"We are beginning to learn some of the lessons we had to learn during the Cold War — that to take on the opposing ideology we had to take on the extremists, but we had also to win over moderate opinion." -- from Gordon Brown in this article
During the Cold War, Gordon Brown claims, "to take on the opposing ideology we had to take on the extremists, but we had also to win over moderate opinion."
Which "extremists" are those? Stalin and Mao? And which exemplars of "moderate opinion" were appealed to? Was it Khrushchev and Brezhnev?
During the Cold War the instruments of warfare included propaganda designed to limit the appeal of the enemy ideology -- not "extremist" Communism, but Communism tout court. And it was those within the Soviet Union, the most thoughtful people, who realized the failure of Communism on its own terms (to offer a more just and more prosperous society). This realization came only in part because of relentless outside pressure, and those who came to this realization ended the central role of the Central Committee and the self-discredited Communist Party.
Victory in the Cold War was not defined as replacing the "extremists" within Soviet Communism with those of "moderate opinion." Had it been, "victory" would have been achieved when Stalin died and Malenkov and Bulganin were no longer ruling, and "moderate" Khrushchev was in power. But Khrushchev was followed by the 18-year regime of Brezhnev, and it was only after that, when Gorbachev, advised by Aleksandr Yakovlev, and then Yeltsin, and many others, together ended the rule not of the "extremists" but even that of those Communists of "moderate opinion," that the Cold War could be said to have been won.
Brown should be forced to explain his analogy. He should be forced to explain, that is, how he intends to bring Muslims of "moderate opinion" to power in Saudi Arabia and Iran and Sudan and elsewhere, and to keep them there, and also how he intends to do the same for the now-obviously deeply unsettling and menacing Muslim population within Great Britain.
To what passages in a text-centered belief-system will he, Gordon Brown, appeal? And how much of the Qur'an, how much of the Hadith, how much of the life of the exemplary Muhammad will Gordon Brown the Islam expert have to teach 1.8 million Muslims to ignore, and to permanently ignore, and to make sure that their children and grandchildren also ignore and that none or few of them ever relapse? How will he make sure that none of them ever take a peak at what is, Gordon Brown will discover, the real and true Islam, the Islam that divides the world uncompromisingly between Believer and Infidel, the Islam that divides the land mass of the world between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb and requires a state of war to exist permanently between them (though does not always require open warfare when the Muslim side is too weak, and would be harmed by conducting such operations)?
How will Gordon Brown, and how will others who think dreamily like Gordon Brown, perform this trick, this Party Trick that has not the slightest chance of success? It has no chance of success because it ignores both the doctrine and the observable practice of Muslims wherever they may be found today and for the past 1350 years, years of Jihad-conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, stopped only by countervailing and more powerful military force.
Gordon Brown should ask himself two questions.
The first is: why Muslims? Why is it, of all the various immigrants who have arrived in the United Kingdom, Chinese Christian or Confucian, Hindus from India or Indonesia or East Africa, black Africans from Nigeria or Ghana or Kenya or Tanzania, Indians from the Andes, Poles or Russians or Armenians, or any others, that only the Muslims who appear to have this peculiar trouble with integrating, this seeming irreducible inability to offer heartfelt loyalty, or even express any interest in, the legal and political institutions and history of the United Kingdom and those who inhabited it for the past several millennia?
The second is: why Muslims everywhere? Why is it that not only in the United Kingdom, but also in France and Germany, in Italy and Spain, in Belgium and the Netherlands, in Denmark and Sweden and Norway, that governments everywhere find that Muslims present the same problems, the same loyalty offered only to fellow Muslims, members of the umma al-islamiyya? Why is it that in all these places they make demands, outrageous demands, for changes in the legal, political, and social arrangements, the laws and customs and institutions, that everyone else accepts and that reflect slow progress, achievements attained over centuries by the non-Muslim populations of the various European countries?
What is it that makes Muslims different from all other immigrant groups, many of them quite alien, bearing alien creeds – alien, yes, but not, as with Islam, not only an alien but also a hostile creed?
And what is it that makes Muslims such a problem, so that their large-scale presence has everywhere in Infidel lands created conditions that are far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous for the Infidel population than would be the case without such a large-scale presence?
