I watched a bullfight in Madrid when I was 12 years old. One of the bulls pulled a Gandhi and refused to be goaded into fighting, and was later led out of the ring alive and well. He didn’t seem fazed by the derision of the crowd.
Watching this clip, my sympathies were for the bull.
Animal rights and all that.
Europeans having second thoughts on Obama and the Euro.
Europe’s disappointment with Persident Barack Obama’s presidency was laid bare Thursday as the EU’s most senior figure called for a dramatic effort to revive transatlantic relations.
The President of the European Commission said the new era at the White House was in danger of becoming a “missed opportunity” for Europe.
José Manuel Barroso said the EU-U.S. relationship was not living up to its potential. The criticism follows a series of fundamental disagreements on how to deal with the economic crisis, climate change and trade reform.
The feelings of a deepening rift are mutual. Senior U.S. figures said Obama could never live up to Europe’s sky-high expectations.
Barroso revealed his frustrations with Washington during a wideranging interview in which he also admitted that the euro had acted like a “sleeping pill,” luring some countries to the edge of economic disaster with an “illusion of prosperity.”
Euro: opiate of the people.
The Swiss authorities have decided not to extradite film director Roman Polanski to the United States to face prosecution in a 1977 sex case.
The 76-year old Oscar-winning director, who was arrested last September in Zurich and had been under house arrest in Switzerland, is a free man, according to Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf.
The US has expressed its disappointment over the move.
Widmer-Schlumpf said the decision had been taken following Washington’s refusal to give access to confidential documents.
“In these circumstances it was not possible to exclude with the necessary certainty that Roman Polanski had already served the sentence to which he was condemned at the time,” Widmer-Schlumpf told a news conference in the capital, Bern, on Monday afternoon.
We’re not Iran. We have a criminal justice system perfectly capable of adjudicating these matters without Swiss second guessing.
She added that Switzerland had also decided against extradition because Polanski had been coming to the country in good faith for years.
So what? Former Nazis have lived in our nation in good faith, but when discovered we sent them back. Just because Polanski lived high on the hog for decades shouldn’t mean a thing.
LA is busy cutting business ties with Arizona over the immigration law. Will they be doing the same for Switzerland?
Eurotrash.
As the euro continues to dance on the brink of calamity, the people responsible for the deepening debacle have finally come up with a scheme that will save it once and for all. It’s a cunning plan that draws heavily on that old joke about a European heaven and hell. You’ll be familiar with it: in heaven the police are British, the cooks are French and the engineers are German; while in hell, the police are German, the cooks are British and it’s all organised by the Italians.
The euro version goes like this: fiscal policy is run by the Greeks, the Spanish and the Italians; interest rates are set by a central bank in thrall to politicians in France and Italy, and it is all organised by a Portuguese socialist and a Belgian. The idea will go down a treat in places like France, Greece and Portugal. But if you’re German — an increasingly disgruntled citizen of Europe’s largest and most productive economy — you might be starting to think it represents a final signal to get the hell out of there.
I exaggerate, of course. The EU summit is destined to break up without any firm plan being agreed. The hope in European capitals is that the E750 billion bailout plan announced early last month will provide enough sticking plaster to get them through the next few months and perhaps into some kind of tolerable recovery.
But it’s a forlorn hope. The euro continues to plummet on foreign exchanges. This week all eyes are on Spain, where investors are betting a Greece-style bailout is coming down the tracks. As various disaster scenarios are pondered, a consensus is forming among moneymakers and policymakers: the euro, in its current form, cannot survive.
There are only two ways out of this bind: forward or back, more Europe or less. Closer integration of economic policies, or an acknowledgement that the euro itself was a step too far on the path to integration. More integration or less? It does not take a student of European politics to know which way Europe’s political elites are likely to go.
The plan being discussed is extraordinary. Like gamblers increasingly obsessed with the idea that their string of mounting losses will eventually pay off with an even bigger win, the European chiefs in Brussels are convinced that if they just double down one more time on their integration project, they will finally achieve victory. So the plan being dreamed of is a radical fix that would create a eurozone-wide fiscal policy.
Until a few months ago Jean-Claude Trichet was insisting, like the Duke of Wellington on the English constitution, that the euro was more or less perfect. Now, he is calling for a new ‘budgetary federation’ to keep the project afloat. In Brussels and Paris, and at the ECB headquarters in Frankfurt, officials talk openly of what this would look like. At minimum, a powerful new agency, administered in Brussels, would scrutinise the tax and spending plans of all members of the eurozone. It would be empowered to order a profligate government to rein in its spending, or face unspecified penalties.
Such an agency would represent a eurocrat’s dream. But it is fraught with difficulties. First, the existing eurozone rules are supposed to keep everyone’s deficits to a prudent limit. And then, what is to be done to the likes of Greece? There is enough protest at its attempts at cuts: the idea of imposing a fine on countries already in budgetary disaster is like something out of Ionescu. It calls to mind the slogan on a T-shirt I saw at the beach once: ‘The beatings will continue until morale improves’.
In theory, the only way of ensuring stability within monetary union, as most economists will tell you, is to go for full-fledged fiscal union. In other words, to make the Greek budget a section of the budget for the whole eurozone. So Greece could nestle safely in the harbour of German taxpayers’ vast funds. But in the case of the eurozone, such a fiscal union is likely to result only in deeper economic peril, social unrest and political disarray. And it would mark an almost complete repudiation of what the euro was supposed to stand for when it was hatched almost 20 years ago.
In so many ways, the Germans do not deserve this. While the British have usually been regarded as the most eurosceptic of Europeans, it’s easy to forget that the Germans were never very enthusiastic either. Helmut Kohl was desperate to secure French support for the reunification of Germany — over the stiff opposition of Margaret Thatcher and the British. So he agreed to French demands to support a currency union. It was a quid pro quo. Just as a united Germany was the Chancellor’s political dream, so monetary union was the dream of François Mitterrand, the president of France…
…the nation that did not adopt the Euro but did adopt center-right economic p0licies: Sweden.
Sweden has exceeded analysts’ economic forecasts with quarterly growth up 1.4 percent and year-on-year figures placing the country at the top of the European pile.
“Seasonally adjusted gross domestic product (GDP) increased by 1.4 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2009,” Statistics Sweden said.
Analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had expected the Swedish economy to grow 1.3 percent in the first three months of the year.
Sweden’s GDP expanded three percent in the 12 months to March 2010, the statistics office said.
Swedish bank Handelsbanken said that “all-in-all, these figures show that Sweden stands out as a top performer in the EU family.”
The country was hard-hit by the global economic crisis but its economy quickly bounced back, returning to growth in the second quarter of 2009, with a 0.7 increase in GDP.
For years European socialists have indulged themselves in soft living, mocking the US all the while as barbaric. Not any more.
