RUTHFULLY YOURS

Deutschland is struggling with an invasion of migrants many of whom are criminals, the EU is splintering, and the arrogance of Trump hatred is appalling. The recent issue had the following headlines:
Trump’s AmericaDemocracy at the Tipping Point
‘America First’Trump and Bannon Pursue a Vision of Autocracy
Trump as Nero Europe Must Defend Itself Against A Dangerous President
The Pain of a Donald Trump Presidency
Travel BanDonald Trump Better Watch Out!
Trump’s Attack on Germany and the Global Economy

And this column is the nastiest……
How America Lost Its Identity By Holger Stark
Reporter Holger Stark spent the past four years as DER SPIEGEL’s Washington correspondent during a time in which the country changed radically enough to elect Donald Trump as its president. What led this once mighty nation into decline?

On a frigid January evening one year ago, I was standing in a line of around 1,000 people in Burlington, Vermont, to see Donald Trump. I reported my very first story on the United States in 1991 and had been living in the country since 2013. I thought I knew the country well. But on that evening in January, I realized that I had been mistaken.

Burlington lay under a blanket of snow and next to me in line stood Mary and Tim Loyer, both wrapped in dark-blue parkas. Mary was unemployed and her son Tim had a job at a bar. Both told me they were Bernie Sanders supporters. Tim said he was particularly bothered by the power held by large companies, that the division of wealth was unfair and that people like him no longer had opportunities to improve their lives. It was the anthem of the working class.

When asked what he found attractive about Trump, Tim said: “Bernie and Trump are the only politicians who say what they’re thinking and do what they say,” as his mother Mary nodded along. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is corrupt, he said. In an election pitting Trump against Clinton, Tim said he would not vote for Clinton. Again, Mary nodded.

At the entrance, security personnel patted us down and asked if we were planning on voting for Trump. Only those who said yes were allowed to proceed.

When Trump began speaking, a demonstrator stood up and yelled that Trump was a racist. The candidate paused, shook his fist and demanded that security throw the protester out. “Keep his coat. Confiscate his coat,” Trump said from the stage. It was 21 degrees Fahrenheit (-6 degrees Celsius) outside. Trump snarled as his fans jumped to their feet hooting and jeering. One was reminded of a lynch mob.

I learned three things on that evening in Burlington: In the fatherland of capitalism, anger with the elite is so vast that even leftists would rather vote for a narcissist billionaire than a veteran of the political establishment. In a country that values freedom of opinion higher than almost any other country in the world, there were now attitude tests prior to admission to political rallies. And many Americans, who are otherwise so polite, lose all restraint when confronted by those who think differently.

Everything that I associated with America seemed no longer to apply on that evening in Burlington. What had happened to this once-proud country?

I found answers to this question on a journey through American society — to places like Vermont, Maryland, Rhode Island and Virginia. Those are just a few of the places I have visited in the last four years — places where those symptoms could be seen that together add up to the huge crisis that has gripped America. This self-confident country that has spent decades exporting its values with imperialist hubris has lost its identity. Democratic capitalism no longer works well enough to keep together a country of 325 million people and to guarantee domestic peace.

The United States is not alone in having been struck by this identity crisis: It has also hit the United Kingdom, France, Germany and other countries. But America, where capitalism flourishes to a greater degree than anywhere else, has been hit the hardest of all.

The secret to the country’s success was not just that societal cohesion was anchored by one of the most liberal constitutions in the world, but also by the promise of advancement inherent in the American Dream. The result was an extremely powerful country that seemed unlimited in its possibilities. It wasn’t always attractive, and sometimes it was downright ugly, but the U.S. was always the country that the rest of the world looked to. America proudly led the way.

The America of today has lost faith in its own superiority. It has become a regressive country that is turning its back on the world. If you leave Washington, D.C., behind and travel through the country, from Alabama to Alaska, you will find that the American Dream has been lost. The country is no longer proudly leading the way.

With his diabolical instinct for the country’s political mood, Trump captured this shift on campaign evenings like the one in Burlington, distilling it to a single maxim that warmed the hearts of many in the United States: “America First.” Trump epitomizes America’s desire for a new identity, he has lit a beacon of hope for the white majority that still makes up two-thirds of the country’s population. Many of them have come to feel like foreigners in their own country. More than anything, though, he has promised to return greatness and values to this unsettled and adrift slice of society. That he will “Make America Great Again.”

