As the European sovereign debt crisis intensifies, Moody’s has joined the other ratings agencies in downgrading Spanish government debt. Meanwhile, unions in Greece called a general strike and the streets of Athens filled with demonstrators, but the Greek parliament went ahead and passed the next set of austerity measures designed to bring the country in line with the requirements of the Troika.

In other news, a recent three-day outage of Blackberry service in the Middle East contributed to a significant reduction in road accidents, up to 40% in some countries.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Egghead, Erick Stakelbeck, Fjordman, Frontinus, Gaia, heroyalwhyness, Insubria, JP, LN, Vlad Tepes, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Our English correspondent Seneca III returns with the first essay of a four-part series on British history, human development, and Islam. A slightly different version of this essay was previously published at Crusader Rabbit.

A Long Day’s Journey Out of Night
Part I: Roots

by Seneca III

The human predilection to gather in co-operative communities in order to shape, control and utilise a particular environment for the benefit of all members of the commune is as old as our species. It is an animal thing, a pack thing, a tribal thing.

In both zoology and psychology the term ‘territorial imperative’ is a noun used to describe the need to claim and defend a territory, its assets and the successful social organisation that generated them.

It has been argued that in human terms the intensity of this need is inversely proportional to the length of time such a domain has been populated by a particular group who are or have become ideologically and genetically homogenous and have for long known no threat from without.

This first in a short series of essays examines the history and present condition of my own locale. As a working example, predominantly rural in nature, it reflects much of the same time line and upheavals as in more urban areas, although there, close to the epicentres of occupation, awareness of the current threat is far more acute.

Essentially, the main thrust of my argument is that history is the key. It is there that, throughout Europe and the Anglosphere, evolved those socio-cultural characteristics and modes of conduct that determine and will forever define why and what we are, and so clearly separate us from the descendents of the tribes of Arabian Peninsula and those conquered by them.

Some time around 3500BC a finely crafted and polished flint hand axe fell to the floor of a forest. One can only ponder why it fell and why it remained there, for this was a valuable and sophisticated tool, and we know that Neolithic man preferred to farm and herd and build his burial barrows on open, higher ground rather than down amongst the trees where bears and wolves roamed.

Yet, as there are some faint hints of small settlements in the dim, forbidding woodland where the axe fell, it is conceivable that the owner was a stranger, a trespasser perhaps, fleeing from the territorial imperative of the locals. Whatever happened that day, there the axe remained, sleeping beneath the trees that would shed their leaves upon it and then in their time crumple into the deepening carpet of rich soil.

Over the ensuing millennia the axe lay in darkness as above it strode the men of the Bronze and Iron ages, leaving their mark, particularly in the forest where, in early spring, the floor is still an ethereal and seemingly endless carpet of bluebells. There they paused and then passed on, Celts and then Romans who in their turn were followed by the Romano-British, each of them dropping or discarding some small token of their transient presence: a few coins, some broken pottery or the black circles of their charcoal kilns.

In the late seventh century an extended family of West Saxons, driving north from their settlements about thirty miles away, established a home, or ‘Ham’. It was they who split the rocks and felled the trees, ploughed the first fields, built a Great Hall for their Thane and neat, rectangular thatched houses for themselves, all close to several small springs rising just to the south and west of their clearings.

In the distant past these springs had bubbled to the surface, becoming a rivulet and then a stream that chuckled its way to the southeast. As it travelled the stream was fed along its course by other streams and run-off and, growing swiftly, it became a river artery, the Great Ouse, along which would come the vanguard of the Angles as they penetrated inland from the Wash to challenge the Saxon hegemony.

Thus it came to pass that these tribes of crook-boned men made war in this place, but over the passage of time sanity or necessity prevailed and thereafter came a wary peace punctuated by bouts of intermarriage and fractious squabbling until finally settling into the bucolic homogeneity of an Anglo-Saxon forest village.

The first significant record of the village is, of course, the Domesday Book of 1086, which indicates that the area had by then become something of a hodgepodge of feudal landowning, divided amongst the Norman invaders by ‘hides’ and ‘hundreds’ between “…the Count of Mortain, Giles de Pinkeni and Earl Aubrey in the values of five shillings, ten shillings and nine pounds…” However, one should view these figures with some caution; the Domesday Book was devised as a basis for taxation, and those who collected the taxes, not those who would pay them, assessed the value.

