out both on the streets and in rarified cultural and academic institutions. Half the country considers their opponents godless, pagan heathens who are—at times literally—in league with Satan. The other half considers their opponents Nazis who are seeking to rebuild and re-enforce a white-dominated racial hierarchy. Both believe, quite sincerely, that the victory of the other side will mean the triumph of evil and therefore must be prevented at (almost) any cost.

All of this has led me to contemplate a depressing but perhaps inevitable possibility: I don’t see how America gets out of this. I had hoped that the Capitol attack might finally break the fever, and that some measure of sanity might prevail. But the opposite happened, and the Right has, with some noble exceptions, doubled down, proclaiming that the mob were peaceful protesters and Ashli Babbitt is the new John Birch. The Left, meanwhile, has gone about gutting the right to free speech and destroying the lives and reputations of anyone who ventures that there are, for example, only two sexes. Neither side, then, is willing to admit the obvious, and is determined to impose an alternative truth—that is, lies—by coercive means, if necessary.

This all seems to add up to something like a sign of the end. Republics, and especially democratic republics, rest not only on the written law but also on an unwritten law: “Thou shalt submit to reality.” This brand of Enlightenment-born politics requires citizens to assent to the laws of the republic, the institutions of the republic, and the results of its regular elections, secure in the knowledge that there will always be another one. In other words, citizens are expected to conduct themselves as reasonable human beings. No one, however, appears to be reasonable anymore. One side believes that the moral imperative of equity overrides all other values and considerations, including the Bill of Rights; the other side submits to nothing but the dictates of its spiteful demagogue. This is unsustainable.

There's much more at the link.  Recommended reading.

I don't see how America gets out of this, either.  It's still possible for rational, reasonable people to find a way;  but rational, reasonable people are not in charge right now, and are not leading either wing of US politics.  It's become a tired old cliche to quote Yeats, but sadly his words are no less accurate for that:

What Mr. Kay fails to realize (or, at least, to acknowledge) is that the individual leaders involved - President Obama, of whom he clearly approves, or President Trump, of whom the opposite is clearly true - are not the "leaders" of their respective "sides".  The two are merely figureheads for their followers, giving a human face to a fundamental dissonance in US society.  The extremists on either side appear unwilling to regard the other as "human".  Instead, they're "things" - "Rethuglicans" or "Democraps", leftists or rightists, conservatives or progressives, enemies or friends.  There's no longer any recognition of the essential humanity and shared national heritage that should unite us.  I've written many times about that dissonance and its effect on societies.  See, for example, what I said about the Paris terror attacks in 2015, and apply that to US society today.  There's an awful lot in common.

I did not like and still do not like President Trump's arrogant, abrasive style, and did not and do not support him because of it.  I did so because his policies to put America first and restore the balance between Wall Street and Main Street were and are, to me, so self-evidently correct.  Others will, of course, disagree with that perspective, as is their right.  That's the beauty of freedom;  one is free to choose.  I disagree profoundly with those who hold that President Obama's policies were right;  but I grant that if he won a free, fair, democratic election and proceeded to implement those policies, he had the same right to do so as President Trump had to do the same when he won election.

Sadly, neither side is willing to extend such tolerance to the other any longer.  We are no longer the "United" States, whether we like it or not.  Instead, we no longer trust each other, and we no longer trust the organs and institutions that run our country.  That way lies dissolution.  As economist Herbert Stein said, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop".  That seems to be happening right now to our country in its present form.

Charles Lipson sums it up.

Sometimes, stories that appear unrelated share common foundations and have cumulative effects, far more serious than any one does individually. Highlighting these common features tells us something profound about our society and its troubles.

. . .

The problem we face, beyond the specifics about crime, COVID, duplicity, and social division, is a palpable breakdown in public order at the same time the public has lost confidence in our government officials and the institutions they lead. The two meta-problems—the breakdown of order and erosion of public confidence—are deeply intertwined because we count on our leaders and institutions to give us reliable information, provide a stable environment (so each of us can go about our lives), and abide by the same rules we all do. Those are foundational elements of a peaceful, liberal, democratic society. Their attrition imperils that society and its governance.

. . .

The danger and dishonesty come after decades of eroding trust in public officials and the institutions they lead. Polls in the early 1960s showed over 70% of the public believed public officials were telling the truth. Those numbers have declined steadily to less than 20%. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon got that ball rolling downhill, but it hasn’t stopped. The mistrust goes beyond public officials to include news media, social media, universities, corporations, unions, churches, and even civic organizations such as the Boy Scouts.

The public put aside those doubts, at least temporarily, when the COVID pandemic struck in February and March 2020. Almost everyone was willing to follow mask mandates and business closures. They were willing to let small children skip in-person learning and use their computers. But after more than a year of self-confinement and school closures, the public’s patience has run out.

So has the public’s confidence that health officials know what they are doing and are telling us the truth.

. . .

The public’s growing mistrust of senior officials, elected and appointed, overlaps with widespread doubts that those officials must follow the same rules as the rest of us. This common standard, and public confidence in it, is foundational to our constitutional democracy. Politicians, billionaires, and celebrities may be able to hire the best lawyers, but they are not supposed to be above the law itself.

. . .

The key point here is that these problems—and they are serious—occur amid a long-term decline of trust in all our institutions, public and private. That problem goes well beyond the FBI’s bias, the hypocrisy by Muriel Bowser or Gavin Newsom, or the public mistrust in Anthony Fauci’s pronouncements and the CDC’s guidance. It goes beyond Trump’s dangerous game in questioning the election, and beyond surging crime and illegal immigration. Serious as those problems are, an even larger problem encompasses them: threats to our country’s stability are cumulating when the public no longer has confidence in the institutions meant to cope with them.

Again, more at the link.

