The Hundred-Year Haunting

Yesterday - not a month earlier - was the true anniversary of the "Great War" - July 28, the day when the Royal and Imperial government of Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. The declaration was preceded by an ultimatum designed to be rejected (weeks prior, in fact), and war followed despite Serbia's willingness to bend over backwards without compromising its sovereignty.

Austria-Hungary wanted Serbia wiped off the map, and its leaders thought this would be a quick and easy victory, and that Russia would either stay out of it, or be handled by Germany. None of that proved to be the case. Instead, Europe - and the world - plunged into unprecedented slaughter that would go on till 11/11 1918.

Gavrilo Princip - the student whose bullet struck Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28 - did not live to see the end of the war. He died in April 1918 in Terezin, a Czech fortress that would later be used by the Nazis as a way station for Jews destined for death camps. Deprived of books and paper, Princip reportedly scratched on the walls of his cell the following epigram: "Our shadows shall wander Vienna, haunting the court, frightening the lords."

A year and a half ago, Sara Hoyt argued that the present-day nihilism of the West can be traced to the trauma of the Great War:

...we’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water. We’ve thrown out the idea of honor, even when honor means “looking after yourself and those who depend on you.” We’ve thrown out the confidence in our own culture. We went looking for some mythical noble savage who was never there...

... we've fallen into the rabbit hole of this sort of anti-hierarchy hierarchy, where greater power is given to those who claim (even while making d*mn sure no one unseats them) to want to “smash the establishment” and where greatest honor is given to those who hate their own culture and who glorify some mythical “other” who will never come close to their imagined greatness. Power is attained by claiming a wish to commit cultural suicide.And the sad thing is that some of these people actually mean it.

The story has come unmoored and is flapping in the wind, like a shroud. The specter of WWI is haunting western civilization. It’s time to lay the ghost to rest.

To the extent that the few in the West recognize and regret this, most fall into the trap of blaming the Orthodox Other - Serbia, but also Russia (!) - for allegedly starting it all. Because in this post-post-postmodernist mess that passes for "Western civilization" today, there are different kinds of Other: the mythical perfect Good ones (victims, martyrs, the oppressed, etc.) and the mythical perfectly Evil ones - the "oppressors", "enemies of progress" and "reactionaries", among other things. And who fits where isn't based on any semblance of logic, or reason, or facts, but on the current feelings of the person doing the sorting.

How did it come to this?

Empire's White-Knighting Explained

In an article published in Counterpunch on Friday, Diana Johnstone pulls back the curtain on the Ukraine crisis:

"In September 2013, one of Ukraine’s richest oligarchs, Viktor Pinchuk, paid for an elite strategic conference on Ukraine’s future that was held in the same Palace in Yalta, Crimea, where Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met to decide the future of Europe in 1945. The Economist, one of the elite media reporting on what it called a “display of fierce diplomacy”, stated that: “The future of Ukraine, a country of 48m people, and of Europe was being decided in real time.” The participants included Bill and Hillary Clinton, former CIA head General David Petraeus, former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, former World Bank head Robert Zoellick, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt, Shimon Peres, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Mario Monti, Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite, and Poland’s influential foreign minister Radek Sikorski. Both President Viktor Yanukovych, deposed five months later, and his recently elected successor Petro Poroshenko were present. Former U.S. energy secretary Bill Richardson was there to talk about the shale-gas revolution which the United States hopes to use to weaken Russia by substituting fracking for Russia’s natural gas reserves." 

Ah yes, the shale gas canard that's physically and mathematically impossible: the U.S. simply does not have the shipping and processing capabilities to meet Europe's gas needs - nor is there nearly as much shale gas in the fracking wells as originally estimated. Doesn't stop the world's biggest conmen from trying, though.

"U.S. policy, already evident at the September 2013 Yalta meeting, was carried out on the ground by Victoria Nuland, former advisor to Dick Cheney, deputy ambassador to NATO, spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton, wife of neocon theorist Robert Kagan. Her leading role in the Ukraine events proves that the neo-con influence in the State Department, established under Bush II, was retained by Obama, whose only visible contribution to foreign policy change has been the presence of a man of African descent in the presidency, calculated to impress the world with U.S. multicultural virtue. Like most other recent presidents, Obama is there as a temporary salesman for policies made and executed by others."

The truth hurts. But it's blindingly obvious.