Throughout the first half of the second millennium the area remained somewhat a back-waterish sort of place. During the ages of monastic domination and the supremacy of the medieval Catholic Church the village went quietly about its rural business without overt travail — until the tumultuous arrival of the Reformation. It was then that a local man, an ardent follower of the theology of Wycliffe in the Lollard tradition, went to the Burning Stake in the Stone Pits still vehemently denying the ‘doctrine of transubstantiation’ and refusing all opportunities to recant and save his life.

And the axe slept on. The dissolution of the monasteries and the sustained turbulence of the Tudor period played its part in the shaping of the religious and social life of the village and causing it to lean, in the longer term, towards a predilection for Puritanism and, later, the Non-Conformism that came into being after the Restoration. Happily no more Burning Stakes were erected, but verbal history speaks of a poor woman who was accused of witchcraft and met her end in the local pond!

Yet time does not dally too long in any one milieu, and for the village the winds of change continued to blow, inexorably ushering it into other uncertain futures. It is a local tradition that during the upheavals of the Civil War a number of Royalists met their end in a nearby field, and that considerable booty and many horses fell into the hands of the locals. It is a fact that Cromwell visited the village and that during the time of his Protectorate one John Washington, from Sulgrave in the same county, fled and sailed for Virginia.

There in 1732 was born to his grandson Augustine a son who was named George. George and his cohorts were apparently not very happy with the price we were charging them for tea*, and thus this corner of middle England inadvertently contributed to the independence of what is arguably our most successful colony.

However, in the summer of 1765, perhaps to level the playing field a little, one Simon Eddings of Northampton was sentenced to transportation to the Americas for “…deer poaching in Whittlewood forest and assaulting keepers”.

Over all of these years the forest gradually retreated before the plough — one such intrusion bringing the ancestral axe back into the light of day — but nevertheless forests remained the defining characteristic of the area. The1667 survey records “18,000 oak trees fit for naval timber”, and during the next couple of centuries, despite their nationalisation by an avaricious Treasury, our local forests would contribute a significant percentile of the planks and baulks that became the fighting ships of the Royal Navy in the age of sail.

Today, through this still fairly arboreal landscape, there runs a lane, at first a narrow track and then a broad highway down which drovers brought their stock to the pastures of the Midlands and the markets of London. By 1800 half a million beasts were being driven on the hoof through this area every year to feed the hungry capital and thus, slowly, through such evolutions and the pressing demands of an expanding population we approached the 20th Century.

We did so primarily through the creative genius of the Victorians, who, over a great, soaring viaduct of engineering brick, brought the railway; we did so through the ability to transport our produce on that railway, and through the consequent loss of our small brewery and other traditional local businesses in the face of mass-produced imports brought in return by the same railway and, subsequently, motor transport.

Finally, like all other freemen of these windswept islands in the North Atlantic, we came into the new century and our men and women marched off to two world wars from which so many did not return, their sacrifice in no small part giving us what we find here in this the first decade of the 21st.

Now, in quiet, relative affluence, the product of our ancestors’ labours and courage, here abide a complacent people comfortable in a faux sense of security. Only the tag end of our older generation can remember what it really means to stand on the edge and look over the brink. Yet, yet, there is a growing sense of… of anger, of awareness that this era’s invasion will not be forever confined to the environs of the occupied territories established within the cities, that it will come soon to a place near us or our children.

And, I would add, in the final analysis the territorial imperative is first and foremost a survival trait that is hard-wired into our genes. It has been dormant here for several decades, but it is stirring, and it is a ferocious beast when roused. We are long in these parts; they have been purchased for us with the blood and sweat of all our generations, the same blood that binds us now and makes this land our land, a land the Muslim barbarians must never have but as a grave.

In a future essays I will attempt to explain why Islam has remained so implacably primitive in its social interactions and cultural development whilst the rest of the species has struggled, and generally succeeded, in shedding itself of such limiting behavioural determinants.

And to those of our own who would aid and abet the superimposition of this atavistic theocratic system upon our established way of life I say this: We know what diversity is, we have had several thousand years of it and we are happy with the result because it has been a progressive form of diversity, a levelling of similars.

Islam, however, has cornered itself in a evolutionary cul-de-sac, and wherever it becomes established all others within or close to its remit are forcibly infected, and in turn retrogress by a factor of fourteen centuries, the very antithesis of what we have accomplished over the same time frame.

