Pascal Bruckner, in a must-read essay in Quillette, describes how Europe is allowing its own virtue to destroy it.

Western Europeans dislike themselves. They are unable to overcome their self-disgust and feel the pride in their heritage and the self-respect that is so strikingly evident in the United States. Modern Europe is instead mired in shame shrouded in moralizing discourse. It has convinced itself that, since all the evils of the twentieth century arose from its feverish bellicosity, it’s about time it redeemed itself and sought something like a reawakened sense of the sacred in its guilty conscience.

What better example of this proclivity exists than Angela Merkel’s embrace of about a million refugees fleeing war-torn Syria in 2015? Even though this gesture that would help replenish a shrinking labor force was not strictly disinterested, for this pastor’s daughter it was also a spectacular way to repudiate Nazism and escape its shadow. After the catastrophe of the Second World War, the Federal Republic would now offer itself as an ostentatious example to the world. Germany would practice open-heartedness in a single country, just as Stalin in the USSR had once practiced socialism in a single country. Already pre-eminent in Europe, Berlin would call the shots, whether exercising toughness or kindness. Merciless with the Greeks in July, when the Chancellery wanted to eject them from the eurozone, but beneficent with the Syrians in September, it could demonstrate severity or an ever so imperial charity. …

Many people are wondering why it is only Europe that feels guilty, not only for its own past crimes, but also for the faults of others? The answer is simple: we dominated the world for four centuries. The empires have collapsed but their memory remains, and this has given rise to an ever-expanding discipline: post-colonial studies. We have become the continent of the uneasy conscience and we wish to show the rest of the world the face of moral law in all its purity. Europe sees itself as a sacrificial offering, through which the entire world can expiate its sins. It offers to assume the shame for every misfortune that befalls the planet: famine in Africa, drowning in the Mediterranean, terrorism, natural disasters, they are all directly or indirectly our handiwork. And when we are attacked—by terrorists, for example—it’s still our fault; we had it coming and are undeserving of compassion. Since we are overcome by such a torrent of sins, all we can do is bear up and attempt to correct and atone for them all, one by one. An unctuous discourse intended to edify is replacing what was once political and historical analysis; an ideal society must replace the existing one of ordinary men, and be cleansed of its impurities. Two areas in particular reveal this delusion of sanctity—immigration and ecology.

RTWT

This kind of building would produce that kind of decision.

The Independent:

The Home Office has refused asylum to a Christian convert by quoting Bible passages which it says prove Christianity is not a peaceful religion.

The Iranian national, who claimed asylum in 2016, was told passages in the Bible were “inconsistent” with his claim to have converted to Christianity after discovering it was a “peaceful” faith.

The refusal letter from the department states the book of Revelations – the final book of the Bible – is “filled with imagery of revenge, destruction, death and violence”, and cites six excerpts from it.

It then states: “These examples are inconsistent with your claim that you converted to Christianity after discovering it is a ‘peaceful’ religion, as opposed to Islam which contains violence, rage and revenge.”

When contacted by The Independent, the Home Office said the letter was “not in accordance” with its policy approach to claims based on religious persecution, and said it was working to improve the training provided to decision-makers on religious conversion.

Wikipedia:

Bombings increased significantly in 2015, with Swedish police investigating around 100-150 explosions. There were over 30 explosions reported in the Swedish city of Malmö alone by August 2015, up from a total of 25 in all of 2014. Malmö police have consequently warned about undetonated grenades in the city. According to Swedish police, the use of hand grenades in crime is unprecedented in all comparable European and non-European countries, and the only countries with similar characteristics are those with warlike conditions.

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BBC:

The devices are easily obtained, says Reine Bergland of Stockholm police. They can be bought from gangs for just a couple of hundred Swedish kroner (about £20).

“Sometimes when they buy weapons they get grenades as part of the deal. They throw in a couple of hand grenades, so to speak.”

The rise in possession of hand grenades – mainly unused stock from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s – has come to symbolise Sweden’s heated debate about violent crime as it heads towards an election in September.

The rate of violent crime in the suburbs of Sweden’s big cities has worsened in recent years, in what officials blame on rising gang-related crime.

There were 306 shootings last year, which left 41 people dead. In 2011, there were 17 fatalities.

The violence has turned some parts of Stockholm into “no-go zones” for paramedics, says Henrik Johansson, former head of Sweden’s paramedics union.

“People who live in these areas are very scared to call the police or get help from ambulances. They are scared about consequences for them and their families.”

