Islamic Crusades Episode 2: Before Islam

Posted on October 4, 2008 by Baron Bodissey

The Story of the Islamification of Egypt, Iraq, and Iran

The next installment in the series from from Occidental Soapbox:

[post ends here]

Ten Reasons to Get Rid of the European Union

Posted on October 4, 2008 by Baron Bodissey

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.
For a complete Fjordman blogography, see The Fjordman Files. There is also a multi-index listing here.

With this essay, Fjordman announces the completion of his first book. As publication information on it becomes available, it will be posted here.

1. The EU Promotes Crime and Instability

The EU does not protect the peace in Europe. On the contrary, it undermines stability in the continent by dismantling border controls at a time of the greatest population movements in human history, with many migrants coming from politically unstable countries whose instability spills over to European states. Through its senseless immigration policies, the EU could become partly responsible for triggering civil wars in several European countries. Maybe it will be remembered as the “peace project” which brought war.

EU Stalin The European Union has created a borderless region from Greece to France and from Portugal to Finland, yet the citizens of these countries still pay most of their taxes to nation states whose borders are no longer upheld. It is ridiculous to pay up to half of your income to an entity that no longer controls its own territory or legislation. Unless national borders are re-established, the citizens of EU member states no longer have any obligation to pay taxes.

The EU promotes a ridiculous amount of laws and regulations, yet street crime largely goes unpunished and is growing increasingly common. Laws are used to punish the law-abiding while real criminals rule the streets, although this flaw is admittedly shared with many national governments. The EU makes a mockery out of the social contract every single day. As the authorities from Berlin via Amsterdam to London and Rome fail to uphold law and order, citizens have not just the right, but the duty to arm themselves in order to protect their property and the lives of their loved ones.

It is quite possible that we could indeed benefit from some form of European cooperation in defense of a shared civilization, but not in the form of the EU as it is today. The EU is not about cooperation for protecting the best interests of Europeans; it is about turning the entire continent into a Multicultural theme park while the natives get culturally deconstructed and demographically crushed. The EU is a large-scale social experiment conducted on hundreds of millions of people. It is not about economics of scale, it is about stupidity of scale.

The EU does not give Europeans a “voice” on the international arena. It’s a bureaucratic monster at best, a dangerous Utopian project at worst. It makes our enemies take us less seriously, not more. It is not about giving anybody a voice; it is about silencing the voices we already have, by depriving us of any say regarding our future and the destinies of our peoples.

2. The EU Weakens Europe’s Cultural Defenses

The EU is systematically surrendering the continent to our worst enemies. When French, Dutch and Irish voters rejected the EU Constitution, the EU elites moved on as if nothing had happened. When the Islamic world says that the EU should work to eradicate “Islamophobia,” they immediately consent to do this. When an organization ignores the interests of its own people yet implements the interests of that people’s enemies, that organization has become an actively hostile entity run by a corrupt class of abject traitors. This is what the EU is today.

The EU is deliberately destroying the cultural traditions of member states by flooding them with immigrants and eradicating native traditions. This is a gross violation of the rights of the indigenous peoples across an entire continent. Europe has some of the richest cultural traditions on the planet. To replace this with sharia barbarism is a crime against humanity. The European Union is currently the principal (though not the only) motor behind the Islamization of Europe, perhaps the greatest betrayal in this civilization’s history. Appeasement of Islam and Muslims is so deeply immersed into the structural DNA of the EU that the only way to stop the Islamization of the continent is to get rid of the EU. All of it.
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3. The EU Promotes a Bloated Bureaucracy

A study released by the organization Open Europe in August 2008 found that the EU employs an “army” of bureaucrats, and that the actual number of individuals required to run the EU is close to 170,000 — more than 7 times the 23,000 figure sometimes cited by the Commission.

According to them, “The legislative process of the EU is an extremely complex and opaque system, making it very difficult to identify how many people are actually involved in formulating, implementing and overseeing legislation. However, research by Open Europe, using limited available information, shows that just to draft and work out how to implement legislation the EU requires a bureaucratic staff of around 62,026 people. This figure reveals where the EU’s real legislative work is actually done: in committees, behind closed doors and out of the public eye. Most of the work takes place away from the core institutions within Expert Groups, Council Groups, and what are known as Comitology committees.”
EUSSR
Notice how this closed and secretive process of drafting legislation for half a billion people resembles that of a dictatorship. The EU follows a strategy of hide in plain sight and conceals the real power behind layers of bureaucratic complexities. This strategy was also followed with the drafting of the ridiculously long European Constitution.

If somebody presented you with a contract of hundreds of pages of more or less incomprehensible technical language which was to govern all aspects of your life and that of your children and grandchildren, and that person told you to just take his word for it that it is good and could you please sign on the dotted line, would you have accepted it? That is essentially what the EU has done regarding the fate of an entire continent, not just a single family. When some annoying people, such as the Dutch and the Irish, were unkind enough not to consent blindly to their new serfdom, the EU decided that they were bound by the contract they just rejected, anyway. It’s arrogance on a monumental scale, if not plain treason.

The EU is not yet a totalitarian entity, but it holds all the tools it needs to in order to become one. It has managed to corrupt the national elites to sell out the freedom of their peoples by inviting them to take part in the world’s largest racket, paid for by European taxpayers. The growing pan-European nanny state now interferes with every aspect of social and economic life, governed by an unaccountable and often hostile minority of social engineers who wish to impose their way of thinking on the majority.

4. Excessive Regulation and Centralization is bad for Freedom and for Prosperity

Europe once became a dynamic continent thanks to competition at all levels. It is now virtually impossible to find a sector of society that is untouched by the often excessive EU regulations. The EU functions as a huge superstate centrally directed by statists obsessed by regulations. They have learnt little from history, where central planning has been an almost universal failure. Here is what Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell Jr. say in How The West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation Of The Industrial World:

“Initially, the West’s achievement of autonomy stemmed from a relaxation, or a weakening, of political and religious controls, giving other departments of social life the opportunity to experiment with change. Growth is, of course, a form of change, and growth is impossible when change is not permitted. Any successful change requires a large measure of freedom to experiment. A grant of that kind of freedom costs a society’s rulers their feeling of control, as if they were conceding to others the power to determine the society’s future. The great majority of societies, past and present, have not allowed it. Nor have they escaped from poverty.”

