This for all the non-Catholics out there who can't understand why Walt and others are making such a big fuss about the partial destructionby fire of the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris. In "Notre Dame in flames: part of the Great Chastisement?" (WWW 16/4/19) I saw the tragedy as evidence of God's displeasure with the modern Roman Catholic Church. A similar view was expressed by Michael Matt in "Notre Dame will rise again!" (WWW 17/4/19).
But Notre Dame was... still is... much more than a house of worship for Christians. The building itself embodies and symbolizes the history and culture of European civilization, for the history of Christianity is the history of Europe and the entire Western world. That stone truth is discussed in this video by Bill Whittle and the men of Right Angle. As far as I know, none of the 3 is Catholic is Catholic, and that's just the point.
Notre Dame is immensely important as a symbol of Western civilization. If it is not rebuilt, or if it is "modified" to make it "more modern" and "inclusive" -- say by putting an Islamic crescent at the top of a new spire -- that would represent the finality of the decline of the West. Now is the time to resurrect not just the cathedral but of the ideas and values that informed the building of the cathedral. God save Notre Dame... and God save us Christians!
Showing posts with label European civilization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label European civilization. Show all posts
Thursday, April 18, 2019
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
VIDEO: Douglas Murray discusses "The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam" with Mark Steyn
I have mentioned Douglas Murray's excellent book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam a couple of times in recent weeks, most recently in "The irreversible browning of Canada", WWW 26/10/17, which is in the running to be one of Walt's most-read posts of the year. But until now we haven't put up a video of the author discussing his work. Ed. has found a number on YouTube -- Mr Murray seems to have done his book tour on the Internet! -- and has selected an interview with Mark Steyn, so you get two voices of reason in one video. Running time is just over an hour.
Further reading (and watching): You'll find a review of The Strange Death of Europe, copied from Goodreads, as well as a much shorter video (11 minutes) in "Douglas Murray explains the lie of multiculturalism", WWW 24/9/17. Now go out and buy the book. Tell 'em Walt sent ya!
Further reading (and watching): You'll find a review of The Strange Death of Europe, copied from Goodreads, as well as a much shorter video (11 minutes) in "Douglas Murray explains the lie of multiculturalism", WWW 24/9/17. Now go out and buy the book. Tell 'em Walt sent ya!
Thursday, October 26, 2017
The irreversible browning of Canada
Assiduous readers of WWW will know that I habitually refer to the huge landmass north of the world's longest undefended border as the Great Not-so-white North or the Great No-longer-white North. I have been accused of exaggerating the degree to which Canada has been changed by the mass immigration encouraged by its governments (both Conservative and Liberal) over the last half-century. Data from the 2016 Census released by Statistics Canada this week show that I was right. Lifetime pct .991.
The decennial head count found that 21.9% of the Canadian residents counted are immigrants, the highest percentage in 85 years. And, I venture to say, the actual percentage is higher still, since the hundreds of thousands of migrants living in Canada illegally are unlikely to have filled in the census forms. StatsCan itself, if it were honest, would concede that the lowest rates of completion of the questionnaires were in the ethnic enclaves (read: ghettos) of Toronto, Vancouver and Montréal.
The naïve Canucks -- correction: the Canuck government -- accepted 1.2 million new immigrants between 2011 and 2016, with another 300,000 expected to have arrived by the end of this year. 60% of them were "economic migrants" -- the desirable (?) kind -- with the remaining 40% being allowed in under the "family reunification" programme -- less desirable -- or as "refugees" or asylum-seekers or "irregularly admitted", the kind of people the majority of Canadians have said they don't want to "welcome" to their country. See "Majority of Canucks think government 'too generous' to asylum-seekers", WWW 15/9/17.
By far the largest source of new immigrants (over 60%) come from Asia, including the Muslim Middle East. Africa has now surpassed Europe as the second-most important source, with folks from the Dark Continent (including Muslim North Africa) increasing to 13.4%. Here's how the numbers look in graph form.