Jihad in Frankfurt

Time and again it happens. Someone opens fire on a bus of soldiers, or targets fellow soldiers on a military base, or shoots up a mall or a recruiting office. Yells "Allahu akbar!" as he does it. And then the Imperial propaganda apparatus musters all its considerable resources to not report the identity of the murderer, deny that his actions could have had anything to do with jihad or Islam, or even not report the event at all.

Why is this? Why is the Empire so hell-bent on denying the existence of jihad? They have no problem playing up the inept shoe bombers, baby-bottle bombers and underwear bombers, whose mad plots never come anywhere close to actually hurting anyone. But when jihadist gunmen actually kill Americans, whether in Salt Lake City, Arkansas or Frankfurt, the Empire goes to great lengths to direct the public's attention elsewhere.

Perhaps it's a power thing. News of airline threats can be used to empower the strip-searching government goons. There is nothing to be gained politically from the American people realizing they can be shot anytime, anyplace.

And then there is another consideration: the said jihadist gunmen may belong to the "wrong" group, designated by the propaganda apparatus as righteous victims that cannot possibly be blamed for anything, including terrorism. There is no way to explain how the U.S. "shares values" with organ-trafficking, drug-dealing slavers and terrorists. So it isn't explained. Facts don't fit the narrative, so if they can't be spun to make them fit, they are ignored or / worse yet - suppressed. No jihad here, move along.

Until next time.

Mustafa's Genocide

Mustafa Ceric, head of the Islamic Religious Community in Bosnia, likes to travel around the world and pose as a "moderate" and "tolerant" Muslim. His latest junket was in Paris, where he traveled last week on the invitation of David de Rotschild, to take part in a conference dubbed "Projet Aladin" (the Aladdin Project). Apparently, this was a gathering of some two hundred political and academic personalities from the Islamic world dedicated to promoting Jewish-Muslim dialogue "based upon mutual acquaintance, respect and refusal to deny and diminish Holocaust."

I know this because of a press release posted on an obscure news portal, which also listed the hosts of the event (French ex-president Chirac, German ex-chancellor Schroeder, prince Hassan of Jordan, ex-president of Indonesia Wahid, and UNESCO), and included a statement issued by the participants, clearly aimed at Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's constant disputing of the Holocaust.

But the event gave Ceric the opportunity to make the preposterous claim that:

"Muslims and Jews have a joint experience of persecution and genocide in Europe: both were expelled from Spain (Endelus) in the fifteenth century, with the Sephardic Jews finding a safe haven in Sarajevo, which is best witnessed by the Sarajevo Holy Haggadah, and both suffered a genocide in the twentieth century, Jews from the Nazis and Bosnian Muslims from the Serbian aggressors."

The claim that what happened in Bosnia was a genocide absolutely qualifies as "diminishing the Holocaust." A savage ethnic conflict that killed two percent of the country's entire population (including combat casualties) compares to a campaign of mass murder conducted by the Nazis, how exactly? Oh, I forget, the death of "up to 8000" (the actual number is still a mystery!) Muslim fighters in Srebrenica is apparently a "genocide" on par with the Shoah!

There is also a hidden temptation for the Jews in Ceric's claim: Muslims will stop denying the Shoah if the Jews would agree that the Muslims were victims of genocide, too! Preposterous? I think so. But could it happen? Wouldn't be the first time the Jews bought into Muslim propaganda:

We outwitted three big Jewish organizations - B'Nai Brith Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress. We suggested to them to publish an advertisement in the New York Times and to organize demonstrations outside the U.N. This was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the (Muslim) Bosnians, we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind.

- James Harff, executive for PR agency Ruder Finn, to French journalist Jacques Merlino, 1993 (source)

One reason this is particularly galling is that the Muslims of Bosnia took part in the Holocaust. During the war, Bosnia was part of the "Independent State of Croatia" (NDH), and Muslims were considered "Croats of Islamic faith." The Ustasha regime ruling the NDH seized the property of Bosnian Jews and sent most of them to death camps like Jasenovac. Many Muslims took part in this infernal endeavor, and were rewarded by the Jews' property. Others answered the call of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and allied with Hitler.

Completing the travesty is that the Ustashas' principal target were the Serbs, of whom they killed hundreds of thousands! Yet the mass murder of Serbs isn't a "genocide," oh no - Srebrenica is!

The Sarajevo Haggadah, which Ceric mentions, had to be hidden during the war from the "tolerant" NDH authorities. Muslims claim they saved it from destruction. Croats say it was a Croat who did it. In any event, the book was saved. But what happened to the Jews?