Steven Erlanger in the New York Times:
Across Western Europe, the “lifestyle superpower,” the assumptions and gains of a lifetime are suddenly in doubt. The deficit crisis that threatens the euro has also undermined the sustainability of the European standard of social welfare, built by left-leaning governments since the end of World War II.
Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations and early retirements, its national health care systems and extensive welfare benefits, contrasting it with the comparative harshness of American capitalism.
Europeans have benefited from low military spending, protected by NATO and the American nuclear umbrella. They have also translated higher taxes into a cradle-to-grave safety net. “The Europe that protects” is a slogan of the European Union.
But all over Europe governments with big budgets, falling tax revenues and aging populations are experiencing rising deficits, with more bad news ahead.
With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle, at least not without a period of austerity and significant changes. The countries are trying to reassure investors by cutting salaries, raising legal retirement ages, increasing work hours and reducing health benefits and pensions.
“We’re now in rescue mode,” said Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister. “But we need to transition to the reform mode very soon. The ‘reform deficit’ is the real problem,” he said, pointing to the need for structural change.
The reaction so far to government efforts to cut spending has been pessimism and anger, with an understanding that the current system is unsustainable.
In Athens, Aris Iordanidis, 25, an economics graduate working in a bookstore, resents paying high taxes to finance Greece’s bloated state sector and its employees. “They sit there for years drinking coffee and chatting on the telephone and then retire at 50 with nice fat pensions,” he said. “As for us, the way things are going we’ll have to work until we’re 70.”
In Rome, Aldo Cimaglia is 52 and teaches photography, and he is deeply pessimistic about his pension. “It’s going to go belly-up because no one will be around to fill the pension coffers,” he said. “It’s not just me; this country has no future.”
Changes have now become urgent. Europe’s population is aging quickly as birthrates decline. Unemployment has risen as traditional industries have shifted to Asia. And the region lacks competitiveness in world markets.
According to the European Commission, by 2050 the percentage of Europeans older than 65 will nearly double. In the 1950s there were seven workers for every retiree in advanced economies. By 2050, the ratio in the European Union will drop to 1.3 to 1.
“The easy days are over for countries like Greece, Portugal and Spain, but for us, too,” said Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, a French lawyer who did a study of Europe in the global economy for the French government. “A lot of Europeans would not like the issue cast in these terms, but that is the storm we’re facing. We can no longer afford the old social model, and there is a real need for structural reform.”
In Paris, Malka Braniste, 88, lives on the pension of her (more…)
For Angela Merkel, leader of the eurozone’s richest country, a queue is forming of high-quality adversaries. As she tips German Geld und Gut into the furnace of a rescue package for the euro, while going it alone in a misguided ban on market “manipulators”, the brass-neck Chancellor has infuriated domestic voters, angered her EU partners (in particular the French) and invited the so-called wolf pack of global traders to do its worst.
In one respect, Mrs Merkel is right: “The euro is in danger… if the euro fails, then Europe fails.” What she has not yet admitted publicly is that the main cause of the single currency’s peril appears beyond her control and therefore her impetuous response to its crisis of confidence is doomed to fail.
The euro has many flaws, but its weakest link is Greece, whose fundamental problem is that for years it spent too much, earned too little and plugged the gap by borrowing in order to enjoy a rich man’s lifestyle. It flouted EU rules on the limits to budget deficits; its national accounts were a moussaka of minced statistics, topped with a cheesy sauce of jiggery-pokery.
By any legitimate measure, Greece was unworthy of eurozone membership. That it achieved card-carrying status was down to the sleight-of-hand skills of its Brussels fixers and the acquiescence of central bank bean-counters. Now we know the truth, jet-hosing it with yet more debt makes no sense. Another dose of funny money will delay but not extinguish the need for austerity.
This is why the euro, in its current form, is finished. The game is up for a monetary union that was meant to bolt together work-and-save citizens in northern Europe with the party animals of Club Med. No amount of pit props from Berlin can save the euro Mk I from collapsing under the weight of its structural dysfunctionality. You cannot run indefinitely a single currency with one interest rate for 16 economies, when there are such huge fiscal disparities.
Five years ago, the European Union’s account of itself resonated with end-of history triumphalism. In organic fashion, democratic socialism would spread eastward and southward, recivilizing the old Warsaw Pact and the Balkans through cradle-to-grave entitlements, state unionism, radical environmentalism, and utopian pacifism. No wonder that Turkey begged — and often humiliated itself in the process — to get inside this more perfect union.
Over here, we were often lectured by “progressives” that almost everything Europe did was better — subsidized mass transit, free college tuition, extended maternity leave, early retirement, and “soft-power” diplomacy. Indeed, Obama’s presidential campaign was in some senses a stealthy referendum on Europeanization. And once he was elected, his moves to raise taxes, expand government, expropriate some private industries, run up exponentially increasing deficits, subsidize environmentalism, and triangulate with enemies and allies abroad were European Union to the core.
Few wanted to listen when it was pointed out — well before the Greek meltdown — that on key questions of demography and immigration, the future of the European Union was bleak. The very idea that, in historical terms, socialism, agnosticism, pacifism, and hedonism were not only interrelated and synergistic, but also suicidal for civilization, was considered crackpot.
Furthermore, even in the days of loud socialism, Old Europe’s notion of class made it hard to assimilate Islamic immigrants. Unlike other newcomers, North Africans and Turks channeled their resentments through religious fundamentalism. Something about their European hosts — the pacifism, the liberal perspective on matters of sex, the agnostic and atheistic proclamations — infuriated Muslims in a way not even the Great Satan did. The result was that the more a liberal Europe tried to appease radical Islam abroad and its own estranged Muslim underclass at home, the more it was despised as weak, decadent, and — worst of all — increasingly irrelevant.
Few wanted to listen when it was pointed out that Europe was, in terms of traditional military power, nearly defenseless, unable to protect itself from Russian bullying, a bellicose radical Islam, or a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. Its reluctant participation in the war against the Taliban, warmly welcomed by Washington, only made all of that more clear. Apparently, the technocrats in Brussels figured that the Neanderthal age of war itself was over. Learned diplomats in The Hague and at the UN would soon adjudicate “differences,” which largely grew out of either misunderstanding or preventable material inequality, rather than Thucydidean honor, fear, and perceived self-interest, which were innate to the human condition, and checked by fossilized concepts like military preparedness and deterrence. That all such pretension was predicated on the safety net of NATO and the U.S. defense budget was considered simplistic, or at least problematic. (Or perhaps Europeans felt that if cowboyish Americans like to strut on the world stage — why, let them strut and waste their money occasionally on Europe’s behalf.)