Hence, if you who defile the Mother of Parliaments by passing laws to protect and enable this deadly carcinoma eating away at our intestines can lift your heads out of the public trough for a moment, please try to take this on board: Slavery, be it slavery of the body or slavery of the mind, is abomination, and we will have none of it.

*

Note from the Baron: The colonists in New England did not object to the price of tea, but to the tax imposed without their consent upon their purchase of it. They insisted that such unjust taxation violated their ancient rights as Englishmen.

Previous posts by Seneca III:

2007		Oct		13		A Letter to my People
				26		Another Letter To My People
2008		Oct		5		Excerpt From “Ere the Winter of Our Discontent”
2009		Oct		22		The Cultural Death of a People
				23		Do Star Chambers Serve a Useful Purpose, Or Do They Obfuscate the Issue?
		Nov		8		By the Rivers of Babylon
2010		Jul		2		The ‘Phoney War’ Is Over
		Sep		13		Musings on the Winds of Change
		Oct		13		The Fourth Dimension of Warfare, Part 1
2011		Jan		1		The New Year Comes With Ham
		Feb		6		My Yesterday in Luton
		Jun		17		The English Spring
		Jul		12		The Betrayed

Yesterday afternoon a Middle Eastern-looking fellow on Southwest Airlines Flight 3683 raised a ruckus high in the air over Amarillo, Texas. He yelled some stuff about God killing everyone, and said he wasn’t afraid to die. The plane then made an emergency landing at the Amarillo airport, and the man was taken into custody.

Oh, and I almost forgot: the agitated passenger shouted “Allahu akhbar!” as a part of his angry imprecations. But have no fear — according to the television news report below, “The FBI said the man had no terroristic intent.” That’s a relief!

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:

A more detailed account of the event appeared today in the Amarillo Globe-News:

“You’re all going to die,” a man dressed in black screamed at passengers Tuesday afternoon. “You’re all going to hell. Allahu Akbar,” translated as God is great in Arabic.

Federal authorities arrested Ali Reza Shahsavari, 29, of Indialantic, Fla., onboard the Boeing 737 after pilots made an emergency landing at Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport at 3:30 p.m. He is being held in the Randall County jail on a federal charge of interfering with a flight crew.

[…]

Police said the incident began with Shahsavari arguing with another passenger. The flight crew separated the men, said Amarillo police Cpl. Jerry Neufeld.

Shahsavari went into a bathroom and yelled obscenities from the rear of the plane, said passenger Doug Oerding, of Sacramento, Calif. Attendants tried to calm Shahsavari before a female flight attendant finally succeeded in quieting him. Oerding said.

[…]

Amarillo Aviation Director Patrick Rhodes said an emergency call was placed about 3:30 p.m. to the control tower at Rick Husband. The caller initially reported a male passenger was attempting to break into the cockpit, Rhodes said. Amarillo police said the call came from the cockpit.

“He was being disruptive and unruly on the flight, but he was not specifically trying to break into the cockpit,” Rhodes said.

When the plane reached a gate at the airport, police boarded it and arrested Shahsavari without incident, Neufeld said.

[…]

FBI Special Agent Mark White, based in Dallas, said the event did not appear to be an act of terrorism. He described Shahsavari as a U.S. citizen who might have experienced an episode of mental illness.

“It sounded like he sort of lost control of himself,” White said.

OK, so he was a loony. Makes sense. No sane person would stand up on a plane and spout off like that, right?

Yes, crazy people sometimes act out on airplanes and have to be restrained. So do drunks. But the majority of incidents of alarming behavior on airliners seem to include “Allahu akhbar!” Funny about that.

So maybe this Islam thing is just an example of mass lunacy: 1.5 billion lunatics all over the world.

Whoops! Scratch that — According to the Justice Department, I’m not supposed to use the “I” word when talking about terrorist (or non-terrorist) incidents. Just by coincidence, today we learned that Attorney General Eric Holder wants to make sure that Muslims and Islam are never mentioned when describing acts that may or may not involve terrorism — I mean, “violent human-generated disturbances”:

DOJ Official: Holder ‘Firmly Committed’ To Eliminating Anti-Muslim Training

Attorney General Eric Holder is “firmly committed” to nixing anti-Muslim material from law enforcement training, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, Dwight C. Holton said Wednesday.

Holton, who was U.S. Attorney when the FBI arrested the so-called Christmas tree bomber, said that he spoke specifically with Holder about the “egregiously false” training that took place at the FBI’s training headquarters at Quantico and at a U.S. Attorney’s office in Pennsylvania, which was first reported on by Wired.

