RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/the_eureich_versus_britain.html

Europe has a neurotic compulsion to repeat the past. This is bad news, because nobody wants to repeat five (count ’em!) East-West wars exploding out of Europe over the last two centuries.

But – the E.U. now has a better idea.

It wants European nations to surrender to the German-French axis without a shot being fired. “Countries must give up their sovereignty and join the one-world government,” German chancellor Angela Merkel remarked generously the other day. The E.U. Times, of all places, remarked that “[n]o, this isn’t something Adolf Hitler said many years ago.”

Everybody in that part of the world knows who runs the E.U.: the Germans, fronted by the French. So when the charming Frau Merkel said that, most of her listeners filled in the rest of the story. But the Brits were not laughing.

Just to keep the historical record straight:

Napoleon beat the German-speaking provinces around 1800, arousing a century of vendetta wars.
Otto von Bismarck used Prussian robo-militarism to invade Paris in 1871.
WWI started as an enormous German-French meat-grinder, finally ended by the United States entering the war.
In the 1920s and ’30s, Hitler arose in revenge for WWI, leading to thirteen years of industrialized massacres of innocent human beings and ending with catastrophic Axis aggression in World War II, including the Japanese Rape of Nanking and all the rest.
But…Europe’s world wars did not end in 1946. They just moved to the Soviet Empire, which included East Germany. Korea and Vietnam were proxies for the U.S.-Soviet struggle.

And now we have Reich Number Six, called the “European Union.” But the only “union” in the E.U. is the unelected ruling caste, which rules with an iron hand, while the left-out voters are getting sick and tired of the scam.

This may be why Emmanuel Macron, the German vassal in Paris, just called for an E.U. army – to use agains

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13369/france-macron-brexit

We are most grateful to French President Emmanuel Macron for revealing that the problem of the “backstop” is far larger than anyone had realized. It was seen as merely a problem of good faith of the EU Commission toward the UK. Now we see that it is also a problem of good faith of all the 27 remaining members of the EU. The problem is 28 times larger than anyone had noticed.

The flaw in Article 20 of the “backstop” is that it permits the customs union dictated by the Protocol to continue forever unless both parties agreed to end it. What is needed is the reverse: a date on which the application of the Protocol ends unless both parties agree to continue it. Indeed, the length of the transition period starting on March 29, 2019 is defined in the reverse manner in the Withdrawal Agreement. So why did the UK’s negotiators fail to demand something of the kind for Article 20?

Although UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative critics do have the power to create a majority against her deal by voting with the opposition, there is a much greater majority in the Commons for preventing a no-deal exit. That is, there are other Conservatives who will themselves join the opposition in feverishly averting no-deal, and with good reason. Apart from May’s Conservative critics, no-deal is unthinkable.

On November 25, 2018, a summit meeting of the 27 remaining countries of the European Union approved the Brexit deal agreed with the UK’s Theresa May. At the end of the summit, President Macron gave a press conference in which he announced how he would abuse the deal to blackmail the UK, thereby making approval of the deal in the UK Parliament unthinkable. This deal must be the shortest-lived treaty in history.

From the moment that Theresa May first presented the proposed Brexit deal to her cabinet on November 14 and to the House of Commons the next day, opposition to it has steadily risen among the MPs of her own Conservative Party. Also the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (DUP), the coalition partner that gives her a small majority in the Commons, is unanimously opposed. May has earned respect for the resolution with which she promotes the deal amid a cacophony of opposed voices that offer no coherent alternative, but also amazement at the stubbornness with which she rejects any change to the deal, thereby ensuring its failure.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/12/02/spain-reels-far-right-vox-party-storms-andalucian-parliament/

The ultra-conservative and anti-immigration Vox has stormed into the Andalucian assembly in Sunday’s regional election, marking the first time a far-Right party has achieved parliamentary representation on any level in Spain’s recent history as a democracy.

The party that favours the end of autonomy in Catalonia and the expulsion of all immigrants who entered Spain illegally won 12 out of 109 seats in Andalucia’s parliament with 11 per cent of the vote.

“Vox was the party that led the political debate,” said the party’s secretary general, Javier Ortega.