That's the problem, right there.  We no longer have faith in each other as fellow citizens.  We no longer have faith in our society and its institutions.  We have lost faith, not just in our common, shared humanity, but in the various and sundry faiths that helped us look beyond the obvious, to perceive the natural in terms of eternal truths and the supernatural.

President Adams pointed out, more than two centuries ago:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

I think he was absolutely right - and we are no longer either a moral or religious people.  Thus, our Constitution is proving inadequate to bind us together.  Sadly, there is nothing else to do so . . . and thus, as Yeats put it, "things fall apart;  the center cannot hold".

I see no way out of this dilemma except separation;  the breakup of our Union into two or more separate polities.  If anyone thinks that's going to be an easy or peaceful process, there's a bridge in Brooklyn, NYC I'd like to sell you.  Cash only, please, and in small bills.

Peter

 

After the disputed August 2020 elections in Belarus, followed by a crackdown against political dissidents in that country, Lithuania supported efforts by pro-democracy groups.  In response, the autocratic regime of Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko has retaliated against Lithuania - and against the European Union, of which Lithuania is a member and which has also imposed sanctions against Belarus - for their interference.

Michael Yon reports on the latest developments.  It looks very much as if the Belarus regime is trying to "weaponize" illegal migration against those it sees as its enemies.

Lithuanian authorities say an Iraqi ‘travel agency’ has been set up in Baghdad to fly Iraqis and others straight to Minsk, capital city of Belarus. From Minsk they are transported to the Lithuanian border and pushed forward. Some migrants apparently become lost and travel back into Belarus and are then sent back to Lithuania.

. . .

Belarus' dictator has specifically threatened to flood Lithuania and EU with ‘migrants’ and radioactive material, and he is making good on the migrants.

According to various Lithuanian officials I spoke with here in Lithuania, Lithuania has information that Belarus is actively flying in ‘migrants’, issuing visa on arrival, wiping their phones of all historical information, and forcing them to the border.

Iraqi Kurds told us yesterday they were bussed but did not know the route they took. Many Africans from Congo, Cameroon, more.

Belarus is weaponizing migrants. Belarus, using Lithuania as unwilling transit, is shaping up to make Lithuania the new Greece, the new Ceuta, the Mexico of EU.

. . .

Lithuanian is about to get flooded — my guess.

There's more at the link.

Belarus is quite open about its intentions.

Lukashenko said this week that Belarus wouldn't shutter its border with Lithuania and "become a camp for people fleeing Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Tunisia."

"We won't hold anyone, they are coming not to us but to the enlightened, warm and cozy Europe," Lukashenko added mockingly.

. . .

Tensions between the EU and Belarus have escalated further after Belarus diverted a passenger jet on May 23 to arrest an opposition journalist.

Lukashenko has said his country will halt cooperation with the 27-nation bloc on stemming migration, in retaliation for bruising economic sanctions the EU slapped on Belarus over the passenger jet diversion.

Again, more at the link.

It looks like Belarus has learned from Turkey, which has successfully "weaponized" the migration of Syrian and other refugees through its territory to Europe for several years.  Faced with growing European opposition to the increasingly hardline Islamic regime in Ankara, the Turks retaliated by literally flooding the European Union's borders with millions of refugees, aiding their passage and adamantly refusing to take them back.  The results we all know.  Belarus is now deliberately turning itself into a transit point for such "refugees" (many of them no more than economic migrants, claiming refugee status under international law but not properly eligible for it, as was the case with many of those coming through Turkey).

The trouble is, there are literally millions of economic migrants and refugees on the move throughout the world at any given time.  Belarus is openly inviting them to come from all over the world, pass through its territory, and become a burden on the economies and societies of their new European Union host nations.  That can only mean an inevitable backlash from the citizens of the EU against any and all such immigration, possibly even leading to attempts to expel those already there - but where will they go if no country is willing to accept them?  Syria doesn't want returnees who oppose the Assad regime.  Burma doesn't want the Rohingya back.  Mexico won't want illegal aliens in the USA from many South American countries, including itself, shoved back onto its territory to find their own way back to their nations of origin.

I can see this trend leading to all sorts of national, international and geopolitical problems, and I don't know that there's any easy solution.

Peter

 

Max Morton asked that question on Memorial Day.  Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.

America today is run by someone, we’re not really sure who, and every part of its culture and history is being deconstructed.

The Constitution is not even a speed bump to a new class of oligarchs and tyrants who are in the process of “reimagining” America as a giant Eveready battery to power their globalist business interests. Clearly half the country no longer believes in ideals like individual liberty, freedom, free speech, live-and-let-live, the Golden Rule, or tolerance.

What happened? If I could go back in time and talk to my dead friends and comrades who fell in service to America, what would they say? Would they still have volunteered? Would they still have put their lives on the line for this? Because this is pretty much nothing like the way of life I know they signed up to defend. This is an abomination. This is something I expect they would fight against.

Zombie America

To paraphrase my colleague Angelo Codevilla, what’s happening now in America is not a perversion or aberration, it’s an assertion of power. What we are seeing is the transformation of America from a free and sovereign nation accountable to the citizens, to a vassal state coalition of oligarchs and rogue national security bureaucrats sympathetic to, if not outright supportive of, China’s global hegemony. Who is really on top in this relationship has yet to be determined. Is it the bureaucrats in service to the oligarchs, or is it the oligarchs backing a rogue bureaucracy? Either way, in the words of the late, great George Carlin, “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”

. . .

This is truly frightening and raises the question of who is staffing and running our national security apparatus? In fact, who is running our country? Has America become a zombie nation? One without principles, morals, a guiding philosophy, or cultural identity? Present-day America seems to be mindlessly destroying everything in its path, whether through horrid foreign policy decisions, antagonistic and divisive domestic policies, or tyrannical governance. Like a Hollywood movie zombie, it is rapidly becoming unrecognizable from its former living self.