Syria now ranks as the seventh biggest source of immigrants, thanks to the tens of thousands of refugees -- almost all Muslim -- welcomed by Junior after his election in the fall of 2015. In 2011 it was ranked 50th. Africans have to be counted among the immigrants from "other countries", since they hail from a number of different countries. The majority of them are not from sub-Saharan Africa, but from the Arab countries of north Africa, who are accepted by the Québec government because they are French-speaking. From Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya and Egypt, Canada gets such upstanding citizens as Omar Khadr and Muayyed Nureddin, Abdullah Almalki, and Ahmad Elmaati (see footnote).
Although it asks about religion and ethnic origin elsewhere in the Census, StatsCan (and the Ministry of Immigration and Refugees) doesn't record these details for new immigrants, so it's just possible that some of the 41,480 who came from Pakistan might be Christian and white, although I wouldn't bet on it. (Lifetime pct .991.) But from the country of origin data, it's easy enough to extrapolate a "colour profile", so that the vizmins (= "visible minorities") can be identified and celebrated.
If you're a white Canadian, you might feel relieved (if you're the credulous type) when your government tells you that only 22.3% are "visible minorities" (read: non-white), even though that proportion is set to rise to over a third within one generation. You're still in the majority, right? Errr, no. It depends where you live. Another datum from the 2016 Census confirms that Canada's largest city, Toronto, is now a "minority majority" city, meaning that whiteys like you are now outnumbered by the dark-complected types who inhabit neighbourhoods like Dixon. See "Why no-one wants to take in Somali 'refugees'", WWW 16/10/17.
What I find most striking about the census data released yesterday is the comparison between the Canada of 2016 and the Great White North described in the Census of 1971. Here's the last (and most depressing) of the three graphs which Ed. has copied from CP, which got them from the StatsCan documents.
In 1971, fully 89% of the immigrants counted in the census came from Europe and the USA. Most of those would have been white. By last year, the percentage coming from Europe and the USA had shrunk to 31%, and more of those are non-white, having spent some time in the USA or Europe before moving to Canada. "Refugees" who apply to come to Canada from Germany (for instance) are counted as coming from Europe, not Syria or Afghanistan (for instance).
If you're a white Canadian -- perhaps one of the "white flees" who have escaped the ghettos of the GTA for the greener (whiter?) pastures of Grey County -- you will find the numbers from the 2016 Census depressing. It's not hard to see the trend. What's depressing is that it's too late now for the browning of Canada to be stopped. A half-century of liberal rule and white liberal guilt have done irreversible damage.
Even if the Canuck welcome mat were pulled back under the door tomorrow, the fecund third-world immigrants -- especially those who don't believe in birth control and abortion -- will pop out about 2.5 brown babies for every white baby. If you're a young, white Canadian, and want to keep living in a white community, you'd better start thinking about emigrating to... well... errr... eastern Europe perhaps -- someplace whose people still believe that European Christian civilization is the acme of human development. And good luck to you!
Recommended reading: The Strange Death of Europe, by Douglas Murray (Bloomsbury Continuum 2017).
Footnote: Turns out Omar Khadr wasn't the only soldier of the Prophet to become instant multimillionaires, courtesy of Canuck taxpayers. CBC News reports that Junior Trudeau's Liberal government has paid a total of C$31.25 million in settlements to three Muslim Canadian men "wrongfully accused of links to terrorism and tortured in Syria and Egypt" after being fingered by the Mounties and Canada's alleged spy agency." Muayyed Nureddin, Abdullah Almalki, and Ahmad Elmaati [What? No "Mohammed"? Ed.] will split the windfall, nearly $25 million in real money. That makes a total of over C$40 million paid out so far this year to four Islamists who were lucky to get the benefit of the doubt.
COMMENTS WELCOME! Click on the headline to open the comments window.