“I want to be perfectly clear about this: training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive, and they are contrary to everything that this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for,” Holton said. “They will not be tolerated.”

The training materials, Holton said, “pose a significant threat to national security, because they play into the false narrative propagated by terrorists that the United States is at war with Islam.”

In other words: we shouldn’t talk about the fact that the overwhelming majority of attempted or successful terrorist acts are carried out by devout Muslims, because that might make Muslims angry and drive them to commit… terrorism.

Hmm. That’s some catch, that Catch-22.

It gets worse:

“Before this effort, a lot of us didn’t understand that when we make an arrest in a high-profile terrorism case that involves someone who claims they follow Islam, it creates a mini-backlash against people in communities,” Holton said.

So when we arrest an Islamic terrorist, the result is a backlash against a “community”? Where is the evidence of for this assertion? Over the past decade, on what occasion have Muslims not been coddled, cosseted, placated, and reassured after one of their fellow Muslims tried to blow up masses of people?

The DOJ is determined to avoid all such imaginary incidents of backlash by never, ever referring to Islam or Muslims, no matter what:

“In the 37-page complaint that laid out the allegations against Mohamed Mohamud, he is never once identified as a Muslim. We were very careful about that. It’s not relevant from our perspective, what’s relevant is the violence,” Holton said.

And then comes a nod to people like me:

He added that not referring to him as a Muslim made him the target of Islamophobic bloggers.

“Of all the hateful things that have been said about me as U.S. Attorney, it’s part of the job, right, having to deal with the bloggers comments — and believe me the medical marijuana crowd does not love me — but of all the hateful things that have been said about me was in response to me saying that,” Holton said. “There are people who don’t get it.”

Well, I’ve got some news for Eric Holder and Dwight C. Holton: despite your dedicated efforts, the American people get it. They now know what “Allahu akhbar” means, thanks to the hundreds of “mentally ill” people who have shouted it on airplanes and in public places during the past ten years.

You don’t have to tell them that Islam is involved; they already know that. They’re well aware of the fact, even if they are reluctant to talk about it except in whispers, for fear of a lawsuit or accusations of “hate speech”.

They can easily see that Mohamed Mohamud has a Mohammed Coefficient of 200%, and they understand its significance.

In fact, the ban on saying “Islam” or “Muslim” will almost certainly have unintended consequences: whenever someone goes nuts on a plane, people will think, “Aha! Islam again!” Because they know the rules: Islam makes its adherents try to blow up planes, but we can’t talk about it.

It’s hard to hush up the truth, but I don’t blame our government for trying. The Muslim Brotherhood expects nothing less.

Hat tips: Frontinus and Vlad Tepes.

From Takuan Seiyo, a musical interlude:

TS asks us to note the diversity in this occasion –

Venue: German Lutheran church Dresden
Composer: Belgian Catholic (Cesar Franck)
Lyrics: Italian Catholic (Thomas Aquinas)
Mezzo-soprano: Latvian Protestant
Orchestra: German, mostly ethnic, some naturalized Europeans, one or two Orientals, male and female

This is probably one of the most-recorded and performed of Thomas Aquinas’ many musical works. It is part of the Sacris Solemniis, written by Aquinas in the mid-13th century for the feast of Corpus Christi. Just as these hymns are still chanted in Rome Italy, they are sung with equal enthusiasm and familiarity in Rome, Georgia — if you can still find a Latin liturgy, that is.

They are often referred to as “those Benediction hymns”. If you learn them young enough, as I did, and sing them daily, as I did, they become part of your deep brain structure; one’s “automatic music”. I feel sympathy for anyone whose automatic music is themes from old sit-coms. On the other hand, anyone who imprinted Bach is fortunate indeed. He or she is destined to die in a benign mood.

This is the good ol’ music from the old country. Its millenia-old traditions came together in the High Middle Ages to produce enough material for future generations to “steal a cxhange and cop a rhyme” for another thousand years or so. In this case, five hundred years later Franck decided to do a riff off of this piece from Aquinas. He did it well, though one wonders what Saint Thomas would’ve thought of this angelic mezzo-soprano.

Portugal may not meet the EU’s mandated deficit-reduction target for 2011, and faces a projected 2.8% contraction of its economy in 2012. Meanwhile, Portuguese union leaders are calling for a general strike in protest against the government’s austerity budget.