When I get ‘mindful’ about Islam, as urged by a think-tank at Griffith University, I recall the fire in a Mecca girls’ school that saw religious police force children back into the flames because they were deemed insufficiently modest to warrant rescue.
With help from lslamic community leaders, the Reporting Islam think-tank at Queensland’s Griffith University re-educates journalists nationally to report Islamic issues “more mindfully” (whatever that means). It’s not as though the ABC, SBS and Fairfax need any encouragement.

The unit, billed as a world-first flagship in terms of educating journos about Islam, got at least $445,000 grants for 2014-16 from the Attorney-General’s department in the Abbott government era. The AG’s top-level contractor for service delivery is the Queensland Police Force. Predictably, the unit won a Multicultural Award from the Queensland Government and SBS last year.

Like most of our universities, Griffith swarms with Islam-friendly academics (except, maybe, in the LBGTI etc safe spaces). Griffith University’s funding has also included $100,000 direct from Saudi Arabia, that bastion of academic freedom and respect for women, gays and Christians. This $100,000 a decade ago went to Griffith’s Islamic Research Unit (GIRU). Graham Perrett, Labor MHR for Moreton and a Griffith U fan, told Parliament, not altogether re-assuringly, that “Griffith University is just one of many institutions throughout the world to receive funding from the Saudi government.”

When I get “mindful” about Islam, as urged by Reporting Islam, I recall the episode in 2002 when a girls’ school in Mecca caught fire. The religious police, instead of helping the young girls to escape, locked them in or forced them back into the blaze. Why? Because the girls weren’t in proper Islamic dress; were not necessarily escorted by male guardians; and might create sexual frissons with the firemen. Fifteen girls burned to death.[1] Saudi’s public beheadings and all that? Watch if you dare. GRAPHIC material

However, nothing the Saudis get up to is as horrific as the deeds of the self-described Islamic State, which are nothing to do with Islam. There was an (STRONG CAUTION: GRAPHIC MATERIAL) ISIS video published a month ago showing a prisoner hog-tied to playground equipment. A boy of about six years is given a large knife and saws the live prisoner’s head half off.[2]

Close to home, nothing-to-do-with-Islam incidents have included

In 2006 Shaykh Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly, Mufti (or Grand Mufti) of Australia, gave a sermon in Arabic to a 500-strong crowd in the Lakemba Mosque describing immodestly-dressed women as ‘cat’s meat’ inciting rapists. [3] Hilaly also quoted approvingly an Islamic scholar who said women who were raped should be arrested and jailed for life for provoking males. Hilaly, who was appointed Mufti by the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils in 1988, had a subsequent history of anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist statements.
Melbourne Muslim cleric and terror cell leader Abdul Benbrika was convicted in 2008 of leading a terrorist network which wanted to blow up the 2005 MCG Grand Final crowd and blow up Crown casino on Grand Prix weekend.
The late Farhad Jabar, 15, in 2015 was allegedly handed the gun which he used to kill Parramatta police worker Curtis Cheng, in the female section of the Parramatta mosque. Jabar shortly before had listened to a sermon in the mosque from extremist Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Four men are under arrest in Melbourne for allegedly planning a Christmas Day attack on St Paul’s Cathedral, Flinders Street Station, and Federation Square.

These sorts of things make it hard for earnest reporters to keep up the positive spin on Islam. But Griffith’s Reporting Islam unit will be their coach, with the backing of the journos’ union, the MEAA. Key people on the team include leader Associate Professor Jacqui Ewart, and Professor Mark Pearson, a one-time reporter for The Australian.[4] They are supported by manager Dr Abdi Hersi, and other Muslim researchers and trainers.

Britain’s decisive vote to leave the European Union and the election, 20 weeks later, of Donald Trump have sent horrified elites to seek solace in fake news and stolen elections to attempt to explain away these twin popular revolts. At a public lecture in London on Brexit shortly before the presidential election, Princeton professor Harold James seized on a comment that Brexit was the outcome of post-truth politics. “Absolutely right,” Professor James responded. “I completely agree with every word.” It was the world of Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin, Professor James averred, one described by Peter Pomerantsev in Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia – which was, in the words of one reviewer, “a beautifully written depiction of a fevered, frenzied society, of a city glittering at the edge of darkness.” The history professor was equating the anti-establishment Brexit insurgency with Putin and the state-controlled Russian media.