The decennial head count found that 21.9% of the Canadian residents counted are immigrants, the highest percentage in 85 years. And, I venture to say, the actual percentage is higher still, since the hundreds of thousands of migrants living in Canada illegally are unlikely to have filled in the census forms. StatsCan itself, if it were honest, would concede that the lowest rates of completion of the questionnaires were in the ethnic enclaves (read: ghettos) of Toronto, Vancouver and Montréal.
The naïve Canucks -- correction: the Canuck government -- accepted 1.2 million new immigrants between 2011 and 2016, with another 300,000 expected to have arrived by the end of this year. 60% of them were "economic migrants" -- the desirable (?) kind -- with the remaining 40% being allowed in under the "family reunification" programme -- less desirable -- or as "refugees" or asylum-seekers or "irregularly admitted", the kind of people the majority of Canadians have said they don't want to "welcome" to their country. See "Majority of Canucks think government 'too generous' to asylum-seekers", WWW 15/9/17.
By far the largest source of new immigrants (over 60%) come from Asia, including the Muslim Middle East. Africa has now surpassed Europe as the second-most important source, with folks from the Dark Continent (including Muslim North Africa) increasing to 13.4%. Here's how the numbers look in graph form.
Syria now ranks as the seventh biggest source of immigrants, thanks to the tens of thousands of refugees -- almost all Muslim -- welcomed by Junior after his election in the fall of 2015. In 2011 it was ranked 50th. Africans have to be counted among the immigrants from "other countries", since they hail from a number of different countries. The majority of them are not from sub-Saharan Africa, but from the Arab countries of north Africa, who are accepted by the Québec government because they are French-speaking. From Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya and Egypt, Canada gets such upstanding citizens as Omar Khadr and Muayyed Nureddin, Abdullah Almalki, and Ahmad Elmaati (see footnote).
Although it asks about religion and ethnic origin elsewhere in the Census, StatsCan (and the Ministry of Immigration and Refugees) doesn't record these details for new immigrants, so it's just possible that some of the 41,480 who came from Pakistan might be Christian and white, although I wouldn't bet on it. (Lifetime pct .991.) But from the country of origin data, it's easy enough to extrapolate a "colour profile", so that the vizmins (= "visible minorities") can be identified and celebrated.
If you're a white Canadian, you might feel relieved (if you're the credulous type) when your government tells you that only 22.3% are "visible minorities" (read: non-white), even though that proportion is set to rise to over a third within one generation. You're still in the majority, right? Errr, no. It depends where you live. Another datum from the 2016 Census confirms that Canada's largest city, Toronto, is now a "minority majority" city, meaning that whiteys like you are now outnumbered by the dark-complected types who inhabit neighbourhoods like Dixon. See "Why no-one wants to take in Somali 'refugees'", WWW 16/10/17.
What I find most striking about the census data released yesterday is the comparison between the Canada of 2016 and the Great White North described in the Census of 1971. Here's the last (and most depressing) of the three graphs which Ed. has copied from CP, which got them from the StatsCan documents.
In 1971, fully 89% of the immigrants counted in the census came from Europe and the USA. Most of those would have been white. By last year, the percentage coming from Europe and the USA had shrunk to 31%, and more of those are non-white, having spent some time in the USA or Europe before moving to Canada. "Refugees" who apply to come to Canada from Germany (for instance) are counted as coming from Europe, not Syria or Afghanistan (for instance).
If you're a white Canadian -- perhaps one of the "white flees" who have escaped the ghettos of the GTA for the greener (whiter?) pastures of Grey County -- you will find the numbers from the 2016 Census depressing. It's not hard to see the trend. What's depressing is that it's too late now for the browning of Canada to be stopped. A half-century of liberal rule and white liberal guilt have done irreversible damage.
Even if the Canuck welcome mat were pulled back under the door tomorrow, the fecund third-world immigrants -- especially those who don't believe in birth control and abortion -- will pop out about 2.5 brown babies for every white baby. If you're a young, white Canadian, and want to keep living in a white community, you'd better start thinking about emigrating to... well... errr... eastern Europe perhaps -- someplace whose people still believe that European Christian civilization is the acme of human development. And good luck to you!
