European Political News

A quote from LifeSite News, 3 April 2008

In December, Catholic author Frank M. Rega released Francis of Assisi and the Conversion of the Muslims; With Concise Biography of the Saint, a book that has received much praise for its biographical portrait of the renowned saint and its highly pertinent focus on St. Francis's relationship with Muslims of the time.

During the Fifth Crusade to Egypt, St. Francis of Assisi walked into a Muslim camp in order to preach Christianity and convert the sultan. Rega's new book recounts St. Francis's bold encounter with the sultan and other important events from the life of the man from Assisi some claim more closely imitated Jesus Christ than any other saint in history. […]

LifeSiteNews: Why did St. Francis of Assisi support the Fifth Crusade?

Frank Rega: Francis understood that the Fifth Crusade was part of an ongoing just war in response to Muslim invasions of Christian lands, which included many attacks against Italian city-states all along the peninsula over the course of centuries. For example, in the year 846, Rome itself was sacked by 11,000 Muslims, who desecrated the tombs of Sts. Peter and Paul.

Further, the crusade was called for by the Holy Father, and it is well-known that Francis had perfect loyalty to the Catholic Church, and showed devout respect for priests and all the hierarchy. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he felt the crusade was justified on spiritual grounds. As mentioned in the book, Francis told the Sultan "It is just that Christians invade the land you inhabit, for you blaspheme the name of Christ and alienate everyone you can from His worship."

LifeSiteNews: What did St. Francis say and do when he entered the Muslim camp?

Frank Rega: It is important here to recognize the bravery of Francis. He preached to armed Muslims who a few days before had won a major skirmish at Damietta, killing about five thousand Christians. The Sultan, al-Malik al-Kamil was also the general of the Muslim army, and ruler of Egypt, Syria and Palestine. Francis first obtained permission from the Papal Legate to cross over the lines during a period of temporary truce. When he reached Muslim territory he and Brother Illuminato were taken prisoner, beaten and put in chains by the sentries.

Here we have an image of St. Francis that is utterly opposed to the statues of a docile friar surrounded by birds and other animals – St. Francis beaten and in chains! He was fully prepared for martyrdom. Upon meeting the saint, al-Malik asked him if he was a messenger from the crusaders. Francis replied that he was indeed a messenger, but a messenger from God. He then proceeded to give witness to his love for Jesus, and said that he wished to save the souls of the Sultan and his men.

LifeSiteNews: How did the sultan and his followers react to St. Francis's words and deeds?

Frank Rega: Initially the Sultan was taken aback by Francis' boldness. After all, the Muslims had just defeated the Christians in a pitched battle, and now one of them dares to state that the Muslims must convert to Christianity. However, the love flowing from Francis began to move the Sultan, and according to one contemporary writer, "that cruel beast became sweetness himself." However, the advisers to al-Malik, the imams, were not so impressed, and demanded that Francis and Illuminato should be beheaded in accordance with Islamic law.

Francis and his companion remained in the Muslim camp for many days, and parted on excellent terms with the Sultan. There is a story in the early Franciscan literature, described in my book, that al-Malik converted to the True Faith on his deathbed.

LifeSiteNews: Is a crusade against Islam needed today? If so, how should it be conducted?

Frank Rega: A traditional crusade by definition cannot be conducted today because it was a movement within Christendom to defend and counter-attack Muslim invasions of Christian lands. It was sponsored by the Church and relied on the support of Christian rulers and Kings. Without the backing of a strong Christendom, which no longer exists, a crusade as such would be impossible.

Furthermore, today an armed religious war would not be fruitful since the real battle is a "cold war" so to speak. It is a war of persuasion, conversion, and diplomatic dialog, since the Muslims have already launched their peaceful "invasion" of what was once Christian Europe. Of course I am only addressing the religious aspects here, and not the war on terrorism, which is in the secular domain.

St. Francis of Assisi and the Conversion of the Muslims Author: Frank M. Rega ASIN: 0895558580

A quote from the Italian press agency ANSAmed, 28 April 2008

The incomes received by immigrants and then sent to their countries of origin are a resource on which the governments in Mediterranean are becoming increasingly dependant: according to a recent survey by the European Investment Bank (EIB), the remittances of foreign workers have increased the volume of foreign investments and development aid received from international organisations. The survey, funded by the Facility for Euro-Mediterranean Investment and Partnership (FEMIP), sheds light on the funds transferred from Europe to eight south Mediterranean countries (Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey), a turnover that represents between 2% and 20% of the gross domestic product of the Mediterranean countries. […]

The countries which benefit most from the money of their emigrants are Morocco, which in 2003 received 2.9 billion euro, followed by Algeria (1.35 billion euro), Turkey (1.3 billion euro), Tunisia (950 million euro) and Egypt (544 million euro). Eurostat, the EU statistics agency, said that most of the remittances made by immigrants living in the EU go to Africa, Morocco in particular.

According to data by Eurostat which drew a map of the remittances flows in 2004, the most consistent money flow to African countries comes from France (59.6% of the French remittances go the South Mediterranean), followed by Belgium (35.9%), the Netherlands (31.2%) and Italy (30.6%).

 
Italy

A quote from the Italian press agency AGI, 29 April 2008

The number of foreign residents in Italy with valid residence permits has been put at just over 2,400,000 (129,000 more than there were last year). Over 88 pct of them live in the Centre-North of the country, with a good quarter in Lombardy.

A quote from ANSAmed, 29 April 2008

The distrust of Italians towards the immigrants is growing: almost one out of three says no to the construction of mosques on the national territory. And if the Islamic immigrants are considered problematic, the control/regulation of immigration represents one of the ten major problems in the country. […] Even a big share of the non-Muslim immigrants (44.5%) believed that immigration from Islamic countries posed more problems than that from other countries. Besides, almost 50% of the Christian immigrants and immigrants from other faiths were against the possibility for Muslims to build mosques in Italy: a much higher percentage than the one registered among Italians (31%).

 
Spain

A quote from ANSAmed, 29 April 2008

One out of five employees in Spain is a foreigner, considering that the immigrants represent 21% of the total of the employees who signed employment contracts in 2007, with an increase by 31% compared to the previous year, news agency EFE reported, quoting a report of consultancy Randstat. Latin America is the place of origin for the majority of the foreign employees, considering that almost one out of four originates from Central America or South America. A total 32.8% of the total of the immigrant employees, according to the report, come from Africa and in particular 23.2% from North Africa and the rest from Sub-Saharan Africa. The employees coming from eastern Europe are on the rise and represent 33% of the total immigrants.

A quote from ANSAmed, 28 April 2008

The regional government of Catalonia has set a limit for the number of immigrant students in the classrooms of state-run schools and private centres, to avoid that the presence of foreign students, prevailing in state-run schools, might give rise to ghettoes.

 
France

A quote from The Washington Post, 29 April 2008

This prison is majority Muslim – as is virtually every house of incarceration in France. About 60 to 70 percent of all inmates in the country's prison system are Muslim, […] On a continent where immigrants and the children of immigrants are disproportionately represented in almost every prison system, the French figures are the most marked, according to researchers, criminologists and Muslim leaders. […]

In Britain, 11 percent of prisoners are Muslim in contrast to about 3 percent of all inhabitants, according to the Justice Ministry. Research by the Open Society Institute, an advocacy organization, shows that in the Netherlands 20 percent of adult prisoners and 26 percent of all juvenile offenders are Muslim; the country is about 5.5 percent Muslim. In Belgium, Muslims from Morocco and Turkey make up at least 16 percent of the prison population, compared with 2 percent of the general populace, the research found.

Simon Barrow has been thinking about the tensions within the Roman Catholic Church between a traditional vision of authority, and a desire to engage with human rights and the modern world.

Google websites account for more than a third of all traffic to UK websites. It also has a strongh presence in a large number of Interet market segments. Do we need to worry?

A quote from The Washington Times, 30 April 2008

Lucinda Creighton, a spokeswoman for Ireland's largest opposition party, Fine Gael, says in a Web posting that "U.S. foreign policy has traditionally been opposed to EU integration."

"The U.S. supports the EU as an economic bloc but nothing more. The idea of a politically strong EU, acting as a check or counterbalance on the U.S. does not sit well with our trans-Atlantic friends," says the spokeswoman, a member of Ireland's Parliament. She also claims in the posting that the U.S. consistently opposes NATO expansion.

The Fine Gael statement targets two prominent Irish businessmen, who are funding a nationwide campaign for a "no" vote, claiming they represent "U.S. strategic interests."