“We put on the table the need to control our borders and end illegal immigration, end abusive levels of taxation and the need to put an end to ideological laws relating to gender.”

Despite running out narrow winner in the region it has ruled continuously for 36 years, the PSOE Socialist party of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez suffered a hugely disappointing result in Andalucia. The party’s all-time low of 28 per cent and 33 seats mean it will not be able to govern with a majority, even with the support of the Left-wing coalition Adelante Andalucia, which includes Podemos.

Spain’s main conservative opposition force, the Popular Party (PP), also lost ground, sliding six percentage points to just under 21 per cent, while the liberal Ciudadanos was the night’s only winner among the established parties, doubling its share to 18 per cent.

Ahead of European and possibly a general election in 2019, Spain’s political scene appears more fractured than ever after the dramatic emergence of Vox on the extreme right of the spectrum.

Despite having seen its number of seats in the Andalucian parliament shorn from 33 to 26, the PP appeared to welcome the arrival of Vox on the political scene.

For the PP’s candidate for the presidency of the region, Juan Manuel Moreno, it was a “historic day” on which “Andalucia had chosen change”, saying he wants to lead a right-of-centre coalition including Vox and Ciudadanos.

https://www.city-journal.org/paris-riots

On July 14, 1789, in Paris, the price of bread had reached its highest point in a century. Parisians held the king responsible, which was in part justified. The royal administration’s meddlesome regulation had made grain commerce among the provinces difficult, leading to local famines. The result: a riot in the capital, and the taking of the Bastille—a mostly empty prison but a hated symbol of the absolute monarchy.

What then followed was a revolution—the French Revolution—taken over by an elite fired by the mad ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: this generation of twentysomething men would invent the first modern dictatorship and shed much French blood before taking on Europe, all in the name of the Republic and according to a Virtue that it claimed to embody. Robespierre, one of the most wild-eyed of the revolutionaries, designated himself the Republic’s messiah, charged with the “purification” of the old world. This history is well known, but it is generally reconstituted in a positive light, baptized with the ideology of “the common good” or “the general will.”

One can’t help but recall this French taste for rebellion, idealized as progressive and ultimately positive, as rioters are currently setting fire to the Champs-Élysées. Might this symbol of consumer society be the equivalent, for contemporary protesters, of the Bastille two centuries ago?

The origin of the present protest is not the price of bread but an increase in gasoline taxes. Yet, with gasoline now occupying a central place in our way of life as bread once did, there is at least some link between the two eruptions. And Louis XVI was guilty by inattention, just as Emmanuel Macron the First, France’s president, seems strangely indifferent to public sentiment. To enact policies that raise gasoline prices—already the highest in Europe—on the eve of the year-end holidays and without offering a justification, was a major political error.

Macron’s mistake was made worse by the justification given after the uprising: the government explained to skeptical citizens that the new tax was actually an ecological measure, and therefore justified, since the goal was not to add to the state’s coffers but to help fight climate change. Obviously no one believes this excuse, including the government that issued it, or so we must hope.

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2018/12/assisted-suicide-of-europe.html

I devoted too little space in my last column, “The Blob and Fake News,”, to the master plan of the UN for world governance, “The “Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration,” which Canada will sign on to. Or, rather, the boy Wonder, JustinTrudeau, will sign on to it.

Trudeau, premier of Canada, opined that national borders are an anachronism and obsolete, and should be abolished. In “The Blob,” I wrote:

According to Gatestone, in 2015, he said,

“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada. There are shared values –openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state.”

Two years later, Salim Mansur at Gatestone reported,

The Canadian government’s recent announcement that it will be providing more than CDN $600 million (USD $455 million) over the next five years to bail out the country’s financially strapped media outlets — as part of the fall fiscal update about the federal budget ahead of the 2019 federal election — is not as innocent as it may seem.

In response to the announcement, the heads of Canada’s media organizations promptly popped open the proverbial champagne and raised their glasses to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Unifor, a national union that represents Canadian journalists, was even more jubilant. It felt vindicated that its slogan of “Resistance” — which it touts as Conservative Party opposition leader Andrew Scheer’s “worst nightmare” — had so swiftly resulted in opening the government’s wallet, and handing out taxpayers’ money, to an industry that should actually be fighting to remain steadfastly independent of any form of government backing.

