RUTHFULLY YOURS

After Abbott’s disappointments, a list that begins with his repudiation of the promise to erase Section 18C, Liberals have placed themselves at the disposal of a wind-vane sensitive to every self-righteous gust howling out of the inner city. Core principles and the courage to advance them are the antidote
The path forward for conservatives is clear, now that the coup executed by Malcolm Turnbull has eradicated any illusions that the Liberal Party led by Tony Abbott could be an effective bulwark against the evermore intrusive power of the state as it seeks completely to colonize civil society and dominate every aspect of life.

Abbott had his chance right at the start of his prime ministership to make manifestly clear where he stood philosophically on the liberal-conservative continuum of political theory and principle. He had only to fulfil one election promise: repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act to restore free speech and expression of opinion – and he chose quite deliberately to break that promise. Apparently he was seeking to curry favour with various lobby groups anxious to retain their state-endorsed shield from all criticism or negative opinion (and, of course, notoriously, he failed in this demeaning aspiration). It was a defining moment. If he couldn’t be relied upon to do that one iconic thing then what else was he good for?

Now he has been swept unceremoniously aside, as Liberal MPs had their minds focused by an impending election wipe-out and, clutching at straws, turned to Malcolm Turnbull, whose political philosophy is even more bankrupt than Abbott’s. Despite airy-fairy motherhood statements about exciting economic and technological challenges, etc., this consists of little more than a fierce desire to snatch the prime ministership by appealing to inner-city progressives and trendoids, who are themselves driven by an insatiable narcissistic lust to assert their moral purity and remake the world in their own effete image.

The Labour Party is a self-consciously progressive party dominated by highly educated people who believe they understand the world and its problems better than anyone else. Jeremy Corbyn is the distilled essence of that otherworldly arrogance
The 2015 British election was a turning point for the Labour Party from which it is hard to see it recovering in its present form. Moreover, there is no obvious centre-Left success story elsewhere in Europe which might provide a guide and inspiration for a Labour recovery. The temporary advance of harder-Left parties like Syriza and Podemos is unlikely to survive contact with economic realities and, in any case, is just further competition for the moderate Left.

In fact Labour’s defeat—in part at the hands of nationalists and populists of Left and Right—represents for the party an unwelcome Europeanisation of British politics. The old social democratic alliance between blue-collar workers and the non-business professional middle class—what one might call the Hampstead–Humberside alliance—has long since disappeared in continental Europe. The Tony Blair victories of 1997, 2001 and 2005 turn out to have been its last hurrah in Britain.

There is plenty of space for a rooted, well-led, social democratic party in Britain capable of speaking for two-thirds of the country or more, and able to appeal to both aspirational middle- and lower-income voters and those who feel left behind by rapid social change. It is just very hard to see how Labour with its current activists, MPs and leaders could ever be that party. For it is the party’s inability to understand the cultural anxieties of most British voters that lost it the election. Leaving aside the (admittedly large) issue of economic competence and Ed Miliband, it simply had no answer to nationalism in Scotland, UKIP English populism in the Midlands and the North (which gave UKIP nearly 17 per cent of the vote and 44 second places in those areas) and the free-market modernity of southern England.

The US President’s actions in striking his pact with the messianic potentates of Tehran have not only guaranteed the nuclearisation of Iran, “the biggest planetary sponsor of terrorism”, but also hindered the chances of Israel preventing this catastrophe
The Third Reich might have desired a “wonder weapon” and yet for all its dark fantasies never achieved that goal. Unless you include the (relatively speaking) desultory V1 and V2 rockets in the category of Wunderwaffe, the Nazis fell well short of the mark—and thank God or the Grand Alliance for that. The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime no less defined by apocalyptic millennialism and eliminationist anti-Semitism than Hitler’s government, has now—thanks to Barack Obama—been given the wherewithal to obtain nuclear-weapons capabilities, if not in the next year or so, certainly within ten to fifteen years.