That Europe’s socialist model had led to relatively modest growth over the last decade in comparison with other advanced economies, that unemployment in Europe was likewise chronically high, and that worker productivity was static were always downplayed or at least balanced by “quality of life” counterpoints. Who cared that, over the last decade, much of Europe saw economic growth at only 50 to 75 percent the U.S. rate per annum, or that it struggled with 10 percent unemployment, or that it discouraged start-up companies, when the quality of life there was so much better for so many more people than anywhere else?
President Obama placed a call to Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero last week to express his support for Spain’s effort “to strengthen its economy and build market confidence.” For once, Mr. Obama is exactly right.
It’s not every day that we draw inspiration from this president or European economic policy. In fact, it’s generally a good idea to do the exact opposite of what the International Monetary Fund and the White House recommend. Nonetheless, aspects of Spain’s reaction to the region’s economic disaster appear to be an exception to this rule.
Mr. Zapatero is taking action to address the root cause of his nation’s fiscal dilemma: excess spending. For years, Spain had doled money out of the public purse with such abandon that its deficit reached 11.2 percent of gross domestic product in 2009. Mr. Zapatero will now impose a 5-percent across-the-board reduction in government salaries. Ministers will take a more substantial, but mostly symbolic, 15-percent cut. More importantly, the government will freeze pension benefits and eliminate a number of non-essential benefits. A total of 13,000 unnecessary government employees will be cut loose.
Not surprisingly, Spain’s public-service unions care more about their personal pocketbooks than the economic survival of the country they purportedly serve and have announced a one-day strike to protest bureaucratic belt-tightening. Madrid’s stock market, on the other hand, rallied in approval.
If Mr. Obama really believes Spain is on the right track, he should implement Mr. Zapatero’s newly announced policies here. Given Washington’s reckless rate of spending growth, the U.S. deficit-to-GDP ratio, currently 10.6 percent, will equal Spain’s next year. To counter this, a modest 5-percent reduction in already generous federal salaries would save at least $7.5 billion up front. Over time, the savings would grow even greater in terms of reduced pension obligations, on which U.S. taxpayers currently spend $70 billion a year.
It makes sense to cut and freeze all federal salaries until our books return to balance. The larger cuts, of course, should be applied to those holding leadership positions. Mr. Obama would survive on a salary of $340,000 a year. His cabinet secretaries can make do with $169,745. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will still live it up on $189,550. Members of Congress won’t need food stamps at $147,900. Most importantly, these moderate actions would help eliminate the mentality that public-sector employees are entitled to automatic pay hikes every year, regardless of the cost to America’s economic health and irrespective of the quality of their work.
While the savings from such cutbacks are not enough to make a large dent in America’s $12.9 trillion public debt, a few billion in cuts are a good start. If we can’t take the easy steps now, we certainly won’t be able to implement the more drastic measures that will be required when our growing debt triggers a European-style collapse.
For as long as I can remember, American liberals have admired western Europe as the epitome of enlightened governance. If only we could be like them, we’d be well-rested, well-fed, healthy and sophisticated.
For just as long, I’ve wondered how long the socialism of Europe could last. Free lunches are never free. (Or as Margaret Thatcher noted, “The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of people to tax.”)
I think the answer has become clear. Robert Samuelson
What we’re seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn’t Greece’s problem alone, and that’s why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven’t fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies.
Americans dislike the term “welfare state” and substitute the bland word “entitlements.” The vocabulary doesn’t alter the reality. Countries cannot overspend and overborrow forever. By delaying hard decisions about spending and taxes, governments maneuver themselves into a cul de sac. To be sure, Greece’s plight is usually described as a European crisis — especially for the euro, the common money used by 16 countries — and this is true. But only up to a point.
Euro coins and notes were introduced in 2002. The currency clearly hasn’t lived up to its promises. It was supposed to lubricate faster economic growth by eliminating the cost and confusion of constantly converting between national currencies. More important, it would promote political unity. With a common currency, people would feel “European.” Their identities as Germans, Italians and Spaniards would gradually blend into a continental identity.
None of this has happened. Economic growth in the “euro area” (the countries using the currency) averaged 2.1 percent from 1992 to 2001 and 1.7 percent from 2002 to 2008. Multiple currencies were never a big obstacle to growth; high taxes, pervasive regulations and generous subsidies were. As for political unity, the euro is now dividing Europeans. The Greeks are rioting. The countries making $145 billion of loans to Greece — particularly the Germans — resent the costs of the rescue. A single currency could no more subsume national identities than drinking Coke could make people American. If other euro countries (Portugal, Spain, Italy) suffer Greece’s fate — lose market confidence and can’t borrow at plausible rates — there would be a wider crisis.
But the central cause is not the euro, even if it has meant Greece can’t depreciate its own currency to ease the economic pain. Budget deficits and debt are the real problems; and these stem from all the welfare benefits (unemployment insurance, old-age assistance, health insurance) provided by modern governments.
Countries everywhere already have high budget deficits, aggravated by the recession. Greece is exceptional only by degree. In 2009, its budget deficit was 13.6 percent of its gross domestic product (a measure of its economy); its debt, the accumulation of past deficits, was 115 percent of GDP. Spain’s deficit was 11.2 percent of GDP, its debt 56.2 percent; Portugal’s figures were 9.4 percent and 76.8 percent. Comparable figures for the United States — calculated slightly differently — were 9.9 percent and 53 percent.
There are no hard rules as to what’s excessive, but financial markets — the banks and investors that buy government bonds — are obviously worried. Aging populations make the outlook worse. In Greece, the 65-and-over population is projected to go from 18 percent of the total in 2005 to 25 percent in 2030. For Spain, the increase is from 17 percent to 25 percent.
The welfare state’s death spiral is this: Almost anything governments might do with their budgets threatens to make matters worse by slowing the economy or triggering a recession. By allowing deficits to balloon, they risk a financial crisis as investors one day — no one knows when — doubt governments’ ability to service their debts and, as with Greece, refuse to lend except at exorbitant rates. Cutting welfare benefits or raising taxes all would, at least temporarily, weaken the economy. Perversely, that would make paying the remaining benefits harder.
Read it all.
…an activist Spanish judge is in the hot seat.
Baltasar Garzón, a high-profile Spanish judge and leftwing champion of the legal doctrine of universal jurisdiction, has been charged with abuse of power. Spanish Supreme Court investigating magistrate Luciano Varela charged Garzón with knowingly overstepping his jurisdiction by launching an illegal investigation into political crimes committed during and after the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War.
The indictment of Garzón has implications that reach far beyond Spain. A guilty verdict would effectively terminate Garzón’s career as a judge, and thereby deprive the global Left of one of its most ambitious legal activists. It would also mark the beginning of the end of Spain’s foray into cross-border jurisprudence, which has been branded as politically motivated harassment of select right-leaning foreign governments, including in Israel and the United States.