In effect, Canadian “journalists,” and journalists everywhere, will become the paid shills of the government and its policies of not saying critical things about Islam or Muslims. Furthermore, rolls of duct tape will be readied to silence any such criticism or to quash it before it even thought of:

The Global Compact requires the media outlets of member-states to adhere to the objectives and refrain from any critical discussions of these objectives that would be deemed as not “ethical” and against UN norms or standards consistent with the ideology of globalism.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/iran-tests-ballistic-missile-in-violation-of-un-resolution/

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that Iran had test-fired a medium range ballistic missile capable of carrying several warheads.

The test violated a Security Council resolution that calls on Iran not to pursue “any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using such ballistic missile technology.”

The missile has the ability to hit parts of Europe and any location in the Middle East, the secretary said.

NBC News:

“We condemn these activities,” Pompeo said, “and call upon Iran to cease immediately all activities relating to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”

On Sunday, a senior Iranian official said the country’s missile program was not in breach of U.N. resolutions.

“Iran’s missile program is defensive in nature… There is no Security Council resolution prohibiting the missile program and missile tests by Iran,” state news agency IRNA quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi as saying.

Qasemi did not confirm or deny that Iran had carried out a new missile test.

Iran has repeatedly said its missile program is purely defensive and denied its missiles are capable of being tipped with nuclear warheads.

The resolution makes no distinction between an “offensive” weapon and a “defensive” weapon. The idea that a nuclear-tipped missile would be “defensive” in nature is absurd, but there are Iranian apologists in the U.S. who back Tehran up.

The language of the U.N. Security Council Resolution “calls on” rather than “forbids” Iran from testing its missiles, according to Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council. The very U.N. resolution that Pompeo cited is also the very nuclear deal the Trump administration withdrew from earlier this year, Parsi added.

“We had a functioning deal and you may not have agreed with all the contents of it but it actually contained this conflict,” he said. “Trump came in, ripped it up and now we are seeing more missile tests, we’re seeing escalation and we are seeing a drift towards war.”

Actually, that was one of the biggest deficiencies in the nuclear deal — that it didn’t cover Iran’s ballistic missile program. Parsi, a pro-regime hustler in Washington, is trying to distract from Iran’s violation by shifting the blame to Trump. It doesn’t pass the smell test. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13367/extremist-persecution-christians-august

“The non-implementation of the law has brought us a gang of hardliners who have become above the law.” — Human rights activist, World Watch Monitor, Egypt.

A group of Muslims thrashed Vishal Masih, an 18-year-old Christian, after he repeatedly defeated a Muslim teen at arm-wrestling.” — Persecution, International Christian Concern, Pakistan.

“We cannot watch our children joining infidels’ church,” explained a local sheikh. — Morning Star News, Uganda.

Comoros: Sunni Islam was formally declared “the religion of the state.” “An ultra-conservative group of radical scholars … are pushing the country to a more extreme view of Islamic law (sharia) in the country and are against Christians.” — World Watch Monitor, August 3, 2018.

Christians Burned Alive and Churches Torched

Ethiopia: Approximately 15 Christian priests were killed—at least four burned alive—and 19 churches torched during Muslim uprisings in the east, where most of the nation’s Muslim population, consisting of 33% of the population, is centered. “Similar tensions are bubbling under the surface in other parts of Oromia,” which is approximately 50% Muslim, said a local source. “We have even heard of places where Muslims had asked Christians to vacate the area. And though this call is veiled as ethnic rivalry by some media and observers, it is at its very core a religious matter.”

Nigeria: During one of eight raids on Christian villages on August 28, Muslim Fulani herdsmen burned alive a Christian pastor, his wife, and three young children in their home; two other non-relatives were also killed in the raids. Armed with machetes and AK47 rifles, the Islamic raiders also looted and destroyed 95 houses and three churches. Gyang Adamu, one of the pastor’s surviving children who was away at the University of Jos at the time, “got to know about the attack when I saw a post on Facebook that Abonong village [his home], was under attack,” he said. When he finally got through to someone local, “the report I received was very devastating; I couldn’t believe that all my family members have been engulfed in the pogrom. On reaching home, I saw my daddy and younger ones burnt beyond recognition. The sight of the gory incident broke me down.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13356/turkey-alevis-persecution

The Alevi-owned broadcaster, TV10, for example,was closed down in September 2016, two months after the failed coup attempt against Erdogan, for allegedly “threatening national security and belonging to a terror organization.”