Answers to #1 and #2 must be given. Now, or later. Better now.
During the Cold War, the West took in a small number of political refugees from the Eastern Bloc.
Once safely in the West, these people simply got on with their lives and did not immediately think "Hey, I've just escaped from a hell hole of a communist country, and must now try and turn my generous host nation into the same craphole".
If only muslims could think in a similar fashion.
If we "won the Cold War" how do you explain the triumph of collectivist ideology and economic determinism in every major institution? But especially academe, where Communism went to fester. Brown's 'Labour' Party is a living testament to the victory of Communism. Now the same people are embracing a medieval theocracy. If only F.A. Hayek were alive to see his thesis proven beyond any doubt. He'd probably kill himself.
As a Kelt, Brown certainly should understand violence. If, during his conceited heroic quest for Unicorns he stumbles upon trouble, he should remember the gene pool and the culture that left him at the high station he currently enjoys.
But he won't. It's the Marxist self-loathing thing that has him hung up on reality, that's what.
Gordon Brown's a loser. But, as an American, I must admit that, looking at the USA roster of Presidential candidates for '08, we're looking at a pick-your-loser situation on this side of the old Atlantic Ocean ourselves.
Gordon Brown cannot perform this trick. The trick really boils down to reconciling Western ideals with an ideology that aims to gain power through demographic conquest. The West’s young concept of democracy is very vulnerable.
But there’s a big moat around the castle. That moat is the social safety net. It was established by Westerners for Westerners to ease the pain of cyclical free market economies. It was not designed to be an alternative lifestyle, which is what it has morphed into.
There was no Federal spending on social programs in 1930 in the US. In 1948, social spending was 10% of the budget. Today it is nearing 60% and growing rapidly. Imagine a politician winning an election today by promising to cut social security benefits.
France will go first since taxes are already at 42% of GDP. England is in the mid-thirties and the US is around twenty percent. My math indicates that the US will lose its credit worthiness sometime before 2027.
Credit ratings are the trick that will save the West from 'radical' Islam, not Gordon Brown. I’m considering voting Democratic in 2008.
http://shadow2027.blogspot.com/
There is also a massive public sector pension scheme liability which never appears in the official statistics.
Naughty Gordon.
This week has been disgraceful in Britain in the way that the government and the media has really got its priorities wrong.
Last week a gang of about eight Muslims came into a school in Wiltshire and tried to murder a fifteen-year-old boy by hitting him half a dozen times in the head with the sharp end of a hammer.
Then on Monday there was the 'Undercover Mosques' documentary on Channel 4 showing how certain important mosques and Islamic groups which the government had hailed as paragons of moderation were in fact places where hatred of the infidels and the preparation for jihad was being encouraged.
You might have thought that these two events would have caused a media and parliamentary storm, but apart from the initial reporting, they have been almost completely ignored in the mainstream media, unless there is lots about it in the Sunday papers, and in the Commons at Question Time, the focus of attention was whether and to what extent remarks in the argument that two of the housemates in the 'Celebrity Big Brother' reality TV show were having over Oxo cubes could be classified as rascist.
It's definitely been a bleak week here.
The "Cold War" paradigm also seems to cloud Mrs. Condoleezza Rice's understanding of Middle Eastern politics. She simply does not recognize the texture and existence of Islam in shaping world events.
Instead the Secretary of State sees events in the same mold that she used when dealing with Communist Soviet Union.
Here are partial excerpts from an article by Neil King Jr. in this week's January 19th edition of The Wall Street Journal. (The full article may require paid subscription).
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice often calls herself "a student of history." And increasingly, she is using history -- or her chosen slice of it -- both to explain and justify the Bush administration's Middle East policy.
When Ms. Rice talks about the challenges the U.S. faces across the Mideast, she points, somewhat surprisingly, to Europe after World War II and to the West's decades-long face-off against the Soviet Union, which happens to be her area of expertise
Citing the Cold War's denouement as context for today's bloodshed and tumult may seem far-fetched to some. But Ms. Rice uses the analogy both to beg for patience -- the Cold War, after all, consumed decades
While traveling this week through the Middle East and Europe, Ms. Rice engaged in several long historical tutorials with reporters in tow.
