Freedom on fire

Freedom is no more than a piece of combustible paper: a forbidden book, a speech draft in longhand, a film no longer printed on combustible stock but still setting minds aglow. All tyrannies in recorded history have sought to burn, confiscate and banish that paper or other media that carried the ideas of liberty, and to burn or banish the authors. Nowadays, such tyrannies exist primarily in Dar al Islam and in its lesser franchises of elective dhimmi socialism (abbrev. dhimmisocialism) in Western Europe and Canada and in nascent forms in the United States and Australia.

Paper, of course, has less wholesome uses, such as receptacle for sanctimonious twaddle, self-congratulatory schadenfreude, ignorant grandstanding, and solipsistic verbal onanism.  What used to be called the “great” newspapers (and magazines) of the world all too often misapply precious wood pulp to such ends.  

So does the New York Times.  Its recent article wasted many column inches on a marginal lightweight, Charles Johnson, but casually dismissed a European party of major importance in the history of freedom, the Flemish Vlaams Belang, as a quasi-fascist entity with an “unabashed record of inflammatory rhetoric and hateful, opportunistic verbal viciousness.”

Diana West has written an article setting the record straight, but I suspect that for the Pravda-on-the-Hudson and its core readership, it will be futile (1). The soi-disant “antifascist” Western elites have veered so far into a delusional dreamscape that they themselves have become enablers of open Socialist fascism acting as a pathfinder for its Islamic kin.

Pictures are always worth a thousand words. And these pictures from Vlaams Belang’s 11 September 2007 anti-Islamization protest rally in Brussels obviate the necessity of debating whether the functionaries of fascism are the ones wearing face-stomping footwear and crippling peaceful citizens in ju jitsu holds, or the ones hoisted by torqued limbs and writhing in pain on the ground, in suit and tie.

 

 

Vlaams Belang’s anti-Islamization rally will go down in history as one of the first major instances where the Eurabian branch of The New World Order exposed its overtly fascist nature. For what the interNational Socialist pan-Eurabian junta manifested here via the orders of its Brussels gauleiter was not an inhibition of an unjustly unauthorized rally. Rather, it was the brutal suppression of critical ideas relative to the junta’s imposed transformation of Brussels into an outpost of Eurabia colonized by imported Muslims.

It’s instructive to compare some moving images from the 2007 pogrom of Vlaams Belang with footage from François Truffaut’s 1966 film, Fahrenheit 451. The film was a flawed but highly original adaptation of Ray Bradbury's 1953 classic novel about a dystopian future. In that future, a radically egalitarian society prohibits critical thinking and outlaws all books as catalysts to such thinking. Government goons looking and acting quite like Brussels’ police rampage about, brutalizing dissenters and burning all books they can find without regard to property, limb or life.
 
Here is Brussels’ treatment of Vlaams Belang: (watch the fragment between 1:45 and 4:09)

 

Truffaut’s/Bradbury’s “firemen” in action can be seen at this link (from 0:58 to 2:25).

There are other parallels in the Truffaut/Bradbury vision of a homogenized, decadent and despotic future West, conceived over half a century ago. People spend much of their time slouching in front of wall-sized TV screens, immersed in state-approved (i.e. politically correct) entertainment, stripped of any joy in art or nature or deeper human contact, and content in their mindless lot. Dehumanized individuals crash cars into beast and man for thrills, just like they do now (everywhere, famously in Apeldoorn, April 2009). As the book-burning protagonist Guy Montag starts questioning his and society’s assumptions, massive television coverage makes a spectacle of his persecution, to distract the people from an imminent and eventually erupting nuclear war.

Another parallel: dissenters risk and lose their lives to preserve the soul of their culture. It may be books in Fahrenheit 451, Vlaams Belang street demonstrations in 2007 Brussels, or films by non-PC Dutch patriots like Theo Van Gogh or Geert Wilders – but it’s the same thing. And let there be no doubt: the Flemish and Dutch leaders of this peaceful resistance and the few others like them in Eurabia are risking their lives at the hand of their kakistocratic ruling oligarchy, no matter who may actually wield the weapons of assault.