Moreover, “Western technology developed in the special context of a high degree of autonomy among the political, religious, scientific, and economic spheres of social life. Is this high degree of autonomy indispensable to the successful application of technology to economic welfare? Few Western scientists would disagree with the proposition that a high degree of autonomy of the scientific sphere from political or religious control is essential to scientific advance. It is almost as clear that a similar autonomy, in much the same degree, is essential to the economic process of translating scientific advances into goods and services. The technological capability of a society is bound to be degraded if control of either scientific inquiry or innovation is located at points of political or religious authority that combine an interest in controlling the outcome of technological development with the power to restrict or direct experiment. In all well-ordered societies, political authority is dedicated to stability, security, and the status quo. It is thus singularly ill-qualified to direct or channel activity intended to produce instability, insecurity, and change.”

The European Union cannot be anything but anti-liberty because it concentrates far too much power in a centralized bureaucratic system that is almost impossible for outsiders to understand. As the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom:

“To imagine that the economic life of a vast area comprising many different people can be directed or planned by democratic procedure betrays a complete lack of awareness of the problems such planning would raise. Planning on an international scale, even more than is true on a national scale, cannot be anything but a naked rule of force, an imposition by a small group on all the rest of that sort of standard and employment which the planners think suitable for the rest.”

5. The Lack of a Real Separation of Powers in the EU Invites Abuse of Power

We should study the work of the great eighteenth century French thinker Montesquieu, who admired the British political system. He advocated that the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government should be assigned to different bodies, where each of them would not be powerful enough to impose its will on society. This is because “constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.” This separation of powers is almost totally absent in the European Union, where there is weak to non-existent separation between the legislative, the executive and the judicial branches, and where all of them function without the consent of the public. In short, a small number of people can draft and implement laws without consulting the people, and these take precedence over the laws passed by elected assemblies. This is a blueprint for a dictatorship.

In 2007, former German president Roman Herzog warned that parliamentary democracy was under threat from the EU. Between 1999 and 2004, 84 percent of the legal acts in Germany — and the majority in all EU member states — stemmed from Brussels. According to Herzog, “EU policies suffer to an alarming degree from a lack of democracy and a de facto suspension of the separation of powers.” Despite this, the EU was largely a non-issue during the 2005 German elections. One gets the feeling that the real issues of substance are not subject to public debate. National elections have become an increasingly empty ritual. The important issues have already been settled beforehand behind closed doors.

Free citizens should obey laws that are passed with the best long-term interests of their nation and people in mind. Most of the laws within the EU’s area are no longer passed by elected national representatives, but by unaccountable EU bureaucrats, some of whom could potentially have been bought and paid by our Islamic enemies with Arab oil money. As such, the citizens of these nations no longer have any obligation to obey these laws.

As Montesquieu warned, “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.” He also stated that “Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.” The current problem with the EU is not just the content of laws and the way they are drafted and passed, but also their sheer volume. Law-abiding citizens are turned into criminals by laws regulating speech and behavior, while real criminals rule the streets in our cities. This situation will either lead to a police state, to a total breakdown in law and order, or both.

6. The Lack of Transparency Leaves the EU Vulnerable to Hostile Infiltration

Eurabia by Bat Ye’or In order to have a system with government under public control, you need accountability and transparency. The EU fails miserably on both accounts. The reason why European leaders could commit a betrayal as large as the creation of Eurabia is not only because EU authorities are not formally subjected to the popular will, but just as much because they have made the decision-making process incredibly complicated and moved real power out of the public view.

There is every reason to believe that some of those claiming to be our representatives have been bribed and/or blackmailed by Muslim countries and other enemies to implement agendas hostile to our interests. No system is perfect, but a closed and non-transparent system such as the EU is particularly vulnerable to infiltration from outsiders and hostile foreign interests.

The “anti-discrimination laws” we now see in Western Europe are an indication that the democratic system no longer works as intended. These laws come from a small group of self-appointed leaders who respond to pressure from the Islamic world, not from their own people. The European political elites increasingly risk being seen as collaborators and puppets for our enemies because that’s in many cases how they act.

7. The EU Leads to Less Freedom of Speech

The EU does nothing to promote freedom in Europe, but rather spends a great deal of time trying to stamp out what’s left of it. The EU, in cooperation with Islamic countries, is rewriting school textbooks across the European continent to present a more “positive” image of Islam. The EU increasingly views the media and the education system simply as a prolonged arm of the state. This is the hallmark of a totalitarian state, which is what the EUSSR is gradually becoming. One gets the feeling that the EU’s concept of a “united Europe” means one nation, one people — and one allowed opinion. It is tempting to say one allowed religion as well: Islam.

EUSSR No! say the Irish According to British writer Daniel Hannan, “Eurocrats instinctively dislike spontaneous activity. To them, ‘unregulated’ is almost synonymous with ‘illegal’. The bureaucratic mindset demands uniformity, licensing, order. Eurocrats are especially upset because many bloggers, being of an anarchic disposition, are anti-Brussels. In the French, Dutch and Irish referendums, the MSM [mainstream media] were uniformly pro-treaty, whereas internet activity was overwhelmingly sceptical. Bruno Waterfield recently reported on a secret Commission report about the danger posed by online libertarians: ‘Apart from official websites, the internet has largely been a space left to anti-European feeling. Given the ability to reach an audience at a much lower cost, and given the simplicity of the No campaign messages, it has proven to be easily malleable during the campaign and pre-campaign period.’ The EU’s solution? Why, to regulate blogs!”

At the time of writing, it looks like the most radical proposals to regulate the blogosphere and independent websites have been watered down for now, but there is no doubt that the EU will make new attempts to censor the Internet, especially since the organization has successfully bribed much of the traditional media. The EU has encouraged pan-European laws against “racism and hate speech.” Every single action the EU has taken vis-à-vis these subjects have led to more restrictions of free speech, online and offline. There is no reason not to expect that trend to continue, especially since the EU tries consistently to placate Muslims and other immigrant groups in every way possible. The EU’s attempts to crush dissent and silence criticism of its ideas will become increasingly aggressive and hard to ignore.

