RUTHFULLY YOURS

December 11, 1941, the United States Congress declared war upon Germany hours after Germany declared war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The vote was 88–0 in the Senate and 393–0 in the House.

Whereas the Government of Germany has formally declared war against the Government and the people of the United States of America: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the state of war between the United States and the Government of Germany which has thus been thrust upon the United States is hereby formally declared; and the President is hereby authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the Government to carry on war against the Government of Germany; and, to bring the conflict to a successful termination, all of the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States.

(Signed) Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House of Representatives
(Signed) H. A. Wallace, Vice President of the United States and President of the Senate
Approved December 11, 1941 3:05 PM E.S.T.
(Signed) Franklin D. Roosevelt

Twisting a quotation variously attributed to Talleyrand, Metternich and Churchill, Vladimir Putin opined in 2002 that Russia is “never so strong as it wants to be and never so weak as it is thought to be”. Sure enough, Russia has probably never been as strong as it wants to be. Geopolitical over-ambition may be a permanent curse on a nation which lies straddled between Europe and Asia, and does not know to which continent it belongs. But, whatever the situation in 2002, there is no truth in the claim that today’s Russia is more powerful than the standard media representation. On all the key metrics except one, Russia is far weaker than most people realise.

The size of its economy is fundamental in assessing any country’s global importance. The ability to create goods and services is correlated with the ability to export those goods and services, and hence to pay for imports. The ability to spend money on imports then matters to suppliers in every country and to all the world’s citizens. Big nations with open markets can impress and influence small nations, simply because prosperity is inter-linked and mutual. Further, a country with a large national output can readily afford the expenditures associated with both soft and hard power. It can spread a favourable image of itself and its culture, disburse aid and support international organisations, and yet at the same time build up its military strength. Ultimately, the dominance of “the West” (meaning Western Europe and North America, with some Asian adjuncts) in the last two centuries has been based on economics. The West has been home to only a fraction of the world’s population, but these have been by far the richest people. Indeed, so high has been the typical income per head that the combined output of Western nations has been well over half the global total for most of the time since 1800.

Is Russia a great power in economic terms? One method of comparing national outputs is to calculate them at current prices and exchange rates. It is certainly relevant to the ability of a nation to import, to invest in soft power and to cover military expenditures in foreign currencies. World Bank data show that in 2015 Russia’s gross domestic product on this basis was $1,326 billion, which made it the 13th largest in the world. It was therefore in the select group of 15 nations that had a GDP above $1,000 billion.

But a glance at Chart One shows that Russia is a dwarf compared with the world’s only two economic superpowers, the US and China. The US’s output is almost 13 times Russia’s while China’s is more than eight times as large. Evidently, on the most familiar and basic criterion of international significance — national output expressed in dollars — Russia is not among the top nations. It is at best a medium-weight power, jostling for position with countries such as South Korea and Mexico — hardly major players in 20th-century global diplomacy. Let it immediately be conceded that the numbers in Chart One, despite having the World Bank as their source, are not conclusive.

“I’m grateful to be alive,” say the dhimmies. But for how long his judges, not his peers, may ask themselves? And their children? How long will they be able to live? Such as Maria Ladenburger?

Geert Wilders, the larger-than-life Dutch politician who dared say what was on his mind about the Islamist invasion of the Netherlands (“too many Moroccans?”), has been convicted of the “crime” of “hate speech” by a Dutch court.

And what is “hate speech”? “Hate speech” is any criticism of a member of a “minority” or the “minority” itself that can range from an emotional tirade to an innocuous comment or remark about Muslims or the race of a Muslim. Or even posing a question about the minority. One can be found guilty of “hate speech” by uttering a truth, such as: “Islam is not a race.”

Wilders asked a rhetorical question of his auditors about the presence and behavior of Moroccans in the Netherlands.

As the Telegraph reported:

The case was based on almost 6,500 official complaints after Wilders led a party rally during a local election campaign in The Hague in March 2014, asking whether there should be “more or fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands.”

The crowd’s response of “fewer, fewer”, was clearly organized, said a judge at the secure court at Schiphol Judicial Complex, near Amsterdam, ruling that Wilders had breached the boundaries of even a politician’s freedom of speech.

