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Ten Years On
by Fjordman
Today, February 20 2015, is exactly ten years since the first time I published an essay under the pen name Fjordman. Time flies. I had been active on the Internet for several years before that date, but I did not have my own website. I did not imagine that I would still be writing so many years later. Yet here I am.
The first essay I published as Fjordman was about the very high number of rapes in Sweden, and how this may be tied to mass immigration. I no longer write about this subject as much as before, but the number of rapes in Sweden is at least as high ten years later.
I was among the first to discuss in English the problems caused by Muslim immigration in Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city. I was often accused of exaggerating or making things up. Meanwhile, Malmö has evolved from stabbings to car bombings. Unfortunately, many of the problems I deal with in my essays have worsened, all over the Western world.
My first blog post got quite a few comments and thousands of readers. That is because it was linked to by Little Green Footballs (LGF). It is hard to believe now, but when I launched my Fjordman blog in February 2005, I got a lot of help from LGF. Back then, Charles Johnson’s LGF was still a large and relevant website. It helped point readers to myself, Gates of Vienna and many other writers such as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller.
I recently visited LGF, which I had not done for a very long time. Charles Johnson still posts. On Google, he is now called a “political blogger, center-left provocateur.”
Those who have followed my writings since the beginning will recall that the period of the LGF Wars was one of the nastiest events I experienced as Fjordman (until Mr. Breivik showed up). That was when Charles Johnson decided to suddenly switch sides and attack all of his former allies in the nastiest and most dishonest manner possible.
In hindsight, we clearly won this conflict. Today, Mr. Johnson is completely irrelevant, whereas I, Gates of Vienna — and for that matter Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch — are still publishing and actually being read.
The moral? Have patience, and continue stating what you believe to be true based on factual evidence. This will not always be pleasant in the short run, but it will eventually pay off.
Looking back, my view is that the most positive development that has taken place over the last decade is that awareness about the Islamic threat among the general public is now much greater than it was some years ago.
Unfortunately, this knowledge still has not led to any significant change in policy among Western ruling elites. They continue to promote mass immigration and open borders, no matter how many terror attacks occur or how much insecurity our societies suffer from. U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama is arguably an even worse appeaser of Islamic aggression today than he used to be seven years ago. Alternatively, perhaps he is just showing his true colors, since he does not have to worry about being reelected anymore.
Furthermore, the darkness represented by Islamic sharia and Jihadist barbarism is spreading and deepening. That is a sad fact. One only has to look at the videos of mass beheadings produced by the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) in the Middle East to realize this. These videos are now watched with great enthusiasm by militant Muslims in cities across the Western world.
I did not know the film director Theo van Gogh when he was murdered by a militant Muslim in the streets of Amsterdam in 2004. More recently, however, Muslim terrorists have been targeting people whom I know and have met multiple times, also in Scandinavia. Since 2005, I have joined the rapidly growing number of people in Western Europe who can no longer have a publicly listed address or telephone number. The threat seems to be getting closer every year. It is no longer abstract.
I have experienced many ups and downs over the past decade. Needless to say, being dragged into the events caused by the deranged mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik in 2011 easily constitutes the low point of my adult life so far. I was forced to evacuate my home and go into forced exile from Norway due to the extremely negative and largely baseless media exposure I received because of this case and Breivik’s so-called manifesto. The weeks after the deadly July 22 attacks is the only time that I have ever seriously considered giving up writing. After a while, I decided to continue. Yes, I lost the protection of a pen name. However, many people write under their real names, even if they face harassment for it. I see no reason to do less than they do.
The most positive thing that has happened to me in the past decade has to be all of the wonderful people I have met. This may sound like a terrible cliché, but I really have been blessed to meet many courageous, funny, smart and wonderful individuals while doing this work. They are one of my main sources of inspirations to keep on going. I am eternally grateful for their company.
For a complete archive of Fjordman’s writings, see the multi-index listing in the Fjordman Files.
It is only because of Europeans like you that I have any hope that Europe will survive. The political leaders are clearly not listening to the people.
I still believe that every day that passes more people wake up to the reality of Islam. That number can never decrease. It can only increase.
Neither Europe nor the U.S. has many people with Fjordman’s courage.