8. The EU Fails to Consult its Citizens and Insults Them When Doing So

The Irish referendum in 2008 on the proposed EU Constitution/ Lisbon Treaty is a powerful testimony to the evil nature of the European Union. Before the referendum, a number of EU leaders made it perfectly clear that the Lisbon Treaty was virtually identical to the European Constitution which had been rejected by Dutch and French voters in 2005, and which should then presumably have been dead.

Former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (the chief drafter of the Constitution) said: “the proposals in the original constitutional treaty are practically unchanged. They have simply been dispersed through old treaties in the form of amendments. Why this subtle change? Above all, to head off any threat of referenda by avoiding any form of constitutional vocabulary.” D’Estaing also said: “Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly… All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way.” Spanish PM José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero said: “We have not let a single substantial point of the Constitutional Treaty go…” Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said: “Those who are anti-EU are terrorists. It is psychological terrorism to suggest the specter of a European superstate.”

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen admitted that he had not read the Lisbon Treaty in full, but nonetheless assured his people that it was good and that Irishmen should vote “yes” based on this assurance. He said that voters were being asked to give the EU a “more effective and efficient decision-making process.”

If a dictator decides to ignore the opinion of everybody else and implement policies as he sees fit without consulting anybody, this could be seen as a “more efficient” decision-making process from a certain point of view. Is it this kind of “efficiency” the EU is promoting? Mr. Cowen doesn’t say, but it’s tempting to speculate that the answer is “yes.” According to the words and actions of the EU elites, the will of the people is merely an annoying speed bump which slows down the implementation of their supremely enlightened policies.

After the referendum, when it was clear that the Irish would have none of this trick, the Irish EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy revealed that he had not read the Lisbon Treaty himself: “I would predict that there won’t be 250 people in the whole of the 4.2 million population of Ireland that have read the treaties cover-to-cover. I further predict that there is not 10 percent of that 250 that will understand every section and subsection,” he said. “But is there anything different about that?” said the Commissioner, adding: “Does anyone read the finance act?” referring to the lengthy documents he drew up when he was finance minister in Ireland.

Let us repeat this again. This man stated — probably correctly — that not more than a couple of dozen people among millions of citizens actually understood the document they were supposed to vote over, yet he saw nothing inherently wrong with this. The EU Constitution/ Lisbon Treaty would finalize the transfer of authority to a new pan-European superstate with almost unlimited powers to direct the affairs and lives of half a billion people in dozens of countries, from Finland to France and from Ireland to Poland. The Irish responded in the only sensible manner, but European leaders made it perfectly clear that they would press on with the project of dismantling European nation states regardless of popular resistance.

French President Sarkozy and German Chancellor Merkel issued a joint statement saying they “hope that the other member states will continue the process of ratification.” The German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said: “The ratification process must continue. I am still convinced that we need this treaty.” The British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said the UK would press on with ratification: “It’s right that we continue with our own process.”

The President of the European Parliament Hans-Gert Pöttering stated: “The ratification process must continue” because “the reform of the European Union is important for citizens, for democracy and for transparency.” In other words: The reason the EU is tossing aside the verdict of the Irish people, as well as the French and Dutch people and numerous others who never got the chance to voice their opinion at all, is for “democracy.”

According to writer Martin Helme, it was always clear that the power elites were not going to accept an Irish “no.” After the first shock they would simply continue carrying out plan A:

“One of the most disgusting and outrageous talking points already being peddled by the Eurocrats and their friends in the liberal mainstream media is that 862,415 Irish voters have no right to block the desired goal of some 450 million Europeans. This distortion of truth should never go unchallenged. First of all, those few million Irish were actually the only citizens in Europe who were asked for their opinion. The rest of the 446 or so millions were never consulted. How can any politician claim that their voters want the ratification of EU constitution/Lisbon Treaty when the entire political class emphatically insisted on not asking the people? In fact, in many countries politicians openly admit that their voters would have done the same as Irish did, i.e. vote against the rotten thing. So it is not the few million Irish voters blocking the will of hundreds of millions of other European voters but very clearly a mass of Irish voters against a few thousand politicians and bureaucrats who make up the European power elite. Secondly, what happened to those 20 million French and Dutch voters who said no to the same document three years ago?”

The European Commission in April 2008 presented a new plan aimed at increasing EU citizens’ involvement in the decision-making process of the 27-nation bloc, as well as making it more popular. “We must consult citizens,” said the Swedish Commissioner Margot Wallström then. She is famous for her remark in 2005 that Europeans needed to approve of the proposed EU constitution or risk a new Holocaust. Three years after the Constitution was first rejected, and still with no Holocaust in sight, the EU no longer pretends to care about the will of the people. When Eurocrats talk about “consulting” citizens, they mean insulting them.

Vienna Demo In April 2008, a demonstration comprising people from all walks of life and from most political parties convened in front of the famous and beautiful Staatsoper (State Opera) in the center of Vienna to demonstrate against the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in the Austrian Parliament, which later occurred without holding a referendum. Opinion polls showed that a majority of Austrians were convinced, as they should be, that policy is determined almost exclusively by Brussels. They see local politicians as largely deprived of any power, and many of them were reluctant to grant even more power to the unaccountable EU.

Opinion polls from mid-2008 showed that a strong majority of the Dutch were still against the Lisbon Treaty, which is virtually identical to the Constitution that Dutch voters rejected by 62 to 38 percent in the 2005 referendum. Nevertheless, the Netherlands is going ahead with the ratification of the Treaty even after the Irish rejected it, said Premier Jan Peter Balkenende. The political elites are determined to continue a process which will essentially dismantle their country and reduce it to just another province in an emerging Eurabian superstate, and openly ignore their own people in order to implement this.

As Helme states, “Governments have willfully and knowingly gone against the will of the people, trashed their own constitutions, corrupted their courts to go along with it (thus trashing the rule of law) and started to govern without the consent of the people or the rule of law….This is the path that leads to revolution. Good! As Thomas Jefferson said ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’ I have a feeling that more and more people around Europe are ready for it. How about the politicians?”