In a typical Lenin-Alinsky ruse, the dhimmisocialist (3) pan-Western tyranny that has already hatched calls the other side fascist, and prosecutes it as such. It’s emblematic that the extreme leftoblob Michael Moore has even hijacked the title Fahrenheit 451 to call his own “progressive” piece of libelous Westphobia  “Fahrenheit 9/11”.

In the Belgian version of this counterfeit, the dhimmisocialist mayor of Brussels, Freddy Thielemans, justified his planned pogrom with the assertion that Vlaams Belang’s demonstration was “incitement to discrimination and hatred which we usually call racism and xenophobia” that is “forbidden by a considerable number of international treaties and is punished by our penal laws and by the European legislation.”

Now, 29 months later, the next stage of the toxic toads’ assault on the peoples of the West is taking place in Amsterdam. Geert Wilders is standing before a kangaroo court on charges of, mirabile dictu, “incitement to discrimination and hatred.”  An old trick of any dark oligarchy with respect to extirpating inconvenient ideas. Already used against Socrates and seen in the West more recently in the 1945 Nazi  trial and execution of the nonviolent resister and bearer of a distinguished German surname, Helmuth James Graf von Moltke.

But there is more to Geert Wilders’s trial. The chicaneries that preceded it, the 70-page rap sheet, the bizarre comments by the Pharisees in charge, the disproportionality between the offense and the prescribed penalty, connote in one’s mind the prosecution’s charges in the most famous trial of them all. Those were charges of blasphemy.
 
The blasphemy on trial in Amsterdam is not against Allah, though if Eurabia proceeds on course such blasphemy and whatever else the Organization of The Islamic Conference dictates will be proscribed at Dutch law within years, if not months (4). Rather, it’s blasphemy against the religion of multiculturalism, diversity, appeasement, cowardice, treason and vain hopes of 30 shekels of perpetual profit from the Islamglobal economy of The New World Order.   

Numerous well-informed observers have noticed the demonstrable truthfulness of Mr. Wilders’s statements for which the Netherlands justice system proposes to fine and jail him for two years, presumably stripping him of his parliamentary immunity first. Wilders’s opening statement in court was itself predicated on the question, “If something is true, how can it be punishable?”

But truth, empirical evidence, justice or the public good have nothing to do with it. This is lawfare – an asymmetrical war by the racially and culturally Europhobic neosocialist oligarchy on the people it governs. A war to squash ideas and the political parties that embody them and therefore jeopardize the oligarchy’s hold on power and the perks of power.

The depths of obscenity

“It is irrelevant whether Wilder’s witnesses might prove Wilders’ observations to be correct”, stated the Dutch Public Prosecution Service (Openbaar Ministerie). “What’s relevant is that his observations are illegal”.

The four paragraphs of the Dutch Penal code under which Geert Wilders is being tried may be found here, but a writer interested in the marrow of things would condense them as follows:

He who publicly, verbally or in writing or image, deliberately expresses himself in a way insulting of, or incites hatred or discrimination or violent behavior against,  person or a group of people or their property because of their race, their religion or belief, their gender or hetero-or- homosexual nature or their physical, mental, or intellectual disabilities, will be punished with a prison sentence of up to one year or a big fine, except if he does so in his professional (i.e. Geert Wilders) or avocational (i.e. bloggers, freedom activists) or group (i.e. organized nonviolent resistance) capablity, he will get up to two years in prison and a bigger fine.

In the symposium The Trial of Geert Wilders, the American attorney David Yerushalmi found that this law he calls “fascist” contains a prepackaged guilty verdict against Wilders. What’s most telling to me is that that the law does not discriminate between insulting and advocating violence. Moreover, it expresses the fatwa of the West’s ruling elite against discrimination. That is a death sentence -- for Western civilization.