And you’re right about political leaders not listening; that’s a problem on both continents though it presents itself in seemingly dissimilar ways. Given the differing cultural climates it probably depends on what kind of tumult occurs as to whether any of us will survive in a place that doesn’t turn into a soviet. BHO is certainly trying to sell us out.
Stay Strong Fjordman. As I said many years ago , on LGF, your depth of knowledge, writing skills and certain trumpet forewarning the web of the EuroAppeasers of the Jihad, have been immeasurably important to the greatest threat to post Westphalian Western Civilization since the Nazis. You are a treasure Sir and your compiled essays equals Spengler and Toynbee in their overarching reasoned analysis.
Thank you our friend. 😉
“…the Islamic threat among the general public is now much greater than it was some years ago.”
The western public would have to be in a full out coma to miss the bombings in London, Madrid, the Glasgow airport “Dr.” bombings, the two head choppings in London, the OK head chopping, the Fort Hood Shooter, the Ottawa shooter, the underwear bomber, and the recent slaughter in Paris and Copenhagen.
It has become increasingly hard to get away from the subject.
And yet, when I read the comments on Yahoo News I am continually amazed by the cocoon that some insist on wrapping themselves in that all is well and “we” are overly excited…
Thank you Fjordman for your continuing thoughts. I take them seriously.
I thought Charles Johnson was killed in a tragic saxaphone accident?
very funny. Bravo!
I think one of his guitar strings snapped and whipped off the top of his head. Some say it improved his style.
I liked Chazzer’s photography, even if his people skills are a bit rudimentary. Or perhaps just rude.
Politicians are still not listening and electoral success are meager and fragile.
On the positive side, in the last 15 years the argument has moved from a mere focus on the cancer (Islam) to the smoking habit (PC mafia/blasphemy laws, hyper migration, reckless destruction of the family unit and native culture, relativism etc) that lead to this cancer and promotes its continued spread.
Another development I see is the clearer and important distinction between Islam, a poisonous political ideology akin to National Socialism (just equate non-believer with Untermensh), and a person being unfortunate to be born into Islam – the Moslem.
The distinction between Islam and Islamism has been shown to be unsustainable and artificial.
The effectiveness of defection practiced by the Left, the socialists the PC mafia in short, by saying “…but look at Christianity” is also rapidly diminishing. Clear lines of argument are emerging that the foundational texts of Christianity andIslam are so fundamentally different (Quran being the direct word of God) , and consequently that Islam is not reformable.
The mantra that Islam is the Religion of Peace has become to be ridiculed. Numerous Imams themselves pointed out that a more appropriate interpretation is “Religion of Submission”.
So I think the argument is being won. Won however, while the demographics are being engineered to be lost. The GIDA movement is born out of this tension.
The next steps must be make more progress on the political and legislative side (reversing PC mafia legislation for example).
Thank you Fjordman (and GoV) for your contributions to the development of the argument.
That’s a concise description of the evolution of events and necessary future action.
The problem is that the politicians ARE listening.
To their fellow enemies of western civilization.
I am pleased to have found GoV and Fjordman, recent though my “discovery” be. I’m happy (well, not really “happy,” but you understand how it is to find others with a similar analysis of an overwhelming situation) to have found both, even though it was in the aftermath of the terrible Charlie Hebdo & kosher grocery massacres in Paris last month.
Only the admins of this website can tell whether their readership (i.e., independent/distinct visitors) has increased since then–or after any of the other specific recent horrors–but I would hope it has. I found GoV directly because I’m also a commenter, under a different Internet handle, at the Washington Post on-line site. When I saw the incisive, comprehensive comments and the strategic (i.e., overall) analysis being posted under the commenter name “GatesofVienna,” I immediately knew I had to see whether there was such a website and, if so, to read it.
But why did this name mean so much to me?
When I was in college, one of our upper-division German texts (“Aus deutscher Geschichte”) contained a detailed chapter by the editor of the book. The first chapter covered “Johannes Gutenberg.” The second, “Die Tuerken vor Wien.” Although there are three additional chapters (Chapter 5: “20. July 1944”), my marginal translations/notes tell me that we only read these two. Thus, the importance of Vienna was already in my mind my college days.