A rare Brexit-supporting professor was sharing the platform. “I completely disagree,” declared Robert Tombs, a Cambridge historian and the author of The English and Their History. “We’ve never lived in an age of truth.” The two centuries after the invention of the printing press more or less saw the collapse of European civilization. “I just don’t know when there was a time when the people were told the truth by politicians and the press.”

What is new – and troubling – is the use of “fake news” to justify censorship and its use as a tool of social control. After Donald Trump’s election, liberals such as Tom Friedman hailed Germany’s Angela Merkel as the West’s true leader for upholding Western values. Her open-door immigration policy, which helped her garner Time magazine’s 2015 Person of the Year honor, is sometimes explained as reflecting her experience of living under Communism. “In East Germany, we always ran into boundaries before we were able to discover our own personal boundaries,” Time reported.

Sounds nice, but was that fake news? Merkel’s family was one of the few that had moved from West to East Germany. They had the privileges that came from being favored by the Party – two cars, access to stores selling Western goods, travel to the West. “They were élite,” Merkel’s Russian teacher said in a 2014 profile by George Packer in The New Yorker. A former East German colleague described her role as secretary for Agitation and Propaganda of the state youth organization, Freie Deutsche Jugend, at East Berlin’s Academy of Sciences. “With Agitation and Propaganda, you’re responsible for brainwashing in the sense of Marxism,” according to former German transport minister Günther Krause, who rejected Merkel’s claim that her role was mainly sourcing theater tickets for fellow students. “Agitation and Propaganda, that was the group that was meant to fill people’s brains with everything you were supposed to believe in the GDR, with all the ideological tricks.”

Any vestigial revulsion that the former Agitation and Propaganda secretary might have felt at the pervasive censorship of the East German state was quickly swallowed when Merkel sought to co-opt social media firms to help contain the backlash against her pro-immigration stance. In September 2015, she confronted Mark Zuckerberg after her government had complained that Facebook wasn’t doing enough to crack down on xenophobic postings. Last month, her government announced plans for a new law to fine Facebook up to €500,000 for distributing fake news.

The concept of thought pollution, which fake news supposedly feeds, is intrinsically totalitarian. It implies there are those who speak the truth and there are those who do not, casting the latter as enemies of society and, nowadays, of the planet. “We live in a world of radical ignorance,” claims Stanford professor Robert Proctor. “Agnotology” – the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance – is a term coined by Proctor, whose interest in it was sparked by his study of the tactics of Big Tobacco in obscuring the harmful effects of smoking cigarettes.

The secret tobacco memo that aroused Proctor’s attention was written in 1969, five years after the Surgeon General’s first report warned of the dangers of tobacco smoking. According to the successor report marking the report’s 50th anniversary, per capita consumption of cigarettes (based on Treasury Department data) peaked in the early 1950s, and blipped up again before starting a multi-decade decline from the early 1960s.

By contrast, the tobacco industry in Britain in the 1950s – at the insistence of the industry’s chief statistician (he had been sacked and reinstated six weeks later) – decided not to dispute the epidemiological evidence linking smoking with lung cancer. Notwithstanding tobacco-industry neutrality, per capita cigarette consumption in Britain continued to rise through the 1960s, peaking only in the mid 1970s, more than a decade later than in the U.S.

Social phenomena can be far more complex – and more interesting – than Proctor’s simplistic morality tale allows. Indeed, it turns out that agnotology is a self-referring idea that, like fake news, is a tool of propaganda. According to Proctor, combating ignorance extends far beyond clarifying the evidence. Inevitably switching from smoking to climate change, Proctor gives the issue an ideological and philosophical framing: “The fight is not just over the existence of climate change, it’s over whether God has created the Earth for us to exploit, whether government has the right to regulate industry, whether environmentalists should be empowered, and so on. It’s not just about the facts, it’s about what is imagined to flow from and into such facts.” (Emphasis added.)

Facts and non-facts do not exist in isolation from their context, something that history teaches above all. From Proctor’s thoroughly researched but morally dubious The Nazi War on Cancer (1999), we learn that “the barriers which separate ‘us’ from ‘them’ are not as high as some would like to imagine.” Himmler, for example, wanted the Waffen-SS to be non-smoking, non-drinking vegetarians and voiced an opinion often expressed by today’s political Left: “We are in the hands of the food companies, whose economic clout and advertising make it possible for them to prescribe what we can and cannot eat.”