Moorish Spain: A Successful Multicultural Paradise? Part 1

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Andalusian ParadiseThe Myth of the Andalusian Paradise:
Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain
by Dario Fernandez-Morera
Wilmington: ISI Books, 2016

Dario Fernandez-Morera, of Cuban extraction, is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. He has previously published American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas (1996), as well as numerous papers on the literature of Spain’s Golden Age.

In this new book he tackles one of the anti-European left’s most cherished delusions, viz., that al-Andalus, or Moorish Spain (711–1492 AD), was a successful multicultural society in which Christians, Jews and Muslims flourished together beneath the tolerant eye of enlightened Islamic rulers. These supposed halcyon days of Moorish tolerance are contrasted favorably with both the Visigothic Kingdom that preceded them and the Spain of the inquisition that followed.

So popular has the romantic image of enlightened Muslim Spain become that it has been publicly endorsed by such distinguished historical scholars as Barack Obama and Tony Blair. Indeed, according to Prof. David Levering Lewis, Europeans missed a golden opportunity by not going down to defeat at the Battle of Tours in 732 AD. If only Charles Martel’s Franks had succumbed, he writes,

the post-Roman Occident would probably have been incorporated into a cosmopolitan Muslim regnum unobstructed by borders … one devoid of a priestly caste, animated by the dogma of equality of the faithful, and respectful of all religious faiths.

In two-hundred-forty pages of exposition backed up by ninety-six closely printed pages of notes, Fernandez-Morera methodically demolishes this optimistic multicultural object lesson by means of copious references to the primary documents: writings by Muslims, Christians and Jews who actually lived under Islamic rule in Spain. The cumulative effect of the evidence he cites should be enough to prove to any unbiased observer that Moorish Spain, if no worse than other Muslim-controlled societies of its time, was also no better. Read more

“The Large-Scale Death”: The Massacres of Bleiburg and Viktring

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BleiburgReview of The Tragedy of Bleiburg and Viktring, 1945 by Thomas Rulitz

Packaging is often of more decisive importance than content. This is particularly true today for many fine authors and their works in the field in humanities and especially in the field of modern history. For the reasons of politically incorrect content or due to editorial self-censorship, their works often fail to attract the largess of mainstream publishing houses. It has become a customary procedure for the System to relegate free thinkers and would-be heretics and their literary or scientific achievements to marginal outlets, such as self-publishing, that are very similar to those used by dissidents in the ex-Soviet Union.

However, both by its approach and by the huge number of citations from opposing sources, the recent book by the young Austrian historian, Dr. Florian Thomas Rulitz, The Tragedy of Bleiburg and Viktring,1945, may be an exception to this unwritten rule.  This book was recently published in English translation by Northern Illinois University Press, and it also contains a fine foreword by Paul Gottfried, a prominent scholar.

One merit of the author is that he taps into archives across the ideological board, quoting extensively from ex-Yugoslav communist archives, British archives, and German military archives. He also provides facsimiles and eyewitness accounts by surviving Croat and German expatriates. The book has 300 pages, out of which over a third are quotations, references and bibliographical notes. Read more

Nelle Harper Lee, 1926–2016: Minorities Never Lie About Rape

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Harper Lee’s death on February 19 drew the international attention one would expect given her status as the Martin Luther King of literature. Her novel To Kill a Mockingbird is annually visited on high schools everywhere with a demand for its reverence equal to the demand for unquestioned veneration of the reverend doctor himself. And yet, the mockingbird cried a complex tune last month, hitting notes not long ago thought to be beyond its range.

As expected, January’s holiday for MLK elicited the sniveling sighs of White supplication. In contrast, February’s eulogies lacked the once-anticipated chorus for Lee’s immediate canonization. The problem last month, of course, was actually the problem of last year with the sinful publication of Lee’s other novel, Go Set a Watchman. In it, Lee revealed that St. Atticus Finch was a segregationist(!)

Progressives and cuckservatives everywhere gasped! But then they remembered they control the narrative. In fact, they invented it. And they can modify it whenever the facts so require. After all, they had been claiming for decades that women never lie about rape while simultaneously Biblicizing a novel in which a woman does in fact lie about rape.