Clear and Present Danger

The current regime likes to talk about the domestic extremist danger to “our democracy.” What they really mean is that traditional Americans are a threat to their transformation of America away from a sovereign nation-state to some form of authoritarian oligarchy.

Too many Americans fail to understand the very real threat to their lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness posed by a regime that holds this belief. Unfortunately, Americans seem to be waiting for a white knight or some divine miracle to roll back the regime’s ongoing transformation of America. The truth is, that old America, the one you grew up in, the one you think of as normal, doesn’t exist anymore. It’s gone, and it isn’t coming back.

Whether the current regime is backed by an oligarchy-supported deep state bureaucracy, or a deep state bureaucracy supported by China-sympathetic oligarchs, the clear and present danger to every traditional American is centered in Washington, D.C.

We cannot be free if our elected leaders are under the influence of China. And we cannot be free if we must live by the leave of a rogue national security establishment. If Americans want their liberty, they will have to rid themselves of the ruling elite’s swamp—as Donald Trump sadly discovered too late, there is no coexisting with it.

There is still a large part of America that wants to live in a republic and that wants the return of their natural God-given rights enshrined in the Constitution. But there is also a large part of America that no longer believes in the ideals of the republic and are intolerant of anyone who thinks differently.

One faction must bend the other to their will by force, or separate and each go their own way. We are at the point in this great experiment of liberty and self-governance that was America where we must begin the separation between those two factions. They cannot coexist in peace and it is folly to think one side will be able to impose its will on the other.

On this Memorial Day, I will be thinking of my friends and comrades who made the ultimate sacrifice, and I’m not afraid to say that some of those memories will be difficult. But I know that their beliefs and the way of life that motivated them to serve as warriors still exists. It exists in every defiant American who refuses to bend the knee to the tyrant. It exists in every American who still believes in liberty, freedom, and equal justice under law. It exists in those who yearn for the self-determination of a republic. I think that’s worth fighting for, and I think there are others out there across America who believe the same.

It is time to stop trying to debate our country back into unity. Instead, it’s time to look forward, to make a place where we can again live free, speak freely, worship freely, and live out our lives in the manner we choose. It is time to acknowledge the truth and learn to live with it, as difficult as that may be, and to move on. It is time to understand, and say out loud, the republic is dead; Long live the republic!

There's more at the link.

My perspective is a little different, and perhaps a little clearer, than most Americans'.  You see, I came here in the mid-1990's, and my first contact with America was at that stage of its development.  After 9/11, I saw the wholesale destruction of civil liberties as the "security state" took over many aspects of government, and I was deeply troubled by it.  I was "fresh enough" to constitutional rights and civil liberties that I was very aware of how quickly and easily they were overruled.  Since President Obama's administration, I've watched unelected bureaucrats and political cronies systematically dismantle many of the things I found most attractive and valuable in America, replacing them with partisan political structures that George Washington and the Founding Fathers would probably have gone to war all over again to prevent.

I therefore agree with Mr. Morton that the American Republic I knew in the mid-90's is effectively dead.  Those who've been here much longer than I may not have been fully aware of its dying.  The "boiling frog" syndrome has doubtless had its effect.

I hope and pray that our constitutional republic can be saved . . . but I have to admit, I doubt it.  The divisions between Left and Right have become so strong, so overwhelming, that there's virtually no possibility of compromise any longer.  Also, it's ridiculous to talk about fighting to resolve the issue.  With tens of millions on each side, we can't kill or threaten our way out of this.  I pointed that out in connection with the Paris terror attacks of 2015, and the argument is equally valid here.  I said then, and I still say now, "We cannot kill our way out of the dilemma of being human, with all the tragedy that entails."

Perhaps the only way forward is to divide our present nation into two (or even more) parts.  That may be the only way to avoid another bloody civil war.  Unfortunately, that won't be acceptable to the oligarchy currently running things in Washington, because it would dilute and diminish their power.  Therefore, I expect bloodshed, no matter what happens.

Peter

 

I'm getting awful tired of those who blame the Jews for any and every evil that afflicts us.  Anti-semitism is an age-old shibboleth, something brought out of the closet whenever activists for whatever cause need a scapegoat to explain away their particular obsession.  Adolf Hitler is the best-known example, but he was only one in a long, long line of anti-semites who've infested history with their poison.

Now comes Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, blaming Jewish pressure in part for the drive to reopen schools (which she and the AFT oppose).  She's nominally Jewish herself, but like many progressive extremists, she disregards that minor anomaly.

Union leader Randi Weingarten criticized Jews as "part of the ownership class" dedicated to denying opportunities to others in an interview released on Friday.

Weingarten—who is herself Jewish and draws a six-figure salary as head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—took aim at American Jews in an interview with the Jerusalem Post. When asked about parents critical of the AFT's resistance to school reopening, Weingarten took aim squarely at Jewish critics.

"American Jews are now part of the ownership class," Weingarten said. "Jews were immigrants from somewhere else. And they needed the right to have public education. And they needed power to have enough income and wealth for their families that they could put their kids through college and their kids could do better than they have done."

"What I hear when I hear that question is that those who are in the ownership class now want to take that ladder of opportunity away from those who do not have it," she said.

There's more at the link.

The AFT is a thoroughly progressive-infiltrated organization.  It joins many others in expressing anti-semitic ideas and tendencies.  The mainstream news media have ignored Black Lives Matter's anti-Semitic tendencies, shown in brutal harshness during riots in Los Angeles, threats in New York City and encounters in Philadelphia, among others.  One wonders whether the media are refusing to cover such incidents because of political correctness, or because they agree with the sentiments expressed?  It's a good question.

Basically, when I hear or see anyone blaming "the Jews" for anything, simply because they're Jews and with no other evidence, I instantly write off the speaker(s) and their organization(s) as utterly lacking in credibility and unworthy of respect.  They're merely repeating the tired old prejudices of many generations before them.  They have no originality, no foundation for their prejudices - just resentment that's looking for a target on which to focus.