Few remain in Bosnia today. Most have long ago emigrated to Israel, which Mustafa Ceric's "brothers" in Hamas and Hezbollah desire to destroy. Yet somehow, the fate of the Bosnian Jews and the Muslims' ties to the Nazis and the modern-day jihadists don't seem to matter to ex-politicians and UN bureaucrats. What they care about is being lectured by this "moderate" and "tolerant" mufti about the "joint experience of persecution", while he recycles vile propaganda about the "Serb genocide" and harangues against "Islamophobia."

We should rightly point a questioning finger at the organizers of this travesty for putting another brick into the wall of Eurabia. One could, and should, rightly condemn the Serbian officialdom, which has continued to ignore the genocide during WW2 even though the Communist regime that suppressed any inquiry into it has been gone for two decades now. None of that excuses Ceric for what he said, or what he's been doing for years - but it explains why he's been getting away with it.

"Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me," goes the saying that Emperor Bush once famously mangled. When it comes to Bosnia, the Jews have been fooled once already. Now Mustafa Ceric is trying to fool them again.

"Just like in Bosnia"

Just the other day I quoted Brendan O'Neill about how the hysterical Imperial propaganda about Bosnia fueled the jihad. Today I present the following video as an exhibit.

Egyptian preacher Amr Khaled's argument is simple. There are 20-30 million Muslims in Europe, and they are having babies. Europeans are not. So Muslims will become a majority "within 20 years". In order to prevent this (natural and desirable, by implication) course of events, the evil, ignorant infidels of Europe are out to "provoke" the Muslims, so they could have a pretext for ethnically cleansing them.

"...like they had in Bosnia."

See the video:

Supporting Their Own

Just as I was watching the ending of the Croatia-Turkey matchup at Euro 2008 (I won't give it away, but let's just say few saw that coming), this photo arrived in my inbox:



I don't know the source. I don't know where it was shot (though I presume somewhere in Germany, judging by the license plates) or when exactly. The caption was, "In Germany, support for their own."

As a commentary on immigration, integration and multi-culturalism in Europe, this picture is certainly worth a thousand words.

On the Road Again

I'm in Europe for the next two weeks, doing some research and getting some (in my opinion) well-deserved R&R. I may post some observations while traveling, but then again, I might not. Reliable broadband 'net access is still a pipe dream in some places. We'll see.

Meanwhile, chew on the notion that Europeans tend to look at Americans with a mixture of pity , sympathy, condescension and smugness. Sure, the EUSSR is destroying itself from within as well - but that self-implosion is far less obvious than the teetering dollar, the Iraq fiasco, and the circus that is the presidential election.

Quisling's Cause

John Laughland has an excellent and informative piece in the most recent Spectator, revealing that the idea of European unity was championed vocally by none other than Vidkun Quisling, the infamous Norwegian collaborator during the Nazi occupation. He also uncovers some interesting tidbits about Nazi flirtation with "Europeanism."

This isn't to say that today's Eurocrats are Nazis; they are more Soviet in their statist zealotry, if anything. But it is a good counter-argument to the oft-repeated canard that the EU arose as a reaction to Hitler and the second world war.

The Last Christmas

Antiwar.com today has a whole section dedicated to the Christmas Truce of 1914. Four months into the Great War, German, British and French troops in the trenches spontaneously ceased killing each other and spent a day exchanging gifts, playing football and caroling. Afraid that the truce might end the war altogether, generals on both sides ordered the resumption of hostilities and threatened punishment against anyone who even contemplated a truce again. The war went on for three more years, killing millions and mortally wounding European civilization.

Out of its ashes arose the Versailles system, a conflicted Middle East, a vengeful (soon to be Nazi) Germany, and the Soviet Union. Twenty years later, Europe was finished. What exists today is the pale shadow of a once-great civilization, a decadent, nihilistic, post-modernist mess. The mere mention of Christmas has become forbidden in the "tolerance"-obsessed statist anti-culture that is the West today.

The Communist experiment has nearly destroyed eastern Europe. Conflicts created by the post-1918 partition of the Middle East are fueling a global resurgence of Islamic jihad. The American Empire, which arose from World War Two and scored a Pyrrhic victory in the Cold War, is now bleeding itself to death all over the world.

In some ways, that day in 1914 was perhaps the last true Christmas in the West.

There is no going back to that time, of course. And, given that the men who stopped the truce and willingly took their countries to war were a product of that time as much as the soldiers who caroled together after four months of trying to kill each other... I would say that's a good thing. But if there is to be a future for European civilization, we must come to a realization that the past 92 years have not been "progress," but rather a tragedy of some magnitude.