The Mockingbird mainstreamers eventually gathered themselves and saw the error of their initial shock. Unfortunately, Atticus hadn’t been immaculately conceived as they had previously believed. But he still had done right when the faith had been challenged, and if his motives had been mixed, that only demonstrated the nuanced characterization they always claimed to admire in literature. Read more

Eine Rezension von „Warum die Deutschen? Warum die Juden?” — Teil 1

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A Review of “Why the Germans? Why the Jews?” — Part 1, originally published on January 19, 2016.

Eine Rezension von „Warum die Deutschen? Warum die Juden?”
von Götz Aly

  1. Januar 2016

Die Kultur des Holocaust ist dabei, Deutschland zu zerstören. Von Intellektuellen und Medienelite über Jahrzehnte immer und immer wieder bekräftigt, hat das Konzept, dass Deutsche und ihre Nachkommen verantwortlich sind für „ein einzigartiges Verbrechen in der Geschichte der Menschheit“ einen derart demoralisierenden Effekt gehabt, dass Millionen voll und ganz Angela Merkels gegenwärtigen Versuch unterstützen, die ethnische Basis ihrer Nation zu zerstören. Überall im Westen wurde die Kultur des Holocaust mit verheerenden Folgen dafür genutzt, jede Opposition gegen die von der jüdischen Diaspora verfolgte Strategie einer massiven nicht-weißen Einwanderung und des Multikulturalismus zu unterdrücken. „Der Holocaust” ist der Dreh- und Angelpunkt der Agenda zur Verdrängung der Weißen, wobei jeder Hinweis auf rassische oder ethnische Identifikation oder Solidarität in Europa in den Hirnen von Millionen – wahrscheinlich Milliarden – Menschen sofort mit Auschwitz und dessen vermeintlichem Grauen in Verbindung gebracht wird. Read more

Black and Hispanic Democrats versus White, Liberal Democrats

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Lots of White faces at a Bernie rally

Lots of White faces at a Bernie rally

With all the attention on Donald Trump, there has been little discussion of the astonishing rift between Black and Hispanic Democrats on one hand and White liberal Democrats on the other.

Hillary Clinton has shut Bernie Sanders out of the Black and Brown voters. She is their candidate. She is catering to them to an astonishing degree. She has endorsed all the fantasies and lies about White cops killing Black males. She has hauled the mother of Travon Martin around, putting her on the stage to endorse her candidacy, and talking about how Lil’ Travon was murdered by George Zimmerman but there was no justice. She has extolled the Gentle Giant. She made statements about a breaking story about three Black coeds who claimed they were attacked by Whites on a bus who called them “nigger.” When a surveillance video from the bus revealed that the whole story was concocted, Hillary refused to retract her statements or to apologize for joining in false accusations against innocent people.

There is no limit in race-betrayal that Clinton will not go to. Read more

Could It Happen Here?

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This essay is based on a speech given at NPI’s 2016 winter conference, Identity Politics; first posted at Radix.

The Donald Trump phenomenon is amazing. I’ve never seen such enthusiasm for a politician—ever. His rallies are overflowing with emotion. This scares a lot of people because it conjures up images of populism, and even fascism. There’s something about crowds of cheering White people that terrifies America’s elites, especially when the speaker is criticizing their long-standing immigration policies.

We have become inured to an arrangement in which major party candidates are vetted by the media and the donor class before being put up for election. It’s a top-down system that more resembles an oligarchy than a democracy. Donald Trump has not been vetted.

Trump has said some incredible things—things I never thought I would hear from a politician with a real chance to win it all: birthright citizenship, Mexican criminality, a moratorium on admitting Muslims, an immigration policy that meets the needs of Americans, to name but a few. Without Trump in the GOP field, we’d be choosing between candidates’ methods of balancing the budget.

For years, the system has been stacked against our movement, to put it mildly. We have been doing our best to figure out how to get our issues before the public—issues like immigration and the demographic transformation of the United States. We ask: How could it happen? How could a political movement arise that would ignite the imaginations of White America, depose the corrupt donor class in the Republican Party and the corrupt politicians in Congress, and generate a populist uprising among those Peter Brimelow calls the “historic American nation”?

Read more