The current dustup began in October 2008, when Garzón accused General Francisco Franco and 34 of his former generals and ministers of crimes against humanity in connection with mass executions and tens of thousands of disappearances of civilians between 1936 and 1952. Garzón also ordered the exhumation of 19 mass graves.
Considering that the Spanish Civil War ended more than 70 years ago, and that Franco died in 1975, few suspects, even if identified, would be alive today to stand trial. But the main objection to Garzón’s probe has stemmed from the fact that he decided to limit his investigation only to crimes committed by the right-wing Nationalists (ie, the Francoists). His enquiry did not extend to political crimes committed by the left-wing Republicans (anti-Francoists), which included Marxists, liberals and anarchists. Republican death squads murdered up to 70,000 clergy, nuns and ordinary middle class Spaniards in a veritable reign of terror that largely contributed to the rise of Franco.
She loves America and someday wants to drive across country and take it all in. But first she must complete her duties as the German Prime Minister.
Ironically, this country she has always yearned for often gives her the cold shoulder. Although her speech before the US Congress was met with enthusiastic applause, what she couldn’t see was that a number of very young people were clapping at the back of the room. Members of Congress had instructed their staffs to fill the back rows, because there had been relatively little interest in attending the chancellor’s speech.
Shortly before her departure, she was snubbed when General Motors announced that it preferred not to sell its subsidiary, German automaker Opel. In the preceding months, Merkel had spent countless hours trying to organize a sale.
But for Merkel, the hardest pill to swallow is that America, her paradise, has brought her President Barack Obama. In the election, she favored his opponent Hillary Clinton, out of “female solidarity.” Besides, Obama poses a threat to the view, so useful to Merkel, that politics cannot be fun and inspiring.
Her approach to politics, at any rate, isn’t. Merkel, who can be very entertaining privately, runs her country with a calculated blandness — a deliberate effort not to upset anyone or rock the boat. This too is based on a well thought out script, but it is not one that would be of any interest to Hollywood, which she will also visit this week. Her script is more suitable for the kind of late-night television program likely to put its audience to sleep.
When Obama conducted his election campaign in 2008, the sedate Germans were flabbergasted. This was politics? A man speaking with passion and convincing half of the world that change was imminent? He offered American voters a vision that included groundbreaking healthcare reforms and a world without nuclear weapons. It was perfectly staged, and instead of calculated blandness Obama showed calculated charisma. Almost three-quarters of Germans wanted him to become president.
Merkel sensed that some of the praise for Obama reflected criticism of her. Her fellow conservative Christian Democrat Norbert Röttgen, the current environment minister, said at the time: “He has created a mood that makes it possible to have faith in politics. That’s worth a lot more than a tax concept or a plan to reform health insurance, because it creates a context and politicizes in the best sense of the word.”
A Testy Reaction When Asked about Obama
At the time, she revealed a rarely seen trait: irritability. Whenever she was asked about Obama, her reaction was usually testy. She said that he had been all talk and no action, and she developed a position that seemed advantageous to her at the time, portraying Obama as a glib speaker and herself as a practitioner of power politics who was at least getting a few things done.
When Merkel watched Obama’s inauguration on television, she was so transfixed that she kept a helicopter waiting. She has a soft spot for historic moments, and she didn’t want to miss seeing the first black man being sworn in as president of the United States. She too is a member of this club of “firsts,” being both the first East German and the first woman to become Germany’s chancellor. She doesn’t have the feeling that she has to look up to the president.
Merkel met with Obama several times after his inauguration, and it was soon clear that the two leaders weren’t exactly hitting it off. Most of the world was pleased to see former President George W. Bush go, but Merkel is one of the few to miss him a little.
It is a damned place,” commented Aleksander Kwasniewski, the former Polish president and communist-turned-social democrat.
It’s difficult to disagree.
Katyn, the forest near the western border of Russia, which in 1940 became a mass grave for some 4,000 Polish Army officers and community leaders out of 20,000 first interned by the Soviet government following the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov carve-up of Poland and then subsequently murdered by the KGB’s predecessor on Stalin’s orders, has tragically claimed more Polish victims almost exactly seventy years later.
In news that sent shockwaves through Poland and the rest of Europe, the plane carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski, together with 130 (88 according to Polish media) other senior government and military officials as well as family members of original Katyn victims has crashed on approach to the Smolensk airport, according to the latest reports killing everyone onboard.
The Polish delegation was flying in to take part in joint Polish-Russian commemorations of the Katyn Massacre. The visit, together with the participation of Russia’s Prime Minister Putin in an earlier commemorative ceremony, were widely seen as encouraging first signs of a thaw between the two countries, relations strained both by centuries’ worth of bad blood and conflict, as well as more recent determination of post-communist Polish governments to chart a pre-European and pro-American course, outside of Russia’s sphere of influence.
The death of the president, together with so many key officials and guests, is not simply a tragedy in itself, but it throws the whole region into the sea of uncertainty of the kind not experienced since the fall of Communism.
It was under Kaczynski’s tenure as president that the Polish-Russian relations reached freezing temperatures. Putin, the glacial tsar of the new Russia, had found a stubborn match in Kaczynski, a former anti-communist dissident and then a constant fixture of the Polish political scene over the past two decades of independence. In 2001, Kaczynski founded, together with his twin brother Jarsolaw, the Law and Justice Party, a conservative populist platform that allowed Jaroslaw to govern as the prime minister between 2006 and 2007, and Lech to be elected as president in 2005. The influence of Law and Justice on the Polish political scene has been characterized by a mixture of social conservatism with a nationalist-Catholic bent and foreign policy whose three main pillars were pro-Americanism, throwing Poland’s new-found weight around the European Union, and strong anti-Russian sentiments…
The EU and US show weakness to a tyrant. (Under Bush, a cowering Gaddafi fessed up to his nuke program and destroyed it.)
March was a good month for Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. He received high-profile apologies from both the United States and the European Union. The apologies were at the expense of Switzerland, the country against which Gaddafi has officially declared “holy war.” Switzerland has a tradition of neutralism in international conflicts, but could not avoid a nasty conflict with Libya. Trying to remain “neutral” in the Swiss-Libyan conflict, the US and the EU grovel before the Libyan despot.
The conflict between the Alpine republic and Libya began in July 2008, when Hannibal Gaddafi, the then 31-year old son of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, savagely beat up two of his servants in the President Wilson Hotel in Geneva. The Swiss police arrested Gaddafi jr.; he was released on bail after two nights in a cell. In retaliation, Libya took two Swiss businessmen as hostages, imprisoning them for “visa violations.”