Without discrimination, neither physical existence nor a moral or intellectual system can obtain, except as miasmatic pap. Without wise discrimination between the inside and the outside, any society is destined for the flush hole of history.

The writer Nidra Poller [ibid.] quotes the Dutch Law Professor Fokko Oldenhuis:

“…the statements of Wilders are un-Dutch, they don’t belong to our Christian-Judaic culture…. He discriminates Moroccans because of their race and causes hate against them…. His desire to ban the Koran brings fear and terror into peoples homes… The laws against hate crimes were made in 1934, to protect the Jews in a reaction to what was happening in Germany.”

 
Poller asks, “What could be more obscene than enrolling 6 million exterminated Jews in a battle to deprive one honest upstanding legitimate popular Dutch MP of the freedom to oppose the spread of an ideology [i.e. Islam] that blatantly plans the extermination of the remaining Jewish population of the world?”

But what Dutch Body Snatchers (5) like Professor Oldenhuis are saying and what the Dutch state is doing to Geert Wilders is more obscene than that. For Netherlands in World War 2 was complicit in the murder and expropriation of 104,000 Dutch Jews (6) -- over 74% of that country’s total – because of punctilious obeisance to the prevailing laws of that era’s version of fascism.

The evil laws streamed from the German occupiers, but they were executed obediently and efficiently by Dutch functionaries. Dutch Jews were registered, tabulated and expropriated by Dutch administrators (timetable here), rounded up largely by the Dutch police, often via the good offices of Dutch informers. They were interned mainly in Camp Westerbork and Camp Vught, and guarded there by the Dutch Federal Police, though as of Summer 1942 subordinated to a small contingent of German SS overseers.
 
From Westerbork, the Jewish internees were transported by 93 trainloads over two years directly to German liquidation camps: primarily Auschwitz, Sobibor, Terezin and Bergen Belsen. Those trains were sourced, scheduled, operated, driven and meticulously logged by the Dutch Railways.

We need not omit the involvement of Jewish organizations at the lower end of this process, from conducting the internal affairs of Camp Westerbork to compiling the lists of names for deportation upon German orders. Moreover, the Dutch did not actively participate in the killing of Jews, and a minority of them performed exemplary acts of compassion, even heroism (e.g. here  and here) to help their Jewish co-citizens.

Furthermore, while hundreds of thousands of Dutchmen supported several Dutch National Socialist Parties (primarily the NSB), were active collaborators or just plain antisemites, the majority was untainted by such rot. But precisely that is the quandary.

In his inquiry into the Dutch Holocaust, G. Jan Colijn, a Dutch-born American professor and genocide scholar, inverted the Daniel Goldhagen “Hitler’s willing executioners” thesis. Colijn asked the question, how is it possible that the Netherlands, a country with a deep-rooted and integrated Jewish minority, and with a low rate of antisemitism, also had the highest percentage of Jewish Holocaust victims in all of Western Europe. (7)

The main answer is that the Dutch were, and are, a law abiding people. Most of the wartime Dutch bureaucrats, the police, railway personnel etc. just wanted to obey the law and avoid trouble (8). People simply looked away when Jewish neighbors were under attack. The attacks were lawful, and laws were there to be implemented and obeyed. And it’s mostly because of that, rather than the current and fraudulent shibboleth of “racism” that 104,000 Jewish citizens perished in one of the least antisemitic countries in the world.

When the small number of surviving Jews started trickling back to their homeland from assorted death factories or camouflaged holes in walls, the Dutch government again used the cover of grossly misapplied laws, this time to loot the dead and the surviving.
  
During the occupation, Dutch banks had implemented German orders to transfer the accounts of their Jewish clients to LIRO. A researcher of these things, Manfred Gerstenfeld, defines LIRO as “a looting bank instituted by the Germans to expropriate money from the Jews.”   The Dutch government assessed taxes on the looted accounts, including inheritance taxes on the assets of Jews whom the government’s functionaries had collaborated in dispatching to their demise.