Perspective on the times:
In 1683 North America had been colonized by the French, the Dutch, and by English religious refugees as well as fortune-seeking “gentlemen” answering to the sovereign. The Spanish had been active in Central and South America for a century and a half (Battle of Cajamarca, Pizarro def. Atahualpa). The Nederlanse Gouden Eeuw (Dutch Golden Age) was underway (Jan Vermeer, 1632-1675), and the Dutch East India Company was making its members an absolute fortune by trading in spices–the Portuguese were *not* happy about it.
And in Central Europe, the Siege of Vienna (the *first* one, in 1529, about which more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Vienna) was advancing as a move in the Ottoman attempt to take control of the Habsburg Empire. Approx. 150 years later the Turks still looked to control Central Europe; thus the “Battle of Vienna,” also referred to as the Schlacht am Kahlenberg, after the nearby mountain. The siege began on 14 July 1683; the culminating battle took place on 11 and 12 September 1683. More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna. There were long-term, if somewhat erratic, attempts by the Ottoman Empire to capture and control Central Europe. They never really gave up that dream; their entry into World War I was another manifestation of this desire.
(BTW, it’s not that I consider Wikipedia the be-all and end-all of sources. I look at the References and Further Reading at the end of many articles and look at *them* if I want to know more or have other questions.)
Back to Fjordman. I went through some of the GoV archives the other night and fell upon “A History of Mathematics and Mathematical Astronomy” from November 2003. Gobsmacked, I was. This is an amazing monograph on the subject, and it covers much more than its humble title conveys. Printing it out would take (rough guess) 50 or so sheets of paper, at least. I’m still making my way through it.
As I am so new to GoV and Fjordman, I am unfamiliar with the LGF/C. Johnson renegade situation, but experienced (perhaps) a similar, albeit smaller-scale (there being no Internet then) episode in Mid-Modern Feminism. I had been working with a group of women in Atlanta and was under the impression that all of us supported X, Y, and Z. I even participated in broadcast radio and television panel discussions and debates about these topics and received positive feedback from the other members of the group. But one day…yes, one day I went to the weekly meeting and was accused of/screamed at/shredded verbally for something that Rumor had it I had said.
By the time I was able to make myself heard and negate any such idea, the damage was complete. I had experienced a “trashing,” as the vernacular of the time termed it.
If I square or cube or raise to the fourth power that trashing and then throw in the lack of privacy now made possible by the Internet *and* the violence so visible now, I am *vastly pleased* that Fjordman is still here and writing such important works.
Thank you. Dank U wel. Merci. Danke schoen. Gracias. Gratias. Arigato gozaimasu.
In 1683 North America had been colonized by the French, the Dutch, and by English religious refugees as well as fortune-seeking “gentlemen” answering to the sovereign.
Ah, but the Spanish set up house in Florida the century before. There is a small building in St. Augustine, at the motherhouse of the Sisters of St Joseph, dating back to that period. They think it may have been a smoke house.
And then there’s St. Augustine itself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Augustine,_Florida
Founded in September 1565 and continuously inhabited.
Somehow the other nations “settled” here while Spain is described as plundering…hmm.
Say what you will about Charles Johnson, he’s right about global warming, and most of the right is wrong. Blogs of all stripes have a tendency to condense into like-minded souls, and rally round their flag. Unfortunately, this means that everybody who gets their information from such blogs is full of false confidence, because everybody who’s part of their community agrees with them about everything. It isn’t just in churches that there’s a lot of preaching to the choir going on. It happens on this site too. You guys are too stark in your appraisal of Islam, for instance, and too dismissive of the science of climate and CO2.
Sorry, Sam, but we’re not warmists. And you know that. But you keep showing up beating that CO2 drum. “Science” is it?
Try this one:
http://climateaudit.org/
Or Anthony Watts:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
Sorry, old bean, but you attend the other church – the one with all those emails, and the heretic who resigned from Greenpeace because he says global warming is not the true religion:
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/022714-691587-greenpeace-co-founder-says-no-evidence-of-global-warming.htm
But keep on tithing to your version of reality, Mr. Grant, and nice to see you again.
You’re right about one thing: we certainly will say what we want about Chazzer. Go rally ’round his flag, me boy.