In other news, a young woman in Austria was almost strangled to death when the veil of her hijab got caught in a dough-mixing machine. A passerby happened to see her plight, and cut her free of the veil with a knife. The victim remains in the hospital with severe neck injuries, but is expected to recover.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, CSP, Erick Stakelbeck, Fjordman, Insubria, Jerry Gordon, JP, Nilk, Steen, Van Grungy, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

There has been much discussion recently about declining birth rates in the Western world and the demographic crisis that must inevitably result. Commentators often point out that the projected age distribution thirty years from now — with old people far outnumbering the young — will be catastrophic. No nation in history has ever faced such a reproductive decline and survived. No matter how fertility patterns change in the near future, we are told, it is too late to halt the slide into demographic senescence.

Such gloomy predictions overlook an even gloomier possibility: a rise in the fertility rate among people of breeding age is only one way that the age distribution of a population might assume a more normal curve. This is not something any of us wishes to contemplate. No one in his right mind wants to consider the possibility that the upper end of the age distribution will be culled until the ratio of young to old returns to a level that can be socially and economically sustained. Yet, given present political trends, this seems an increasingly likely outcome.

More than three years ago I posted a speculative analysis of possible scenarios for the “demographic winter” that will inevitably face the Western world. That essay was written several months prior to the collapse of the real estate bubble and the onset of the Great Recession. Since then there has been no sign that the best-case assumptions I outlined will ever come to pass.

Despite an unprecedented sovereign debt crisis, the Western democracies have not substantially reduced their statutory obligations to the elderly and the retired, nor has the retirement age been adjusted upwards significantly in most countries. The Baby Boomers are now entering retirement and claiming their expensive entitlements, while the diminution of the skilled taxpaying workforce is eroding the capability of the state to pay out future benefits without massive new borrowing.

The immigrants that are still being imported in large numbers to Western countries (a million or so have arrived in Britain since I wrote my previous analysis) will not pay enough in taxes to support the natives who are retiring. Research in several countries indicates that immigrants cost the state more in social benefits, medical care, law enforcement, etc. than they pay in taxes. The bankruptcy of the Western democracies can only be hastened by increasing the rate of immigration.

The newcomers, however, become reliable voters for the Socialist parties in whatever country they take up residence. In alliance with aging native Socialists, they provide an all but unshakeable majority demanding ever-increasing benefits and state-provided services. Reducing the level of benefits for retirees (and everyone else) thus becomes politically impossible.

This convergence of maladaptive political and social processes has recently become evident in Greece. The Greek government is attempting to implement a severe austerity regime which is designed to reduce the country’s unprecedented deficit and sovereign debt. Public sector wage and benefit cuts, pension decreases, the raising of the retirement age, and other unpopular measures are part of the package.

The Greek populace is adamantly opposed to such measures, and has taken to the streets in violent demonstrations to protest any further austerity. Strikes have become an almost daily occurrence, making the country unappealing as a tourist destination and further depleting the state’s tax revenues. Greece is on its way to becoming ungovernable, absent a military coup or some other intervention that does away with the normal democratic process.

The Greek present is a sober reminder of the future facing the entire West. Somebody had to go first, and due to their peculiar social, economic, and political conditions, it had to be the Greeks.

When democracy breaks down, an authoritarian regime of some sort is the only viable alternative to societal chaos. Different countries will realize authoritarian control through different means. A coup may be the most likely outcome in Greece. Under similar circumstances in the USA, a state of emergency will probably be declared, followed by martial law.

Once a non-democratic form of governance is installed, the grim, necessary, unpopular measures that could not be considered previously may then be implemented. As pointed out in the article below, the elderly members of society will be easier to victimize than young people, even if the geezers outnumber the punks by three or four to one. A thousand vigorous, angry, and armed young men present a more persuasive political argument than tens of thousands of weak and doddering old people in their rocking chairs, wheelchairs, and nursing home beds.

This is the grim and horrible calculus that may someday have to be employed by the hard men who take over the remnants of the state in a post-democratic world.

I hope I’m wrong about all this. Let’s pray that our feckless leaders somehow cast aside their fecklessness and cowardice. May they rediscover the qualities of true leadership that are necessary to see us through the looming crisis!

Unfortunately, the signs are not auspicious.

Contemplating Geronticide
June 3, 2008

We’ve been thinking the unthinkable lately here at Gates of Vienna.