Police have acknowledged 60 or so “vulnerable areas” but reject the description of “no-go zones”, a highly loaded term in Sweden.

After all, violent crime in Sweden and who is to blame for it has become an ideological battlefield.

In February 2017 US President Donald Trump controversially linked the problem to the influx of migrants to Sweden.

“Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible,” he said.

A self-proclaimed humanitarian superpower, Sweden took in the highest number of asylum seekers per capita during the migrant crisis of 2015. Many were refugees fleeing war and abuses in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea. …

Sweden’s government denies it is immigrants who are causing the rise in crime. (! — DZ)

“The people who are causing problems for us today, the vast majority of them are born in Sweden, and that’s not a notion of migration. That’s an issue of integration and an issue of social inclusion,” said Justice Minister Morgan Johansson, a centre-left Social Democrat.

Journalist denied entry to UK to interview right-wing politician and to film her boyfriend, a founder of an Austrian right-wing group “Generation Identity,” giving a speech in Hyde Park, because “her planned activities.. bear a serious threat to the fundamental interests of society.”

Vox Day admires all the grammatical errors, which suggests to me that the person in authority and laying down the decision on who might or might not enter the country was someone not a native speaker of English, and then proceeds to quote John Derbyshire on the ironies of current British entry policy:

Young Ahmed sneaked into Britain hidden in a truck that brought him through the Channel Tunnel from France. British immigration officers intercepted him. Ahmed told the immigration officers he had trained with ISIS.

Let me just repeat that: He told the immigration officers he had trained with ISIS.

But Ahmed was not refused entry. Instead, he was given free accommodation, first in a charity shelter, then in a pleasant middle-class foster home. [Betrayed by the ‘shy and polite’ boy they took into their home: Iraqi asylum seeker, 18, is found guilty of trying to blow up 93 Parsons Green commuters with bomb built with his foster parents’ Tupperware while pair were on holiday, Daily Mail, March 16, 2018] He was sent to school, at British taxpayer expense of course. His teachers reported him telling them it was his duty as a Muslim to hate Britain.

Today, Friday, March 16, 2018, Ahmed was convicted of making a bomb and trying to detonate it in a London subway train last Fall. Fortunately, the thing didn’t explode properly; but it still left 51 subway passengers with serious burns.

Let me just repeat one more time: He told the immigration officers he had trained with ISIS.

Enoch Powell got it right: “Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.”

Brett Stevens wants reparations with repatriation.

For a moment, step back from your preconceptions and view this world from the viewpoint of a minority group who were not the founders of a nation.

This place was not designed for you. None of its symbols, customs, values, imagery, or history fits you. In fact, the majority only makes it worse when they try to include you, because this does not negate the fact that you were brought here as labor, whether in chains or as a low-paid immigrant.

You can try to “assimilate,” as the moron conservatives argue, but that means giving up who you are and admitting that you are a conquered people. In fact, no matter what you do, you will feel like a conquered people, at least until you live in a land founded by your people, designed for your people, commanded by your people.

This applies to every group but the founding Western Europeans. [Emphasis added] If you are not English, German, Scots, Dutch, northern French, or Nordic, you are going to find that the founding group look different from you and their values and customs are alien to you. Their ways exclude the ways you need to live and behave.

As a result, you are always looking for compensation. Not because you feel injured, per se, because you are living better here than in your source nation. You want compensation because you feel left out, and you are always going to feel left out until your people are in control.

And those nice majority people? They seem friendly, but you know that everyone acts in their own best interests and wants to live among people like themselves. When they run off to a Whitopia, you know that even if you batter down the doors and get in, that place is Not For You.

You contemplate going back to your source nation. It might be a little rough, but there are great places to live in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Your middle classes now have the knowledge they picked up at trade schools and business schools to make an American/European-style first world nation within the third world.

RTWT

OK, grumpy old un-PC type that I am, the idea of writing a check and then waving bye-bye to Ta-Nehisi Coates has more than a little appeal. But, what do you know? Micks, Wops, Bohunks and Polacks, all the Roman Catholic ethnic groups are also not “founding Western Europeans” and are evidently hopelessly unassimilable, even us Lithuanians (unless we get to sneak in, just like those non-founding square-headed Scandinavians, under the “Nordic” quota, based on conspicuously large percentages of people with blue eyes and blond hair).

If I’m going back to Lithuania, my reparations had better be large enough to acquire and restore a decent manor house.

And, just think, Dutchies like Vanderleun get to stay!

John Nolte is perfectly correct: “Liberals eventually ruin everything.” Last night’s Superbowl featured a series of political propaganda advertising spots.