Sam I a have a degree from the U of Wisconsin in Geography and a Minor in Climatology. Reid Bryson, was the most accomplished climatologist/meteorologist in the country at the time. He passed away recently but even dead he is far more knowledgeable than you as his writings, monographs and work still exist and that goes all the way back to the 1940’s.
Bryson once said dismissively, ” I can go out outside and spit and cause more global warming that doubling CO2″.
When the charlatan hoaxers of global warming realized it hasn’t gotten warmer in the last 17 years (Read the UN’s 5th IPCC report published last year where they finally tell the truth) the hoaxers changed the name to ‘climate change’. When they did that the rest of the world that likes thinking vs. ideology woke up and it has been downhill for you [epithets] ever since. Now you can stop being a ‘denier’ – a word you guys like to use.
Fjorman, Spence, Glick, Wilders, Tommy Robinson, are — in a way– prophets of our times. They love their societies and their countries. They are merely warning in advance of the dangers that are looming and getting ready to engulf us all. These are heroes.
When it is too late, soldiers/ martyrs get sacrificed for the freedom of their nations and their families. What these people are doing is the same thing. What Israel is doing is avoiding another looming holocaust. What Briggette Bardot is doing is the same. These people have penetrating intelligence. What they are doing now is a noble act to avoid the price of thousands, nay, millions kissing the dust.
Why “our elected” government paid so much money and homage to those dissenters and were called by our freedom loving elites “intelligentsia. How come these are not called intelligentsia when they are doing something more noble than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.
Is there a more noble person who predicts disaster 50 years in advance?
murad–
This is eloquent. Thank you.
Fjordman, I remember your earlier posts – indeed one of them informed a rather virulent response I made to a particularly nasty muslim contributor on the Bangkok Post forum. It was on rapes in Sweden. This brought me to GoV, Up Pompeii, the Brussels Journal and, as the song goes…That’s how I got to Memphis.
What happened to Gandalf and Up Pompeii?
Anybody know?
I hope he is okay.
I as a regular reader.
Looks like three problems now:
1. Islamists
2. Those who want to use Islamists. Maybe should be #1?
3. Putin
Warmists have to answer 1. Hot spot at @30,000 ft. in tropics is not there.
2. Temp. historically has gone up before CO2.
3. Temp not rising now.
4. More CO2 does not do anything.
Fjordman, so glad you pulled through all the BS you’ve had to put up with..You truly are a great writer and your conviction to it and us is not un-noticed nor unappreciated..Thank you and do please keep ’em comin’..
Murad..I’d have included Mark Steyn in your mentionables..The Baron and Dymphna too..Really nice tho..Can’t cite all and everybody eh¿
Thanks Dymphna for informing Sam of exactly both sites that I was going to inform him on..You took the links right out of my mind..If he has an iota of integrity he’ll apologise..
That won’t happen, medge. Sam Grant shows up periodically to nag about climate change. He’s a fundamental warmist and no amount of reality will change his mind. He drops a comment here and runs…doesn’t come back, probably because he can’t source anything reliable. So to answer your query: no, a proven record that he hasn’t an iota of integrity.
Gotchya..Hope you’re feeling better (alot better!) and you’re not snowed in down there..but I know you are..I thought last winter was bad..We in Canada (kwebec lol
I am proud to be associated in a small way with Fjordman. I was probably the last person to leave a comment on his old site, about 10 years ago. It has turned out pretty much as he and I expected, but only worse. Western Civilization is dying, being slowly murdered by its elites with their blind, self-serving multiculturalism and political correctness. Our leaders (political, academia, the media, clerical, big-business, etc.) care little about the people, our future and even less about the values that have made WC great. The ideals of honesty, equality, human rights, separation of state and church are being thrown in the mud, replaced by ideologies that elevate violence and legitimize any and all grievances. They do this to mutual acclaim, believing the only true evil in the world is Western judeo-christian civilization — everything else being but innocent victims deserving of help and even compensation. They have one standard for us and none for the others.
Still, we do what we can, when we can. I try to do my part, as seen here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16953
Thank you, Fjordman. Jay
are supposed to get it worse..I’m already feeling ridiculous about talking about weather on an AJ site..Enough!..Take care Dymphna..Stay warm ..
But ya doesn’t have to call me AJ..rim shot (Gretsch American snare) Turkish cymbal (symbol) crash..tD..