"The businesses of both Ulick McEvaddy and Declan Ganley are heavily dependent on contracts from the State Department, the Pentagon and U.S. government agencies. I believe that these men are a lot less concerned about Irish sovereignty and the wording of the Lisbon treaty than they are about the potential hit to their own personal business interests," Ms. Creighton writes in the Web posting.

The businessmen lead a campaign group called Libertas, which is campaigning against the treaty's ratification. […] Fine Gael is the main opposition party in Ireland's legislature, and has been the traditional rival to the incumbent Mr. Ahern's Fianna Fail, with both parties conventionally depicted as "center-right." […] Fine Gael's anti-American statement might come as a surprise to some observers, but it could also be an attempt to test the water on any growth of disaffection with the U.S. in Ireland.

Following the victory of Silvio Berlusconi’s rightist alliance in Italy, The Economist wrote a condescending editorial, entitled “Mamma mia.” The article stated that Berlusconi was not The Economist’s choice and said that the “Italians may come to regret electing [the jester of Italian politics] once again.” Barely a month earlier, Spain had re-elected its own “jester,” Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, a man whose main ambition is to destroy Spain’s Christian heritage and substitute it with a postmodern, multicultural utopia where homosexuals marry and the state raises children. At that election, however, The Economist did not feel compelled to snub the winner. It just told its readers that Spain needs “a bipartisan approach to […] solve big questions of national identity.”

Italy and Spain are two frontline states on Europe’s southern border. They are being overrun by millions (no exaggeration) of immigrants, many of whom cross the straits in boats from the African shore of the Mediterranean. Three years ago Spain (40 million inhabitants) announced a collective amnesty for a staggering 800,000 undocumented aliens, despite having already offered six other amnesties in the past 15 years. Two years ago, Italy (58 million inhabitants) amnestied 500,000 illegal immigrants, having already offered five similar regularizations between 1988 and 2006. And still the immigrants keep coming. Immigration, however, is not the “big question of national identity” The Economist is referring to.

Obviously, economics is mostly on The Economist’s mind. Consequently, economic reform is what the above editorials mainly dealt with, though in Spain’s case the magazine also mentioned the “national identity” question in a reference to the seats won by regionalist and separatist parties from Catalonia and the Basque country. These parties kept Mr Zapatero from an absolute majority in the Spanish parliament. Hence, he will have to accommodate them in some way.

Strangely–though tellingly for a magazine which, like The Economist, is representative of Europe’s mainstream media—the editorial on Italy did not mention the astonishing electoral success of the Lega Nord, a constituent of Mr. Berlusconi’s right-wing alliance.

Like the parties in Catalonia and the Basque country, the Northern League (full name: Lega Nord per l’Indipendenza della Padania—Northern League for the Independence of Padania) is a regionalist, indeed separatist, party. Padania, in case you have never heard of it, does not exist as a nation; it is the collective name that the League uses to denote the various regions of northern Italy (such as Lombardy, Piedmont, Venice, Tuscany, South Tyrol, and others). The League is made up of several parties (including the Lega Lombarda, the Liga Veneta, the Alleanza Toscana) that want to restore to their regions the sovereignty that they enjoyed prior to the formation of the Italian State in the 19th century.

The success of the Northern League was the pivotal element in the victory of Mr. Berlusconi’s alliance. It enabled him to win an absolute majority in the Italian parliament. The League completely wiped away the left in the north. It doubled in size and won a stunning 8.3% of the national vote, sending 60 deputies (+37) and 26 senators (+13) to Rome. In some northern regions, it had the support of up to 50% of the electorate. This remarkable result, however, was not worth the consideration of The Economist, or of the rest of the European media. As they did not report on the League’s victory, they did not need to explain to their readers why the party had done so extraordinary well. Indeed, the international media preferred to lament the return of “the jester” rather than point out that the Northern League won so massively because of its forceful anti-immigration platform.

On Monday (21 April), the leftist Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera wrote, “Fear boosted the Northern League’s vote, doubling and tripling its haul in front-line towns where local prosperity is undermined by thefts and burglaries. Unpunished crimes generate anger and people lose trust.” It is telling that even this leftist newspaper talks about “front-line” towns–-as if a war is going on—to describe the blue-collar areas around Milan where immigrants are making life unbearable for indigenous workers who no longer feel at home in their own neighborhoods. Roberto Mura, the League’s secretary for the district of Pavia and the mayor of San Genesio, 25 kilometers south of Milan, told the Corriere: “We struggle to shake off […] the image of the rough and ready, apolitical racist League militant. […] I know we’ve got to live with immigration, but the rules have to be respected. The League has been saying so for fifteen years. We’re now reaping the reward for the coherence and clarity of our project to defend the territory.”

As Mr Mura points out, the “apolitical” Northern League is in politics not for the sake of politics itself, but to “defend the territory.” There is something remarkable going on here, though it will never hit the mainstream media because the latter do not want to see it:

The most successful anti-immigration parties in Europe are regionalist/secessionist parties. They are “apolitical” because they do not particularly like politics. Their militants, members and voters do not like the state, they want to be left alone. They defend local communities that want to run their own affairs. They are parties of the land and the community, rather than the state. They are, as the media and the political establishment derisively call them, “populists.”

Milan, the capital of Lombardy, is 700 kilometers (430 miles) to the south of Brussels, the seat of the European Union, that supranational European superstate in the making which already accounts for 75% of the legislation in its 27 member states. The League is as opposed to Brussels as it is to Rome: it’s regionalist, restrictionist, and “Eurosceptic,” meaning that it doesn’t much like supranational mingling in local affairs.

Let us now travel from Milan to Brussels. First we must cross the Lombardian border into Switzerland, then we cross the Alps in order to reach the valley of the Rhine River. We follow the Rhine, which constitutes the border between France and Germany, until we arrive in the Low Countries, in particular in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern part of Belgium, where Brussels is situated. There, we can visit the buildings of the European and the Belgian parliaments but also those of the Flemish Regional Parliament.

The largest party in the latter parliament is the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) party. It represents a quarter of the Flemish electorate and is considered one of the most professional and successful of Europe’s patriotic parties. It is remarkably similar to the Lega Nord. It is separatist, in favor of restricting immigration and Eurosceptic.

The VB was founded in 1978 by Flemish nationalists aiming for the independence of Flanders. The Flemish provinces are the historic southern, Catholic half of the Netherlands. In fact, the Flemish provinces belonged to the Netherlands until the International Powers gave them to the newly created French-dominated state of Belgium in 1831. From the start, the VB warned against immigration by people from a culture entirely alien to that of Flanders; indeed, the VB was the first party to address the issue. It still demands that immigrants assimilate and, hence, that their numbers remain low enough to assure that this is possible. The party’s position is also that immigration from countries with a culture closer to that of Flanders should be given preference, but they have to adapt to the locals and learn the language of the Flemings, Dutch.

The VB is critical of immigration for exactly the same reason why it demands Flemish independence: because it wants to preserve Flemish national identity. As Frank Vanhecke, the then VB leader, wrote in The Flemish Republic in July 2003: “We defend the Flemish national identity, against the Belgian state as well as against immigrants who abuse our hospitality to wage an anti-Western war in Flanders. The VB is a party of Flemish patriots, prepared to defend Flanders’ culture and traditions, its values and, above all, its freedom.”

The Flemish provinces experienced their heyday in the Middle Ages, when the Netherlands was a confederate cluster of autonomous provinces. The provinces were dominated by powerful cities, such as Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels, who made it quite clear to the nominal dynastic ruler that he had to leave the burghers in peace or face rebellion. In northern Italy, the situation was almost similar, with powerful city-states running their own affairs. And so it was all along the 700 kilometers that we have just traveled. The cities along the Rhein, such as Cologne and Strasbourg, enjoyed considerable autonomy, while Switzerland was a confederation of tiny, sovereign republics of Alpine farmers. This was not a coincidence. In fact, these regions have a common history that goes back to the time when Charlemagne’s empire was divided, almost 1,200 years ago.

Charlemagne, king of the Franks, a Germanic tribe, conquered most of continental Western Europe and was crowned Emperor in 800 AD. He was the first ruler France and Germany had in common. His son, Louis the Pious, was the last. In 843, the Carolingian empire was divided. Charlemagne’s grandsons, Charles the Bald and Louis the German, became the first kings of, respectively, France (West Francia) and Germany (East Francia). There was, however, a third brother, Lothar, the eldest. He inherited the lands that lay between those of his brothers: Middle Francia.