9. The EU Undermines Political Legitimacy and Connections between Rulers and the Ruled

EuroMed map Proponents of the European Union claim that it is a “peace project.” But the EU is not about peace, it is about war: A demographic and cultural war waged against an entire continent, from the Black Sea to the North Sea, in order to destroy European nation states and build an empire run by self-appointed bureaucrats. This is supported by national politicians in order to enhance their personal power, by creating a larger political entity than their individual nation states and by ridding themselves of the constraints of a democratic society. The EU corrupts national political elites into betraying the people they are supposed to serve and protect.

Anthony Coughlan, a senior lecturer at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, states the following in an essay at the EU Observer:

“At a national level when a minister wants to get something done, he or she must have the backing of the prime minister, must have the agreement of the minister for finance if it means spending money, and above all must have majority support in the national parliament, and implicitly amongst voters in the country. Shift the policy area in question to the supranational level of Brussels however, where laws are made primarily by the 27-member Council of Ministers, and the minister in question becomes a member of an oligarchy, a committee of lawmakers, the most powerful in history, making laws for 500 million Europeans, and irremovable as a group regardless of what it does. National parliaments and citizens lose power with every EU treaty, for they no longer have the final say in the policy areas concerned. Individual ministers on the other hand obtain an intoxicating increase in personal power, as they are transformed from members of the executive arm of government at national level, subordinate to a national legislature, into EU-wide legislators at the supranational.”

EU ministers see themselves as architects of a superpower in the making, and can free themselves from scrutiny of their actions by elected national parliaments. According to Coughlan, EU integration represents “a gradual coup by government executives against legislatures, and by politicians against the citizens who elect them.” This process sucks the reality of power from “traditional government institutions, while leaving these still formally intact. They still keep their old names — parliament, government, supreme court — so that their citizens do not get too alarmed, but their classical functions have been transformed.”

The European Union is basically an attempt by the elites in European nations to cooperate on usurping power, bypassing and abolishing the democratic system, a slow-motion coup d’état. Ideas such as “promoting peace” or “promoting free trade” are used as a pretext for this, a bone thrown to fool the gullible masses and veil what is essentially a naked power grab.

The European Union is deeply flawed in its basic construction and cannot function as anything other than an increasingly totalitarian pan-European dictatorship, run by a self-appointed oligarchy. Indeed, there is reason to fear that it was designed that way. Power is concentrated heavily in institutions that are above the formal restraints of public consent and above the informal restraints of public scrutiny and insight. EU authorities can do more or less whatever they want to, as they do in relations to the Arab and Islamic world.

10. The EU Spreads a Culture of Lies and Corruption

After Irish voters had clearly rejected the Lisbon Treaty (the slightly changed, but otherwise recycled version of the European Constitution which had been rejected by French and Dutch voters earlier), Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark said Ireland should be given less than nine months to work out its problems with the Lisbon Treaty prior to the EU’s parliamentary elections in 2009. Rasmussen said that the Irish “no” vote to the Constitution should not stop further work by the Union toward getting the treaty ratified. European leaders, including Danish ones, have generally preferred ratification of the EU Constitution without popular referendums because they know there is powerful resistance to it in many countries. It is meaningless to have referendums if they only come when the elites want them to, and these elites can ignore them if they dislike the results.

Mr. Rasmussen is a great example of how the European Union slowly destroys the democratic system and is deliberately designed to do so. He is supposed to follow the will of and interests of his people, but his actual loyalty lies with the rest of the EU oligarchy. He’s by no means the worst person among EU leaders; this isn’t about his personal flaws, it’s about the EU and how it eventually corrupts even otherwise decent individuals. A similar thing happened in Portugal, where the PM responded to calls from the leaders of Germany and France, not his own electorate.

The EU is a slow-motion coup d’état conducted against dozens of countries simultaneously. It is designed to empty all organs subjected to the popular will of any real power and transfer it into the hands of an unelected oligarchy. In fact, it’s worse than a coup d’état because this traditionally implied that a group of people seized control over a country. The EU doesn’t just want to seize control over nation states; it wants to abolish them. The EU is organized treason.

The EU elites react as one when faced with challenges to their power base from ordinary people. MEPs in the European Parliament as well as participants at every level of the EU system get very well-paid jobs for taking part in it, which means that their pragmatic interests lie with maintaining it. Their loyalty has been bought — with the tax money of European citizens — and transferred from their people, where it theoretically should be, to the EU. The EU is their pension plan, so to speak. When you challenge the EU, you thus constitute a direct threat to their personal financial interests, and they will respond accordingly.

Just like the Soviet Union, the European Union promotes a culture of lies and corruption which starts at the top and filters down to society as a whole. The EU system corrupts virtually everybody who comes close to it. It cannot be reformed, it can only be dismantled.

The Blackhoods of Antifa

Posted on October 4, 2008 by Baron Bodissey

I’ve written several times previously about Antifascist Action (a.k.a. AFA or Antifa, with name variants in several other European languages). It’s a loosely interconnected alliance of hard-left groups who use violence and intimidation against “racists” and “fascists”, i.e. anybody who opposes Leftist orthodoxy. In some countries the AFA brigades enjoy the tacit support of the police and local authorities in their actions.

Recent events in Cologne and Malmö have brought the “anti-fascists” into the limelight. El Inglés and our Flemish correspondent VH teamed up to do a little research into the black-hooded goons of Antifa. It El Inglés has gathered the results into a report, which is presented below.

The Blackhoods of Antifa
by El Inglés

Introduction

Antifa Blackhoods As readers of this blog will all know by now, the recent anti-Islamization demonstration planned to take place in Cologne was disrupted by groups of blackhooded thugs. These thugs, whom I will refer to collectively as Antifa for the purposes of this brief preliminary discussion, are a force the size and strength of which it is extremely difficult to discern through casually scanning the news reports concerning the event. With the help of a great deal of valuable research done by VH, already a regular contributor at Gates of Vienna, I propose to start thinking slightly more rigorously about these far-left hoodlums in the hope that we might come up with some ideas as to what, if anything, should be done about them. This essay will not and cannot propose anything definite course of action or present any definite conclusions. It is no more than a speculative piece designed to foster and stimulate discussion amongst those who may be interested.