A TV10 cameraman, Kemal Demir, was taken into police custody on November 25, 2017 and arrested on December 2. Veli Büyükşahin, TV10’s chairman of the board, and Veli Haydar Güleç, a TV10 producer, were arrested on January 10. All are still in prison.

“TV10 did not belong to a major business. While it was trying to carry out its activities with its few employees and very limited resources, it was closed down by executive order. Moreover, its properties were seized [by the government] and then sold by the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (SDIF)… The indictments against them contain no criminal element and judges have turned down the indictments twice. Yet, these people have been detained for 10 months and there is still uncertainty as to when they will be tried in a court and when a result will be obtained from the hearings.” — Kemal Peköz, MP from the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), in a speech before parliament November 1.

In Turkey, several methods are employed to eliminate religious minorities, not only by physical violence. Instead, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tries to erase minority faiths by preventing their ability to function by denying them the freedom to establish and safely operate their own institutions and places of worship. The Alevis, for instance, a historically persecuted religious minority in Turkey, are all-too-familiar with this form of oppression.

The Alevi-owned broadcaster, TV10, for example, was closed down in September 2016, two months after the failed coup attempt against Erdoğan, for allegedly “threatening national security and belonging to a terror organization.”

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/11/smith-bentham-wilberforce-liberal-foundations-australia/

As planning for the new colony of New South Wales was under way, Thomas Jefferson was in Paris working with La Fayette on a French Declaration of the Rights of Man. It was an age when the democratic idea had been given such momentum that it would be unstoppable, and nowhere would be more receptive to it than the Australian colonies. The British government might have hoped that the new colony would be well out of the way of dangerous ideas, located as it was on the other side of the world, but it could not but be influenced by the intellectual ferment of the times.

In the domestic debate in Britain about the nature of government, there were three thinkers who were to have deep and direct impact on the colonies through their influence on Britain’s government and the thinking of its rulers and its intellectual classes: William Wilberforce (1759–1833), Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and Adam Smith (1723–1790).

The ideas of these thinkers would constantly resonate in political debate and in the press (when it developed in the 1820s) in Australia, but the one who has claims to be the theorist around whom the greatest debate swirled was Adam Smith, for Smith’s ideas were extraordinary and counter-intuitive. They challenged some of the deepest prejudices and beliefs that had governed policy as far back as anyone could remember. Wilberforce’s ideas appealed to the heart, and through Christianity to a deep faith-based belief in the equal humanity (and divinity) of all people; Bentham’s appealed to the legal reformers and institution builders, to those who liked a systematic and rationally ordered world; but Smith’s ideas required people to confront conflicts between heart and mind in a way no other thinker of the age was to do. In no other thinker was the conflict between the recommendations of reason and those of prejudice to be so dramatic. His ideas were to build a broad social and policy base for liberalism, both in Britain and in its Australian possessions.

Economic liberty and the public interest

Smith was a leading figure of the so-called “Scot­tish Enlightenment”. During the eighteenth century the Scottish universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews were pre-eminent in Britain in their intellectual quality, and a number of thinkers in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen developed ideas that were to transform people’s understanding of human society. David Hume (1711–1776), a historian and philosopher, Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), a historian, Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University, James Steuart (1707–1780), the first political economist to use the phrase “supply and demand”, and Adam Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, led the revolution in ideas. Each of these men attempted to add to the then pitifully small amount of knowledge about how human societies actually worked: what caused them to evolve and grow and develop certain characteristics and, above all, what was the basis for peaceful co-operation between people in a world where authority had retreated and coercion was weak.

Like the philosophes in France who influenced them, these Scottish thinkers were highly sceptical of the common understandings and explanations of their day about the functioning of the social and economic order. They did not believe that societies were held together by the force or the authority of absolute monarchs or ruling classes nor even by the efforts of organised religion, nor did they believe that the ceaseless pursuit of treasure was the real road to wealth, nor that a nation was better off by excluding the products of others.