Lothar’s kingdom was named after him: Lotharii Regnum or Lorraine. Today, Lorraine is the name of a province in the east of France. It is the province where Joan of Arc, France’s national heroine came from. However, contemporary Lorraine is only a tiny part of the Lorraine of old. In Lothar’s time, Lorraine comprised all the countries that lie between France and Germany today—the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg and Switzerland—plus the eastern part of present-day France, the western part of Germany and the northern half of Italy.

When Lothar’s son died without offspring in 875, the middle territories were divided between Charles the Bald and Louis the German. However, as these regions lay on the periphery of their heartlands, generations of kings of France and Germany were never able to establish a firm rule over them. The result was that throughout the Middle Ages, and for some up to the 18th century and even today, the lands of Lothar, Old Lorraine, were made up of self-governing republics of farmers, independent counties controlled by burghers or city republics.

Self-governing, with little interference from greedy princes, their tax controllers and meddling civil servants, these lands became very prosperous. Capitalism has its origins here. This whole axis from Amsterdam in the north to Siena in the south developed into the economic spine of Europe. The former Carolingian Middle Lands saw not only the birth of capitalism but also of limited government. A decentralized political culture developed where the burghers governed themselves without caring much about faraway rulers.

Later, and gradually, French and German monarchs succeeded in bringing most of the regions of the ancient Middle-Frankish realm under their control. The kings of France and Prussia succeeded in subduing their part of the Rhen region. The French Revolution swept away all the existing self-governing systems, and after the fall of Napoleon only Switzerland returned to its old constitutional order. To a large extent, however, the spirit of Old Lorraine lives on today in the lands of the former Middle Kingdom where citizens are still influenced by centuries of independence, self-reliance and adherence to a local identity that opposes centralizing authorities in far-away capitals.

In Switzerland, the only remaining sovereign part of Old Lorraine (at least until Flanders and Padania regain their independence), these feelings are so strong that the country stubbornly refuses to become a member of the European Union. Switzerland itself is a regionalist nation, made up of 26 provinces (cantons) that to a very large extent rule themselves. The country has strict immigration laws and the Swiss want to make these even stricter. The last elections, in November 2007, were won by the Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party, SVP), which with 29% of the votes reinforced its position as the biggest party in the country. The international media describe the SVP as “far-right,” “populist,” “xenophobic” and “intolerant.” Like the Vlaams Belang and the Lega Nord, the SVP is localist. It combines a strong attachment to local communities with a clear affirmation of the right of these communities to “defend the territory” and preserve their own, traditional, ethnic identity.

Most of the regionalist parties in Europe, such as those in the Basque country, Scotland and elsewhere, are leftist. Except along the “spine of Europe.” These parties are the most successful of the parties of the European right. They have a localist quality, and yet they are fighting to protect the Christian, Western heritage of the continent as a whole. The SVP is currently campaigning for a referendum, on 1 June, to “stop mass naturalization” of immigrants. Italy’s new Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, comes from the Northern League and has announced “tough measures against clandestine immigration.” The VB, under constant harassment by the Belgian authorities, is working on a project to export its model to neighboring countries. Last January, the party established an international network called “Cities against Islamization,” in which it has aligned itself with local parties in cities along the Rhine—Pro Köln (Pro Cologne) from Cologne in the German Rhineland and Alsace d’Abord (Alsace First) from Strassbourg, the capital of Alsace, the French Rhine province. Like the VB, these parties defend local interests and oppose Islamization.

While France succumbs to North Africans and Germany to Turks, the parties from Old Lorraine, the spine of Europe, are preparing to fight for the preservation of their own identity. Owing to the massive immigration by people from an entirely different culture, many ordinary Europeans no longer feel at home in their own countries. Home is that cosy, often small, place where people feel safe among those whom they know and trust. The fight for the preservation of Europe is a fight for one’s own home, village, town, city, provence. That is why it is a localist issue.

Resistance to Islamization is not a matter of ideology, as one prominent American “anti-Jihadist” seems to think. The successful resistance in Europe has a provincial and an ethnic basis. It is about the right of the Europeans to hand their traditions, their identity, their cultural heritage down to their children so that the latter can continue to enjoy Europe’s ancient freedoms. The spirit of Old Lorraine has survived for 1,200 years. “Populist” parties in Flanders, Switzerland, Lombardia, Cologne and Alsace and other regions along the spine of Europe are popular for the simple reason that they are not prepared to let twelve centuries of capitalist self-reliance, self-governance and limited government fade away simply because foreigners are moving in with a spirit adapted to Arabian desert life.

“It is the wrong way to fight the global jihad,” writes the American anti-Islamist. “To form one group for indigenous Europeans, as has been done in several countries, reduces virtually every issue to the one non-negotiable issue of race and ethnicity, discourages cooperation, and thus encourages Balkanization, works against the idea of representative government, and obscures the common values of Judeo-Christian civilization that are shared by people of many races and ethnicities.”

Ethnicity, however, is not by definition a racial concept; it is a cultural one. Ethnicity is about the spirit, the culture that we share. For the above parties this culture is precisely the culture of limited government, of the common values of Western civilization, the adherence to home. Is all this bad because it is indigenous rather than ideological?

  

Paul Belien is a Flemish journalist. He is the founder of The Brussels Journal. His wife is a member of the Belgian parliament for Vlaams Belang. This article was first published by Takimag.com on April 27, 2008 .

Sony Television has apologised for screening a cartoon series called Suicidal Squirrels, above, which shows 100 different ways in which the furry animals might die.

A quote from EU Observer, 28 April 2008

Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern has issued a stark warning on the consequences of rejecting the EU [Libon] treaty as the latest poll shows a narrowing gap between the yes and no side. A no vote would have "repercussions that would do immense damage to Ireland," and would be a "disaster for the country," he said on Sunday (27 April), according to the Irish Times.

His words were in reaction to a poll published by the Sunday Business Post that showed that 35 percent were in favour of the treaty, 31 percent said they were against and 34 percent remain undecided. The results represent a decrease for the Yes side of eight percentage points, an increase for the No side of seven percentage points and an increase of one point for the undecided category when compared with a similar polls taken two months ago.

The high percentage of those who do not know how they will vote, as well as stronger showing for the no camp, comes just six weeks ahead of the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, set for 12 June. [...]

All member states need to approve the treaty for it to come into force. So far 11 of the 27 have done so. Ireland is the only country having a referendum on the document, with a no vote likely to put the treaty on hold for good. This means the country is under extreme pressure to secure a yes vote, with much of high politics in Brussels on hold until after 12 June.

A series of senior politicians have visited Ireland to try and woo voters, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

 
A quote from EU Observer, 25 April 2008

The Lisbon treaty is set to be examined to see if it breaches national laws in two member states, raising the risk that the 1 January 2009 deadline for the document to come into force across the EU will be delayed.

The Czech Senate on Thursday (24 April) voted in favour of asking the constitutional court to check whether the treaty is in line with Czech law. […] The key issues that the senators asked the court to check include the transfer of certain powers to EU institutions, the shift of decision-making among member states from unanimous to majority voting, as well as the legal implications of adopting the Charter of Fundamental Rights – with the charter causing the most concern among Czech lawmakers. […]

Meanwhile, Germany's court is also set to examine the treaty. After the lower house of parliament strongly endorsed the charter on Thursday, conservative MP Peter Gauweiler repeated his intention to bring the treaty before the country's constitutional court.

"What Brussels is supposed to get in powers is not compatible with our democratic principles," Mr Gauweiler told the Saarbruecker newspaper. He said his reason for bringing the case is the constitutional court's loss of power to the European court. The constitutional court has until now kept an eye on the inalienable rights of German citizens given to them by Germany's constitution (Grundgesetz), he noted.

"With the Lisbon Treaty, the sovereignty over these rights is given to foreign courts, whose members are not sworn to protect the constitution. That is not allowed by the constitution," the MP told the paper.

A quote from EU Observer, 28 April 2008

Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern has issued a stark warning on the consequences of rejecting the EU [Libon] treaty as the latest poll shows a narrowing gap between the yes and no side. A no vote would have "repercussions that would do immense damage to Ireland," and would be a "disaster for the country," he said on Sunday (27 April), according to the Irish Times.

His words were in reaction to a poll published by the Sunday Business Post that showed that 35 percent were in favour of the treaty, 31 percent said they were against and 34 percent remain undecided. The results represent a decrease for the Yes side of eight percentage points, an increase for the No side of seven percentage points and an increase of one point for the undecided category when compared with a similar polls taken two months ago.

