Democracy’s Slow Extinction
by Michael Devolin
“The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.” — Robert Maynard Hutchins, 1954
It would be no small feat to pinpoint when, exactly, Western journalists and politicians began losing their grip on reality. I’m much too young and inexperienced, even at sixty, to attempt such a feat. But I’ve always thought the day Yasser Arafat received a Nobel Peace Prize was a watershed moment in modern history, a turn for the worse. I just couldn’t wrap my mind around how a man best known for murdering Jews indiscriminately (but much less known for falsifying their history), even advocating the extermination of all Jews in the Middle East, could possibly deserve such an honour as a “peace prize.” Adolf Hitler was much of the same mind as Arafat, and he hasn’t received half the honour. Jay Nordlinger, who wrote a history of the Nobel Peace Prize, recounted in The Times of Israel that after it became public knowledge Arafat was one of the recipients of this prestigious award, “One of the committee members [Kare Kristiansen] announced that he was resigning. He could not stomach a prize to Arafat.”
This was back in 1994, decades after Muslim terrorists began obtruding their warped personalities and their lunatic ideologies into the fabric of the Western world and during which time we began accepting such obtrusions without objections. Terrorists ceased to be terrorists and became statesmen, even a statesman carrying a .357 magnum into the UN General Assembly in New York City. We’ve arrived at a point in our human evolution where it’s acceptable to wave the ISIS flag on campus but ultimately dangerous to do the same thing with the flag of Israel; where it’s acceptable to physically harass Jewish students in the halls of our universities but deserving of scorn to profile the religious ideology functioning in the background of that harassment; where it’s acceptable for Rafael Barak, Israel’s ambassador to Canada, to bolster the obfuscatory and erroneous notion that “The root of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not, and has never been, about religion.” The closer the few get to the truth, it seems, the further the many are removed from it.
Harold Joseph Laski warned, “We must plan our civilization or we must perish.” The majority of Western politicians and journalists have forgotten prudence, the virtue of looking ahead. To purport that Muslims have a choice between a good Islam and a bad, to pretend that Islam the good has been hijacked by the bad, is nothing more than the specious claim that Islam the good will save the Western world from Islam the bad. (The jihadists say the same thing, only in their anarchic world the appellations are reversed: Islam the bad becomes Islam the good.) That American or Canadian or British Muslims are travelling to Syria to become mujahidin in the service of ISIS is a direct consequence of Western journalists and politicians minimizing or dismissing the efficaciousness of Islam the good to creating Islam the bad—even from within a democratic society where Muslim religious are provided the many freedoms their parents were denied in the totalitarian autocracies they immigrated from. Imams are now publicly making a distinction between Westernized Islam and the Islam of the Middle East, boasting that the Middle Eastern version, with all its attendant violence and overt Jew-hatred, is the pure Islam. The danger (read: future) the Western world now faces is that the Middle Eastern version is close to becoming the preponderant interpretation taught in our mosques.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Louis Simpson wrote, “It is one thing to suspect that the news media are corrupt; it is astonishing actually to see lies being fabricated before your eyes.” We are witnessing the slow death of Western democracy, and our politicians and journalists are delivering the blows. Far from nourishing our society with denouements to political and/or religious impasses with honest criticism and objectivity, they simply and shamelessly excoriate those of us brave enough to face these impasses head on. It’s not proper for ordinary citizens to tell the world that four Jewish rabbis were hacked to death while at prayer in a synagogue in Jerusalem by two Palestinian Muslim terrorists, but it’s a good news story to report “a police shooting of two Palestinians,” later to be changed to “4 Israelis, two Palestinians, killed in synagogue attack.” And the attack had nothing to do with the religion of Islam.
Those who tell the truth are now silenced by those who tell lies. The voices of those who speak out in defence of our freedoms are constrained by those who remain indifferent and apathetic even while these freedoms are under siege. Like sheep inured to the slaughter we have become inured to the constant stream of lies from Western journalists and politicians more concerned about forgiving Islam its crimes and cruel manifestations—no matter how atrocious—than they are about preventing Democracy’s slow extinction.