I guess we can add the AFT and Ms. Weingarten to the list of those lacking credibility and unworthy of respect.

Peter

 

An interesting article examines the state of race relations in America from the perspective of a self-described "elite" African-American writer, and points out some uncomfortable truths.  Here's an excerpt.

Activists on the Left of American politics claim that “white supremacy,” “implicit bias,” and old-fashioned “anti-black racism” are sufficient to account for black disadvantage. But this is a bluff that relies on “cancel culture” to be sustained. Those making such arguments are, in effect, daring you to disagree with them. They are threatening to “cancel” you if you do not accept their account: You must be a “racist”; you must believe something is intrinsically wrong with black people if you do not attribute pathological behavior among them to systemic injustice. You must think blacks are inferior, for how else could one explain the disparities? “Blaming the victim” is the offense they will convict you of, if you’re lucky.

I claim this is a dare; a debater’s trick. Because, at the end of the day, what are those folks saying when they declare that “mass incarceration” is “racism”—that the high number of blacks in jails is, self-evidently, a sign of racial antipathy? To respond, “No. It’s mainly a sign of anti-social behavior by criminals who happen to be black,” one risks being dismissed as a moral reprobate. This is so, even if the speaker is black. Just ask Justice Clarence Thomas. Nobody wants to be cancelled.

But we should all want to stay in touch with reality. Common sense and much evidence suggest that, on the whole, people are not being arrested, convicted, and sentenced because of their race. Those in prison are, in the main, those who have broken the law—who have hurt others, or stolen things, or otherwise violated the basic behavioral norms which make civil society possible. Seeing prisons as a racist conspiracy to confine black people is an absurd proposition. No serious person could believe it. Not really. Indeed, it is self-evident that those taking lives on the streets of St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Chicago are, to a man, behaving despicably. Moreover, those bearing the cost of such pathology, almost exclusively, are other blacks. An ideology that ascribes this violent behavior to racism is laughable. Of course, this is an unspeakable truth—but no writer or social critic, of whatever race, should be cancelled for saying so.

. . .

Nor does anybody actually believe that 70 percent of African American babies being born to a woman without a husband is (1) a good thing or (2) due to anti-black racism. People say this, but they don’t believe it. They are bluffing—daring you to observe that the 21st-century failures of African Americans to take full advantage of the opportunities created by the 20th century’s revolution of civil rights are palpable and damning. These failures are being denied at every turn, and these denials are sustained by a threat to “cancel” dissenters for being “racists.” This position is simply not tenable. The end of Jim Crow segregation and the advent of the era of equal rights was transformative for blacks. And now—a half-century down the line—we still have these disparities. This is a shameful blight on our society, I agree. But the plain fact of the matter is that some considerable responsibility for this sorry state of affairs lies with black people ourselves. Dare we Americans acknowledge this?

. . .

... in terms of police killings, we are talking about 300 victims per year who are black. Not all of them are unarmed innocents. Some are engaged in violent conflict with police officers that leads to them being killed. Some are instances like George Floyd—problematic in the extreme, without question—that deserve the scrutiny of concerned persons. Still, we need to bear in mind that this is a country of more than 300 million people with scores of concentrated urban areas where police interact with citizens. Tens of thousands of arrests occur daily in the United States. So, these events—which are extremely regrettable and often do not reflect well on the police—are, nevertheless, quite rare.

To put it in perspective, there are about 17,000 homicides in the United States every year, nearly half of which involve black perpetrators. The vast majority of those have other blacks as victims. For every black killed by the police, more than 25 other black people meet their end because of homicides committed by other blacks. This is not to ignore the significance of holding police accountable for how they exercise their power vis-à-vis citizens. It is merely to notice how very easy it is to overstate the significance and the extent of this phenomenon, precisely as the Black Lives Matter activists have done.

There's more at the link.

The author raises important points, but in my opinion also bends over backwards to avoid offending those activists of his own race who are promoting "cancel culture" and trying to silence any views that dissent from their own.  I suppose it's like approaching the problem from two different perspectives.  Let's take inner-city crime as an example.  It's unarguable that most inner-city crime is committed by blacks against other blacks.  The FBI crime statistics tell the story, year after year after year.  That's the reality.

There are two main ways (probably more than two, but I digress) of approaching it.  One is to say, "Let's stop that behavior, by any means necessary:  then, when we've made our inner cities safer places to live, let's go into how to reform and improve them so that those living there have better life chances and choices in the future."  That's how I would tackle it.  Deal with the problem - by whatever means are necessary.  Once crime is under control, then we can sort out the underlying factors.  The other approach, often argued by "elites", is that we should fix the underlying problems first.  That would then lead to a decline in the problem, and its eventual solution.  I call that a cop-out.  What about those suffering right now under that crime wave?  They must be protected.  To do that, criminals must be stopped.  Unless and until that is done, we're abandoning those who most need help - and that's unacceptable.

The article strikes me as Utopian in its expectations, but the author's entitled to his opinion.  Go read it for yourself, and let us know what you think in Comments.

Peter

I think one of the saddest aspects of our current political, social and cultural polarization in these dis-United States is that most of us no longer listen to those with different opinions to our own.  We've retreated into our "comfort zones", and we tend to stay there.  Anyone who agrees with us is in that zone too;  anyone disagreeing with us is instantly classified as outside that zone, and is therefore automatically to be distrusted, even shunned.

I find support for this theory in the news and opinions we consult every day.  I grew up with parents who encouraged me to read widely about the news;  to expose myself to opinions from both the left and the right, and think about why they said what they said, and how they were trying to portray current events.  As I matured, and became a participant in some of the events thus described, I could see for myself how the bias of the journalists and editors concerned affected their reporting, and thereby judge whether their outlets were worthwhile or not.  Sadly, people today don't seem to want to do that at all.