The high percentage of those who do not know how they will vote, as well as stronger showing for the no camp, comes just six weeks ahead of the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, set for 12 June. [...]

All member states need to approve the treaty for it to come into force. So far 11 of the 27 have done so. Ireland is the only country having a referendum on the document, with a no vote likely to put the treaty on hold for good. This means the country is under extreme pressure to secure a yes vote, with much of high politics in Brussels on hold until after 12 June.

A series of senior politicians have visited Ireland to try and woo voters, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

 
A quote from EU Observer, 25 April 2008

The Lisbon treaty is set to be examined to see if it breaches national laws in two member states, raising the risk that the 1 January 2009 deadline for the document to come into force across the EU will be delayed.

The Czech Senate on Thursday (24 April) voted in favour of asking the constitutional court to check whether the treaty is in line with Czech law. […] The key issues that the senators asked the court to check include the transfer of certain powers to EU institutions, the shift of decision-making among member states from unanimous to majority voting, as well as the legal implications of adopting the Charter of Fundamental Rights – with the charter causing the most concern among Czech lawmakers. […]

Meanwhile, Germany's court is also set to examine the treaty. After the lower house of parliament strongly endorsed the charter on Thursday, conservative MP Peter Gauweiler repeated his intention to bring the treaty before the country's constitutional court.

"What Brussels is supposed to get in powers is not compatible with our democratic principles," Mr Gauweiler told the Saarbruecker newspaper. He said his reason for bringing the case is the constitutional court's loss of power to the European court. The constitutional court has until now kept an eye on the inalienable rights of German citizens given to them by Germany's constitution (Grundgesetz), he noted.

"With the Lisbon Treaty, the sovereignty over these rights is given to foreign courts, whose members are not sworn to protect the constitution. That is not allowed by the constitution," the MP told the paper.

The Swiss journalist Alain Jean-Mairet responds to an article by Daniel Pipes entitled “Europe or Eurabia.” Pipes lists three possible outcomes to the current crisis in which millions of Muslims are slowly but surely exerting more and more influence over the European countries they have migrated to: 1) domination of Europe by Islam 2) rejection of Islam by Europeans who finally emerge from their coma and rise up against the enemy 3) peaceful and harmonious co-existence between Muslims and Europeans.

In the end, Islam's inability to accept European culture forces Pipes to reject the notion of a peaceful integration. This leaves two prospects: Europe will become an appendage of North Africa, or civil war will erupt. But Alain Jean-Mairet foresees only chaos:

If the practice of the Islamic religion is not categorically rejected in Europe, the future of the continent, contrary to Daniel Pipes' prediction in Europe or Eurabia, is clearly mapped out. In a word, it will be decline.

Europe is too satiated and refined, too old, too neurotic and weary, and probably could find within itself the sense of abandonment or sacrifice necessary to yield to a culture it had been forced to believe was superior. But the soul of Eurabia is that of a medieval beast, barbaric, proud and without real culture, except for the culture of lies. The union of the two could never generate a society that looks to the future.

This is because the culture of Islam itself is non-existent. At its base it is hardly more that the thick, salted and putrid sap of the desert, the tribal customs cultivated when the need to survive as a group is the dominant preoccupation. The culture attributed to it comes from conquests, pillaging, or sudden bursts of energy that impose themselves not thanks to Islam, but in spite of this spiritual black hole that the message of the prophet Mohammed really is. And so a cultural encounter between Europe and Eurabia will produce only aborted efforts. The culture of hatred and of limiting fatalism that will be spread by the mosques will prevent any new creativity from blossoming.

Furthermore, the Muslims who are settling en masse in Europe are not a united or fraternal community. It is extremely improbable that Muslims from Turkey will be willing to share harmoniously an Islamic European power with Muslims ruled by Saudi Arabia or with those arriving from India. For the moment, they all still have a lot of space, but the first disputes are already apparent, notably in Germany between Turks and Kurds. There is no reason to suppose that the various opposing Muslim communities will get along better in the context of Europe.

Jean-Mairet goes on to explain that for Europeans to rediscover their Christian roots and start having larger families they need to be informed, and this information has to reach them before the point of no return is reached. However Europe does not allow information to circulate. He points to the flood of censorious activity that greeted Fitna by Geert Wilders. Unfortunately, individuals such as Wilders, willing to risk everything, are always (wrongly) associated with violent right-wing political elements. Jean-Mairet suggests that left-wing rather than right-wing violence is more likely to surpass that of the Muslims. (For the record, in his article Pipes acknowledges, rather reluctantly one feels, that Muslims are more apt to commit violence than Europeans.)

So the Islamic domination of Europe will not be a strong and successful enterprise because of inherent internal differences within Islam itself. Likewise, uninformed, propaganda-saturated Europeans are too mixed up and too afraid of war to fight back.

What is left is a degraded unlivable situation where hatreds harden, violence becomes a daily occurrence, and the brightest people emigrate. [...] For the moment all indications are that things are getting worse, and if Europe does not succeed, in the near future, in eliminating the near totality of the practice of the Islamic religion on its territory, that is, the driving force and crucial element behind the hatred and political ascension of Islamists, it will lose the means to govern itself.

One way or another, Islam will be the future of Europe. [...] If Europeans seriously ponder this problem and its foundations, and then act with courage and determination, there is a chance they can resolve it. If they prefer to believe in their lucky star, they will soon be lying under it.

At least Alain Jean-Mairet has taken a firm stand on the need to eliminate Islam from Europe. Something Daniel Pipes has never come close to doing, to the best of my knowledge. Note too that he has specified "the practice of the Islamic religion" as the cause of the problem, aligning himself thus with Geert Wilders who stresses that the problem is the religion, the Koran.

Turkey’s Progress

Meanwhile, the Frenchman Joachim Véliocras reports at his website Islamisation that there was a parade in the city of Mantes-la-Jolie in honor of the Turkish national holiday on Sunday April 27.

Deputy Pierre Bédier of the UMP [France’s governing party] authorized a Turkish Islamist parade in Mantes-la-Jolie [in the western suburbs of Paris] […] In Turkey, you can imagine the fate that would befall the organizers of a parade for the Armenian or Greek or Kurdish national holiday... […] In the photo [from the newspaper Le Parisien], note the official flag of Milli Gorus: the crescent on a green background. Milli Gorus, a Turkish Islamist movement, fights for the establishment of a world Caliphate. The marchers, furthermore, are wearing the military uniforms of the Sublime Porte, with the ostentatious sabre.
About the Milli Gorus: It is the largest Turkish organization in Europe. Created in 1971 in Braunschweig, Germany as the Turkish Union of Germany, […] German intelligence in 2000 classified the organization as "Islamist fundamentalist". Here are a few statements [...] from the organization leaders, that leave little doubt as to their Islamist orientation:
"Milli Gorus is a shield that protects our compatriots from European barbarism."
"Democracy is a Western error."
"[Jews] are vampires and blood suckers."
"[Western countries are] instruments of the world-wide secret Jewish conspiracy."
"Our community is a means to an end – the end being to Islamize society."

Turkey is making progress in its quest for membership in the European Union. Le Figaro dated April 21 outlines the prospects for reforms within Turkey that would accelerate the process:

Turkey could be part of the European Union within "10 to 15 years," provided it continues the policy of reform that has begun, in the view of Olli Rehn, European commissioner on expansion, [...] Questioned about the possible ban by the Turkish Constitutional Court of the AKP party in power, Mr. Rehn felt that such a measure "would harm the reform process."

This is in reference to the attempt by Turkish secularists to ban the Islamist AKP party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In March they brought a lawsuit against the party which they accused of having become a "hotbed of activities contrary to the principle of 'laïcité'". The outcome of the suit is pending.

Gaëlle Mann discloses at her website that a referendum in France on Turkey's membership is no longer a requirement, thanks to... Nicolas Sarkozy.

The French are no longer in a position to block new memberships in the European Union. A bill to reform the Constitution was adopted on Wednesday (April 23) by the Council of Ministers. The bill abolishes the requirement to hold a referendum to ratify new member States in the European Union. "We feel that this obstacle really is meaningless. It establishes a general rule, when in fact we should consider things on a case by case basis, as with Turkey." On the topic of Turkey, President Nicolas Sarkozy continues to believe that it "does not belong in the European Union," explained government spokesman, Luc Chatel.