Michael Devolin has been a member of JDL Canada since the 1980s, and has served as the personal bodyguard to Meir Weinstein, National Director of JDL Canada, at several high-profile trials, including the Jim Keegstra hate crimes trial and the Imra Finta war crimes trial.
Michael Copeland says
“Sharia law”, the European Court ruled, “is incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy”. What is Sharia law ? “Sharia is Islam, to be clear: there is no difference between Islam and Sharia“, explains Fouad Belkacem, “Abu Imran”, of Sharia4Belgium. http://libertygb.org.uk/v1/index.php/home/root/news-libertygb/6641-islam-is-incompatible-with-democracy
profitsbeard says
Pure “democracy” is an ochlocracy. (Mob rule.)
Without a Constitution and Bill of Rights that codify Liberty and unalienable human rights, simple democracy itself allows a Gaza or Algeria or Egypt to vote in a terrorist organization as their government.democratically.
Luckily the militaries of the last two states over-ruled the terrorists and kept their countries relatively free.
Without the cultural basis of a secular rule of Law, democracy means very little.
Darren says
A well written piece. It reminds me of the 1930s all over again, it might even be worse. This mass denial of reality by so many people is a sight to behold especially when the evidence is in your face every day. Many people can’t or won’t accept reality because if they do, they have to face some rather horrible truths, it’s better to recoil from that truth because it makes you feel uncomfortable or because it doesn’t conform to your preconceived notions of what you think the world is like so you deny that reality. Those of us who simply view the world as it is and are simply commenting on what is happening and what we are seeing and trying with our own meager intelligence to think of ideas or solutions to the problem are castigated and vilified because our version of reality doesn’t jive with the dream world these people are living in.
Something I learned from my own experiences is when observing something or someone never base your decision to act off how you feel base it off of what you see before your eyes. We like to lie to ourselves about a whole host of things because actually admitting the truth can lead to many unpleasant feelings many people from what I observed seem to recoil sometimes from facing certain truths either about themselves or other issues. This issue to me is no different, though what I call the surburbanite mentality also plays a factor. Many in the west have live relatively sheltered lives and due to that they super impose their own view of the world and belief system on other people. Many think the world is all white picket fences and Mrs. Smith walking her dog, but the truth is something much darker. Human nature itself is quite dark and often times the reasons given for something isn’t the real motivation behind it. We like to lie to ourselves though. I guess I’m the oddball I’d rather know the absolute truth about an issue despite how it makes me feel, than to live in blissful ignorance. No idea if I’m rambling or not what I am trying to convey is hard to put into words, I’ll just end it here I guess.
Rob Porter says
Darren, not just a well-written piece, but a good, thought provoking article. However, I cannot say that I lie to myself “about a whole host of things because actually admitting the truth can lead to many unpleasant feelings”. So no, I don’t recoil, I see clearly what is developing in a thoroughly gutless Western world with it’s pathetic politicians who pass for ‘leaders’ and an appalling media, and often think of Aleksandr Solzhenityn’s 1978 commencement address at Harvard in which he spoke of the ‘failure of courage’ in the West. For his views he was hated by many academics, but nothing changed his resolve to speak the truth. Yes, too much comfort, love of comfort and lack of threat does not instill backbone in individuals.
Our resolve should be to crush Islam and remove all vestiges of it in Western society, knowing full well that if we don’t it will come home to haunt us. Instead we have spineless ‘leaders’ and media that seek to pretend that all the Islamic violence around has nothing to do with Islam. And they do this while knowing nothing about bloody, brutal, savage, satanic Islam. ‘Let’s pretend that Islam is peaceful and if we do it will go away and we won’t have to fight’ is their cowardly delusion.
No wonder that more and more, for all their errors and excesses, I like the spirit of the Crusaders of that First Crusade to the Holy Land. Their primary thought was to crush Islam that had made life hell for southern Europeans and take back from them what they had stolen from others.
Darren says
I’m not saying we all do, but many people would rather lie to themselves than admit the truth about many issues, not just islam. We lack the political capital and the will for this war at the moment, hopefully this can change as things heat up further and more people get sick of innocent people being killed for some sick ideology. Right now though it seems the most we can do is try to shed as much light on this issue as possible and to talk about it with as many people as possible. If we could convert some high profile leftists to our side like Bill Maher or others I think it might make those on the left more open to dialog since once of their own is saying the same things we “extremists” are. Hopefully though after the next big jihadist event people will have a national dialog about islam.