Back in 2018, David Blankenhorn wrote an article titled "The Top 14 Causes of Political Polarization".  Two of those reasons he described as follows:

12. The spread of media ghettoes. The main features of the old analog media—including editing, fact-checking, professionalization, and the privileging of institutions over individuals—served as a credentialing system for American political expression. The distinguishing feature of the new digital media—the fact that anyone can publish anything that gains views and clicks—is replacing that old system with a non-system that is atomized and largely leaderless. One result made possible by this change is that Americans can now live in media ghettoes. If I wish, I can live all day every day encountering in my media travels only those views with which I already agree. Living in a media ghetto means less that my views are shaped and improved, much less challenged, than that they are hardened and made more extreme; what might’ve been analysis weakens into partisan talking points dispensed by identity-group leaders; moreover, because I’m exposed only to the most cartoonish, exaggerated versions of my opponents’ views, I come to believe that those views are so unhinged and irrational as to be dangerous. More broadly, the new media resemble and reinforce the new politics, such that the most reliable way to succeed in either domain is to be the most noisesome, outrageous, and polarizing.

13. The decline of journalistic responsibility. The dismantling of the old media has been accompanied by, and has probably helped cause, a decline in journalistic standards. These losses to society include journalists who’ll accept poor quality in pursuit of volume and repetition as well as the blurring and even erasure of boundaries between news and opinion, facts and non-facts, and journalism and entertainment. These losses feed polarization.

There's more at the link.

I'm not sure whether Mr. Blankenhorn's reasons are among the causes of political polarization, or among its results - or both.  An argument can be made either way.  Nevertheless, I think his concern about our failure to consult more and wider sources to obtain news, and the failure of many news media to report accurately and factually, instead of reporting opinions as facts and seeking to manipulate their audience, are both spot-on.

To use myself as an example, I consult several news resources each morning, choosing some from each side of the political and cultural spectrum so that I can view events from both perspectives.  On the right, I have the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and the New York Post.  On the left, I have the Drudge Report (which used to be on the right, but has changed radically over the past few years), the Washington Post and the Guardian's US edition.  For overseas news, I look to the BBC and some British and European newspapers, consulting them less frequently than US sources, but often enough to get a feel for how things are viewed from non-US perspectives.  I find this mix of sources gives me a reasonably balanced view of what's happening in the world, and what it might mean.

It doesn't take that long to skim through these news sources each morning;  I daresay I take less than half an hour each day to do so.  Nevertheless, it helps keep me balanced, aware of both sides of the story, and more able to see through partisan propaganda and judge opinions against facts.  I highly recommend the practice to all who have time to do likewise.  It helps us to stop seeing things from one side only, and seeing those who think differently from us as enemies rather than as fellow human beings.

Reading different opinions doesn't mean that I don't have any of my own, and it doesn't mean that I'm so unsure of myself that I'm at the mercy of the prevailing political, social or cultural winds.  It simply means that I want to view the world from as many perspectives as possible, to understand how others are seeing it differently to me.  It also challenges me to think about why I hold my opinions.

I've often used the analogy of white light being refracted through a prism.  The prism separates it into primary colors according to their wavelength, like this:




Someone standing in the beam of red light might exclaim, "Oh, what a lovely red!"  Someone standing in the blue beam might object, "It's not red - it's blue!  Look, I can see it with my own eyes!  I can't be wrong!"  Of course, they're both wrong about the light in its original form.  They're seeing it through their own "filters".  They can each see part of the truth, but not the whole of it.  If they both took the time and trouble to investigate, they'd acknowledge that the totality of the light - before refraction - was white, and that they were each viewing only one wavelength of it, and that neither of them understood the full picture.  However, they probably wouldn't bother to take the time or the trouble to do that.  Does that remind you of our current political, social and cultural polarization?  It sure does me!

Sadly, my efforts to retain a balanced perspective don't meet with the approval of some of my readers.  Interestingly, such opposition comes from both sides of the political fence.  I've been accused of being both liberal and reactionary;  of being a "fence-sitter", and an ideologue or extremist.  None of those accusations are correct.  I'm simply trying to be true to myself, and what I've learned to believe as the result of a life filled with many experiences that I'd rather not have had (as regular readers will understand).  I know extremism doesn't work, on either side of the political fence.  I know centrist perspectives risk being neither fish nor fowl, and run the risk of havering and equivocating and hesitating, rather than committing to action as a situation or event demands.  However, I also know (I've learned the hard way) that trying to understand both sides is required if we're to remain balanced.  No effort = no understanding = extremism.  Q.E.D.

That angers some people who've decided that balance is irrelevant.  For them, it's "their way or the highway".  Well, I can't change them, and they won't change me.  I'll continue to do what my pastor's heart tells me I must, and try to be "a city set on a hill" and "a light to the world".  It may be a rather battered city and a flawed light, and I may be wrong at times, but I still hope to offer a little shelter and provide a little illumination here and there.  Judging from the several thousand readers who return here each day, I must be doing something right!

Even if we still disagree (perhaps vehemently) with some other perspectives, we can at least try to understand them, and acknowledge that some of those holding them are as sincere in their beliefs as we are.  Given that, we can seek to work together in at least some areas, for the good of our communities, towns, cities, states and our nation as a whole.  That doesn't mean we have to surrender what we hold dear;  it means we hold fast to the core, and accept that others hold different core beliefs to our own, and do our best to work with them in areas that don't threaten our respective cores.

There are far too many extremists out there right now, trying to burn down this country and destroy our national unity.  Let's not add to their number.

Peter

Europe is facing perhaps the most critical set of challenges in its modern history - and in combination, they threaten to destroy the European Union and its common currency, the Euro.  The coronavirus pandemic is merely the "cherry on top" of a set of other issues that are all coming to a head simultaneously.  What's more, developments there are of direct and immediate concern to the United States, because they'll have a "spillover" or "knock-on" effect that will undoubtedly affect us.