I will confess to a certain lack of interest in the taxonomy of the hard left. Communists, anarchists, revolutionary socialists, autonomer, ‘anti-fascists’: I neither know nor care what the exact differences may be between these various groups. Parsing this swarming bunch of criminals is an activity I will leave to those who both have the stomach for the task and consider it important to understand the ideological structure of, and fissures within, our self-elected street-level human rights enforcers.

Antifascistisk Aktion Given that Antifa are clearly capable of putting aside their differences for long enough to engage in the occasional bout of civil unrest, for the duration of this piece I will treat them as the single group that they are sometimes able to form. However, for the purposes of this essay, I will ignore the occasional small-scale targeted action carried out by Antifa types, such as arson attacks on the homes of anti-immigration politicians or brutal assaults on anti-Islamization activists such as Anders Gravers, the head of SIAD. Though perpetrated by the same stripe of person, I think these criminal activities are sufficiently different from the mass action witnessed recently in Cologne to deserve an analysis of their own. Accordingly, I will concentrate on Antifa as a mass-action entity in this essay.

This discussion will be loosely structured around a series of key questions about Antifa that I will try provide some preliminary and speculative answers to below. They are as follows:

1)		How many of them are there across Western Europe and where are they located? I define an Antifa member here as being a core member of Antifa activity, concealing their identity with masks and hoods, and prepared to engage in violence against ideological opponents and/or the police and whatever other criminal activity they deem appropriate to their interests. Normal demonstrators do not count, however closely allied they may be with Antifa.
2)		What are their financial resources?
3)		What is their recruitment process?
4)		What are their strengths?
5)		What are their weaknesses?

1) How Many and Where

AFA Pride Despite initially reading that 40,000 people were expected to attend the counter-demonstration in Cologne in total, it seems, on the basis of what VH was so good as to unearth, that no more than five or six thousand people attended in total. VH has also estimated (I am entirely reliant on his work here) that there would not have been more than about 2,000 Antifa there. The significance of this number depends on certain factors. If the attempts to disrupt the Pro-Cologne demonstration were a major event on the Antifa calendar for 2008 and only 2,000 of them made it, we must either assume that the figure of 2,000 is roughly representative of their strength in Western Europe, or that there are is a significant number of additional cadres, but the financial and organizational resources required to get them there were lacking, or some combination of both possibilities.

VH informs me that there were probably not more than a few hundred non-German Antifa members at the demonstration, and that those came mainly from Belgium, the Netherlands, and perhaps parts of France. It seems reasonable to suggest that there are at most a few thousand serious Antifa members throughout the bulk of Western Europe. They may be complimented in any given situation by a significant number of normal protestors who they may instruct and direct to a certain extent, but these people are probably not much of an issue one way or another in their own right.
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2) Financial Resources

As one might expect of a group of people who, despite their ideological differences, all reject the fundamental organizing principles of Western societies, Antifa members do not seem to be high earners. It is also hard to see how a group of this nature could generate any reliable flow of funding of any sort, or who it would be prepared to accept it from.

AFA We would benefit by knowing more on this subject, but VH has sent me some fascinating information on the attempts by Antifa in the Netherlands to have “squatters’ rights” recognized by the government. As far as I can make out, the Netherlands has recognized a ‘right to squat’ since a court ruling in 1971, which Antifa have made great use of. The vexing question of how people who are presumably not engaged in productive labour of the sort rewarded in a modern economy can continue to lead their chosen lifestyles is thus partly answered, certainly for the Netherlands and perhaps for other countries as well to some extent. Availing themselves of the opportunities presented by the occasional building left vacant for more than a year, the single largest component in their, or anybody else’s, living expenses is reduced virtually to zero.

In September of this year, in response to a proposed bill to change the law and ban squatting, several hundred ‘activists’ from across the country held a demonstration in Utrecht to protest. With Antifa as with anyone else, threaten to withdraw the subsidization of their lifestyles with the wealth of others, and they squeal. The reliance of these people on living off other people without providing something of value in return is evident, and provides a great insight into how feeble their ability to fund themselves presumably is. I will discuss this important issue in more detail below.

3) Recruitment Process

I would imagine that many, if not most Antifa groups have some sort of web presence or are at least active enough on Indymedia and other similar sites to be able to provide a point of contact for those who are interested in getting involved. Face-to-face contacts and recruitment will be viable in areas with visible Antifa groups. However, the most interesting questions with respect to Antifa recruitment are those that pertain to screening and depth of access.

Anyone turning up to an action dressed in black with a hood and a mask will doubtless be allowed to participate to some degree, as Antifa requires large numbers of people if it is to achieve what it wants to achieve. It gets away with this because of the lack of any obvious operational security requirements, which is another point I will touch on below in a discussion of Antifa’s possible weaknesses.

4) Strengths

AFA Sweden Though the organizational prowess of Antifa seems to be considerable in some regards, we would do well not to overstate it. Given that hardcore Antifa members presumably spend their lives waiting for the next bit of ‘action,’ their ability to buy a bus ticket to Cologne given two months’ advance warning is hardly overwhelming. The key strengths of the Antifa, for which we must give them their due, are their tactical and ideological coherence at street level. This conclusion is based on sketchy evidence and a few leaps of faith, but I believe it is likely to be valid, as I shall explain below.

Antifa seem to have a finely-honed awareness of what they can get away with, both politically and tactically. Given that this is not something that can be derived from first principles, but must be understood afresh each time on the basis of the country of operations, the relevant stances of the government in question, and perhaps other factors too, Antifa must have good intelligence in this regard if my reading of their tightrope-walking act is correct. This bespeaks contacts in government and a nuanced understanding of the politics of the country in question and the way they themselves are viewed in it.

