Essays in Idleness

For a dead obvious reason, it will not be possible to have a public discussion, or “debate,” about the social crisis in Germany brought on by mass Muslim immigration; or anywhere else in Europe, for that matter; or in Canada, or in the USA. Alas, what seems obvious to me, does not so seem to many other people. So I will try to explain.

It begins with an extraordinary event. I do not mean the New Year’s sexual assaults on a few hundred women in the middle of Cologne; or those in many other trans-Alpine European cities where Muslim “refugees” have recently arrived in extraordinary numbers. This could easily have been anticipated by anyone who had even a modest understanding of the situation. With cases of rape and sexual assault already skyrocketing in all European countries with significant Muslim immigration, prior to the annus horribilis of 2015, such events were a certainty. I was myself entirely unsurprised; just as I was unsurprised by the events of 9/11 in 2001. Indeed, I had publicly predicted (well, in a bar) that the Islamists would try it again, after the earlier hit on the World Trade Centre, in 1993: “They have selected an iconic target, and they will strike and strike again, until they have brought that sucker down.”

No: mass rape and sexual assault on Europe’s (non-Muslim) women was a done deal, from the moment each European government bought into the idea of replacing their aging labour forces, to pay for their welfare entitlement programmes, by throwing their doors open to young male immigrants from the Middle East. “They” were invited to do “our” work for us. (Sounds like too good a deal, no?) Of course, they might have other ideas; and the specific idea of a Muslim occupation of Europe goes back nearly fourteen hundred years.

That such young men would, so very often, forsake work for welfare, came as something of a surprise to the liberal, tolerant, smarming elites. And more, that they would justify this on the immemorial religious ground, that while Muslims must submit to Allah, Infidels must submit to Muslims. Including sexually, in the case of Infidel women.

I was not even surprised by the smugness of people capable of ignoring such basic realities. I first encountered it many years ago, in its most incurable form, chatting with Israeli liberals. There is the old saw, “A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged”; but these people had been mugged, and were still liberal. One dinner I remember vividly in a Jerusalem suburb with a peace-activist couple. They wanted the borders to “Palestine” opened.

“You are already in Palestine, from a Palestinian perspective,” I noted, without drawing a response.

At one point I was rude enough to say: “I can’t understand. You are living one kilometre away from people who want to kill you, and vow to do so when they get a chance. And you want the border opened.”

There was some blather about having to make the first gesture in negotiations for “peace.” I had heard this from every American Secretary of State, except Reagan’s George P. Schultz, along with the words “two state solution” — but they could be partly forgiven for living far off in Cloud Cuckooland, and not knowing what they were talking about. Whereas, these people could not help knowing. So I gave up on them, and we spent the rest of the evening in a pleasant chat about art and archaeology (they admired the design of Crusader castles); during which, as I recall, I had only once to suppress the remark, “You’re not really Jewish, are you?”

How can people be so blind: not to minor passing spectacles, but to questions of life and death? How can they not see what is before their eyes, and bigger than anything else on the horizon?

But with post-modern liberalism, disarmed by “political correctness” (far too mild a term for this powerful drug), this is no aberration but a mode of being. Or so I have observed.

Which takes me towards what surprised me this week. Not the events in Cologne, which we now learn also happened in many other cities as part of their New Year’s celebrations; rather, the complete media silence.

I can understand Merkel’s government not wanting to talk about it; I can understand liberals, generally, preferring some other topic; but I could not understand how the entire German mass media, on nominal “right” and “left” alike, and I assume with little cross-consultation, agreed to shut the story down as if it had not happened; consciously lying to report that there were “no incidents” that night. And in the same Germany whose motto, seventy years ago, was, “I did not know.” Three full days they kept it clamped — right across the Bundesrepublik (138,000 square miles, 80 million inhabitants) — until the growing buzz on “social media” made disclosure unavoidable.

Since, the right-thinking people have tried other common forms of denial: to diminish the significance of the story; or bluster the most trivial details; or transfer blame from the perpetrators; or re-bury the story in the face of reader interest; or change the angle to “hate speech,” defined to include any form of opposition to correct, right-thinking thought.

The chief of Cologne’s police was removed, after he complained that he never had the resources to deal with mob violence on so large a scale; and the government at Berlin got Google, Twitter, Facebook, &c, to agree to censor “hate speech” on their lines, in precisely the way the Chinese government gets social media providers to delete any dissident voice, in China.

Germany’s Justice Minister, Heiko Maas — already on record with the most fatuous statement about the Muslim “wildings” (he attributed them to “organized crime”) — then topped himself. He said that this censorship has nothing to do with freedom of speech. It is merely designed to prevent the “far right” from speaking freely in social media; which are the only part of the media from which they are not already excluded.

Which is to say, it had everything to do with freedom of speech.

I mention Maas because he gives such prize examples for both of the tactics liberals use, in reply to any cogent argument: 1. unctuous preening and strutting and, 2. personalized smearing. (I have been unable to discover a third, in the course of my decades of journalistic experience.)

But again, I could hardly be surprised to learn that the German progressive elite consists entirely of drooling, malicious idiots. For this I also already knew. Rather, my gobsmackling came from the discovery that their hold on power is so complete. I could actually convict myself of being naïve.

On the other hand (neither having been amputated by the Shariah specialists), I must admit that this is a rather old tale. The secular state, whoever governs, has always had interest in silencing opposition to its monopolist claims, or to its worldview, however trite. Moreover, its vanity is especially teased by revelations of its own stupidity and incompetence. It seeks, instinctively by tyrannical means, to advance stupidity all round, churning mud to move it past each successive obstacle.

I would guess that the government solution — in every jurisdiction of the Western world — will be to hurl countless additional billions at “counselling” for Muslim immigrants, who have behaved in what the Nanny State considers to be naughty ways. And I can safely predict that the result will be to aggravate the tensions. Not some, but all reasonably intelligent Muslims will see through this fey act — to convert them from Islam to the liberal vacuity. Increasing numbers will then turn to the more radical imams, for more effective remedial counselling. The result will be the exact opposite of each government’s stated aim. Yet each may prevail, because every alternative idea of the native Europeans — such as, “Islam is Islam is Islam” — will be smeared, and unctuously and preeningly strutted down.

Eventually, the upward pressure of fact will overcome the “official” pressure downward, and there will be an earthquake. Perhaps the initial signals have already been felt. But those who look forward to the full subduction, have even less happening in their brains than the hallucinogenicized liberals.