The requirement, implemented at the insistence of Jacques Chirac in 2005 when the Constitution was being reformed, aimed at calming the fears that the possible entry of Turkey into the EU had aroused in France. The paradox is that the referendum is being abolished by Nicolas Sarkozy, who is himself opposed to Turkey in the EU. Now, any new membership will be ratified EITHER by a referendum OR by a vote of both houses of Parliament. This was the system in place before Chirac's amendment was introduced.

The secretary of State for European Affairs, Jean-Pierre Jouyet says that abolishing the referendum requirement solved Sarkozy's "credibility problem" with his European partners. "How can you negotiate, if at the end of negotiations you say, 'I have negotiated with you for two years, but there's nothing I can do. I'm not the one who will make the decision, I must leave it up to a referendum?' You are no longer credible within the framework of European negotiations."

From what I have read it comes as no surprise to insiders that Sarkozy is betraying the French people again on the issue of Turkey. It was suggested long ago, before he became president, that he would work secretly to help Turkey's cause.

A quote from the BBC, 13 February 2008

A project exploring a theory that Celtic was one of the major languages of Europe alongside Greek and Latin has received extra funding. Aberystwyth University's department of Welsh is tracing the roots of Celtic from which Welsh, Gaelic and Irish are derived. […] Professor Patrick Sims-Williams, who is leading the project, said the grant would enable Dr Alexander Falileyev, a scholar from St Petersburg working in Aberystwyth, to investigate Celtic in southern Romania and as far east as Galatia in Turkey.

Prof Sims-Williams said: "We know that these areas were colonized from the 3rd Century BC onwards by peoples who spoke Celtic languages. It's becoming clear that Celtic was one of the major languages of ancient Europe, alongside Greek and Latin, and that's an exciting perspective for people who tend to think of Celtic languages as minority languages. […] It would appear that most EU countries have a Celtic past."

 
A quote from the Italian press agency ANSA, 28 April 2008

Former agriculture minister Giovanni Alemanno was voted in as Rome mayor on Monday, taking the Italian capital to the Right for the first time since the fall of Fascism. [...] He is married to Isabella Rauti – the daughter of far-right diehard Pino Rauti – and wears a Celtic cross around his neck, a symbol of the far right in Italy. Alemanno insists that he wears the encircled cross as a religious symbol.

This is a short segment from Farming Today at the weekend, throwing a different light on what is happening with our possible "food security" problem. The national breeding pig herd is down by almost a tenth since Christmas; get a British pork chop while you can.

More on this later, but I just turned on the Wardman Wire Election 2008 Chatroom for testing if you would like a sneak preview.

Boris or Ken; YouGov or Mori: We’ll have to wait and see… It’s the final straight to the big day: May 1st. Will it be Boris, will it be Ken? We’ll have to wait and see… What is sure is that the pollster YouGov is either going to be the only credible pollster left in the UK [...]

The roundup is a compendium of last week's outstanding posts in the British Blogosphere.

Britblog Roundup No. 167 (27-Apr-07) is hosted at Cabalamat.

For the full Pods and Blogs Roundup to download, visit Chris Vallance's site.

A quote from Aftenposten, 28 April 2008

A new report by the [Norwegian] justice minister, Knut Storberget, shows that 99.2 percent of all serious robberies on the streets of Oslo are never solved. Last year, 11,033 crimes were reported, but just 80 were solved.

 

A cartoon from Jesus and Mo.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy says he will decide by late 2008 or early 2009 whether France will fully rejoin the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It is one of the more important issues left unresolved at the recently concluded Bucharest Summit, where Sarkozy proclaimed: “I reaffirm here France’s determination to pursue the process of renovating its relations with NATO.”

General Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s military structure in 1966 in protest over American dominance of the Atlantic Alliance. And more than 40 years later, the issue of American influence over European security remains a fundamental stumbling block to improved Franco-US relations.

But France has been toying with the idea of rejoining NATO for more than a decade. Indeed, in 1995, Sarkozy’s predecessor, the neo-Gaullist Jacques Chirac, told US President Bill Clinton of his desire to bring France back into the Alliance command structure. But the effort was abandoned when the Clinton Administration rejected French conditions for full re-integration, and when Chirac lost his governing majority in snap parliamentary elections in 1997.

Sarkozy, who has been called “an American neo-conservative with a French passport” because of his desire to mend relations with the United States, first announced the possibility of a French rapprochement with NATO in a September 2007 interview with The New York Times. But even if Sarkozy has pro-American leanings, he also is thoroughly Europe-centric in his worldview; correspondingly, he has spelled out French conditions for rejoining NATO that are very similar to those of Chirac: American acceptance of an independent European defense capability and a leading French role in NATO’s command structures.

Sarkozy reiterated his demands in November, when, in an address to the US Congress, he called on “the Alliance to evolve concurrently with the development and strengthening of a European defense.” France’s Minister for Europe, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, echoed this by saying: “We want to make openings with regard to NATO. […] But let’s be clear: We are ready to make these openings only if they allow the strengthening of a real European security and defense policy.”

But French calls for an autonomous European military capability have been greeted with skepticism by several European countries that are reluctant to undermine the existing security links with the United States established through NATO. Indeed, some of the more US-leaning European states suspect that France’s renewed interest in rejoining NATO is in fact a Trojan horse designed, ultimately, to destroy the Atlantic Alliance from within.

Sarkozy, therefore, seems to have concluded that if he wants to advance the cause of autonomous European defense, he will first have to placate euroskeptics on both sides of the Atlantic by proving his commitment to NATO. But France is unlikely to rejoin NATO if it does not promote European integration. Indeed, the President of the EU Military Committee, French General Henri Bentégeat, has said: “I think that if France normalizes its relations with NATO, European defense projects will become easier to progress.” Says Sarkozy: “The more we are friends with the Americans, the more we can be independent.”

Nowhere are French proposals for an autonomous European defense capability more controversial than in euroskeptic Britain, whose government is seeking ratification of the highly unpopular Lisbon Treaty (the repackaged European Constitution) this summer. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who had earlier promised to hold a popular referendum on the Treaty, has now decided it will be easier to obtain a “yes” vote by sidelining British voters altogether and instead submitting the document directly to Parliament for ratification.

With this in mind, Brown presumably advised Sarkozy during his first official visit to Britain on March 26-27 to frame his proposals for European defense in such a way as to avoid endangering the Lisbon Treaty ratification process. Indeed, Jouyet, the French Minister for Europe, recently said that: “We will obviously take care not to jeopardize the ratification process of the Lisbon Treaty, because we know that in certain countries these issues are sensitive.”

This probably explains why the symbolically important issue of French re-integration into NATO has been postponed to a meeting of the North Atlantic Council at the level of foreign ministers in December 2008, or even perhaps to NATO’s 60th anniversary summit in April 2009.

An EU Army to Rival NATO?

France will assume the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union on July 1, 2008. And Sarkozy has already made it clear that the centerpiece of his (exceptionally ambitious) agenda will be the full development of an autonomous European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP).

The full extent of Sarkozy’s vision for European defense will be published in the forthcoming “White Book” on French defense sector reform. But according to senior aides, Sarkozy’s central proposal for the French presidency of the EU revolves around using provisions in the Lisbon Treaty that call for “permanent structured cooperation” to create what many believe in effect will become a common EU army.

In practice, the French plan is to proceed around an inner core of the biggest European countries (“strengthened cooperation” in eurospeak) called the G-6: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain. (Other countries can join this initial group at any time.) France wants each G-6 country 1) to contribute 10,000 troops to a 60,000-strong “common intervention force” and 2) to commit to spending a minimum of 2 percent of GDP on defense.

France also wants the EU to have its own independent military planning capability (with its headquarters in Brussels). Says Europe Minister Jouyet: “We propose that Europe acquires the operational means for intervention with a planning center in Brussels.” This has been echoed by French Defense Minister Hervé Morin: “An own planning staff in Brussels forms part of our ideas.”

Another French proposal involves the creation of common EU arms market and the “definition of a common European disarmament and arms control policy.” Says Jouyet: “We are ready for an internal market and an arms agency at the European level which will allow us to reinforce our industrial bases.” Indeed, the European Commission recently proposed two new directives: one on defense procurement and another on intra-EU transfers of defense products.

France is also expected to proceed with a plan that would create a “common arms export policy” based on a proposal recently passed by the European Parliament. Furthermore, France wants to harmonize military training in Europe, as well as to “Europeanize” the foreign military bases of EU member states.