Switzerland soon dropped the charges against Gaddafi’s son, but Libya kept the businessmen under house arrest. One year later, in August 2009, Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz traveled to Tripoli. To secure the release of the hostages, he apologized to Gaddafi for the brief detention of his son. Gaddafi released one of the hostages, the Muslim Swiss citizen Rachid Hamdani, but refused to accept the Swiss apologies. Libya kept the other businessman, the ethnic Swiss Max Göldi, in prison.
The November 2009 referendum, in which 57.5% of the Swiss voters approved a ban on the construction of new minarets in Switzerland, made Libya even angrier. Libya announced a boycott of Switzerland, and called for the dissolution of the country. On February 24, 2010, Gaddafi declared jihad against the “faithless” Swiss.
In an attempt to downplay the terrible implications of Gaddafi’s appeal for unlimited violence against Switzerland, US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said that the call for jihad against Switzerland was “lots of words … and not necessarily a lot of sense.” Instead of defusing the situation with his “joke,” Crowley made matters even worse. Gaddafi took the comment as a personal insult and threatened that there would be “negative repercussions” for American oil companies in Libya. On March 10, both Crowley and the American government offered their apologies to the Libyan dictator. He accepted them, and said that Tripoli would resume relations with Washington “in a manner of mutual respect.”
The unfortunate Max Göldi, meanwhile, has been moved to a damp, smelly windowless cell in the wing of a Tripoli jail where he is imprisoned with 90 of the most dangerous criminals of Libya…
…Meanwhile, Gaddafi’s son continues to cause mayhem wherever he goes. Two weeks ago, a photographer waiting for Gaddafi at a nightclub in Istanbul was attacked by the Libyan’s bodyguards. Last December, British police had to intervene at Claridge’s, one of London’s top hotels, when Hannibal Gaddafi hit his 29-year old wife, a former model, in the face and broke her nose. The British police did not arrest him, however, but allowed him to go to the Libyan embassy. In 2005, Hannibal Gaddafi had been arrested in France after beating his pregnant girlfriend at a Paris hotel. He was later given a four-month suspended prison sentence for the assault.
…In the egghead-o-sphere, there’s been an ongoing debate about whether America should become more like Europe. The battle lines are split almost perfectly along left-right lines ideologically. Liberals like Europe’s welfare states, unionized workforces (in and out of government), generous benefits, long vacations, etc. Conservatives like America’s economic growth, its dynamism and innovation.
From what I can tell, everyone agrees that you can’t have Europeanization without European-size governments. Hence, America’s government outlays (pre-Obama) have tended to hover around 20 percent of GDP (the average of the last 50 years), while Europe’s are often more than twice that. In France, government outlays are nearly 55 percent of GDP. In 2009, the bailout and the Obama budget sent America’s government outlays to 28 percent of GDP, but that should decline a bit over the next decade, unless Democrats have something else in mind.
To be fair, liberals insist conservatives are wrong to think that Europeanizing America will necessarily come at any significant cost. New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman says that, in exchange for only a tiny bit less growth, Europeans buy a whole lot of security and comfort. Economists such as Stanford’s Michael Boskin say Europeans have a standard of living about 30 percent lower than ours and are stagnating. Others note that the structural unemployment rate in Europe, particularly for young people (it’s over 20 percent in many countries), is socially devastating.
Obviously, I’m in the conservative camp. But I think the debate misses something. We can’t become Europe unless someone else is willing to become America.
Look at it this way. My seven-year-old daughter has a great lifestyle. She has all of her clothes and food bought for her. She goes on great vacations. She has plenty of leisure time. A day doesn’t go by where I don’t look at her and feel envious of how good she’s got it compared to me. But here’s the problem: If I decide to live like her, who’s going to take my place?
Europe is a free-rider. It can only afford to be Europe because we can afford to be America.
The most obvious and most cited illustration of this fact is national defense. Europe’s defense budgets have been miniscule because Europeans can count on Uncle Sam to protect them. Britain, which has the most credible military in NATO after ours, has funded its butter account with its gun account. As Mark Steyn recently noted in National Review, from 1951 to 1997 the share of British government expenditure devoted to defense fell from 24 percent to 7 percent, while the share spent on health and welfare increased from 22 percent to 53 percent. And that was before New Labour started rolling back Thatcherism. If America Europeanizes, who’s going to protect Europe? Who’s going to keep the sea lanes open? Who’s going to contain Iran — China? Okay, maybe. But then who’s going to contain China?
But that’s not the only way in which Europeans are free-riders. America invents a lot of stuff. When was the last time you used a Portuguese electronic device? How often does Europe come out with a breakthrough drug? Not often, and when they do, it’s usually because companies like Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline increasingly conduct their research here. Indeed, the top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single country combined. We nearly monopolize the Nobel Prize in medicine, and we create stuff at a rate Europe hasn’t seen since da Vinci was in his workshop.
If America truly Europeanized, where would the innovations come from?…
Headline translation: “What now, dear parents?” The Teutonic tyke is flipping double mids to promote a recent special free education supplement of the German weekly Die Zeit (”The Time,” owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing). It is Germany’s largest weekly paper, and has a reputation for highbrow content. The ad, created in-house, was placed in the country’s dailies, plus on a few billboards nationwide. Well, I bet little hellacious Heidi here instigated some uncomfortable street family conversations.
Germans don’t want to subsidize laziness.
Here’s a classic example of why Euro socialism is a bad idea for America with our many “nations” within one nation.
That is, the social contract among 82 million Germans with similar values might sustain socialism. But when you include a nation of supposed slackers, it breaks down.
After yesterday’s call by two German politicians that Greece sell off islands, historic buildings and artworks before receiving aid, the German tabloid Bild has written an open letter to the Greek prime minister George Papandreou:
Dear prime minister,
If you’re reading this, you’ve entered a country different from yours. You’re in Germany.
Here, people work until they are 67 and there is no 14th-month salary for civil servants. Here, nobody needs to pay a €1,000 bribe to get a hospital bed in time.
Our petrol stations have cash registers, taxi drivers give receipts and farmers don’t swindle EU subsidies with millions of non-existent olive trees.
Germany also has high debts but we can settle them. That’s because we get up early and work all day.
We want to be friends with the Greeks. That’s why since joining the euro, Germany has given your country €50bn.
Andrew Stuttaford in The Weekly Standard:
Tolstoy was wrong. Every unhappy family is not unhappy in its own way. Scratch the surface of a foundering relationship, and you’ll often find that money is, if not the sole source of the misery, undeniably the most poisonous. This is certainly true within the “ever closer” family that the European Union is meant to be. Some of the EU’s most savage fights have been about cash, an awkward fact that can equally be read as underlining just how far from familial this most unnatural of unions really is. The different nations of the EU remain, emotionally at least, nations. They continue to be foreign to each other. And who wants to give their money to a bunch of foreigners?