According to VH’s research, some 500 Antifa were eventually arrested in Cologne. The number of these people charged with a crime is presumably zero. To what possible end would the German authorities, national, regional, or municipal, wish to clutter up their court and prison system with hundreds of well-organized young criminals whose comrades could create significant political fall-out and bad publicity?

No, the desire of the authorities in situations such as these is to do the bare minimum necessary to contain the situation, and ensure that ensuing problems are as minimal as possible. So if we assume that one in four of the Antifa members present in Cologne were arrested, all to be released in the next couple of days, we are forced to conclude that Antifa as a whole have a very clear idea of which lines they can cross and which they cannot in attempting to achieve their political objectives. The demonstration was cancelled, and the long-term damage to the Antifa was nil insofar as we can discern it at present. This was a good result for them, at least in the short term, and was not achieved by chance.

To realize how impressive the performance of Antifa is in this regard, consider what is presumably involved in setting up an illegal blockade of the type that apparently featured in Cologne. Let us assume either that there are no police in the area in question or that the police who are present are keeping their distance. We have then a road or some other similar area of passage that Antifa wish to curtail passage along. My own experience of blockading roads is, sadly, rather limited, but a few minutes’ reflection will make it clear that the task the Antifa set themselves in doing this is far from trivial.

A group of Antifa deciding to block a road are putting themselves in a position where the probability of being involved in direct physical confrontation with others, up to and including heavily armed riot police, is high. Depending on the circumstances, the ability to predict the nature and scale of the likely violence may be rather limited. Though the recent Antifa activities in Cologne seem to have passed without significant challenge to said Antifa, despite the large number of arrests, this will not always be the case.

I submit that it is not possible for any group of people to do what Antifa do in blockading roads without having both a clear and well-communicated plan of action which takes into account different contingencies (police involvement, police charge, attack by opposing demonstrators, attack with bricks or water cannons, partial break in the blockade, injury to one of the Antifa members, etc.) and a high degree of confidence that fellow Antifa will back them up with fist and foot if need be.

Take away the first and they become a mob, the second a routed mob. Their ability to maintain tactical coherence and strong unit morale, which I take to be considerable, is impressive and a significant advantage in the face of less well-disciplined opponents. It presumably derives largely from distinct Antifa chapters acting in unison during Antifa actions, as it would be exceptionally difficult to maintain if members were dispersed at random throughout the Antifa contingent. As in an army, so in Antifa: small-unit cohesion will be an indispensable component in how they work.

Moving onto a slightly different strength, Antifa need some sort of reasonably well-established doctrine with respect to the degree of violence they can offer opposing demonstrators and the police. I have very little awareness, either in terms of background knowledge or specific information pertaining to recent events, of Antifa trying to kill people. Yet given their militant nature, ideological commitment, and the manifest hatred they have for their opponents, this would seem to require some explanation. I can only assume that Antifa know very well that they operate with, and only with, the consent of the state, be it in their home countries, or the country of any particular Antifa action.

Note that consent does not necessarily imply approval here. It only suggests that, at the very least, the authorities have conducted some sort of cost-benefit analysis on the crushing and dispersal of Antifa and decided that the costs outweigh the benefits. Whether approval exists or not would have to be judged on a case-by-case basis.

Given the intrinsically criminal nature of what they do, Antifa are clearly vulnerable to large-scale prosecution should any particular government turn its mind to the project. They are also liable to being undermined financially (turfed out of their squats, for example), banned from staging counter-demonstrations, infiltrated by the police and security services, and damaged structurally and ideologically by the incarceration of key figures.

It is therefore in their interests to keep the irritation they cause governments below a certain threshold if they wish to continue their activities at all. But they must keep it close to this threshold in order to be effective as judged by their own standards. This requires a keen awareness of lines that must not be crossed and the political scenes in their countries of origin and action. In effect, they must conduct the same cost-benefit analysis as governments (as outlined above), and conduct it accurately enough to arrive at the same conclusions. This will require a combination of ‘empirical research’ and political savvy that would be non-trivial to acquire and update as necessary.

5) Weaknesses

At first glance, it seemed to me that the recent events in Cologne marked Antifa as being, potentially at least, a major force in street-level politics throughout Western Europe. However, after having peered through at least some of the murk surrounding those events and accumulated some reasonable amount of information on the concrete details of what happened in Germany, it seems to me that this conclusion was unwarranted. Indeed, I do not think that Antifa constitute a force that will be capable of significantly influencing events in the case of a breakdown of civil order of the type predicted in “Surrender, Genocide, or What?”.

As discussed above, there do not seem to have been more than 2,000 Antifa in Cologne. If we assume that, adding in Scandinavian Antifa and German, Belgian, French and Dutch Antifa who were not in Cologne, we would have a maximum of 5,000 spread throughout this part of Europe, we are still talking about a force that is small in any absolute sense and cannot assemble itself as a whole even for an event such as that that took place in Cologne. Even there, it successfully conducted its activities only because the authorities in Cologne were, by all accounts, happy to let it move freely around the city, sabotage transport infrastructure, and intimidate and assault people trying to peaceably take part in a legal demonstration.

It is hard to believe that Antifa had any more freedom of movement, literally or figuratively, than the German authorities allowed it. It is terrible news for Germany that its government is sanguine about the notion of large gangs of hard-left criminals dictating what can and cannot take place on its streets, but this is more indicative of the current state of German party politics than any intrinsic capabilities of Antifa.

Furthermore, it should go without saying that, without at least the tolerance of government, Antifa cannot even really exist, much less function.

It is not an insurgency.
It cannot create or maintain the pillars of a modern society.
It is not a government-in-the-making.
It has no moral authority.
It is not a mass movement, despite its ability to occasionally recruit a few thousand placard-wavers to swell the ranks of its blockades.
It has no military capabilities.
It cannot take or hold territory.

When government opposes it, it will crumple. Yet when government supports it, it will be irrelevant, swamped by the vastly superior resources of the state. It is probably only relevant at all in marginal cases in which society as a whole and government in particular are weak, divided, or ambivalent with respect to given political developments and lack either the resolve to act, leaving a vacuum within which Antifa can operate, or the courage to apply pressure to certain parties, in which case they can allow Antifa to do so for them, thereby maintaining a degree of plausible deniability. That this sorry state of affairs currently prevails in many European countries does not remove this fundamental weakness of Antifa.