For the United States (and other pro-NATO allies), Sarkozy’s plans pose a dilemma. On the one hand, the Americans want the Europeans to assume more of the burden for transatlantic defense. On the other hand, they want the Europeans to do this in a way that does not undermine NATO. And most of Sarkozy’s proposals seem to be geared toward creating a rival European defense structure that over time will duplicate but not double NATO resources.

For example, the 60,000-strong EU force would draw on the very same troops that are currently committed to NATO. For such an EU force to be viable, troops would need to be on constant standby for EU missions. Considering that all EU countries are already stretched to the limit, Sarkozy’s plans would almost certainly divert manpower away from the NATO mission in Afghanistan. And nearly all observers agree that the future of the Atlantic Alliance hinges on success or failure in Afghanistan.

Several European countries, especially Britain, have also resisted the creation of an autonomous EU military planning cell because of fears that it will duplicate the existing operational planning center at NATO known as SHAPE. And some EU countries are concerned that the creation of an internal EU arms market will make it more difficult for them to reach bilateral agreements with third countries (such as the United States) in relation to the licensing of exports of military equipment.

In an effort to alleviate some of these concerns, NATO in March 2003 reached a series of agreements with the EU known as the Berlin Plus arrangements. These guarantee that NATO not only maintains the right of first refusal to conduct crisis management operations (if the EU wishes to use NATO resources, it may only act independently in an international crisis if NATO chooses not to), but that all members have an effective veto by virtue of the fact that the EU may only draw on NATO assets if the whole alliance approves.

But the Berlin Plus agreements (and thus the whole debate over the EU’s institutional relationship with NATO) will be reopened as a quid pro quo for France rejoining NATO. And if Sarkozy succeeds in creating an independent EU military, it will be at the expense of NATO, which in turn will dilute American influence over European security policy.

French Pro-Americanism Unlikely to Outlast Sarkozy

Although some analysts believe the pro-American Sarkozy is filling the shoes vacated by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, most of the French political class does not share their president’s enthusiasm for things American. Indeed, their goal for more than 60 years has been to reduce American influence in Europe. Thus it seems doubtful that Sarkozy’s overtures to the United States will outlast his own administration.

This was foreshadowed on April 8, when Sarkozy faced down a vote of no confidence because of his plans to deploy a battalion of 800 French troops to Afghanistan (France already has 1,600 soldiers in Afghanistan, mostly around the capital, Kabul.) French leftists accused Sarkozy of a dangerous “Atlanticist drift” that risked turning France into Bush’s lackey. The leader of the “moderate” opposition Socialists, François Hollande, said Sarkozy decided to send French troops to Afghanistan “under pressure from the Americans” and that France risked losing its independence on the world stage.

For most of the French ruling elite (the anti-American Left and the nationalist Right), the United States is considered to be the main problem in international affairs because of its reluctance to share its power. The only solution, in their view, is a French-led EU superstate that can counterbalance America on the global stage. And a unified EU foreign and defense policy that is completely independent from NATO (ie, the United States) is essential to achieve equal status. Until then, anti-Americanism will continue to be the preferred means to accelerate the process of loosening the transatlantic link.

Sarkozy may be sincere in his desire to rejoin to NATO. But by conditioning such a move on support for an independent EU defense capability, he is saying that to be more European tomorrow, he has to be more Atlantic today.

 

 
Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. This analysis was first published by World Politics Review on April 23, 2008 .

A quote from The [London] Times, 28 April 2008

A British citizen [Nissar Hussein, 43] who converted to Christianity from Islam and then complained to police when locals threatened to burn his house down was told by officers to “stop being a crusader” [...]. The report says that he was subjected to a number of attacks and, after being told that his house would be burnt down if he did not repent and return to Islam, reported the threat to the police. It says he was told that such threats were rarely carried out and the police officer told him to “stop being a crusader and move to another place”. A few days later the unoccupied house next door was set on fire.

I'm doing a short survey for an article for tomorrow: Which do you think is the most visited website in the UK?

Please drop your suggstions in the comments.

Here is Harriet Harman talking about the importance of absolute data security, which is essential in order to prevent theft of personal data and other people pretending to be you. This is important.

There are various drawbacks to an expat's life in Japan, starting with the big task of learning the redundancy-packed language and dealing with the cultural parochialism of the population – a parochialism in the intellectual sense only, for in the material sense the Japanese have mastered the best the West has to offer.

A good example of these detriments transpired in 2004, when Shintaro Ishihara, the governor of Tokyo, opined about the French language.  Mr. Ishihara stated that French is disqualified from being an international language because it is "a language in which nobody can count."

Indeed, French numbers from x70 through x99 are weird constructs on a 20 base (e.g. 91 is expressed as “four times twenty plus eleven”), but that’s as far as it goes. What's more significant is that this was a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black: for, with respect to counting, Japanese may well be the most dysfunctional language in the world.

There are different Japanese vocabularies for counting long, thin objects, or flat, thin objects, or small round objects, or ships, or books, or sheep or cars. The proliferation of this is practically boundless; mercifully, outside of specialists, most Japanese give up after mastering perhaps five hundred words just to count from one to twenty.

Moreover, the largest numerical unit for which there is a word in Japanese is ten thousand. A foreigner in a business meeting who mentions an item like the 67,835,303 euros that his company earned last year, must inevitably witness Japanese executives stopping to count on their fingers in order to divide 67,835,303 by 10,000 so that they be able to grasp and express the figure in their language.

This is significant too: the man who made this amazingly parochial remark is one of the most feted people in Japan: superstar politician, famous novelist, polemicist, yachtsman, and Keio University graduate. And his remark holds one of the keys to our subject matter today.

Inconveniences and differences notwithstanding, there is one overwhelming blessing that makes me glad to be in Japan. It's the daily experience of living in a country that, unlike Western Europe, and increasingly the United States, does not actively pursue it's own extinction.

I am a European. Ich kann nicht anders. Europe had left my parents long before they left it almost 50 years ago, so now I am a Euro-American and I take this distinction seriously. Still, I don't feel the religious impulse except  in a church that's at least 300 years old; and it's only European music that penetrates to my soul, and only European languages in which I can express what I hold dearest, and only European artifacts that satisfy my love of beauty and craftsmanship. Well, not quite – Japanese artifacts do that too.

But Europe is my Beatrice: a pure vision of the past with little resemblance to what she is now. The real, contemporary Beatrice does presume to tread the path, like Dante Alighieri's muse, from Purgatory to Heaven, but the Compass of Reality shows that the path in fact leads in the opposite direction: back to Virgil's guided tour of Hell. This is a Beatrice with a bipolar personality disorder, self-inflicted cicatrices, labial and nasal rings and tattooed breasts, sporting combat boots and a black leather suit with a Palestinian terrorist's kaffiyeh wrapped around her studded dog collar, with a book of onanistic gibberish by an Althusser or Bataille or Foucault in one hand, and a Quranic whip for self-flagellation in the other.

What Europe has become is on ample display in the daily news. In the April week in which this has been written, France had put Brigitte Bardot on trial for the sixth time for "inciting racial hatred," but really just because La Bardot desires that France remain French, as did Jeanne d'Arc and, before her, Charles Martel. And in Spain, a very pregnant, 37-year-old woman, wearing a sloppy chemise over her protrusion, reviewed a line of Spanish troops standing at attention. It was not a scene from Luis Buñuel's new film, The Discreet Charm of the Socialist International, but Spain's new Minister of Defense, Carmen Chacon, on official duty.

To put a lactating symbol of feminine vulnerability in charge of the defense of a country with a long and proud martial history is to announce to the world: See, we castrated ourselves; we beg that you be gentle with us; please wear a condom. Would that the Groupe Islamique Combattant Marocain or Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb lay down its arms in benevolent reciprocity. As it were, the sight of a pregnant woman in charge of the defense of Al-Andalus gives these testosterone–pumped descendants of the Moors some exciting ideas of a very different nature.

And in New York, the erstwhile symbol of what in Europe's formative past was both its best and its worst, the Roman Catholic Pope, proved that the papacy is no longer concerned with pesky value judgments. You can swathe the German postmodern socialist theologian in gold and brocade, but you can't swathe his weltanschauung. And so Benedict XVI, after having inveighed for greater American receptivity to its final inundation by the Third World, lectured the General Assembly of the United Nations that the world is "in crisis" because decisions rest in the hands of "a few powerful nations."