So it shouldn’t be any surprise that Germans are infuriated at the thought of having to stump up for a rescue of Greece’s Augean state. Their own economy is faltering. They have held back labor costs for years. They have, often painfully, maintained budgetary discipline. That’s not the way it’s been in Greece. With Greek government debt at 125 percent of GDP, a budget deficit of 12.7 percent, and distinctly shaky public support for any sort of austerity program, there is little, beyond beaches, about that country to appeal to citizens of the thrifty Bundesrepublik. Opinion polls show that over two-thirds of Germans reject the idea of contributing to a Greek bailout, and the venom with which that opposition is expressed suggests that exasperation has drifted into contempt.
To give more money to the Greeks would be akin to giving schnapps to an alcoholic, argued Frank Schaeffler, deputy finance spokesman for the Free Democrats, the junior partner in Germany’s governing coalition. Focus magazine ran a cover story on “The Fraudster in the Euro-Family” (a reference to the more creative aspects of the Greek government’s accounting) and illustrated it with the Venus de Milo, one-armed and flipping the bird.
Earlier this month, a 28 year old Muslim from Skåne was awarded just over 6,000 euros by a Swedish judge because he had refused to shake hands with a woman. One can wonder whether the woman maybe should praise herself lucky. After all, she wasn’t convicted for racism for the simple fact that she thought she could shake hands with a Muslim man.
More than four years ago, Alen Malik Crnalic entered a course with the Swedish Public Employment Centre (Arbetsförmedlingen, AF) in order to find a job. In May 2006, he was on an interview in Älmhult for a trainee job as a welder, and during that interview, he refused to shake hands with the CEO of the company. The CEO happened to be a woman, and as an active Muslim, Alen Malik Crnalic says he’s not allowed to touch women outside his own family. Apparently, he also avoided eye-contact with the CEO during the interview, and rather stared to the ground.
One appreciates the First Amendment the most when seeing how its absence in Canada and Europe leads to criminalizing political speech.
Mark Steyn writes about the trial of Dutch politician Geert Wilders for anti-Islamic statements.
At a certain level, the trial of Geert Wilders for the crime of “group insult” of Islam is déjà vu all over again. For as the spokesperson for the Openbaar Ministerie put it, “It is irrelevant whether Wilders’s witnesses might prove Wilders’s observations to be correct. What’s relevant is that his observations are illegal.”
Ah, yes, in the Netherlands, as in Canada, the truth is no defence. My Dutch is a little rusty but I believe the “Openbaar Ministerie” translates in English to the Ministry for Openly Barring People. Whoops, my mistake. It’s the prosecution service of the Dutch Ministry of Justice. But it shares with Canada’s “human rights” commissions an institutional contempt for the truth.
As for “Wilders’s witnesses,” he submitted a list of 18, and the Amsterdam court rejected no fewer than 15 of them. As with Commissar MacNaughton and her troika of pseudo-judges presiding over the Maclean’s trial in British Columbia, it’s easier to make the rules up as you go along.
And in Amsterdam the eventual verdict doesn’t really matter any more than it did here. As Khurrum Awan, head sock puppet for Mohamed Elmasry, crowed to the Canadian Arab News, even though the Canadian Islamic Congress struck out in three different jurisdictions in their attempt to criminalize my writing, the suits cost this magazine (he says) two million bucks, and thereby “attained our strategic objective—to increase the cost of publishing anti-Islamic material.” Likewise, whether Mijnheer Wilders is convicted or acquitted, a lot of politicians, publishers, writers and filmmakers will get the message: steer clear of the subject of Islam unless you want your life consumed.
But at that point comparisons end. Had the CIC triumphed at our trial in Vancouver, the statutory penalty under the B.C. “Human Rights” Code would have prevented Maclean’s ever publishing anything on Islam, Europe, demography, terrorism and related issues by me or anybody of a similar disposition ever again. I personally would have been rendered legally unpublishable in Canada in perpetuity. But so what? I’m an obscure writer, and my fate is peripheral to that of the Dominion itself.
Geert Wilders, by contrast, is one of the most popular politicians in the Netherlands, and his fate is central to the future of his kingdom and his continent. He is an elected member of parliament—and, although he’s invariably labelled “far right” in news reports, how far he is depends on where you’re standing: his party came second in last year’s elections for the European Parliament, and a poll of the Dutch electorate in December found it tied for first place. Furthermore, if you read the indictment against him, you’ll see that among other things Wilders is being prosecuted for is proposing an end to “non-Western immigration” to the Netherlands: the offending remarks were made in response to a direct question as to what his party would do in its first days in office. So the Dutch state is explicitly prosecuting the political platform of the most popular opposition party in the country, and attempting to schedule the trial for its own electoral advantage. That’s the sort of thing free societies used to leave to Mobutu, Ferdinand Marcos and this week’s Generalissimo-for-Life.
Spanish blogger No Pasaran brings to light an interview in Le Monde
Philippe Bernard’s full-page interview with a Harvard law professor (Randall Kennedy is — supposedly — “one of the most respected analysts on racial questions in the United States”) in Le Monde brings the startling information that it turns out that the very fact that an African-American was elected president is proof that America is racist! (And indeed, the racial issue in America is “explosive“!)
“Why did people cry when Obama was elected?” Kennedy asks. “Why was that moment so marvelous? Because many people thought they would never see the day when whites would vote for a black man.”
So that proves that America is not racist, right? Right?! Wrong! No, it proves America is racist, because if America were post-racial, we would never have seen those people shedding those tears!
You can’t win; I’m telling you, with those people, you can’t win…
You can read the interview for yourself here.
If you don’t speak French, use the Google toolbar translation feature. It produces an understandable, but at times comical, translation.
Blogger No Pasaran reports that Europeans are feeling mighty disappointed by Obama Messiah.
Well, here we go. Remember the number of articles bemoaning the fact that Europeans are stupefied by Bush’s arrogance, or whatever (or words to that effect)? Well, now we get a huge front-page headline in Le Monde saying Europeans Shattered by Obama’s Indifference (Les Européens ébranlés par l’indifférence d’Obama, the title changes in the internet version). Meanwhile, an editorial in Le Monde bemoans the fact that Europe has been snubbed — again (this time, it is Barack Obama’s refusal to participate in José Luis Zapatero’s USA-Europe summit).
ATHEISTS HAVE begun a campaign against the Government’s new blasphemy law, which came into force on January 1st as part of the Defamation Act.
The group Atheist Ireland has published 25 quotes it says are blasphemous, attributed to people from Jesus Christ to Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern.
Under the new law, which the group is campaigning to have repealed, blasphemy is punishable by a fine of up to €25,000.
It defines blasphemy as publishing or uttering matter grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, and intending by such publication to cause such outrage.