Nuclear diplomacy, as Michael Rubin argues in Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue States (2014), only works if a rogue regime wants to renounce its pariah status, as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi did in December 2003. Otherwise, sitting down at the table with the representatives of a miscreant regime—as per North Korea—seems more likely than not to reinforce the contrariness of the rogue entity, since it is that very defiance that brings Western offers of conciliation and recompense in the first place. Over twelve years of on-off-on nuclear talks with Iran has produced more negatives than dividends: “Iranian authorities have become masterful at taking ten steps forward toward their nuclear goal, so long as they mollify diplomats by occasionally taking one step back.” As has been argued by Kissinger and Shultz (see “Wiser Men on the Iranian Deal”, Quadrant, May 2015), Western negotiations with Tehran have had the paradoxical effect of making possible what they were originally intended to prevent: the legitimisation of Iran as a nuclear threshold power.

Critics of the Iran nuclear deal often point to Bill Clinton’s nuclear accord with North Korea as a reference point for what we can expect next, and this week we were given a fresh lesson on that score. Satellite imagery shows Pyongyang is reactivating its plutonium reactor at Yongbyon, and now the regime has publicly threatened to produce more bombs and test another long-range ballistic missile.

That isn’t the nuclear-free future Mr. Clinton promised in 1994, when he claimed “the entire world will be safer” thanks to a deal that required Pyongyang to “freeze and then dismantle its nuclear program.” Oh well. For now, the interesting question is why Pyongyang is again rattling its nuclear saber. There may be an Iran angle here, too.

Our Central European correspondent Max Denken returns with an overview of the “migration crisis” — not just the current metastasis of the disease in Europe, but also the symptoms exhibited throughout the twilight of the Western world.

Hope for thee, suicide for me

Like Goethe’s Young Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther (German: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774) Europe is committing suicide.

An unrequited love, as was the case with Goethe’s protagonist, except in this case it’s not for Lotte but for non-White, non-Christian “humanity.” An inability to take one’s own side in a conflict — ditto Werther, plus that’s the very definition of “Progressive.” A conviction, like Werther’s, that her suicide is necessary to restore balance and happiness — in her case, of the world. And voilà: the shot booms.

This being the 21st century, a pastiche of Beethoven’s and Schiller’s Ode to Joy is playing in the background, affirming the suicide’s undying “celebration” of the “European values” of “unity in diversity, freedom, peace, and solidarity.” Which would have been great, had the diversity not been artificially torqued to include at least 50 million aliens from all corners of the Third World. The great majority of whom are unalterably alien and unabsorbable Muslims.

Now even that has been superseded by prostration before a drowning tide of “refugees” from Africa and the Middle East — mostly Muslims, too. Muslims that Europe has fought at least ten major wars between AD 711 and 1699 to keep out of Europe, not counting dozens of bloody regional wars that individual nations had to wage to protect themselves from Islamic aggression, e.g. Russia (nine wars with Turkey alone ending 1878), Poland, Hungary, Byzantium, Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania and others.

All that is accompanied by massive propaganda, lying, obfuscation, subterfuge, blackmail of dissenters and sheer terror at the hand of the states’ and EU’s ruling elites, hired “anti-racist” hounds, journalists groomed by postmodern Marxist mentors, freelance Antifa shock troops, and their Muslim allies. The psychotic illusion started long ego, when Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s foisted his European Union “dream” onto the European elite in the 1920s. The elite then foisted it on a bamboozled population, beginning in the 1950s-60s (see Jean Monnet, Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Kohl and others) [1].

Coudenhove-Kalergi, a rich cosmopolitan aristocrat who, like today’s European and American potentates of the New World Order, never held a real job or balanced a checkbook, wrote in his Practical Idealism:

“The man of the future will be of mixed race. Today’s races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals.”[2]

He also wrote, in his Pan-European Manifesto (Eng. trans. Alfred A. Knopf, 1926, as Pan Europe) “Every great political happening began as a Utopia and ended as a Reality.” How true: we might adduce such additional examples as the Children’s Crusade in 1212, Communism, Maoism, National Socialism, and even Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple, of Jonestown, Guyana fame.

The European Union’s plan for immigration is as nonexistent as its plan for debt.