First, there's the almost irresistible rise of nationalist sentiments - "our nation" rather than "our overarching European community".  Britain exemplifies this with its long-drawn-out struggle between a pro-European "elite" or "deep state" and popular resentment over loss of control over the nation's own destiny, forcing it into a European mold that was never a good fit.  The result was Brexit, which took effect at the end of last year, and is now being tidied up and implemented.  Britain's far from the only nation or national bloc that wants to be independent.  Italy has a strong nationalist movement;  parts of Spain and other nations want to break away from both the EU and their national government;  and Eastern Europe nations in general are suspicious of the supra-national bureaucracy in Brussels telling them what to do and how to govern themselves.

Next, there's the problem of Third World migration.  This isn't going to go away anytime soon:  in fact, it's going to get worse and worse.  Uncontrolled population growth in Africa, combined with massive political incompetence, corruption and inefficiency in that continent, has resulted in literally tens of millions of people who are desperate to go somewhere - anywhere! - that offers them a better life.  They aren't worried about whether or not they're welcome, or whether or not their presence will be legal.  For them, it's literally find a way to make a living and support those they've left behind, or starve.  Therefore, they're flooding into Europe, and won't stop coming, because that continent is so much richer than their own that it's like a great big light beckoning them onward in the darkness.  Couple this with an influx of alleged "refugees" (in reality, mostly economic migrants) from Middle Eastern countries, and Europe is awash with foreigners who depend on its social support structures and entitlement programs, won't assimilate into the culture and language of their new home, and want to bring all their families and friends to join them.  In the process, they're igniting xenophobia and nationalism all over again - the very factors the European Union was supposed to minimize and mitigate.

Add to that adventurist politics in Turkey, where President Erdogan seeks to portray himself as the new Caliph of the Islamic world.  He's more or less openly supported extremist terrorism in Syria, and when that failed, he intervened militarily to support his client organizations there.  He's also trying to intervene in Libya, where his puppets have "granted" Turkey exploitation rights to the seabed of the Mediterranean Sea between their countries (without having the legal right to do so, and in defiance of other national economic zones and interests in the same area).  This has produced millions more refugees to threaten Europe's stability, and he's using them to do precisely that, as a retaliation for Europe's refusing to support his adventurism.  It's also resulted in Turkey's increasing isolation within NATO.  Turkey is now distrusted almost as much as Iran by the rest of Europe and the USA.

That, in turn, has led to a major shift in European attitudes towards migration and refugees, which has become visible during the latest refugee crisis in Greece when Erdogan withdrew border controls and urged over three million refugees to cross into the latter country on their way to Europe.  Greece hardened its attitudes and its border, and is fighting to keep them out.  Other Eastern European nations are sending detachments of their armed forces to help Greece.  The Economist observes:

In 2015 thousands of irregular migrants and asylum-seekers entered Hungary, en route to Germany. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, built a fence along the country’s southern border to stop them. The European Commission chided Mr Orban. “We have only just torn down walls in Europe; we should not be putting them up,” tutted a flack for the European Commission. Fast forward five years, and ugly scenes erupted at the EU’s borders once again. Migrants trying to reach Europe on a dinghy were greeted by a Greek vessel, whose crew hit the boat with sticks and fired warning shots at them. This time the commission had a different response. “I thank Greece for being our European aspida [shield] in these times,” said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. What changed?

Two visions of the EU competed during the migration crisis of 2015 and 2016, when more than 2m people flooded into the bloc. On one side stood the humanitarians, who viewed the EU as a normative power, a shining light on a hill. For them, the response was a moral question with a simple answer: Willkommenskultur. On the other side were the hardliners. Their argument for stiff, brutal measures at the border was based on practicality (a state can only feed and house so many refugees at once) and politics (voters will kick out anyone who allows too large and sudden an influx, sharpish). After five years of wrestling, the humanitarians have been routed. Now the hardliners reign supreme.

There's also the undeniable fact that most of the "refugees" streaming towards Europe are not, in fact, refugees at all - they're economic migrants.  They want a better life for themselves, and if the only way to get it is to pretend to be oppressed victims of war, they're more than willing to do that.  They're being actively assisted by those who regard immigration and border restrictions as fundamentally wrong, and seek to overturn them.  Hungary has been in the forefront of those pointing out this reality.

[Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orban said depictions of the situation at the Hungarian border in the international media were inaccurate, arguing that 95 percent of newly arrived migrants were military-aged men.

It’s forbidden to say so in Europe, but this is an organized invasion, Orban said.

So far this year, more than 5,000 migrants have attempted to enter Hungary illegally, with many of them showing up in large organized caravans.

The Hungarian Prime Minister insisted that the migrants were backed by organizations claiming to be NGOs operating similarly to people smuggling groups. These organizations had significant financial resources and considerable logistical capabilities, he added.

He also said Hungary’s secret service was monitoring the situation and had a clear view of “how the movement of migrants is being organized”.

Now, on top of all these pressures, we have the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic.  It's closing down economies all across Europe, and imposing unbearable financial difficulties on companies and nations already in a parlous fiscal state.  There are calls there, as in the USA, for billions, even trillions, in government aid to the business sector.  There is no money left to fund the absorption of new waves of refugees, even if there was space for them;  and there are no jobs for them to support themselves.  Even existing refugees are likely to find themselves holding the short end of the stick compared to citizens and voters.  The cost of caring for thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of sick people is going to cripple European budgets for months to come, perhaps years;  and the economic fallout of the pandemic will persist for years, perhaps decades.

The image of the "finger in the dike" is well known:  a boy sticks his finger in a hole to stop the water coming through, thereby saving the low-lying land behind the dike.  For decades, Europe has basically held itself together by using this approach.  Every time a leak appeared in the wall surrounding its cherished unity and joint principles, an official finger was rammed into the hole to keep out the barbarians who threatened to destabilize it.  Now, there are too many pressures, and too many holes, and not enough fingers.  The European Union can't possibly plug them all.  Neither can the individual nations within it.  The dike - i.e. the Union itself - is in grave, possibly irreversible danger of collapse.

