Stephen Walt on Anders Brevick, Immigration, and Western Culture

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If there’s one characteristic that defines the European nationalist parties, it is that they have eschewed racialist rhetoric in favor of cultural arguments. Geert Wilders, Marine LePen, et al. have claimed that Islam is incompatible with Western culture—that Muslims refuse to assimilate and have values that are incompatible with Western modernity, particularly on women and sexuality.

Without doubt this tactic has made nationalist parties more acceptable to mainstream voters and more difficult to attack by the left. It is not possible to tar these parties with the ultimate post-WWII pejorative—”Nazi—which is sure to come up if one breathes a word about ethnic interests of Whites.

Now Stephen Walt, of Israel Lobby fame, attempts to undercut cultural conservative arguments that he associates with Breivik—“the idea that he is defending some fixed and sacred notion of the ‘Christian West,’ which is supposedly under siege by an aggressive alien culture” (“Breivik’s Warped Worldview“). (He’d doubtless disapprove even more of Breivik’s Nordicist proclivities.)

In my review of The Israel Lobby, I made the following point about Western elites:

Confronted with the moral critique of America emanating from elite universities and the media, the old Protestant intellectual establishment quickly yielded the high ground. Many of them became avid cheerleaders of the new multicultural zeitgeist that rejected the America and even the Americanism of their ancestors, to the point that the new zeitgeist has become a consensus among elites of all stripes. They accepted their own demographic decline, and they gave up their pretensions as cultural leaders and trend setters. And they implicitly paved the way for their eventual  loss of political power to other groups, some of which have historically conditioned grudges against them—a dangerous situation to say the least. In doing so, they became the pallbearers for their own people.

Sadly, this applies to Stephen Walt. In the current main TOO article, Charles Dodgson does an excellent job of refuting Walt’s moral indictments of the West. Right now I am reviewing Ricardo Duchesne’s The Uniqueness of Western Civilization—a book that I strongly recommend for intellectuals like Walt. Duchesne, a sociologist at the University of New Brunswik, is fond of showing how the critics of the West typically presuppose ideas whose origins are uniquely Western. Read more

Does the Norway Atrocity Make Nationalism Illegitimate? A Reply to Stephen Walt

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My first thoughts on learning about the mass murder committed by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway on 23rd July 2011 were mixed with emotions. That such atrocity could be committed in the name of something I also believe in–the defence of the West from Third World colonization–was sickening. Should I feel shame? Perhaps. I certainly felt fear. As a parent I could imagine how those youngsters’ parent felt and my own children being targeted for my beliefs.

Then shame or a sense of impending shame began to take over. Viewing Breivik’s video and skimming his book forced the realization that this was not an aimless rampage but an act carefully thought out to achieve a goal. Breivik may be a psychopath, but he is a psychopath with a purpose. And his purpose is also mine. I had a moral dilemma.

The dilemma was this: If defending Western identity inevitably leads to atrocity, to the killing of innocent people, how can I justify participating in identity politics? How can I be a White loyalist and live with myself? It is easy to make excuses and brush the issue under the proverbial carpet. Most nationalists are not killers. We have a just cause. The other side does bad things. Some immigrant communities are prone to violence. Etc. etc. Still, if our side descends to atrocity, that is something for which we must take responsibility. Read more

United in Prayer?

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When you live in a place like Memphis, the local news media (which is owned by and takes its marching orders from the National news media-ABC, CBS, NBC, Scripps-Howard, Gannett, etc.) is constantly fanning the dying embers of the “Civil Rights” movement.

Why? Because the CRM was the one unqualified success of liberalism since WWll. It was the one manifestation which, at least among both mainstream conservatives and liberals, is like Caesar’s wife and is “beyond reproach.”

A case in point is the article, “United in Prayer,” taken from the Monday, August 1 edition of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, our daily fish wrap. The occasion for this article is to focus attention on the unveiling of the new MLK Statue on the National Mall in Washington D.C. next week.

The story features the “iconic” Clayborn Temple, formerly Second Presbyterian Church until 1949 when, as often happens in Memphis, the old neighborhood transitions from White to Black and the White churches sell their facilities to Black churches. Clayborn Temple is “iconic” because MLK and other “civil rights pioneers” used it as a base of operations back in the 50s and 60s.

Clayborn Temple is a stone building, and therefore the only thing that needs to be done to keep it presentable is to keep the roof repaired, but like so many other buildings in the black neighborhoods of Memphis, this didn’t happen and the AME denomination, which owns it, is now offering to sell the dilapidated hulk for $1 million plus, due to its “iconic” status, in hopes that some guilty white liberals will buy it and convert it into yet another CRM shrine.