Our politicians won’t for obvious reasons, but hopefully more people in the media and academia open their eyes. I agree with your solution and I think that is what is going to need done, but for now we lack the political capital or will for this to realistically happen. So hopefully as more and more innocent people are killed more and more infidels wake up. If this doesn’t happen then things will just get worse and worse, and people will be faced with that choice anyway. Let’s hope we make the right choice and choose to survive.
Wolfgang says
@Darren
Hone your forest skills…….trust me you are going to need them.
Wolfgang says
@Darren
Most women suffer from that complex of not seeing things as they are, for example, my wife likes to have things ” prettied up “, you know flower print table cloths, red blanket in the back seat of the SUV, matching coffee cups at thanksgiving and so on and so on, you get the idea, me ? I am utilitarian, very, very basic, flat earth tones, flat green tones, tan canvas rucksacks, too many men follow the metro sexual trend as well, if you read the story of Edward Bernays, he said
” But in this period, the term propaganda just meant information or something like that. So he wrote a book called Propaganda around 1925, and it starts off by saying he is applying the lessons of the first World War. The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to “regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies.”
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/bernprop.html
If you are non conformist….then you are a threat to the system, we have all been conned by it, most are happy to keep it that way, when you break free, you really are free.
Dave says
Thank you, Mr. Devolin, for such a powerful and beautifully written article.
Salah says
Harold Joseph Laski warned, “We must plan our civilization or we must perish.”
This was another PC statement.
A non-PC one should read:
“We must return to our Judeo-Christian civilization or we must perish.”
or
“We must turn back to God or me must perish.”
Turning away from God creates a vacuum and Evil fills that vacuum.
“And when an unclean spirit is gone out of a man he walketh through dry places seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith: I will return into my house from whence I came out. And coming he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then he goeth, and taketh with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is made worse than the first. So shall it be also to this wicked generation.” Matthew 12:43-45
Gart says
I have the suspicion Salah, that it is God talk that gets us into this mess to begin with. More people should leave their favourite toys at home.
Salah says
I have the suspicion, Gart, that you’re putting all religions in the same basket. This is the surest way to exonerate Islam.
pongidae rex says
The single definitive characteristic of the West for over a generation is self destruction in doomed attempts to solve the symptoms of global dysfunction in the Islamic and 3rd world via immigration and ‘nation building’, without daring to address the root causes of this dysfunction. So determined is the West to avoid addressing the root causes of the chaos it is battling that it is willing to sacrifice its own core principles for Orwellian distortions of language and discourse.
The root causes of the chaos engulfing the world in the 21st century are Islam and overpopulation.
Until these pathologies are addressed directly, no amount of blood, sacrifice and treasure is going to change anything.
Darren says
But to actually address the problem would require taking action that may cost you or your cartel err gang err party a few votes, it’s better to deny the problem exists and to kick the can down the road hoping the sh*t falls on the next person pref the other gang err party.
Wolfgang says
With extreme sadness I say that the US experiment is almost over, for most of the 12,000 years of recorded history, mankind has slid from brutal rulerships of kings who ruled as Gods, they had the power to give life or death in their words to abject slavery for the masses. I say the US and the constitution has and is totally unique in the history of man, the US with her codified rights of declaration will always stand as the ideal for all men, I believe it will disappear in my lifetime, sadly it is in its dying days, many, many of us will live to see it die. To be sure there will be a conflagration when that day comes, for too many it will be too little, too late. As Robert says, we began the slide long ago now, there will be much darkness of the soul for mankind ahead, none of us know where this will lead or end, we can but guess, a prudent man prepares for a rough long journey in the wilderness. We can be sure of one thing, the USA will never be the same again as it was and neither will the rest of us.
When the USA dies……the effect will be felt right around the planet and her enemies will dance with joy, in that day I will weep.
Wolfgang says
Michael Devolin……Thanks
Wolfgang says
……..”THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
From Edward Bernays
……. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world……..