The pressures being exerted on the European Union right now are enormous.  I doubt very much whether it can withstand their cumulative onslaught.  Tom Luongo agrees.

Regardless of whether you believe the pandemic is real or not, the reaction to it is real and is having real consequence far beyond the latest print of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The lockdown of Italy isn’t a temporary thing. Oh, the suspension of free movement is temporary, but it portends something far bigger.

It’s the beginning of the real political balkanization that’s coming to the European Union over the next few years. Old enmities and prejudices have not been stamped out under the boot heel of oppressive legislation coming from a bunch of disconnected technocrats in Brussels.

They have only been suppressed.

Because when there are existential threats there’s no time or desire to virtue signal about how we’re all one big happy dysfunctional family.

. . .

So in the midst of this mess comes COVID-19 and the uncoordinated and inept response to it from the political center of Europe to date. Only now are they coming to the conclusion they need to restrict travel, after sitting on their hands for a few weeks while Italians died by the hundreds.

. . .

And this is your signal that this is the beginning of the real crisis. Because while COVID-19 may have been the catalyst for the breakdown of capital markets, capital markets were simply waiting for that spark to occur.

Any other type of spark, a bank failure from a run of bad loans, could have been handled and absorbed ... But with COVID-19 being the ultimate form of exogenous shock to the global economy there is no containing the financial contagion.

. . .

The next stage of the crisis is here with the focus finally turning to Europe. The U.S., for all of its faults, is one nation with a unified debt market and an executive who can and has exercise powers necessary to keep the wheels from completely falling off the U.S. economy ... That money will go into a logistical pipeline that far outstrips Europe’s to combat a disease over a smaller population spread across larger distances. That limits the damage to the U.S. It ensures political stability that the EU cannot hope to compete with for the trust of spooked capital.

Add the global economy grinding to a halt. We’ll see the crisis emerge in Europe to feed a widening gyre of debt servicing that will look like a global bank run on dollar liquidity.

It will force fundamental reform of the euro and the ECB. They are necessary for the EU to survive this crisis in anything close to its current form.

I’m not laying odds that will work. Instead I expect Schengen’s suspension to hold and more countries go the way of the Brits by exiting the EU itself.

The European Union is one of four major power blocs in the world, the others being the USA and its allies, China and its allies, and (diminished, but nevertheless still wielding influence and power) Russia and its allies.  If the EU collapses under the strain of all these simultaneous pressures, global geopolitics will be substantially realigned.  It'll be a time of great stress for all the other power blocs, and nobody can be certain what the new balance will be that eventually emerges.

As for the refugees flooding into Europe (not to mention those already there, who are refusing to assimilate and overloading social services), I suspect they're going to be in for a very hard time indeed.  As my friend Tamara Keel observed back in 2013:

Euros have a proven zero-to-jackboots time lower than just about anybody on the planet. Get Gunter or Pierre all backed into a corner and feeling existentially threatened and you'll be wishing you hadn't, faster than you can say "Arbeit Macht Frei".

I think she was exactly right;  and I think we're going to see that sentiment in action in Europe soon.  We're already seeing it on the Greek border with Turkey.

Peter

Earlier this month, I wrote an article titled "Why African migrants will flood the world over the next half-century".  As if to highlight the sheer desperation for something - anything! - better that most migrants exhibit, the BBC has published a remarkable in-depth article about a young Ghanaian man who decided to try to document the risk, abuses and crimes faced by literally millions of would-be migrants as they journey through Africa on their way to the Mediterranean Sea and, hopefully, Europe.  It's chillingly blunt about the dangers they face.

Here's a brief excerpt from a very long article.

It was night when the trucks came to an abrupt stop, jolting Azeteng from a half-sleep. Voices called out from the dark, ordering the migrants to get out, and they were surrounded by men in military fatigues carrying AK-47s. They had hit the first Tuareg rebel checkpoint.

The rebels fired shots into the air and ordered the migrants to line up to pay. Those who didn’t have enough money were told to form a separate line and had their pockets searched and possessions taken. Then they were beaten. Azeteng was hit hard in the side of the head, knocking his glasses off his face. A migrant in front of him was hit with a metal pole and bled from the mouth. A Gambian man, whom Azeteng had befriended on the journey, held up his Koran and begged in vain for them to stop.

Azeteng put his glasses back on and, overcoming a swell of fear, pressed the tiny button under the arm. The grainy footage captured the migrants shuffling past a militant holding out a large plastic bowl, depositing cash. When the bowl was full, another militant tipped it into a larger bowl. Those who had paid were ordered to sit on the sand and wait. The wind whipped up and the cold started to bite.

It was then that Azeteng saw the two Nigerian women again, the women who had sat up front with the driver. Women from Nigeria, more than any other African nation, have fallen prey to the sex-trafficking trade to Europe. A well-established criminal network entraps them with promises of well-paid jobs as hairdressers or houseworkers or similar, then sells them into sex work. “As soon as they leave their family and community network they become extremely vulnerable,” Michele Bombassei, a UN expert on West African migration, told me. “And this is the moment the sexual exploitation begins.”

Azeteng had spoken to the Nigerian women briefly, back in Bamako. They were confident and outgoing. They had joked and laughed. Now their heads were bowed, and Azeteng watched as they walked silently into the desert escorted by seven armed men from the checkpoint. The seven men gang-raped the two women on the desert floor, close enough for the migrants to see.

When it was finished, the women were brought back and put in the front of the truck and the migrants were put in the back of the truck, and a heavy silence settled on them. The jubilation of earlier that day had given way to fear.

. . .