Another striking weakness is the lack of any independent financial base. The above anecdote about the squatters laughably trying to protect their “right to squat” makes clear the financial weakness of Antifa in general, at least insofar as the anecdote is applicable to Antifa in general. If the Dutch government does indeed succeed in taking this most cherished of human “rights” away, many Antifa may find themselves in the hideous position of having to work for a living.

AFA Italy More fundamentally, the financial weakness of Antifa will increase the attrition rate of recruits, pushing down the number of years the average recruit spends as a member and with it the mean competence of Antifa as a whole and the morale of remaining members. It also reduces their ability to engage in international actions, which would presumably explain why significant numbers of European Antifa members (using their numbers as estimated above) do not seem to have been in Cologne. It is, after all, hard to imagine that they had anything better to do with their time.

It was noted above that Antifa needs the tolerance of government to survive, but this is not only true in the sense that it can, as an intrinsically criminal entity, be shut down if the political will exists. Perhaps more importantly, it is true in the sense that the very livelihoods of Antifa members seem to be dependent on the existence of a strong welfare state, and I am particularly indebted to VH for explaining this point to me.

He tells me that most of the street-fighting militants are between the ages of 16 and 28 or so, and that they survive on welfare payments whilst living a noble savage-type existence in squats. Upon eventually graduating from the ‘tactical’ branch of Antifa, they drift in the direction of more ‘managerial’ roles while obtaining volunteer positions (and still receiving welfare), or employment at certain predictable types of organizations (‘anti-racism’ organizations, immigrant advocacy organizations, local government and so on, all of it funded by the taxpayer). What this means, if I have read the situation correctly, is that significant numbers of parasitical, seditious, hard-left types with overt criminal tendencies are subsidized by the state to try and undermine it and its laws. Leaving to one side the absurdity of this situation and what it says about modern Europe, it is clear that one of most obvious ways of trying to damage, if not destroy, Antifa would be to castrate it financially through ripping it, kicking and screaming, from the teat of the state.

The last obvious point that could, in principle, constitute a weakness is the open nature of the Antifa recruitment process. Given the large numbers of people Antifa must attract to be at all effective, and given further the lack of any obvious mechanism whereby an infiltrator could impair Antifa’s ability to achieve its goals, we must assume that virtually anyone who wants to join any of the subgroups that combine to form Antifa as a whole is welcome provided they display a minimum level of commitment. This suggests that finding a way of making infiltration hurt Antifa could radically reduce its recruitment capabilities while hurting morale at the same time.

Of course, if one were prepared to engage in illegal activities, it would not be hard to think of ways to use Antifa’s laxness in this regard to punish it and rot away at it from the inside. Doing so without crossing the line into illegality, however, would require detailed case-by-case knowledge of what sort of information could be gathered on individual Antifa members to convince the police to prosecute them, public authorities to withdraw their financial support, or employers to fire them. Whether or not any theoretical efforts made in this regard might not be made with greater effect in lobbying to reform the relevant parts of the welfare state or persuade the police and courts to more assiduously prosecute Antifa in the first place is, admittedly, an open question.

Conclusion

Antifa, though impressive in its ability to occasionally motivate and organize reasonably large numbers of dysfunctional and unproductive youth, does not seem to be in possession of any of the characteristics that might award it some determinative influence on the trajectory any particular European state will take with respect to Islamization. Whether or not any given demonstration will take place is ultimately determined by the government of the country in question, though in hiding behind Antifa may to allow that government to shrug and attempt to avoid responsibility for making said demonstration impossible.

Note also that, given the small numbers of Antifa members, their feeble financial resources, and the amount of time required to organize any major action, the ability of Antifa to disrupt simultaneous or near-simultaneous events across Europe will be close to zero.

Nevertheless, Antifa is a serious enough political phenomenon to deserve serious consideration, especially given its tendency to target individuals with potentially lethal violence. Though I excluded this aspect of its ‘activism’ from this discussion, the destruction of Antifa as a whole would be justified on these grounds alone, insofar as such a loose-knit entity can ever be completely destroyed.

Furthermore, the willingness of what is presumably a small set of Antifa members to viciously attack specific individuals, be they politicians, judges, or political activists, is probably more of a problem for those who would oppose Islamization than the mass mobilization witnessed recently in Cologne. Identifying the individuals responsible for these attacks almost certainly constitutes a better reason to infiltrate Antifa than that outlined above, the costs of which could well outweigh the benefits.

Perhaps the single greatest structural weakness of Antifa is that its entire operational doctrine, at least with respect to mass action, is predicated on the existence of a powerful apparatus of state, which sets the constraints within which it must work. Should the breakdown of civil order that I and others have envisaged ever occur in any European country, Antifa will find that its baseball bats and steel toecaps do not represent the cutting edge of early 21st-century military technology. If that day comes, there may well be a belated discovery that walking into a gunfight without a gun is the most unforgiving of errors.

Guilt by Association

Posted on October 3, 2008 by Baron Bodissey

I knew my Thursday night post would get me in trouble — when I post about race, it always gets me in trouble — but I didn’t expect that the mud would splatter as far as Jihad Watch. A commenter there has accused Robert Spencer of harboring the same vile racist thoughts that I do. Since Robert can occasionally be found in the same room as me, it must be true, right?

Here’s what the commenter said:

So Mr spencer, is this what all this mess is about? White Nationalism?

http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2008/10/were-all-racists-now.html#readfurther

You have no escape now Mr.Spencer. this is coming from your friend, Baron Bodissey, the one you’ve just met and drank champagne [NB: it was wine and beer, no champagne — BB] with last month in Washington DC.

http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2008/09/mr-bodissey-goes-to-washington.html#readfurther

So what is your excuse now? Ooooh, it’s his own opinion and I have nothing to do with that and bla bla bla.

Well as we say, birds of the same feather flock together.

drop the mask and stop fooling your readers.

PS: by the way, are you even considered white by those folks to hang out with them and work for their cause?