One wonders: does this cover the religion of climate change?
Would mocking Al Gore be a criminal offense? Remember, NYT columnist Paul Krugman called skepticism of global warming treason.
There are conspiracy theories that hold that Europe’s political establishment is deliberately attempting to replace the continent’s population by an entirely different one. Though conspiracy theories are rarely true, Europe’s political establishment is making it extremely hard for the sceptics to refute them. Take, for instance, the recent Belgian amnesty for illegal aliens.
Last July, the government of Belgium announced a collective amnesty for illegal aliens. It is Belgium’s second general amnesty in barely a decade. When the previous one was approved by the Belgian Parliament in 1999, the government promised Parliament that it would be the final one and that henceforward people who entered the country illegally would be sent back. Nevertheless, there has been no crack-down on illegal immigration in the past ten years and hardly any illegal aliens have been sent back.
Last July, immediately after the parliamentary recess had begun, the government of Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy decided there should be a new amnesty to “regularize” illegal aliens who can demonstrate that they have “integrated sufficiently” into the country, e.g. by having children at school. The government took the decision unilaterally, without approval from the Parliament. This is against the law; the Belgian government cannot unilaterally grant a collective amnesty. Only Parliament has the power to do so.
The parties of Van Rompuy’s government coalition shrugged their shoulders. They refused to react against the usurpation of parliamentary powers because they did not want to open a public debate about immigration. Polls indicate that the overwhelming majority of the Belgians opposes the new round of regularizations. The Vlaams Belang, Belgium’s main opposition party, however, went to court. It requested the Council of State, Belgium’s highest administrative court, to annul the amnesty – which it did on December 11.
The government’s reaction to the annulment is astonishing. It announced that the court ruling would make no difference and that the illegal aliens need not worry. Mr. Melchior Wathelet, the Secretary of State for Immigration, said that, instead of collectively regularizing the 50,000 illegal aliens with one single signature, he will sign 50,000 individual regulations, granting each of them an individual amnesty.
Italians have a curious sense of justice.
In 1985, when PLO terrorists lead by Abu Abbas hijacked a ship and murdered a wheelchair-bound American Jew, President Reagan (actually Oliver North) conceived a plan to force their escape plane down in Italy.
The Italians convicted Abbass’s co-conspirators but not Abbas, on grounds of insufficient evidence. He was later convicted in absentia of masterminding the hijacking.
That preamble brings us to the case of Amanda Knox, convicted yesterday of murder.
The trial in the Umbrian college town of Perugia has dragged on just short of a year. As this week’s closing arguments showed once again, the case has very little to do with actual evidence and much to do with the ancient Italian code of saving face.
In closing arguments, Knox was described as a “Luciferina” and “a dirty-minded she-devil.” Preposterous, made-up sexual motives were ascribed to her. One prosecutor speculated before the jury what Knox may have said to Meredith Kercher before, he claimed, forcing an orgy that resulted in her death:
“You are always behaving like a little saint. Now we will show you. Now we will make you have sex.”
Nobody alleges that Knox said this to Kercher. But prosecutors asked the jury to imagine her saying such a thing.
What century is this? Didn’t Joan of Arc, the Inquisition and our own American Salem witch trials teach civilized nations a thing or two about contrived sexual hysteria with a devil twist?
The prosecutors introduced evidence of Knox owning “sex toys.”
Such prudishness by Italians is curious, given that Italian porno star Cicciolina served in the Italian parliament, even continuing her porn career while in office.
On top of everything else, just a few days ago, the parents of Amanda Knox — a schoolteacher and an out-of-work retail accounts manager who’ve maxed out their retirement funds and mortgaged their home to pay for a legal defense — were served with legal papers by the authorities prosecuting their daughter.
Now the parents are under investigation for “defamation,” stemming from a long-ago interview with a British paper, in which they recounted their daughter’s tale of being mistreated while she was questioned all night by police without an attorney.
As for Abbas, he fled to Iraq where Saddam Hussein gave him safe harbor.
He was captured by US forces in 2003. The Italians asked for him to be extradited, but he died of natural causes while in US custody.
If only Abbas had been caught by the Italians with a dildo.
George Handlery in Brussels Journal:
Even in small countries, major trends can unfold early. About noble leaders and their reluctant peons that refuse to follow. International protest and its use to the tottering local leadership. Security, fear and freedom. Radicalization as a face saving device. Immigration then and now. Imported prejudices, failure and the allegation of discrimination.
1. Small country, major issue. Normally, Switzerland is not of much interest to the international reader. Already by standing falsely accused of having invented the cuckoo clock, she is automatically downgraded. The neglect can also be attributed to her size, a functioning system – a juicy crisis brings attention.
Not being on the map is also the consequence of her ability to keep out of armed conflicts. Switzerland did not even need to be liberated in WW2! Some myths shatter on Swiss reality. Effective armed neutrality invalidates a peacenik thesis that arms lead to war. Per capita Tell’s land has a huge army – 600,000 in WW2 out of 4.5 million. Reflecting her industrialization and armament industry, it is largely self sufficient and excellently equipped to exploit the best defense positions nature can provide. Complete the achievements with Switzerland‘s top rating regarding the quality of life and the top earned per capita GDP coupled to being a leading financial center. In the case of a landlocked and no-resources country, this should not be the case. Besides bank secrecy – which is a settled issue and gone by now – Switzerland is currently getting perplexed attention because of the consequence of her direct democracy. On a regular basis, the unique system enables the people to perform executive functions. The voter can make laws and invalidate legislative action. Therefore, if you want to know what the “people” want, then you might find out by consulting the results of the numerous referendums and initiatives. The people’s uncensored voice expressing its real opinion is a good indicator of what comparable societies would say if they would be able to speak up.
The latest, and internationally widely commented, Swiss initiative forbade the erection of further minarets. Expressly not effected are existing structures and new temples as well as the exercise of any religion. To the surprise of all, the initiative passed in what is rated here as a landslide. The decision went against the will of the executive, the legislature, all but one of the political parties, the churches, the economic and social elites, “business,” the media and, belatedly, the Vatican. Why “surprise”? Opinion surveys predicted rejection. That teaches us right away something about surveys in general. People give PC responses to surveyors who are themselves PC. This is what makes surveys into useful weapons in the hands of those who can afford them. More important is another insight. It suggests that the governments, parliaments and the elites of western democracies might not quite express the will of those they claim to represent. Additionally, thanks to the media control of the political class, real public opinion does not always equal what little people are made to think by pundits that have the power to determine what proper views must be.