One wonders whether His Holiness wishes for more power to such nonpowerful nations as those paragons of human rights that were on the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, mercifully dissolved in March 2006: Burkina Faso, Congo Brazzaville, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, Kenya, Mauritania, Nigeria, Sudan, Togo, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Guatemala, Paraguay, and others.

To top if off, the former Professor Ratzinger asserted that the promotion of human rights –- presumably by such devoted advocates as Sudan and Saudi Arabia – "remains the most effective strategy for eliminating inequalities between countries and social groups, and increasing security." As though the proper and viable concern of the Roman Catholic Church ought to be the elimination of inequalities between countries and social groups. The Pope's words sound as though taken from a speech by Lenin to some Bolshevik congress.

However, it is not something that may be pinned on single individuals or institutions. Let us not forget the Archbishop of Canterbury, who wishes sharia upon his country; and the legions of EU's secular humanists in Strasbourg and Brussels, busy like the bees in dismantling and replacing Europe's cultural identity, its racial and ethnic ties that bind, its nations' sovereignty, its peoples' freedoms and patrimony won with copious blood shed over many centuries.

This is a systemic and critical infection of Europe's autoimmune system; Western civilization's, actually. 98% of Western Europe's politicians and state functionaries, and its churches, universities, and mass media, and the great majority of their American and Canadian counterparts, are instruments of the same culturally Marxist and economically Socialist movement aimed at demolishing the nations of the West in the lunatic and deeply immoral hope that it will wipe out war, inequality and "discrimination" in the world at large.

It would be redundant to write much more about the symptoms of this tragic illness, what with this being The Brussels Journal, the chronicle of Europe's decomposition. But perhaps a comparative approach may yield some fresh insights.

We live at a hinge of history, witnessing the large-scale self-disembowelment, a sepukku, of a whole civilization. And we can profit from this observation in two ways:

First, it's not only Europe that has stuck a dagger in its belly and insists on drawing it across, all the way. It's the Anglosphere, the entire white peoples' civilization, too. As each continent is suiciding by somewhat different means, at a different pace, the totality of the phenomenon eludes capture in a single essay. We will therefore concentrate on Europe, but without the myopic schadenfreude that characterizes most American commentators on these matters.
Second, seppuku used to be the exclusive specialty of the Japanese. But Japan, which has reasons to harbor national psychoses and suicidal tendencies similar to those that haunt the West, has managed to avoid going down that path. It's worth speculating why.

Japan's history is crevassed with the same follies, cruelties, injustices and genocides as Europe's is, if proportionately smaller because Japan is so much smaller. The decadence, incompetence and oppression by Europe's aristocracy have generated the counterforces of statism, leftism and sterile, cowardly mediocrity on display in Europe now. But Japan's nobility had led the country into perpetual civil war lasting over 500 years, to be supplanted in the year 1600 by 268 years of a peace-yielding Tokugawa Shogunate's oppression far worse than what Europe's old elites ever inflicted on their lessers.

All this notwithstanding, one does not see the same class envy in Japan, the same anti-elitism and toxic "progressivism" that has wreaked so much havoc on Western Europe and on the United States and Canada. Japan is as socialist as France or Germany, but without the venom, coveting and selfish indulgence that characterizes this political persuasion in Europe.

European countries' nationalism has led Europe to the disastrous Great War, which makes the EU's project to abolish old ethnic divisions understandable. But Japan's nationalism in the 20th century, deranged to the point of rabid chauvinism and Emperor worship, eventually led it to total ruin in World War 2 – and still the nation survives,  its spirit regenerated; its body thriving.

Europe has a major blot on its history, its erstwhile religion and its collective conscience because of its relentless, 1600–year-long persecution of its Jewish minority, ending, if not entirely, in the genocide of half of Europe's Jewry in World War 2. And it has another large blot in its centuries of colonial rampages and exploitations of the indigenous peoples of other continents.

But the Japanese people have, over 1200 years, practically wiped out and displaced the indigenous population of Northern Japan, the Ainu. And their atrocities against the Sino-Korean peoples have not started in Manchuria and Nanking in the 1930s, but in the 16th century. Visitors to Kyoto may still ascend the steps of the Mimizuka: a mound heaped over the ears and noses of 38,000 Koreans killed in a Japanese invasion between 1592 and 1598.

The number of the Korean victims was much higher; the remains in Kyoto are just what fit in the barrels of brine on Shogun Hideyoshi's ships returning from the Korean campaign. And what Hideyoshi did to Japan's Christians could have been staged at the Circus Maximus.

Furthermore, what Japan did to its Allied prisoners of war, just 65 years ago, will enter the annals of humanity's shame and dishonor for all time. Yet, her will to live and its people's cultural pride are still strong, even when subdued by remorse, or propped by denial.

Europe has largely lost its Christian religion – its main spiritual and cultural force. And it's not Europe's but the religion's fault – its tyrannical ways, corruption, dogmatism; its suppression of sex and merriment, its cruelty and persecution of nonbelievers. And so, the religion, to make amends, has made a turnabout and is now promoting the very destructive forces that it used to inhibit: homosexuality and Islam, tolerance of the intolerable, unqualified redistribution of power and income, universalism instead of particularism.

There were other ways to make amends, instead of this quantum pendulum node/2599 going from one extreme to the other. There was the option of finding and staying in a point of equilibrium, anchored by the sublime, nourishing and beautiful that are equally woven into the Church's history and influence.

Japan's religion is desiccated too. Japanese Buddhism has mutated into a a panoply of 2000 weird personality cults fleecing their mantra-chanting flocks. Even the legitimate and ancient branches are little more than burial businesses selling cemetery plots and sticks with magic Chinese characters that are supposed to do for the deceased what papal indulgences once purported to do for the living. Zen has retained its depth and its spiritual force, but it has many more adherents in Europe and America than it has in Japan. And Christianity in Japan is not the powerful current it is in Korea but rather a fashion item: a pretext to wear a designer cross pendant and to have a wedding with Felix Mendelssohn's music and Fred Astaire's wardrobe. Nonetheless, the conduct of the people is moral, humane values abound, civility and mutual consideration are pervasive.

Europe is being strangled by a clique of unelected bureaucrats; regulations-writing mandarins filled with hubris about the inerrancy of their wisdom and its salutary effects on the little people. A constitution of 160,000 words, such as was signed  by the 27 EU member states in 2004 is not, cannot be, an instrument of liberation but only an instrument of oppression. The American constitution has 4400 words.

Japan too is governed by an unelected cabal: very old men of influence manipulating party politics and known, aptly, as the "black curtain." And Japan's self-perpetuating bureaucracy is second to none. The system has been honed to such perfection that high government employees who retire ascend to "heaven," known as amakudari. Heaven consists of quasi-governmental, for-profit corporations created to provide make-believe, high-paying jobs for retired bureaucrats, such as enforcing the myriad regulations and their attendant levies that said retirees wrote into the code book when they were still on government pay.

But embezzling money and wrapping a country in red tape for selfish reasons are one thing. Wholesale treason, making of Europe Eurabia, planting the seeds of perpetual strife and future civil wars, robbing the native peoples of their homelands and birthrights, siccing new, totalitarian laws on them to stifle their dissent, persecuting relentlessly those who object to the ethnocide – all these are another matter altogether. And Japan knows nothing of such horrors.

Both Europe and Japan have deprived their peoples of the fundamental right from which all other rights flow: the right of armed self-defense. Allegedly, this has been done in the people's own interest. But the rates of violent crime have gone up dramatically since the enactment of such forcible disarmament of Europe's citizenry.

In England and Wales, for instance, homicide rates have gone up by 50% after the government enacted a ban on firearms in the mid-1990s. In continental Europe, armed robberies and shooting homicides continue despite the long-standing disarmament of the population, or perhaps because of it. In Japan, in contrast, the same strict banning of firearms has not increased crime, and homicide and robbery are, in statistical terms, practically nonexistent.

Japan has inherent centrifugal forces as much as any Western European country used to have even before its importation of Muslims. The Tokyoite feels about the Osakan what the Berliner feels about the Bavarian, and he expresses it in a different dialect too. The Okinawan's regard of the main islands is every bit as ambivalent as the Sicilian's is with respect to the boot of the mother country. Japanese history is as packed with bloody interregional warfare as Germany's or Italy's are.