Maybe you’ll be considered an honorary white when the fourth reich regime is restored?

I don’t think that anything I say can possibly help, but even so I felt compelled to post a response:

Well, I certainly managed to get Robert in trouble. Sorry about that, Mr. Spencer!

It just goes to show that some people cannot detect bitter irony when they read it. I should have used the irony mark (؟) so that even the slow-witted might catch my drift.

It also shows that I’m right in what I said: one cannot discuss the matter of race without having the dogs of the racism-mongers loosed upon oneself. The subject is simply too red-hot to be touched.

But I have made my decision: I refuse to precede my remarks with the mandatory disclaimer “I’m not a racist, but…” or “I deplore white nationalism, but…”

Saying things like that cedes territory to the race-baiters, and I won’t do it.

It gets me in trouble and has turned an honest Counterjihad blog into a pariah site, but that’s the way it goes. That’s what happens under the laws of PC if you veer from accepted formulations.

– – – – – – – – –

My body of work speaks for itself. Visit http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com, browse the archives, look at the “important posts”, read Fjordman’s work, and decide for yourselves. Since you’re Jihad Watch readers, I assume you’re reasonably intelligent. I don’t have to tell you whether or not I’m a racist. I’m sure you can figure it out.

You’ll also notice that our commenters range from Muslim and liberal trolls through reasonable people on both the right and the left to the “race nationalists” and the hard-core Nazis. I let them be, provided that they abide by our four easy-to-understand rules for commenters.

I do that because I sincerely believe in the value of free speech, and I thrive on being disagreed with. Come on over and disagree — I won’t delete you as long as you are civil, temperate, on-topic, and show decorum in what you post.

There was a time when I would knuckle under to the PC Thought Police, but that time is long past.

Regular readers should consider themselves warned: this blog is poison. If you hang out here, you are announcing yourself to be an eager advocate of the Fourth Reich.

You’re guilty until proven…

Well, actually, you’re just guilty. Period.

Gates of Vienna News Feed 10/3/2008

Posted on October 3, 2008 by Baron Bodissey

	USA
	“We Are All Socialists Now.”
	Bailout, or Blowout? Financial “Rescue” Plan Turns Into Mad Spending Spree
	Barack Obama Presses Black Pols to Agree to Bailout
	‘Jesus Was a Palestinian,’ Claims U.S. History Text
	Obama and His Brown Shirts
	Teachers Union E-Mail Touting Obama Scorned
	Canada
	Barbara Kay, the Islamist Elephant in the Room No Politicians Will Acknowledge
	Europe and the EU
	Islam: Risk of Sharia Entering in Italian Law, Sbai
	Islam: Proselytism in Prisons, Alarm at European Seminar
	Racism Rears Its Head in Norwegian Mountain Town
	Spain: Treasury is Empty, Madrid Says Goodbye to Big Works
	North Africa
	Algeria: Constitution Amendment Very Close, Premier Says
	Israel and the Palestinians
	Amnesty’s Obsession With Israel
	Israel: Justice Ministry Accuses Rabbi of Many Conversions
	Mideast: Gaza Smugglers’ Tunnel, Land Shakes
	‘Palestine Must be Returned to Arabs’
	Middle East
	More Questions Than Answers From Damascus Car Bomb
	Syria: Israel Accuses Damascus of Resuming Nuclear Activity
	‘Youtube’ Must Erase Anti-Islam Material: KHRS
	South Asia
	Acid, the New Weapon for Disfiguring Women
	India: Archbishop Claims 100 Christians on Hindu ‘Hitlist’
	Pakistan Official Says Country at War
	Far East
	Chinese Skype Software Secretly Logs Political Chat Messages
	Sub-Saharan Africa
	Comedian Defends ‘Achmed the Dead Terrorist’ Puppet Routine Against South African Ban
	Latin America
	Student Opposition Leader Gunned Down in Venezuela
	Immigration
	Immigrants Prefer Finns as Neighbours
	Italy: Many Roma Gypsies ‘Gone to Permissive Spain’ Says Minister
	Culture Wars
	‘Bride,’ ‘Groom’ Can’t Marry in California
	General
	Religion: Next Al Azhar-Episcopal Church Meeting in Cairo

Thanks to Bidinotto, C. Cantoni, CSP, Fjordman, Insubria, JD, KGS, Tuan Jim, VH, and all the other tipsters who sent these in. Details are below the fold.
– – – – – – – – –

“We Are All Socialists Now.”

Moral Musings on Capitalism’s Precipice

[…]

The welfare state established the basic moral principle we now see in all its ugliness: that responsible taxpayers are to be sacrificial servants of the irresponsible — that they are to buffer the irresponsible from the destructive consequences of their actions, by absorbing that damage themselves.

But now, we are adding the following amendment to this premise of moral cannibalism: that the greater and more destructive the irrationality caused by others, the more immediate and pressing is the taxpayers’ moral duty to absorb the harm onto themselves.

The basic argument used to push this bailout is that the irrational institutions that were most responsible for the credit crisis are too big, and the harm that they cause too great, to be allowed to fail — i.e., to absorb the consequences onto themselves. The logical conclusion? That gigantic destructive consequences must therefore be transferred onto the backs of those who were not responsible for them.

The fundamental “redistribution” that goes on in our welfare “entitlement” state is not a transfer of money; that’s just a manifestation of its underlying immorality. The fundamental “guarantees” that are not of money, but of other people’s money — as a matter of moral entitlement.

What is being transferred in our “entitlement” state is moral responsibility. What we are witnessing is a transfer of rewards and penalties from those who caused them, to those who didn’t. In this moral inversion, it is the evil and irrational who are rewarded, while the good and rational are punished.

And it is clear that the impetus for enshrining these predatory premises comes from the American middle class — in order to “guarantee” their own middle-class “entitlements.” We are sacrificing the producer to the parasite…and to the predator.

After the triumph of the economic interventionist theories of John Maynard Keynes, Richard Nixon infamously said, in 1971, “We are all Keynesians now.” Many observers of this current bailout hysteria have amended his catch-phrase, chirping, “We are all socialists now.”

— Hat tip: Bidinotto