Recommended reading: The Strange Death of Europe, by Douglas Murray (Bloomsbury Continuum 2017).
Footnote: Turns out Omar Khadr wasn't the only soldier of the Prophet to become instant multimillionaires, courtesy of Canuck taxpayers. CBC News reports that Junior Trudeau's Liberal government has paid a total of C$31.25 million in settlements to three Muslim Canadian men "wrongfully accused of links to terrorism and tortured in Syria and Egypt" after being fingered by the Mounties and Canada's alleged spy agency." Muayyed Nureddin, Abdullah Almalki, and Ahmad Elmaati [What? No "Mohammed"? Ed.] will split the windfall, nearly $25 million in real money. That makes a total of over C$40 million paid out so far this year to four Islamists who were lucky to get the benefit of the doubt.
COMMENTS WELCOME! Click on the headline to open the comments window.
Sunday, June 18, 2017
Anti-immigrant backlash grows across Europe
While I was away [Watch this space for "Tales from Down East". Ed.], Agent 17 sent along the link to "'Enlightenment values': Austria enacts anti-burqa & compulsory integration law", RT News 9/6/17. "Enlightenment values" strikes me as a good phrase. What are those values? They must be the "values" -- a loaded word for the progressive do-good wienies -- which "enlightened" people share and hold dear. "Enlightened" is nowadays equated, quite properly, with the word "civilized". (See the article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)
Enlightened civilization -- European civilization -- is under threat now as never before from the hordes of unenlightened -- read Muslim -- invaders pouring into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa. Even such famously tolerant peoples as the Swedes and the Austrians are getting tired of it, and fearful of being drowned in the wave of Islamization sweeping across the continent. That's what the article is about.
Like King Canute trying to turn back the tide, the Austrian parliament has passed a law that will fine women who wear Islamic dress covering the whole face, and takes away welfare benefits from immigrants who fail to learn the language. It says, remarkably frankly, that "those who are not prepared to accept Enlightenment values will have to leave our country and society."
According to the law, women will face a fine of €150 ($168 in real money) if they wear Islamic dress, either the niqab or the burqa, in public places. In addition to the fines, all new migrants -- even the "refugees" and asylum-seekers -- coming to Austria will now be forced, if they want to suck on the public tit [receive welfare benefits, surely! Ed.] to take a 12-month "integration course" that includes German language lessons.
But wait (as Vince Offer used to say), there's more! The new law also makes it illegal for newcomers to distribute "incendiary materials". Migrants will also be encouraged to volunteer -- do unpaid community work -- to prepare them for life in the workplace, before acquiring permanent work permits. Good luck with that one.
Austria's latest attempt to integrate new immigrants has come in response to the migrant crisis rocking most European countries. At least 90,000 migrants, mostly from Muslim-majority countries outside Europe, have arrived in Austria since 2015. Nothing like the hundreds of thousands who've entered Germany, but still you have to hand it to the Austrians for trying to do something about the problem before it's too late. Oh... wait....
Meanwhile... Virginia Raggi, the Mayor of Rome, has asked the Italian government to stop the flow of immigrants into the Eternal City. Here's why.
This is one of several "camps" -- read "instant slums" -- which have sprung up in Rome. The unenlightened people who live here in squalor are Roma. That's the PC name for "gypsies", the people our mothers warned us would pick our pockets, steal our horses and kidnap our children. They do do those things, except maybe for the horses, of which there's a dearth in Rome, which is why, this past Tuesday, Sra Raggi asked the Italian interior ministry to suspend migrant arrivals to the capital. "I find it impossible, as well as risky," she wrote, "to think up further accommodation structures." See
Rome mayor promises to close Roma camps in the capital , The Local it, 31/5/17.
Mayor Raggi cited as reasons for the request the "strong migratory presence" in the capital and "the continued influx of foreign citizens". According to the most recent figures published by the administration, on 1 January 2016 -- nearly 18 months ago -- there were approximately 364,632 foreigners living in Rome, almost 13% of the total population.
