Elsewhere (182)
Douglas Murray on mass immigration and Simon Schama’s Question Time slip-up:
In that use of [the intended put-down] ‘suburban’, Schama showed something a lot of us had suspected – which is that for a certain type of globe-trotting international celebrity, any concern for borders, national identity and cultural continuity are not just beneath them, but actively ‘common’. Of course, like so many other advocates of mass immigration, Simon Schama can live pretty much where he wants. And if the area around him goes somewhat downhill because the neighbours all start to come from the rougher corners of Eritrea then Simon Schama can move. And he will probably move to a very nice area. But not everybody has that choice. And one thing we can all be certain of is that Simon Schama will never choose to live in Bradford, Malmo or any of the (dare I say it) ‘suburbs’ outside Paris. Yet all the time he will urge other peoples’ neighbourhoods to more closely resemble those great success stories, and look down at people from an ever-loftier height when they dare to object.
Mr Schama currently lives in Briarcliff Manor, an affluent, very white village in Westchester County, New York. The kind of neighbourhood that has genteel regulations regarding alcoholic beverages and the public use of amusement devices.
Jim Goad on the Great Rape Migration:
In Norway, the Aftenposten newspaper once notoriously changed a headline from “Foreigners over-represented in rape statistics” to “New sexual culture shapes attacks.” And when Lars Hedegaard, President of the Danish Free Press Society, dared to note Muslims’ over-representation in rape statistics, he was convicted of “hate speech” under Denmark’s penal code rather than being cheered by the country’s rape-obsessed feminists.
And Christopher Caldwell on Angela Merkel’s colossal gamble:
Citizens of all the tiny countries that lie between the Middle East and Germany were witnessing a migration far too big for Germany to handle. They knew Germany would eventually realise this, too. Once Germany lost its nerve, the huge human chain of testosterone and poverty would be stuck where it was. And if your country was smaller than Germany — Austria, for instance, is a tenth Germany’s size — you could wind up in a situation where the majority of fighting-age men in your country were foreigners with a grievance.
Hm. I hadn’t planned one, but it seems there’s a theme of sorts. Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
What gets me in a state of anticipation is that Cameron has said he won’t contest another election, so the Tories will go into the next election with a new leader. Who could conceivably be Boris Johnson. We could have an election fought between Beano Bozza and Chairman Jezza. It’ll be entertaining, if nothing else.
Hiring Milne makes me wonder whether Corbyn and his advisors are oblivious to how they seem outside of their own immediate circle.
I don’t think it’s a question of being oblivious – it’s that they just don’t see anything fundamentally *wrong* in having been a Stalinist and a Soviet agent of influence (i.e. someone who didn’t even need to be tempted with filthy lucre to work for them).
I think that they fundamentally see others who have a problem with it as being the ones with the real problem. For instance, they really don’t *get* why we don’t understand that the minor doctrinal differences between Hitler and Stalin actually represent a gaping chasm of difference, and that we must be fick or summit, innit?
Alex Massie on the appointment of Seumas Milne:
“You can’t say we weren’t warned. Jeremy Corbyn is nothing if not consistent. When he casts his baleful, weary, disappointed, eye around the world he knows what he sees: a world bought and sold by American gold, aided and abetted, as always, by its snivelling junior, British, partner.
So Cuba is not an island gulag and Venezuela not an incompetent kleptocracy. Each is, rather, a defiant hold-out of revolutionary socialism sticking it to the Yankee man. If that means ignoring certain inconvenient truths then, well, these truths shall remain unexamined.
If that means blaming Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine on Nato then so be it. Because Nato, as any Dave Spart knows, is the latest means by which American hegemony is established, justified and expanded. Remember that the root cause of any problem, anywhere in the world, is simultaneously always overlooked by the doltish mainstream and yet also, for them with eyes and a nose for the truth, remarkably easy to discover. Conveniently, it is always the same root cause. Which does simplify matters”.
Milne has been described – by other, saner lefties – as the man “responsible for making fascism respectable on the left,” and a “journalist who always knows better than the people who were there” – i.e., the victims of the totalitarians Milne rhetorically fellates. And it’s not just his apologia for Stalinism and Islamic barbarism, or his “neo-con” conspiracy theories, or his infamous 9/11 piece, written as the dust was literally still settling on Manhattan. His years in charge of the Guardian’s comment pages were truly bizarre.
He commissioned dozens of outrageously misleading propaganda pieces by members of, or advocates of, Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Muslim Brotherhood, often with no rebuttal or correction permitted and no acknowledgement of the writer’s affiliation. And so Guardian readers were being assured that the Brotherhood “has long espoused non-violence” and that its success “should not frighten anybody” because the organisation “respects the rights of all religious and political groups.” All while Brotherhood president Muhammad Mehdi Akef was telling the Egyptian newspaper al-Arabi that the Holocaust was “a myth,” that Israel’s annihilation could be “expected soon,” and that “Islam will invade Europe and America because Islam has a mission.” And while the Brotherhood’s own websites urged children to take up homicidal ‘martyrdom’ to achieve that end.
I see no reason to assume that Milne didn’t know he was propagating lies.
I see no reason to assume that Milne didn’t know he was propagating lies.
It’s another of the duality of “either evil or stupid, either way we shouldn’t listen to them” conundrums. However, with Milne I think we can rule out stupid.
Doesn’t have to be a strict duality, Milne *could* be both evil AND stupid (within some meanings of the word stupid).
Speaking of Stalin’s rise to power, a scholar who’s been reading newly released original docs from the Lenin years explains how Stalin got all the reins to himself.
Worth listening to both parts.
“Oh, Hitler!” said Abdullateef D., a 32-year-old who arrived in Germany from Syria five months ago. “Good man!”
Probably the most popular book in Middle Eastern bookshops – after the religious ones and the guff about their leadership – is Mein Kampf. It’s the only region where I’ve seen it openly on sale in bookshops. There isn’t much else, either.
Oh, yes, the most liberal people I know all live in 98% white nice neighborhoods, whilst thinking that someone like me, who lives in a 33% white neighborhood, is a conservative and maybe even an unconscious racist because you know. I don’t agree with them on a lot of their lofty proclaimings.
To paraphrase dear old Obi-Wan Kenobe when talking about mass immigration in search of jobs, security and housing: “This is not the Europe you are looking for.”
“German Village of 102 Braces for 750 Asylum Seekers”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/world/europe/german-village-of-102-braces-for-750-asylum-seekers.html?_r=0