The leading judge read out in court:

“It doesn’t matter that Wilders gave another message afterwards [saying he was referring only to criminal Moroccans and benefits claimants],” said the judge. “The message that evening from the podium, via the media, was loud and proud and did its work…The group was collectively dismissed as inferior to other Dutch people.”

Wilders is a member of the Party for Freedom (PVV). It was created in 2006, and campaigned to “limit the growth of Muslim numbers” in the Netherlands, taking nine out of 150 seats. His party wants to ban the Koran, shut all mosques and asylum centers, and take the Netherlands out of the EU. At the moment it is leading in the polls for a general election in March 2017.

What brought the suit against Wilders on were the offended feelings of Moroccan Muslims, who did not like being singled out for “discriminatory” speech.

In court, the judge called his behavior “unworthy” of a politician, and said there was no question that the case was political, as Wilders claimed.

The case, which has taken 20 months to reach a verdict, comes three months before Dutch general elections and Wilders’ PVV is currently leading in some polls.

(NOTE: This was written more than 6 years ago, but relevant today, because it explains Erdogan, his attempt to “re-Islamisize” Turkey politically. The article is still continuously cited.)

Vol. 9, No. 24 http://jcpa.org/article/turkey-between-ataturk%E2%80%99s-secularism-and-fundamentalist-islam/

From the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, Atatürk founded a modern democratic state by forging the entirely unprecedented notion in the Islamic world of a secular Turkish identity. Moreover, this identity was to be based on the Western notion of loyalty to a geographic entity rather than religious solidarity.

Today there is an internal battle among Turkish Muslims between forces that want to be part of the Western world and those that want to return Turkey’s political identity to be based primarily on Islamic solidarity. But it isn’t Ottoman Islam that these Islamist Turks seek to revive. Their Islam is more in tune with the fanatically anti-Western principles of Saudi Wahhabi Islam.

It is not clear whether the present government of Turkey really cares to be part of the EU. Thus, when European leaders insist that Turkey has no place in Europe, they may be playing into the hands of the Islamist forces in Turkey who can say, in effect, “The EU is a Christian club which will never accept us, so we need to look elsewhere, to our Muslim brothers.”

In addition, American involvement has not always proven helpful. The U.S. attempted to reach out to radical leaders in a mistaken belief that they were forces of moderate Islam, thus inadvertently granting them legitimacy.

If a moderate form of Turkish Islam is to be revived, it must stand up to the onslaught of Wahhabism and the temptations of Islamism.

Inventing the Modern Turkish Identity

In the nineteenth century, Ottoman Turks borrowed the Arabic word watan, to signify loyalty to the geographic entity called the Ottoman Empire. Until that time, the word at most conjured in people’s minds the very local place where someone was born. The definition of identify defined by place and language is a European concept – not an Islamic or Middle Eastern one. In the Middle East, identity is defined by religion and then by genealogy, which can become ethnicity. The Ottomans were attempting to instill the Western concept of loyalty to a geographic entity into the minds of the people under Ottoman rule. It was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, who created a Turkish identity – a loyalty to a land – from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. It is he and his associates who set Turkey on the road to democracy.

“It would have been better if the Dutch state had sent a clear signal (to terrorists) via a Dutch court that we foster a broad notion of the freedom of expression in the Netherlands”. – Paul Cliteur, Professor of Jurisprudence, Leiden University

The historic dimension of Wilders’s conviction is related not only to the terrible injustice done to this MP, but that it was the Netherlands that, for the first time in Europe, criminalized dissenting opinions about Islam.

“You can count in it. I will never be silent. You will not be able to stop me…And that is what we stand for. For freedom and for our beautiful Netherlands.” – Geert Wilders, Dutch MP and head of the Party for Freedom (PVV)

“We have a lot of guests who are trying to take over the house.” – Pym Fortuyn, later shot to death “to save Muslims from persecution.”

Before being slaughtered, clinging to a basket, Theo van Gogh begged his assassin: “Can we talk about this?”. But can we talk?

A country whose most outspoken filmaker was slaughtered by an Islamist; whose bravest refugee, hunted by a fatwa, fled to the U.S.; whose cartoonists must live under protection, had better should think twice before condemning a Member of Parliament, whose comments about Islam have forced him to live under 24-hour protection for more than a decade, for “hate speech.” Poor Erasmus! The Netherlands is no longer a safe heaven for free thinkers. It is the Nightmare for Free Speech.