Now, “the day after”, Europe’s governments and institutions condemn the vote’s result and the voters who “committed” the outrage. Amnesty International finds that the Swiss voted “against religious freedom”. “Scandalized” France’s Foreign Minister bemoans the same – while his government forbids burqas. Those veils express in textile what the minarets say in stone. (Oddly, with eight times the population, France has 5 minarets and 500 mosques while Switzerland has four minarets.) Indeed, governments and the governing elite’s shock and outrage might have a simple reason. It flows not from principle but reflects interest. They attack the frightening precedent created by the Swiss because the political classes fear their own peoples. Just take a fresh opinion survey from Germany. There 70% (sound too high to the writer) of the “barefooted” would vote – if their system would let them – the way the Swiss have.
Good to know: the final chapter is not yet written. The defeated leadership chides the voters about their mistake. In addition, the disavowed local political class tries to assert itself against its recalcitrant people. One way to do that is to encourage international pressure to demand that the new law not be implemented. The minaret-builders are not idle either. Emboldened by the angered local elite, they will ultimately turn to international courts – such as the one that forbade the display of crosses in Italian schools – demanding that religious freedom be protected. Naturally, that bold and principled pronouncement will limit itself to Switzerland as representing Europe. So as to avoid insult, the decision will ignore Middle Eastern states or Taliban ruled areas.
Read on.
Europe’s fixation with global warming indicates that many on the continent aren’t firmly tethered to reality. Consider the madness found in a leading German publication.
Using prose that would be better suited for fiction, Christian Schwagerl, in an opinion piece for Der Spiegel, wildly claims that “if the rest of the world were to follow the U.S. example in their approach to fossil fuels, the oceans would not only heat up, but would probably soon begin to boil.”
As if that wasn’t enough evidence of a growing European irrationality, the Der Spiegel staff writer drifts into a fevered narrative deeper in the piece.
“For most Americans, the world beyond the U.S.’ borders is nothing more than an irritating nuisance,” he wrote in an essay titled “Obama Has Failed the World on Climate Change.” “For this reason, arguments based on appeals about drowning Bangladeshis, starving Africans and flooded islands in Indonesia have little effect.”
Drowning Bangladeshis? Starving Africans? Flooded Indonesians? There’s no evidence that man’s carbon dioxide emissions are causing such problems. Yet Der Spiegel lets Schwagerl recklessly fling baseless charges. And the shrillness doesn’t end there.
“Entrenched lobbyists of the oil and coal industries,” he writes, “are the worst energy wasters on the planet — and are thus, indirectly, a major threat to world peace in the 21st century.”
Jacob Laskin reviews The Crescent and the Continent in City Journal.
When the British government recently announced a plan to spend nearly $20 million to reassure “white enclaves” that they had nothing to fear from nonwhite immigrants, it was a tacit admission that much of the public harbored serious doubts about the virtues of immigration. This is not exactly news. Polls show that some 70 percent of Britons believe that there are too many immigrants in their country. Majorities throughout Western Europe agree, and Muslim immigrants in particular are viewed with suspicion. Though we’re often told—not least by Europeans—that Europe has moved beyond such archaic notions as ethnicity, religion, and nationhood to embrace multiculturalism, the widespread concern over Islamic immigration suggests that Europeans have not made peace with the demographic changes reshaping their societies. What are those changes and how did they come about? More pressingly, what do they portend for Europe’s future?
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is Christopher Caldwell’s effort to answer these questions. It is a judicious survey of mass immigration, specifically Muslim immigration, and its impact on Europe over the past half-century. Caldwell, a well-traveled columnist for the Financial Times and a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, is not the first to take up this subject. But his learned, levelheaded, and elegantly written study may be the finest and most insightful diagnosis of Europe’s immigration woes to date.
In Caldwell’s account, mass immigration in Europe was predicated on several assumptions, nearly all of them false. Needing cheap labor to fuel their expiring postwar industrial economies, Europeans assumed that the immigrants they turned to would be temporary; that they would not qualify for welfare; and that those who remained would assimilate and shed the cultural mores and habits of their home countries. The Europeans were wrong on all counts. When its textile mills and factories closed in the sixties and seventies, Europe was left with a vast, imported underclass with one tenuous link to its adopted countries: the welfare payments on which it had come to rely.
The demographic transformation was profound. Europe has always had immigration, but the scale of its midcentury influx was without precedent. And one group led the way. In the middle of the twentieth century, there were practically no Muslims in Europe; today, it is estimated, there are about 20 million, including 5 million in France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Britain. Equally dramatic was the change in immigrants’ economic fortunes. In the sixties and seventies, Germany’s Turkish migrant workers actually boasted higher labor-force participation than native Germans did. Today, unemployment in Germany’s Turkish community tops 40 percent—three times the national unemployment rate. Nor is Germany an outlier. Some 40 percent of Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands are on welfare, Caldwell reports, as are two-thirds of French imams.
It is a subject that would make most governments blush, but officials in the Spanish region of Extremadura have launched a major programme to encourage what could be described as a more hands-on approach to sexuality.
The region’s socialist government has launched a €14,000 (£12,600) campaign aimed at teaching young people how best to set about “sexual self-exploration and the discovery of self-pleasure” – or to put it less delicately: masturbation.
“Pleasure is in your own hands” is the slogan of a campaign that has sparked political controversy and challenges traditional Roman Catholic views on people having sex, even on their own, for non-reproductive reasons.
“This is an intimate subject that should be dealt with at home,” complained local opposition leader Hernández Carrón of the rightwing People’s party. “We have become the laughing stock of Spain.”
…The campaign includes leaflets, flyers, a “fanzine” and workshops for the young in which they receive instruction on self-pleasuring techniques along with advice on contraception and self-respect.
Workshops? Why that’s just plain Xtremadura.
Sometimes it seems liberal Euroweenies are deliberately testing to see just how much totalitarian moonbattery they can ram down people’s throats before encountering significant resistance. In the latest outrage against liberty and national sovereignty, bureaucrats of the European Court of Human Rights have ruled that Italians cannot have crucifixes on the walls of their classrooms.
The ruling by the court in Strasbourg, which Italy said it would appeal, said crucifixes on school walls — a common sight that is part of every Italian’s life — could disturb children who were not Christians.
That is, Muslim colonists might not like that Italy has been a Christian country since Constantine converted to Christianity in the 4th century.
Even some commies are aghast:
Paola Binetti, a Catholic in the opposition Democratic Party, the successor of what was once the West’s largest communist party, said: “In Italy, the crucifix is a specific sign of our tradition.”
Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini concurs:
The history of Italy is marked by symbols and if we erase symbols we erase part of ourselves.
This of course is exactly why progressive Eurocrats want crucifixes banned. The objective is not just to suppress Christianity, which is hardly even defended anymore; it is to eradicate Western civilization. That’s why no effective measures are taken to save Europe from the ongoing Muslim demographic conquest — and why amnesty will soon open the door to massive Third World colonization of the USA.