Why then have the modern-day Western European peoples allowed, and then capitulated before, their own colonization by alien, unabsorbable and, in part, violently criminal newcomers, but the Japanese have not? Among the Japanese, the attitudinal difference about immigration is between those who want to set the cap at ½%, and those who want the cap at 2% of the population. That is the spectrum of opinions among bureaucrats, politicians and other elites too. And to suffer the suppression and demolition of the national identity and heritage, such as Western Europeans acquiesce to, or the displacement of the nation's language, such as Americans eagerly implement, is, in Japan, unthinkable. Japan is much the better for it.

Japan's women no longer want to breed. The country's childbirth rates are at the same critically low levels as Western Europe's: about 1.3 children per woman, versus the 2.2 required for population replacement. Europe's governing elite decided a long time ago that to resolve the demographic crisis it was necessary to import Third-World Muslims. But demography is destiny, not only in the fractions of population growth but also in who those fractions consist of.

With a Third-World Muslim population estimated at 25 to 55 million (and intentional lying or obfuscation by the Establishment in this matter, e.g. here), and with such population's breeding ratios being 4 – 8 children per woman, versus the indigenes' 1.3, it does not take much prescience to foretell that Europe's culture, its civic underpinnings, even its physical landscape will inevitably come to resemble those of the Maghreb, Arabia and HinduKush. And yet, Europe's brainy minders have failed to make this simple extrapolation, and they persecute anyone who does make it.

Japan, on the other hand, has been preparing for a future with a smaller and older population. Instead of importing Asian nurses, Japan has developed robots that care for hospital patients, or it exports its old and infirm to the countries where the nurses are. Instead of importing window and wall washers, it has developed nano-polymers that repel dust and dirt. Instead of importing street sweepers, it has mobilized retired volunteers to maintain the cleanliness of their own neighborhoods. Instead of opening its doors to primitives who happen to be refugees, Japan donates huge sums of money to refugee organizations. Japan does not wish to dilute itself, for any reason.

To capture the reasons for such differences takes enough words for a separate treatment. It will appear here in the near future. But before we sign off, some words on the respective deities: Astarte and Amaterasu.

Amaterasu is the sun goddess in the Japanese mythology, the direct ancestor of Japan's Emperor and the figurative mother of the Japanese people. The reference to the sun is literal and metaphorical, for the goddess is believed to radiate light and life force itself, and also emotional warmth, hope and compassion for the people who worship her. Without her, everything withers and dies.

Amaterasu is said to have invented the cultivation of rice and wheat, the use of silkworms, and weaving with a loom. Her symbol is the sacred mirror. The mirror is kept in the inner sanctum of Japan's most important shrine, the Grand Shrine of Ise . Built of Japanese cypress, the shrine is torn down and rebuilt identically every 20 years, at great expense, reflecting the Shinto belief of the death and renewal of nature. It has been so torn down and rebuilt, in 20-year cycles, 61 times now. 

Astarte was the great and universally worshipped Semitic goddess, known to the Mesopotamians as Ishtar and referred to in the Hebrew Bible as Ashtoret. She was the principal goddess of the Phoenicians and was widely worshipped by the tribes of Israel as well, in addition to their cult of Yahveh.

Astarte represented fertility, sexuality, motherhood and war. Her symbols were the lion, the horse, the sphinx, the dove, the planet Venus and the moon. She was beheld as the Mother of the Universe and the giver of all life on Earth. Pictorial representations often show her naked or with cow horns, symbolizing fertility – but to the Hebrew prophets she was a female demon of lust, luring the People of the Covenant away from their monotheistic path and into temples of sacred prostitution and firstborn child sacrifices.

Astarte has traversed the Mediterranean basin to appear as Aphrodite and Demeter to the Greeks, Uni-Astre to the Etruscans, Venus to the Romans. She reached all the way to the British Isles. But she has reached the wide continent between the Bosphorus and the cliffs of Dover in another form: as the naked daughter of a Phoenician king riding a white, divine bull into the sea and on to Crete. Her name was Europa.

It is in the dissimilar fates of Europa-Astarte on her eponymous continent, and Amaterasu's in her own home islands, that the genesis of some of the differences between Europe and Japan, as discussed above, may be found.

 

Cartoon: Gaping Void

Sooner or later a certain type of pop singer turns his hand to art. Such an entertainer believes himself profound, intellectually advanced, risqué. No doubt he recognizes that there is something inherently silly about the rhyming of some vague, ephemeral, political message. Through art he is able to associate himself with a history of great ideas, and great intellectual and religious movements that have shaped our world.

But he invariably fails in his mission to make any real mark, or to articulate any important message. Ten years ago I was disappointed by a showing of David Bowie’s paintings at a gallery in London’s Cork Street. There was one good work – a small portrait in a somewhat Impressionist style – and this was the only one not for sale. This week, Pete Doherty’s art went on display at the Chappe Gallery in the Montmartre district of Paris. Doherty is best known as the lead singer of Britain’s Babyshambles band, drug addict, and voice of Rock against Racism. His style of dress – which I can only describe as a cross between Boy George and Wurzel Gummidge – betrays an individual who should never have dabbled in visual art, but, alas, he has.

His works published in The Daily Mail this week, show a picture of a topless Doherty, covered with the symbols of swastika and Star of David, some sketches of very poor quality, and a syringe stuck in a canvass, with Doherty’s signature trailing from it. The Daily Mail, was apparently shocked enough by all of this to ask readers, “is this the most disgusting art exhibition ever?” The answer for those of us who have been around the block a few times is surely, “no,” and this is the real indictment of such “art.”

During the first half of the twentieth century artists and writers risked everything in criticizing one dictatorship or another. Likewise, love or hate Picasso or Dali among others, they were pushing the boundaries of artistic style. They were innovators, and genuinely peculiar men. Still today there are some interesting living, figurative artists, such as the Norwegian painter, Odd Nerdrum, or German, Gerhard Richter. Their work may be disturbing, but it is well executed, and draws on the tradition of art. Nor, in contrast to popular conception, is all abstract art rubbish. The “environmental art” of British artists Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long are uncluttered and unpretentious reflections of man and nature, that owe their aesthetics to both the natural world and to Western and Eastern artistic traditions.

Art was also one battleground in the war of political ideologies. Dali was firmly on Spain’s Right, and his work was infused with Catholicism and alchemy; Picasso lent his support, to some extent, to the Communists, who usually demanded figurative art that anyone could understand without interpretation. The Fascists of Italy were unsure whether to make figurative or Futurist art official. Today, it is considered a truism that Western artists are liberal and that art must also be liberal, but, for too many, a better description might be bourgeois. Despite the ugliness of Doherty’s “art” it is an expression of the banal, of the frustrated boy from the suburb who was the best at his school’s art class. Art that uses the swastika and the Star of David is meant to be dangerous, but Doherty’s is not, because it does not articulate anything except self absorption and, perhaps, self pity.

The old adage that “a picture says a thousand words” is rarely true today. Art schools and critics talk positively of “ambiguity.” Fine art, since the emergence of abstract painting, has endeavored to articulate nothing definite lest one patron might be offended or a potential client put off by the thought that he may be about to hang a political message in his living room or the lobby of his office. Yet, “artists” from Doherty to Jan Fabre are becoming ever more irrelevant, ever more middle class, even as they protest their outrageous newness.

The internet has changed everything in recent years. It is the new battlefield of ideas, where a thousand words can be read by a thousand, ten thousand, or a hundred thousand in a short space of time. Blogs and writings of every political, intellectual, and religious stripe are being constantly updated, and bounced around “the net” almost instantaneously. In contrast, Doherty’s scribbled art looks inarticulate and out of date, even though it was only recently produced. And Fabre’s art also looks as if it belongs to another era, its message perhaps crafted for the Cold War era.

As most galleries and museum are now online, and as new artistic web-technology emerges, the internet may not only help to preserve the classical works of fine art, but also to create new art or aesthetics which compliment text, rather than seeking to replace it. In an era of new intellectual competition, in which free speech seems to be eroding in Europe, that may prove essential.

Some bits in the mosaic of our time are overlooked because we look for boulders. This column presents underrated issues/ideas that might deserve attention.
 
1. Allegedly, fair taxes reflect the assumed ability to pay. Generally, the criteria applied are, however, not economic put political. This makes taxation subject to pressures that might be devoid of much economic sense. At the same time, the principle is reversible. The ability to pay depends, ultimately, on the extent of the taxes levied. Therefore, high taxes ultimately reduce tax revenues
 
2. The foregoing opens the door to a related speculation. Prices reflect the value subjectively attributed by the users of goods to what they consume. The share of the disposable income used to attain a good is also determined by the extent it is consume