In the immediate refugee crisis many Europeans are acting on their humanitarian instincts, and that’s laudable. Angela Merkel, Germany’s leader, has been beatified for spontaneously throwing open her country’s doors to an estimated 800,000 Middle Eastern immigrants.

But Ms. Merkel has been busy for five years trying to save the eurozone by throwing extend-and-pretend money at Greece and other countries. She knew these loans weren’t a solution for Europe’s debt and stagnation problems; they were meant to stop the European Union from blowing up in the meantime. Her refugee policy is also partly a case of extend-and-pretend. Germany stepped up to forestall an outbreak of defiance of the EU’s open-borders mandate by front-line European states, triggering a crisis of Brussels’s authority.

Though it may be a humanitarian necessity too, her immigration initiative amounts to yet another time-buying exercise for a European unity project that seems more troubled by the day.

John Kasich is such a nice man. He is a fine governor, but I am sooooo tired of “compassionate conservatives.” He may be an antidote to the hype and vulgarity of Trump, but wanting a “big tent” in the GOP is so yesterday.

I want an impregnable, secure tent protected by the best and mightiest military in American history. I want a president that recognizes the difference between evil empires and allies. I want a president that recognizes and verbalizes the threat of resurgent radical Islam in our immigration and foreign policies. I want a president that respects state rights as a litmus test in choosing judges for the Supreme Court.I want a president that will take the EPO down to size and stop rules and regulations that impede fixing the infrastructure and kill jobs.

I want an antidote to the present administration from top to bottom.

Let the real debates begin.

The Middle East has become a roiling cauldron as multiple and often competing terror groups continue their bloody rampages throughout that embattled region of the world.

By its words and deeds — or more properly, by lack of deeds — the Obama administration created a power vacuum. The situation was further exacerbated when the president drew “lines in the sand” and demonstrated an abject lack of resolve when he failed to act when those lines were crossed.

Negotiations must always be conducted from a position of strength, however, the administration’s posture and apparent lack of resolve projected anything but strength.

Our adversaries respect strength and, conversely, become emboldened when we demonstrate weakness.

Radical Islamists saw opportunities in all of the above and ISIS pushed on with its plans to create a Caliphate. Today huge numbers of people are understandably fleeing the violence and chaos that has enveloped Syria and other parts of the Middle East.

In July 1940, after the debacle of Dunkirk and the fall of France, an anonymously published book called The Guilty Men criticized by name 18 politicians for the policy of appeasement that had led to the war. Someday someone will no doubt write a similar exposé of the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran. But there will be more than 18 culprits whose hands will be stained with the blood this capitulation will lead to.

Start with the 42 Senators who for now are saving Obama from having to veto the bill intended to slow down an agreement that is a disaster for our security and interests. There are only two explanations for these cowardly votes. Either the Senators endorse the delusional argument that giving away the store to Iran is the only option for stopping the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons, or they made a despicable political calculation that their careers depended on staying in the good graces of the party’s hierarchy and its leader. In the end it doesn’t matter if they are naïve idealists, like Neville Chamberlain, or selfish careerists. The dangers are the same.

On Friday the European Parliament, amid a major migration crisis, zeroed in on Europe’s real problem: it voted to start labeling goods that come from “occupied” Israeli territory in the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

The measure passed by a vote of 525 to 70 with 31 abstentions. Although it’s nonbinding, it follows earlier EU resolutions on prohibiting contacts with Israeli “settlements,” and is seen as threatening enough that the Israeli Foreign Ministry has scheduled an emergency meeting on the issue later this week.

An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman said the move was discriminatory and “had the smell of a boycott.” Europe has an inglorious modern history of boycotting Jews and Jewish businesses leading to the Nazi boycotts beginning in 1933.

Europe’s concern about Israel’s “occupation” is highly specific and even unique. As commentator Evelyn Gordon notes, drawing on work by international-law scholar Eugene Kontorovich, the same EU officials who treat the Israeli occupation as criminal “happily facilitate Turkish activity in occupied Northern Cyprus, Moroccan activity in occupied Western Sahara, Chinese activity in occupied Tibet, and much more.”