Coke and Airbnb competed in the nausea-inducing sweepstakes with ads extolling the beauties of “diversity.”

84 Lumber, whose first ad, featuring a Mexican mother and daughter dismayed at confronting Trump’s Wall, was declined by Fox as “too controversial,” ran a minute-and-a-half spot titled “The Journey Begins,” showing the same mother and daughter starting out hopefully and passing through desert, river, and mountains in the direction of El Norte, presumably in search of the land of the generous welfare check.

Audi, as Jack Baruth explicated at length, served up a lesson on the natural superiority of the community of fashion, cloaked as a lecture on Feminism.

All in all, the amount of political virtue-signalling from big, ugly fat cat corporations was simply appalling. Yesterday was one of those days where you wondered if the citizens of Hitler’s Germany were as much bombarded with get-in-line, Gleichschaltung prop as we are.

Liberal “diversity” is such a crock. I’m old enough to remember 1950s America very well. People, like myself, living outside the big cities and the South, never ran into people of other races at all, but we still had plenty of diversity. Go watch one of those old war movies in which the soon-to-be-embattled platoon is shown to be made up of the farmboy from Kansas, the guy with the thick Brooklyn accent, the strong Polack, the ready-with-his-fists Irishman, and the intellectual Jew. My own small town had a population pretty much only made up of turn-of-the-last-century Roman Catholic immigrants, and we still had more than enough diversity to fuel all the mutual dislike anybody needs.

In the old days, newly arrived immigrants came to America, lived in enclaves of their own, and took the worst jobs. Today, some Hindu or Mussulman hops of the plane from Bombay and sends his offspring to Harvard or Yale. The first generation in the country does not line up to work with a pick and shovel in the coal mines, to lay track for the railroads, or to do the heavy lifting in the mill. That first generation can be found teaching the US Constitution (from a left-wing point of view) at Yale Law School (Akhil Amar) or telling Americans what to think about Foreign Policy on CNN (Fareed Zakaria).

No wonder so many people are experiencing a wave of Nativist revulsion. Suddenly, it’s the turn of every personage of color from every remote continent or clime to be welcomed heartily to America, and granted immediate entrée to the national establishment in a way that it was never the turn of Scots Irish who’ve been living here for centuries or the Germans or the Scandinavians or the Irish and Southern and Eastern Roman Catholics who arrived somewhat later. Those people are never counted as diverse, and simply get lectured to by their betters and advised to apology for their white privilege.

Raindrops on roses
And whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver-white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things

“You dirty racist!”

Do you like warm fires, candles, generalized coziness, intimate gatherings with family and friends, even pumpkin lattes and warm socks? Beware! you are guilty of fondness for Hygge, a Danish kind of reactionary thinking that Slate deplores.

Christina Cauterucci last Fall, in response to last years publication of several books on Hygge, mocked the hankering for candles, doubted that Hygge was even achievable for American residents of “drafty apartment[s] with no fireplace, no grandma, nothing but sweatsocks, and an understuffed sofa,” and described Hygge as essentially a yearning for a return to the uterus. She didn’t come right out and say so but, back in the uterus, there are no bearded Muslim refugees looking to cut your throat, shoot you full of holes, or blow you up.

More recently, Alex Robert Ross identified the sinister connection between a liking for candles and warm socks and Racism and Populist Xenophobia.

This all makes sense. A collective craving for childlike comforts in response to social trauma is a psychoanalytic classic. It was Carl Jung who wrote in The Practice of Psychotherapy, “The patient’s regressive tendency[…] is not just relapse into infantilism, but an attempt to get at something necessary[…] the universal feeling of childhood innocence, the sense of security, or protection, or reciprocated love, of trust.” He was a half-sentence away from extolling the virtues of homemade yogurt, eye contact with close family, and a deep, abiding hygge.

Hygge’s turning inward against the world outside comes with a more sinister edge, however. As Charlotte Higgins pointed out in her deep dive for the Guardian last month, hygge’s ties to the far-right in Denmark are remarkably strong. Pia Kjærsgaard, the leader of the right-wing, anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party, has publicly extolled the virtues of the lifestyle, insisting that her office remain cozy and hyggelig at all times. Denmark’s welfare state and reputation for tolerance may be admired by progressives in the U.K. and U.S., but, as Higgins points out, the country’s love of hyggefied thatched cottages with closed doors suggests a conservative undercurrent. “Anything that threatens that safe community, including alien values and ideologies, cannot be tolerated,” she writes.