"The reason that I cite some of these other times, like Europe, is that it is so clear in everybody's mind that the United States and its allies came out victorious at the end of the Cold War," she said in Kuwait. "But if you...look at the events that ultimately lead to that, you would have thought that this was failing every single day between 1945-1946 and probably 1987 or 1988."
When asked this week about what moments in Arab history inform her thinking, Ms. Rice said she had read about "the British experience" in Mesopotamia in the 1920s, which led to the founding of modern Iraq and the withdrawal of British forces. "I know a number of things that went right, and I know the things that went wrong," she said.
"There's a tendency to think about diplomacy as something that is done untethered to the conditions underlying it or the balance underlying it," she said. "In fact, that's not the way that it works. You aren't going to be successful as a diplomat if you don't understand the strategic context in which you are actually negotiating. It is not deal-making."
To her thinking, there has been a shift in underlying forces -- as opposed to events the U.S. might have influenced. Again, she points to a favorite historical analogy: the reunification of Germany. "If you had tried to negotiate German unification for any period of time until 1990, you would have not been able to do it because the underlying circumstances were not there," she said.
"Student of history"? How's that? A dutiful graduate student, a pleasant and plausible pleaser by her resume, which she submits earlyand often, and, though not chosen as the President of the University of Pennsylvania a few years ago when she applied, while in the Bush Administration, successful at this. But she is beyond the situation at hand. Right now she has said she is working furiously to prevent a "Sunni-Shi'a split" - why is she working furiously to do this?
A year or two ago she attempted to speak Russian to a Russian audience. The embarrassing performance made one wonder if she could have read sources in Russian for her early Kremlinology, for it was just a little beyond the kak-vy-pozhivaete stage. Not a deep student of Russian.
And not a "student of history" either -- though capable of impressing George Bush. If she had a serious student of history, she would have been reading all kinds of books, including "The Dhimmi" and "Islam and Dhimmitude," and a dozen more indispensable texts, and would have been capable of dismissing the unrepresentative and smooth Arab leaders, and made policy rather, on the basis of how the Muslim masses, Sunni and Shi'a, Arab and non-Arab, think and behave and will continue to think and behave as long as Islam itself has not somehow been discredited or weakened by ideoligical assault, and she appears not to have given a moment's thought as to why that makes sense from the viewpoint of Infidel interests, Infidel goals. And the American government, its legal and political institutions, and the people who built them and the people who inherited them as their legacy and wish to preserve them, are -- all of them -- Infidels.
Elephant this week as truly been bleak. But it is the chattering classes and the media that have made it so. Not Britain.
They have encouraged the Mohammedanism that inflicts these attacks against us by portraying us as weak. They have seen there opportunity to attack Jade Goody because she is common and uneducated. The racist angle was the icing on the cake.
They are the ones who are destroying the country and they are the ones that will leave for foreign shores the day before the black flag flies over number 10.
But who will stay and fight? The working classes of course, they always do the fighting.
Mert; I’ll second Mother Ecclesiastica. Trump is building in Panama, and Central America is drawing large and increasing numbers of expatriates. Usually wealthy progressives, but interestingly more and more engineering types. My theory is that engineering skills are mobile and can move to lower tax jurisdictions, in contrast to medical or legal people whose revenue streams come from billing western governments. An exodus of technical people is another cost of multiculturalism. My money’s on most of the technical folks coming home when the time comes though. One I know is very Libertarian leaning, has a fully automatic M-16, and really doesn’t like what’s going on back home. He's pretty representative of the working mindset down there.
Since Central America came up, for the record, I sent off my tax return last week and am armed and organized on the northeastern front.
Dear Mert
Yes, I agree with you, that's why I wrote that it's the government and the media that have got their priorities wrong, I didn't the working people. However, the problem is that the government and media are so good at distraction.
Dear Mert.
I am a middle-aged German and if need be - even I will come to your aid if you will have me. It will be my pleasure to take out at least two Mo-Foes before they get me. I am ready to defend any part of Europe and the Free [non-MoFoe] World with my life if I have to.
Not only the working class are sick of this shyte!