The government refused to return most of those taxes to the heirs or survivors, hiding under the legalism of its laws’ legality. Gerstenfeld calls it “a paradigm of how a normal law in a democratic country can become a perverse tool if applied in an extreme situation” [ibid.]

Hiding behind “the law” is an old and odious trick. In a country in which such hiding had such terrible consequences twice in recent memory, the promise of “never again” ought to include not hiding behind tyrannical laws to smash loyal patriots deemed undesirable by the regime. Let alone when such patriots struggle to contain the ideology that wants to complete the job Hitler and the Dutch NSB left unfinished.

Alas, inconceivably, the persecution of Geert Wilders is more obscene even than that. Two additional participants in the symposium, the Canadian lawyer David B. Harris, and Mark Steyn, pointed out that despite the manifest risks to Wilders’s life, the Dutch government is refusing to hold the trial in a secure courtroom, even though it provided one for the trial of the Dutch-born Muslim murderer of Theo van Gogh. Steyn remarked further that in the Low Countries politicians who challenge the Eurabian arrangement are either banned (Belgium’s Vlaams Blok), forced into exile (Aayan Hirsi Ali) or killed (Pym Fortuyn) – and that the authorities are indifferent as to which of these fates befalls Geert Wilders [ibid.].

But that too does not exhaust the depth of the obscenity. The two prosecutors in the Wilders trial, Paul Velleman and Birgit van Roessel, also work for the Dutch National Discrimination Expertise Center [LECD]. Velleman is the head of LECD. As Gates of Vienna has reported, “Paul Velleman was the prosecutor who had the [offensive to Muslims and anonymous] cartoonist Nekschot picked up in a raid by ten police officers in the middle of the night, and kept him locked up for more than two days. Quote from H. Numan: ‘After release, he was told: You can forget about anonymity now. They know who you are.’“

Alias Gregorius Nekschot is a regular citizen. He cannot afford the security arrangements that the Dutch state must provide for Geert Wilders – one surmises, reluctantly -- due to his parliamentary status. So the declared purpose of Nekschot’s arrest and “outing” was, first, to silence him or get him killed, and second, to send a message to all dhimmitude resisters: Mütze ab! Ve know vho you are, and ve know vere you are too. Therefore, they know it too. Shut up or be killed. Mütze auf!

The Dutch National Discrimination “Expertise” Center has finally bagged the big fish. Everyone knows who he is. But now everyone also knows where he is. And once he is jailed, his parliamentary immunity and security detail stripped, they can finally do the work the dhimmofascist regime would like to do itself.

The Road to Castrated Serfdom

Socialism is a road to serfdom, as F.A. Hayek has famously diagnosed. It is only the arrogance and greed for power of the socialist elites ruling the West -- excepting only a Liechtenstein here and there, or a Thatcher/Reagan once in a half century -- that the serfs themselves don’t know it. That’s because their state-fashioned schooling and mental laundry by mass media enforce an omertà on the brilliant Austrian and his ideas.

But neosocialism, of which dhimmisocialism is a sub-category, does the original concept one better. It’s the road to castrated serfdom.

Peter Brimelow highlighted the most salient feature of neosocialism in a prescient 1993 article about the racial demagoguery destroying America’s mortgage banking:

“Classical socialism called for direct state ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Neosocialism just aims at political control. Socialism claimed to be more efficient. Neosocialism claims to be more equitable. Above all, neosocialism professes to combat "racism," since this magic word cows all opposition. Apparent neosocialist objective of the season: commandeering the banking system and forcing it to subsidize key client constituencies.”
 

Brimelow concluded (in 1993!) with these words:

"Neosocialism, however, is not science. What's going on here is a witch-hunt, conducted by the religious Left and aided by key elements of the civil service. The innocent victims will be the banking system, the savers of America, the economy, and ultimately liberty itself.”
 