The most prominent politician in the Netherlands, MP Geert Wilders, has just been convicted of “hate speech,” for asking at a really if there should be fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands. Many newly-arrived Moroccans in the Netherlands seem to have been responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime there.

Paul Cliteur, Professor of Jurisprudence at Leiden University, who was called as an expert witness, summed up the message coming from the court: “It would have been better if the Dutch state had sent a clear signal (to terrorists) via a Dutch court that we foster a broad notion of the freedom of expression in the Netherlands.”

Here are just a few details to help understand what Wilders experiences every day because of his ideas: No visitors are allowed into his office except after a long wait to be checked. The Dutch airline KLM refused to board him on a flight to Moscow for reasons of “security.” His entourage is largely anonymous. When a warning level rises, he does not know where he will spend the night. For months, he was able to see his wife only twice a week, in a secure apartment, and then only when the police allowed it. The Parliament had to place him in the less visible part of the building, in order better to protect him. He often wears a bulletproof vest to speak in public. When he goes to a restaurant, his security detail must first check the place out. His life is a nightmare. “I am in jail,” he has said; “they are walking around free.”

Remarks, incomparably more damning icepicks than “fewer Moroccans”, [were] made by members of the Netherlands’ Labour Party, who of course were never prosecuted.

The irony cannot have been lost on the wider world that on the same day that news of Wilders’s conviction came out the other news from Holland was the arrest of a 30 year-old terror suspect in Rotterdam suspected of being about to carry out ‘an act of terrorism’.

Internationally it will continuously be used against Wilders that he has been convicted of ‘inciting discrimination’ even though the charge is about a proto-crime – a crime that has not even occurred: like charging the makers of a car chase movie for ‘inciting speeding’. As with many ‘hate-crime’ trials across the free world, from Denmark to Canada, the aim of the proceedings is to blacken the name of the party on trial so that they are afterwards formally tagged as a lesser, or non-person. If this sounds Stalinist it is because it is.

In the long-term, though, there is something even more insidious about this trial. For as we have noted here before, if you prosecute somebody for saying that they want fewer Moroccans in the Netherlands then the only legal views able to be expressed about the matter are that the number of Moroccans in the country must remain at precisely present numbers or that you would only like more Moroccans in the country. In a democratic society this sort of matter ought to be debatable.

If there is one great mental note of which 2016 ought to have reminded the world, it is how deeply unwise it is to try to police opinion. For when you do so you not only make your society less free, but you disable yourself from being able to learn what your fellow citizens are actually – perhaps ever more secretly – feeling. Then one day you will hear them.

The trial of Geert Wilders has resulted in a guilty verdict. The court – which was located in a maximum security courthouse in the Netherlands near Schipol airport – found the leader of the PVV (Freedom Party) guilty of ‘insulting a group’ and of ‘inciting discrimination’. The trial began with a number of complaints, but the proceedings gradually honed down onto one single comment made by Wilders at a party rally in March 2014. This was the occasion when Wilders asked the crowd whether they wanted ‘fewer or more Moroccans in your city and in the Netherlands’. The crowd of supporters shouted ‘Fewer’.

On Friday morning the court decided not to impose a jail sentence or a fine, as prosecutors had requested. The intention of the court is clearly that the ‘guilty’ sentence should be enough.

For Wilders himself this will have been another unpleasant ordeal. But he may have become used to them by now. Five years ago Wilders was put on trial for insulting a religion. The first trial fell apart after one of the judges was found to have attempted to influence the evidence of one of Wilders’s defence witnesses. Once the trial restarted, it resulted in an acquittal. So the Dutch Justice system turn out to have been “second-time lucky” in getting the conviction they appear to have so badly wanted.

This is apparent from remarks, incomparably more damning icepicks than “fewer Moroccans”, made by members of the Netherlands’ Labour Party, who of course were never prosecuted:

“We also have s*** Moroccans over here.” Rob Oudkerk, Dutch Labour Party (PvDA) politician.
“We must humiliate Moroccans.” Hans Spekman, PvDA politician.
“Moroccans have the ethnic monopoly on trouble-making.” Diederik Samsom, PvDA politician.