The journalist and author Michael Booth had the same sensation when he moved from England to Denmark. “Hygge can seem like self-administered social gagging, characterized more by a self-satisfied sense of its own exclusivity than notions of shared conviviality,” he wrote in The Almost Nearly Perfect People: The Truth About the Nordic Miracle. Bloom says that it falls in line with a “postcolonial drawbridge theory—the ‘What was lost without [will be found within]’ way of valuing what little cultural and economic capital Denmark had left after the loss of its empire.”

Indeed, Denmark has been struggling with its colonial legacy lately; a rise in the number of refugees over the past two years has uncovered the limits of Denmark’s famously progressive outlook. The government can now seize any item worth more than $1,450 from a refugee in order to pay for their sustenance and upkeep in the country. And after slashing refugee benefits last year, the government advertised the news in Lebanese newspapers, just to be sure that the country didn’t seem quite so attractive to newcomers. The far right Danskernes Parti, or “Danes’ Party,” handed out ‘Asylum Spray’ in the port town of Haderslev in September. Pepper spray being illegal, they filled the cans with hairspray instead, but the message remained hideously clear. “We wanted to figure out a way for Danish people, in particular women, to protect themselves,” party leader Daniel Carlsen said. “In the short run we want to provide solutions to make life better and safer for the Danish people.”

If his words sounded a little hyggelig, it’s no coincidence. Poured into hygge’s candlelit sweetness, like a cloying cream filling, are inevitable and explicit cases of xenophobia and racism. In their recent study of online communities in Denmark, Ahmad Beltagui and Thomas Schmidt explored the hygge of the closed chat room. In one instance, this sense of community was fostered with “what one [user] referred to as a ‘‘little Hyggelig racist joke’.” This online interaction had an unsavory conclusion: “The rapid escalation saw the opponent being addressed in upper case text and accused of both not speaking Danish and being homosexual.” Though such bullying, the researchers write, would not ordinarily be particularly hyggelig, the abuse came “from a user with the word Hygge in their username.” With racist, homophobic abuse online being a cornerstone of right-wing populism today, this little hyggelig anecdote should raise doubts about just how apolitical hygge can claim to be.

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Here’s that Nationalist Julie Andrews:

I still think Trump made a big mistake by chickening out of appearing at last night’s debate, but I suppose I agree with him at least in thinking that Megyn Kelly goes way too far in an adversarial direction at times.

In this episode from last night’s debate, she went after Ted Cruz, armed with a prepared gotcha video, in which she tries to damage Cruz by attacking his record on illegal immigration.

Watching this, I thought that she was much, much too pleased with herself and that she was behaving unfairly as a debate moderator by singling out the front runner present for a specially elaborate attack. The tone of her questioning was too avid. Her appetite for Cruz’s destruction too clear. She was too obviously trying to promote herself professionally by moving beyond the proper level of neutrality to take on, only in one special case, the role of attack dog. I think Cruz handled her perfectly well, and I expect poor little Donald Trump could have managed as well, had he be possessed of sufficient fortitude to show up.

Watch the exchange. The gloating “Yes, it would!” at 0:10 I thought was particularly inappropriate.

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The enthusiasm for Brave, Brave Sir Donald has, astonishingly survived in numerous quarters his cutting and running, his skulking away and buggering off, his funking last night’s debate.

This morning, Trump is winning Matt Drudge’s Poll (63.51%) and The Blaze’s Poll (54% – “by not being there”!). Go figure.

Yesterday, enthusiastic Trumpkins were all over the Internet explaining just how brilliant The Donald’s missing-the-debate strategy really was. It wasn’t about Megyn Kelly and her mean questioning back last August about misogynist remarks, no, no, no. Trump was dignifiedly boycotting the debate because he was righteously offended by being mocked in a press release issued by some of Roger Ailes’ subordinates.

FOX NEWS: “We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president. A nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.”

Some conservative commentators and their friends on Facebook yesterday were assuring me that I was clueless because I had failed to do the research necessary in order to learn that Fox News had nefariously arranged to invite “a Muslim and an illegal alien” to participate in the debate questioning, thereby ambushing Trump. I watched (most of) the debate last night and never saw either of them. Their appearance must have been cancelled at the last minute when that political genius Trump craftily avoided the ambush, or maybe not, too.

A powerful video made by right-wing young Germans.

This video made by a 16-year-old Bibi Wilhaim tells German elites that they have destroyed Germany with their policy of admitting Third World primitives. She calls on the men of Germany to protect their women and children from Muslim attacks. Facebook is apparently censoring her video as “hate speech.”