Now comes the Russian blogger Stanislav Mishin (9) with an opinion piece that the other Pravda – the one on the Moscow River— published under the title, “Western Race Hatred Laws: Keep the Caucasians Down”. After quoting just a small sample from a long, everyday list of horrors that America’s blacks inflict on its whites and various imported Muslims do on Europe’s descendants everywhere, Mishin concludes:

“When the director van Gogh is brutally murdered by an Islamic assailant, not a hate crime. However, his Dutch film, showing the plight of the women under Islam, [snip], that is a hate crime [snip] supported by the Western femiNazis [snip]. Luckily, in [Eastern Europe] this idiocy does not exist. Murder is murder [snip], and defense of the local culture is paramount. Westerners [snip], you deserve this, since the vast majority of you take it and swallow it, like the good little castrated serfs you are. Enjoy your extinction, as you loaf around on your Chinese couches.”
 

And that is the essence of the dhimmisocialist oligarchy’s lawfare against Filip Dewinter and his Vlaams Belang party, and Geert Wilders and his PVV party, and Pro-Köln in Cologne, and so on.

In Belgium, Vlaams Belang itself rose in 2004 under a new name from the ashes of its destruction by the Snatchers’ lawfare. Its political delegates Bart Debie and Frank Vanhecke were stripped either of their jobs or their parliamentary immunity, prosecuted and outlandishly punished on risible – yet devastating under the Eurabian code – charges of “racism.” The idea is to break them and their parties that channel dissent.

That is too how the American “rainbow”-socialist oligarchy conducts its lawfare against America’s taxpayers, employers, “tea-baggers,” “racists” and the like. Trials are still rare, but career capping and banishments from jobs and livelihood are common. The goal is to keep the lid on the good little castrated serf coffin that whitey has resigned himself to be shoved into, albeit reclining on his Chinese-made couch in front of his Chinese-made TV and watching Fahrenheit 451 programming produced in Body Snatcher factories (10).

Just like it was in 1993 in America’s banking industry, it’s still a witch-hunt conducted by the religious Left and aided by key elements of the civil service – but it encompasses all the countries of the world where Europe’s autochthons or their diaspora descendants are still holding on to a diminishing majority.

The well-oiled machinery of repression is vast and global. The working of the interlinking cogs may be glimpsed in any “news” (i.e. agitprop) item, e.g. like this  report that appeared in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir on the day when 57.5% of directly polled citizens of a sovereign country, Switzerland, decided to prohibit the construction of further Islamic minarets:

“Switzerland votes massively [for] the prohibition of minarets”, reads the headline (in French), under which almost every sentence includes words indicating disappointment, disapproval and condemnation or a negative opinion about the legitimacy of the Swiss people’s sovereign voice.

One is informed that the Green Party plans an appeal before the European Court of Human Rights, for violation of religious freedom. Likewise, the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism (CECLR) – the Orwellian name alone merits a short pause -- in Belgium, naturally, opines that the victory of 57.5% of the Swiss citizenry is not a victory for democracy. The lawfare of progressive dhimmitude is trotted out too:

“A prohibition that has no effect but on a single religion is contrary to the Belgian Constitution, to the European Treaty of Human Rights, and to different declarations of the United Nations.” [ibid., my translation]
 

One would wait in vain for the pompous neosocialist frauds running either Le Soir or CECLR or the UN or EU or Switzerland’s Body Snatcher government or the Barko regime in the United States to express equally strong or any opinions concerning the treatment of Christians and Christianity (11) in every Muslim country in the world, or the treatment of whites in South Africa, Zimbabwe and much of the rest of Africa.

Coda

The short-term future of the West and of its courageous defenders like Wilders, Dewinter, Vanhecke, Blocher and others is grim.
 

This cartoon by D.T. Devareaux could be conjugated visually to portray each Western country in its peculiarity, yet sharing the same awful plague. For the Netherlands, it might show the boy Hans Brinker with his left hand’s finger in a dike named Western Civilization. The right hand and its accessories would remain unchanged. A variant related to Geert Wilders’s trial might substitute the word Liberalism on the Magnum .357 with the names of the Dutch Dodges and Inquisitors who have instigated and are running this shameful farce.