Across Italy as a whole [Ed., please check spelling] around 8.3% of the population is foreign. In Rome, around half of the foreign population were from Europe, with Romanians -- gypsies -- making up 23.2% of the total. Although over half the 170,000 or so Roma in Italy are Italian citizens with regular jobs and houses, attacks on the ousiders are common. According to a 2015 Pew Research Centre survey, anti-Roma sentiment is significantly stronger in Italy than almost any other European country. Not hard to understand, is it?
Enlightened civilization -- European civilization -- is under threat now as never before from the hordes of unenlightened -- read Muslim -- invaders pouring into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa. Even such famously tolerant peoples as the Swedes and the Austrians are getting tired of it, and fearful of being drowned in the wave of Islamization sweeping across the continent. That's what the article is about.Like King Canute trying to turn back the tide, the Austrian parliament has passed a law that will fine women who wear Islamic dress covering the whole face, and takes away welfare benefits from immigrants who fail to learn the language. It says, remarkably frankly, that "those who are not prepared to accept Enlightenment values will have to leave our country and society."
According to the law, women will face a fine of €150 ($168 in real money) if they wear Islamic dress, either the niqab or the burqa, in public places. In addition to the fines, all new migrants -- even the "refugees" and asylum-seekers -- coming to Austria will now be forced, if they want to suck on the public tit [receive welfare benefits, surely! Ed.] to take a 12-month "integration course" that includes German language lessons.
But wait (as Vince Offer used to say), there's more! The new law also makes it illegal for newcomers to distribute "incendiary materials". Migrants will also be encouraged to volunteer -- do unpaid community work -- to prepare them for life in the workplace, before acquiring permanent work permits. Good luck with that one.
Austria's latest attempt to integrate new immigrants has come in response to the migrant crisis rocking most European countries. At least 90,000 migrants, mostly from Muslim-majority countries outside Europe, have arrived in Austria since 2015. Nothing like the hundreds of thousands who've entered Germany, but still you have to hand it to the Austrians for trying to do something about the problem before it's too late. Oh... wait....
Meanwhile... Virginia Raggi, the Mayor of Rome, has asked the Italian government to stop the flow of immigrants into the Eternal City. Here's why.
This is one of several "camps" -- read "instant slums" -- which have sprung up in Rome. The unenlightened people who live here in squalor are Roma. That's the PC name for "gypsies", the people our mothers warned us would pick our pockets, steal our horses and kidnap our children. They do do those things, except maybe for the horses, of which there's a dearth in Rome, which is why, this past Tuesday, Sra Raggi asked the Italian interior ministry to suspend migrant arrivals to the capital. "I find it impossible, as well as risky," she wrote, "to think up further accommodation structures." See
Rome mayor promises to close Roma camps in the capital , The Local it, 31/5/17.
Mayor Raggi cited as reasons for the request the "strong migratory presence" in the capital and "the continued influx of foreign citizens". According to the most recent figures published by the administration, on 1 January 2016 -- nearly 18 months ago -- there were approximately 364,632 foreigners living in Rome, almost 13% of the total population.
Across Italy as a whole [Ed., please check spelling] around 8.3% of the population is foreign. In Rome, around half of the foreign population were from Europe, with Romanians -- gypsies -- making up 23.2% of the total. Although over half the 170,000 or so Roma in Italy are Italian citizens with regular jobs and houses, attacks on the ousiders are common. According to a 2015 Pew Research Centre survey, anti-Roma sentiment is significantly stronger in Italy than almost any other European country. Not hard to understand, is it?
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Why the rest of the world hates America -- another view
D'you know where Chuck Thompson comes from? Juneau! I know, but d'you know Juneau? It's the capital city of Alaska [Not Anchorage? Ed.] and, according to Chuck, a good place to be from. Like Bill Bryson leaving Des Moines, Mr. Thompson left his hometown to see the rest of the world. And write about it.