Right on cue, the GWLs show up, this time a contingent from the now uber-liberal Second Presbyterian Church, the original owners. A gaggle of liberal “church ladies” fighting back tears of guilt and remorse despite the fact that most of them hadn’t been born when the CRM occurred, took to falling on their knees before Black folks at Clayborn Temple to beg forgiveness for the imagined and unspecified “racial sins” of their forefathers and mothers.

Read more

Political Violence, Part 2: Violence by the Right: The Media’s Timothy McVeigh Paradigm

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Breivik, Goldstein, Amir, and McVeigh

In a sense, Anders Breivik’s killings were a form of vigilantism, as are almost all killings conducted outside the apparatus of the State. To illustrate my point, we go back to Weather Underground member, David Gilbert, talking about his decision to turn to violence:

Our movement had come about thinking we could shake the moral conscience of America….But painful experience had taught us that there was an entrenched power structure which profited from and systematically enforced oppression. We could not make a dent in the overwhelming social violence of the status quo without coming up against that power structure. (In Dan Berger, Outlaws of America, p. 44)

One could easily envision Breivik making the same exact justification for his decision to turn to killing. Both Breivik and Gilbert killed outside the mechanism of the State, but one is looked at as a sort of hero of the left and intellectual circles, while those same members would view Breivik as a monster beyond compare. This is helped by the media’s attempt to brand Breivik negatively while branding those Good Terrorists with positive qualities. Read more

Israel’s Malaise: Prepare for the Next Diaspora?

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In the discussion about the status and the future of Israel most people tend to overlook its social and economic structure because of  its political and military prowess. But the greatest threat to the Jewish state does not seem to come from abroad, despite the lobbying against Iran. The Arab Spring is coming to Tel Aviv, but not in the way it was foreseen.

When Zionism was launched in the 19th century by Theodor Herzl it was not very appealing to Jews, not in the least because Palestine was part of the economically backward and politically unstable Ottoman Empire. If European Jews chose to migrate, they preferred North America where industry was rapidly developing and the economy was booming. Zionism was not only unappealing but it was also widely regarded as unrealistic—could rural Palestine economically sustain the livelihood of the millions of urban Jews living in diaspora?

Today the question of economically sustaining Israel is more urgent than ever. Israel has enjoyed generous U.S. economic and military support and German reparations for decades, but the pumping of billions of dollars into the Israeli economy has not been enough to counterbalance Israeli expendures. Israel’s economy is burdened by its defense budget which is close to 25% of GNP and its huge state-apparatus accounting for one third of the workforce. Also its elaborate social welfare is a big burden on the state budget which is plagued by the low level of labor participation among the growing number of Orthodox Jews. These Jews are also exempt from military service. Read more

Marine Le Pen suggests Wallonia become part of France

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Marine Le Pen has suggested that the French-speaking part of Belgium become part of France, pending a referendum of all Belgians. This follows last year’s vote in which a majority of voters in Flanders favored Flemish separatists. Le Pen stated that “if Belgian is going to split, if Flanders pronounces its independence, which seems more and more credible a possibility, the French republic would do well to welcome Wallonia into its heart.”

A related article, “End of Nationalism Dream Dying in Belgium” notes that “If even Belgium’s Dutch speaking Flemish and francophone Walloons cannot live together then how can Europe’s ‘Union’, a more recent and even more artificial construction, hope to bridge national differences?”

Indeed. The EU project was built on moral idealism of the left rather than on a realistic understanding of what motivates people. Attachment to ethnically similar people sharing a common language and culture is a bedrock part of human nature–hence the robustness of these differences no matter how much the left would like to engineer them away. Read more

Mesirah is alive and well in Brooklyn

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Writing in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, Michael Lesher, an Orthodox Jew, argues that the  city should not be giving money ($130,000) to street patrols manned by Orthodox Jews in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods (“Orthodox Cops: Separate and Unequal“). Lesher’s article comes in the wake of a kidnapping and murder of Leiby Kletzky, a Hasidic boy, by an Orthodox Jewish man. He points out that “Leiby’s disappearance was only belatedly reported to the police, and that a privately run, Orthodox Jewish ‘patrol’ called Shomrim reportedly had video evidence that went unused during the crucial hours before the murder, while untrained Jewish laymen tried to handle the investigation themselves.”

Lesher notes such groups “all too often driven by religious proscriptions to keep their community’s crimes out of the public eye.” In other words, the groups operate by the code of mesirah in which it is a forbidden to inform on Jews. But of course Lesher is himself violating mesirah by loudly blowing the whistle on his fellow Jews. He has been very courageous in performing this public service. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes.

Publication in the Post probably won’t help Rupert Murdoch in his present travails either.