But it may be the last act of Fahrenheit 451 that may provide a ray of hope for the first act of Freiheit 451.

Unable to live in his fascist and book-less society, betrayed by his Body-Snatched wife, hunted by his government, the protagonist, Guy Montag, escapes to the countryside. There, he meets a group of dissidents who call themselves The Book People. Every one of them has memorized an entire book, preserving it orally until better days come and civilization with its historical culture can be rebuilt.

Granger (12), the leader of the Book People, tells Montag, "We're a minority of undesirables, crying out in the wilderness. But it won't always be so. One day we'll be called on one by one to recite what we've learned. And then books will be printed again.”

Meanwhile, nuclear war has ravaged the urban centers; civilization is destroyed (13). Granger tells Montag the legend of the Phoenix. Society has collapsed and must be rebuilt from the ashes, as it has repeatedly in the past. The Book Lovers – the rebellious, despised holdouts – will be there to transmit the remembrance of things past.

Eurabia and the entire neosocialist project will crash and decompose under reality’s gravity even if no one does anything to precipitate it. It will crash for it must -- like a bridge designed by junkyard architects, built with imagined struts, recycled Third World cables bought on ruptured credit, incompatible materials and exploding bolts hailed as the last word in social engineering.

The task is to be ready for the aftermath.

 

 

Previous articles in this series can be read here.

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(1) The Vlaams Belang record has been set straight many times before: in The Brussels Journal, Gates of Vienna and in Diana West’s, Lawrence Auster’s and Pamela Geller’s blogs, but also in many other venues by writers such as Michelle Malkin, Marcus Epstein and others.

(2) Deleted.

(3)  The Europeans’ anger at their betrayal by their ruling elites is such that I have seen this term used in more pejorative permutations such as “Dhimmi-Socialist Vichy NAZI French”

(4) Incidentally, as of 1 January 2010 the Irish government has enacted a new blasphemy law, punishable by a fine of up to 25,000 euros. (Petition here) .

(5) The basic analogy reverts to Part 1, where we cited the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the film, alien “Body Snatchers” produce giant legume Pods in “factories,” “i.e. hothouses and other sheltered places. The developed Pods  become Body Snatchers who replace living people while appearing to be identical to them. The new Body Snatchers then grow new Pods from which  new Body Snatchers develop – until the whole population has been “snatched.”

(6) The numbers in various sources range from 100,000 to 108,000, with 104,000 most commonly cited. There were also several thousand German Jewish internees and a few hundred Roma.

(7) G. Jan Colijn and Marcia Littell (editor), The Netherlands and Nazi Genocide: Papers of the 21st Annual Scholars' Conference, Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Also G. Jan Colijn, “Review Essay: Anne Frank Remembered”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1996 10(1), pp. 78-92. Other scholars must have written about it too but in Dutch, a language inaccessible to this author.

(8) Additional sources for constructing this wartime and post-war tableau were “Wartime and Postwar Dutch Attitudes toward the Jews: Myth and Truth,”  Manfred Gerstenfeld, and personal accounts here and here.

(9) Mr. Mishin cannot be read for his opinions of his country, his culture and his religion, for they are widely skewed by triumphalism devoid of introspection. But like other Eastern Europeans, he is a sharp diagnostician of the ailments of the West.

(10) The Western purveyors of mass media entertainment are central in the Podization process because of presenting a Body Snatcher version of reality that gradually alters the minds of almost all people who consume this  software. 

(11) Not Jews and Judaism, for that which has not escaped has been extirpated and exists no more.

(12) In the film, Granger is called The Journal of Henri Brulard, a book by Stendhal, as each one of The Book People is known by the name of the book he (or she) has memorized.

(13) In the book, but only hinted in the film.