Chuck Thompson is a travel writer -- the kind who writes magazine articles about places like Juneau, because doing so pays the bills and gets you a look at the rest of the world. But he has the self-awareness to know when he's writing bullshit, and the courage to write the truth, when he can.
In Smile When You're Lying (Holt, 2007) Mr. Thompson gives readers "a hilarious behind-the-brochures tour of picture-perfect locales, dangerous destinations, and overrated hellholes". (That's from the blurb on the cover.) A reviewer said "This Thompson will remind readers of Hunter S.". Walt disagrees. No-one writes like Dr. Gonzo at his best, besides which travelling was only a sidebar to HST's main topic. Nevertheless, this Thompson does remind me of the early P.J. O'Rourke. Holidays in Hell springs to mind. I give Smile When You're Lying a big thumb up.
But a book review isn't what I intended to write. And Smile When You're Lying is more than an anthology of bad trips. In the final chapter -- "Not-So-Ugly Americans and the Road of Good Intentions" -- Chuck Thompson gives his opinions on why Americans in general and American tourists in particular are more reviled in the rest of the world than ever before. His argument makes so much sense to me as to demand a lengthy quote. Here it is.
Around the planet, "America" has become a byword for the kind of pushy, greedy, arrogant, ignorant, scheming, intolerant, hypocritical, violent, militaristic, goose-stepping, blood-gulping, Limbaugh-worshipping bullies that civilized people since time eternal have despised and occasionally battled to death....
No matter how many beaches we [clean] up, no matter how many schools we build amid the rubble of villages we bomb, the world will judge Americans not as well-meaning individuals but as faceless supporters of a fascist regime drunk with military power and an unslakable thirst for oil. In the way Americans once held all citizens of the Soviet Union in contempt, in the way the world's 1 billion baptized Catholics are somehow held accountable for every impetuous decree from a geriatric pontiff whose native language the majority of them don't even speak, the world now judges Americans as an evil herd.
Unfair, maybe, but this makes a kind of sense. Universal scorn is what results from willingly paying taxes to a government that sends soldiers around the globe to secure oil fields and flatten ancient civilizations before trying to rebuilt them according to its own shabby blueprints.... If you pay the taxes that foot the bills, you're complicit in the big picture. And you're hated for it.
Since the entirety of American civilization is based upon European civilization...the progression of American history shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone in the Old World. In the Middle East today, the United States is only acting in the manner that virtually all of its European fathers did whenever they enjoyed military, technological, and economic superiority over a foreign country -- that is to say, using a dominant army to overthrow a foreign regime and shuttle in private enterprise beneath the security of a semi-permanent military presence to extract resources and amass wealth....
Let's all stop being so naïve about who runs the U.S. government and remember...that it was that great peacenik Jimmy Carter who in 1980 signed the Carter Doctrine, making it official U.S. policy to employ "any means necessary" to protect the flow of oil from the Middle East, a document used by both Bushes to justify military actions in the region.
Democrat or Republican, the U.S. government always operates in the interest of corporate profit. And when it yaps about protecting your freedom and the "American way of life", that expressly means the inalienable right to burn Middle Eastern oil so that we can be warm in winter, cool in summer, and travel anywhere we want, whether it's to a beach in Tahiti or the beer cooler at the Quickie Mart down the street.
And now a few words for Walt's Canadian readers. Chuck Thompson concludes Smile When You're Lying thus: Just when you think you've seen the best the world has to offer, there'll always be Canada. That's the very last sentence of the book. The suggestion is that, compared with the Land of the Free [sic] and the Home of the Brave [sic], Canada is, in the writer's opinion, a veritable free and righteous paradise.
Dear Canucks... please keep in mind that Mr. Thompson wrote those words in 2007, before your Dear Leader, Steve Harper, got his hands on the levers of power and began his campaign to remake the Great White North into a pale imitation of the USA. See "Ralph Nader asks: What's happening to Canada?!" I'm sure Chuck Thompson is asking the same question.