Azeteng helped Sekou to a hospital. Four days later, Sekou was dead. Some smugglers collected the body, and Azeteng followed them to a migrants’ graveyard near the edge of town. He watched as they took Sekou’s body from the bed of a pick-up. The dead man had been wrapped in a white sheet, one arm bound straight along his side and the other folded across his chest. They lowered the body into a shallow grave and covered it with sand and gravel and bricks. Adjacent to the migrants’ graveyard was a graveyard for Algerian citizens, with orderly plots and headstones. The migrants were buried haphazardly and close together, with nothing to mark their passing but the disturbance of the earth. Azeteng began to count, first one by one, then in rough batches, and by the time he gave up he’d counted 700 graves.

. . .

Ibrahim started out from Ghana with almost no money, and he was subjected to levels of hardship and brutality that Azeteng had paid to avoid. Locked into debt bondage, he worked for five months in Mali and Algeria with little or no pay. “It is so hard, so hard,” he said. “Work, work, work, work, work.” He pinched a fold of his skin. “My body was not good, it changed because of no food.” Ibrahim walked for five days in the desert after he and others were dumped by the smugglers, he said. He saw hands and feet sticking out of the sand, and helped bury a man who sat down on a dune one day, closed his eyes, and died.

There's much more at the link.

The illegal aliens who are flooding across our southern border are in many ways similar to those flooding out of Africa into Europe (and, increasingly, into the USA as well).  They have nothing at all to live for at home.  Their only hope of a better life is to get to a country with a better economy, offering them the chance to earn more and improve themselves (and, particularly, their descendants in due course).  That's why they keep coming, even in the face of such dangers (which are as real in South America as they are in Africa).  That's why we need a border wall, and vastly increased border security, and everything else necessary to prevent our economy - and our own future - being submerged, and swamped, and drowned in the sea of despair that wants to invade us.

There is no simple, easy answer.  There's certainly, in my opinion, an ethical and/or moral obligation on us to help those less fortunate than ourselves;  but that should not mean we have to sacrifice our own national future, and that of our children, to be swamped by those who would drag this country down to the depths from which they've managed to escape.  That's no answer at all!  Nevertheless, we need to understand the desperation that drives so many illegal aliens.  They're not refugees from oppression, or seeking asylum due to persecution.  They're economic migrants, pure and simple.  We have to understand their motivation in order to deal with them, and with the countries from which they're fleeing;  because unless we help those countries improve their own economies, more and more of their inhabitants are going to flee in our direction.

The irresistible force meets the immovable object.  Who will win?  Right now, in the absence of meaningful border security, it's the invaders.

Peter

CDR Salamander has an interesting series of charts about Africa at his blog.  They're all factual, and I'll leave you to read about them for yourself.  I'd like to highlight this one in particular.  (Click the image for a larger view.)




The reasons for Africa's pyramid-like population distribution and youthful population explosion are many, including (but not limited to):

• Improved medical care, which has greatly reduced child mortality and diminished the impact of traditional "killer" diseases like malaria, dengue and other fevers;
• The AIDS epidemic, which has killed many older Africans and disproportionately increased the ratio of young to old;
• Improved nutrition, particularly through international aid in response to regional disasters like famine, which previously killed thousands (if not millions) of people.

However, those people have nowhere to go in Africa, and nothing to hope for.  The continent is cursed with a chronically low-IQ population.  They're largely unschooled by Western standards;  and even if their educations were better, there are few if any local jobs that would require that sort of learning, and pay a commensurate salary.  There's little industrial development in Africa beyond mines and government infrastructure, and those need cheap labor rather than skilled workers.  There's no social security or welfare network in Africa, because countries on that continent by and large can't afford to provide one;  so, if you have no work, you starve, or turn to crime.  China has spent billions on the economic colonization of Africa, but has done so by importing her own workers to that continent, rather than educating, training and using local staff.  That's not likely to change anytime soon.  (I wrote about the immensity of Africa's problems a few weeks ago in more detail, if you're interested.)

The inevitable result of this lack of opportunity, and intense competition between the multitudes of younger Africans for the few scraps that are available, has meant a veritable invasion of Europe by people desperate to grasp at any opportunity - legal or not - for something better.  A street-sweeper or garbage worker or manual laborer in Europe will earn more in real terms, and have far better economic prospects, than the average school-teacher or government bureaucrat or miner in Africa.  This is what's fueling the influx of so-called "refugees" through Libya and other northern African nations to the southern nations of Europe, across the Mediterranean Sea.  Non-governmental organizations opposed to concepts such as national borders are aiding and abetting this flood.  What's more, it's reached the borders of the USA as well.  We're going to see more and more of it here.

Of course, we can't afford to allow this invasion to overwhelm our economy.  We can't provide for the millions of desperate "refugees" (in reality, economic migrants) from South America who are already overwhelming our border facilities by the millions every single year.  We certainly can't provide for an even greater influx of desperate Africans - yet they're going to keep on coming, because they have no other hope and nothing to go back to in Africa.

I certainly believe in the Christian principle of helping one's neighbor;  and, to the extent that we share a common planet and a common race (i.e. human), we should be willing to help those less fortunate than ourselves.  Sadly, aid to Africa as presently allocated and distributed is a lost cause.  It's almost all embezzled, stolen, and diverted into the pockets of the authorities and the bureaucrats in most African nations.  We need to mount a major effort to make sure that stops, and that aid goes to those who'll use it to genuinely help their people.  Our aid should create economic and other opportunities for them, so that they don't need to flee elsewhere to make some - any! - kind of future for themselves.  At present, this is not happening;  but unless we make it happen, the invasion of First World countries, including our own, by illegal aliens will become an unstoppable flood.

Go look at CDR Salamander's charts again, and think about them.  All that is headed Europe's way today.  It'll be headed our way tomorrow.  What are we going to do about it?  There's no way we can shoot all those who are desperate - not without making ourselves monsters.  We have to find another way . . . but what?

Peter