Donald Trump’s victory signifies much more than a slap to the elites so certain he didn’t have a chance. More than the satisfaction of seeing the chattering classes confounded, it is an assault on political correctness and the anti-growth nostrums it peddles.
When Sir Tim Rice penned “A whole new world” for Disney’s Aladdin back in 1992, the world was indee a very different place. A Clinton, Bill, was running for the White House. The Middle East, devastated by war, remained on knife edge, with a murderous dictator, Saddam, allowed to stay in power when Bush the Elder called off the drive to Baghdad. In Finland, an exciting new (2G) mobile telephone network had just been installed. In Australia, almost everyone was humming along to “Weather with you” by Crowded House.

Twenty-five years later, Rice’s magic lamp may finally be starting to shine. Castro is dead. Britain is leaving Europe, or at least getting ready to unhitch her moorings. The US has a new leader unlikely to bow to the King of Saudi Arabia, as Obama infamously did. And some of the political millstone-round-the-neck issues of the last two decades — infantile political correctness in the media, intent to destroy the enormous benefits of the global industrial economy in a vain attempt to reverse non-existent global warming, and obeisance to primitive cultures in place of civilization – look set to be rejected at last.

As Julie Andrews sang in Oscar and Hammerstein’s Sound of Music, “somewhere in (our) wicked miserable past, (we) must have had a moment of truth”. A majority of the US Electoral College is poise to confirm Donald Trump, a dis-inhibited braggart and billionaire, age 70, as the popular choice of voters in the states that matter as the more likely of the two contenders likely to propel America back to greatness. When America gets over a cold, the rest of the world recovers from influenza, malaria, dysentery and the Zika virus combined.

Post-communist Russia is now led by an ex-KGB agent — plus ca change! — while China’s still-Communist leader is married to a baby boomer pop star. Britain’s leader, for the third time since Boadicea, is “a bloody difficult woman”, as veteran Tory Ken Clarke was heard to opine when he thought the microphone had been turned off. And Japan, of recent years one of the most peaceful countries, is led by the grandson of a member of General Tojo’s WW2 cabinet.

We are told the 21st century belongs to the “agile and innovative” citizens of Asia upon whose coat-tails we hang in the quarry Down Under, otherwise known as Australia. If China ever stops buying our iron, coal, wheat, beef, lamb, wool, wine and milk it will be time to call the national taxidermist. Our former heavy manufacturing centres in Victoria and South Australia are already stuffed, so no hope of alternate sustenance there.

On December 9, for the first time in Dutch history, a court criminalized freedom of expression: The truly heroic Dutch Member of Parliament, Geert Wilders, was found guilty of the “crime” of “hate speech.”

The death sentence against Salman Rushdie in 1989 by Iran’s supreme leader looked unreal. The West did not take it seriously. Since then, however, this fatwa has been assimilated to such an extent that today’s threats to free speech come from ourselves. It is now the West that put on trial writers and journalists.

The Red Brigades, the Communist terror group which devastated Italy in the 1970s, coined a slogan: “Strike one to educate one hundred.” If you target one, you get collective intimidation. This is exactly the effect of these political trials about Islam.

“Hate speech” has become a political weapon to dispatch whoever may not agree with you. It is not the right of a democracy to quibble about the content of articles or cartoons. In the West, we paid a high price for the freedom to write them and and read them it. It is not up to those who govern to grant the right of thought and speech.

In Europe now, the same iron curtain as in the Soviet era is descending.

After the Second World War and the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, a central tenet of Western democracies has been that you can put people on trial, but not ideas and opinions. Europe is now allowing dangerous “human rights” groups and Islamists to use tribunals to restrict the borders of our freedom of expression, exactly as in Soviet show trials. “Militant anti-racism will be for the 21st century what communism was for the 20th century,” the prominent French philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut has predicted.

A year ago, Christoph Biró, a respected columnist and editor of the largest Austrian newspaper, Kronen Zeitung, wrote an article blaming “young men, testosterone-fuelled Syrians, who carry out extremely aggressive sexual attacks” (even before mass the sexual assaults of New Year’s Eve in Cologne, Hamburg and other cities). The article sparked much controversy, and it received a large number of complaints and protests. Biró needed four weeks off work because of these attacks and later (under pressure) admitted that he had “lost a sense of proportion”. Prosecutors in Graz recently charged Biró with “hate speech” after a complaint by a so-called human rights organization, SOS Mitmensch. The case will be decided in court.