Chuck Thompson is a travel writer -- the kind who writes magazine articles about places like Juneau, because doing so pays the bills and gets you a look at the rest of the world. But he has the self-awareness to know when he's writing bullshit, and the courage to write the truth, when he can.
In Smile When You're Lying (Holt, 2007) Mr. Thompson gives readers "a hilarious behind-the-brochures tour of picture-perfect locales, dangerous destinations, and overrated hellholes". (That's from the blurb on the cover.) A reviewer said "This Thompson will remind readers of Hunter S.". Walt disagrees. No-one writes like Dr. Gonzo at his best, besides which travelling was only a sidebar to HST's main topic. Nevertheless, this Thompson does remind me of the early P.J. O'Rourke. Holidays in Hell springs to mind. I give Smile When You're Lying a big thumb up.
But a book review isn't what I intended to write. And Smile When You're Lying is more than an anthology of bad trips. In the final chapter -- "Not-So-Ugly Americans and the Road of Good Intentions" -- Chuck Thompson gives his opinions on why Americans in general and American tourists in particular are more reviled in the rest of the world than ever before. His argument makes so much sense to me as to demand a lengthy quote. Here it is.
Around the planet, "America" has become a byword for the kind of pushy, greedy, arrogant, ignorant, scheming, intolerant, hypocritical, violent, militaristic, goose-stepping, blood-gulping, Limbaugh-worshipping bullies that civilized people since time eternal have despised and occasionally battled to death....
No matter how many beaches we [clean] up, no matter how many schools we build amid the rubble of villages we bomb, the world will judge Americans not as well-meaning individuals but as faceless supporters of a fascist regime drunk with military power and an unslakable thirst for oil. In the way Americans once held all citizens of the Soviet Union in contempt, in the way the world's 1 billion baptized Catholics are somehow held accountable for every impetuous decree from a geriatric pontiff whose native language the majority of them don't even speak, the world now judges Americans as an evil herd.
Unfair, maybe, but this makes a kind of sense. Universal scorn is what results from willingly paying taxes to a government that sends soldiers around the globe to secure oil fields and flatten ancient civilizations before trying to rebuilt them according to its own shabby blueprints.... If you pay the taxes that foot the bills, you're complicit in the big picture. And you're hated for it.
Since the entirety of American civilization is based upon European civilization...the progression of American history shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone in the Old World. In the Middle East today, the United States is only acting in the manner that virtually all of its European fathers did whenever they enjoyed military, technological, and economic superiority over a foreign country -- that is to say, using a dominant army to overthrow a foreign regime and shuttle in private enterprise beneath the security of a semi-permanent military presence to extract resources and amass wealth....
Let's all stop being so naïve about who runs the U.S. government and remember...that it was that great peacenik Jimmy Carter who in 1980 signed the Carter Doctrine, making it official U.S. policy to employ "any means necessary" to protect the flow of oil from the Middle East, a document used by both Bushes to justify military actions in the region.
Democrat or Republican, the U.S. government always operates in the interest of corporate profit. And when it yaps about protecting your freedom and the "American way of life", that expressly means the inalienable right to burn Middle Eastern oil so that we can be warm in winter, cool in summer, and travel anywhere we want, whether it's to a beach in Tahiti or the beer cooler at the Quickie Mart down the street.
And now a few words for Walt's Canadian readers. Chuck Thompson concludes Smile When You're Lying thus: Just when you think you've seen the best the world has to offer, there'll always be Canada. That's the very last sentence of the book. The suggestion is that, compared with the Land of the Free [sic] and the Home of the Brave [sic], Canada is, in the writer's opinion, a veritable free and righteous paradise.
Dear Canucks... please keep in mind that Mr. Thompson wrote those words in 2007, before your Dear Leader, Steve Harper, got his hands on the levers of power and began his campaign to remake the Great White North into a pale imitation of the USA. See "Ralph Nader asks: What's happening to Canada?!" I'm sure Chuck Thompson is asking the same question.
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