Fjordman, El Inglés, Paul Weston, and I have all laid out future scenarios that lie beyond the pale of acceptable speculation. Regardless of the accuracy of our projections, or the fact that we are not advocating what we anticipate, the possibilities that we contemplate here are considered out of bounds.

So we may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a goat.

I’d like to take a slightly different speculative tack this time. Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that the West has acted on Zenster’s recommendations — that Muslim immigration has been curtailed, and the immigrant population in the West has been reduced by deportations or “incentives for reverse migration” — so that the presence of large numbers of Muslims in the West is no longer an issue.

What happens next?

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

If Western countries follow the Japanese example and refuse to ameliorate their declining populations by importing immigrants, they will eventually face a demographic crisis. The United States will get there eventually, but Europe will be first.

So let’s look ahead a quarter of a century, to a time when the survivors from my generation — the Boomers — will be drooling geezers, and the young folks among our readers (you know who you are!) will still be in their maturity.

No matter what transpires in the meantime, the population of native First-Worlders will be a lot grayer by then. Even if Westerners start whelping out babies like crazy during the next decade, the birth dearth will make itself decisively felt during the coming years. Next year’s cohort of European babies will just be coming online in twenty-five years, and in the meantime much of the adult population will have retired and started drawing their pensions.

For the sake of this argument, we’ll make a few assumptions. These conditions are of varying likelihood, but I am listing them as premises; that is, we take them as given and make deductions accordingly:

1.		Third World immigration, including Muslims, is no longer an issue, and is not significant.
2.		The existing European social welfare systems, including pensions and state-funded health care, continue in more or less their present configuration.
3.		Given premises #1 and #2, tax rates have risen to make up for the demographic deficit, so that social programs are still being funded.
4.		In order to assume #3, we must also assume that technological innovation has allowed productivity to increase so that an adequate tax base exists.
5.		Also, the retirement age has been incrementally raised to maintain a larger base of productive taxpayers.
6.		Finally, we assume that medical technology is still available to allow retired citizens to survive well into their ninth and tenth decades.

Note that these are best-case scenarios: under our existing circumstances, these predictions represent the best that we can possibly expect. No assumption is made about changes in Western birth rates, because the effect of any such changes will not yet be fully felt in our societies during the next quarter-century.

So, given all of the above, imagine that you live in the year 2033. You’re walking the streets of Oslo, or Bremen, or Cardiff, or Zurich. What do you see?

The first thing you’ll notice is that there are geezers everywhere. Lots and lots of them.

The mods, rockers, hippies, yippies, disco divas, and hopeless squares of my era are now drooling and nodding in geriatric wards and assisted care facilities all across the heartland of the West. They’re not just listening to “Stairway to Heaven” on the digital sound systems of their nursing homes — they’ve actually got a trembling foot on the first step.

The ratio of retired people to employed workers has increased from the 1:6 or 1:3 or 1:2 that prevailed in 2008 to 1:1, or even 2:1 in some countries — that is, twice as many retirees as workers. The remaining workers not only have to pay more taxes, they have to be more productive to keep their parents’ generation in comfortable retirement.

Medical technology and the mandates of patient care serve to keep more and more people alive far past their allotted three score and ten.

And every year of life after seventy gets more and more expensive. Bypass surgery, organ transplants, hip replacements, pacemakers, MRIs, CAT scans, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, blood work, and all the accompanying medication: the cost of keeping a senior citizen alive into the ninth decade has risen astronomically. Not only that, in 2033 centenarians have become a commonplace: there are hundreds of thousands of them.

Living to a ripe old age has become very, very expensive.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Imagine that you’re a working person living in this Brave New World. You’re in your maturity, between the ages of forty and sixty-five. You have no chance of retiring any time soon, because the retirement age was gradually raised during your youth to make sure that you and your cohort would continue being productive and paying taxes for a longer time.

If you live in one of the countries (for example, Sweden) where the tax rate was near or over 50% in 2008, then your taxes now consume 75% or more of your income. Even those countries (for example, Ireland) that used to be low-tax havens have been forced to raise tax rates above 50% just to maintain state social programs at their accustomed levels.

Depending on what country they are from and when they retired, many of the elderly you see around you have been relaxing and drawing state pensions for well over thirty years. A centenarian in France may well have been existing on state subsidy for more than half of his lifetime.

So you’re a man who works hard and struggles to make ends meet. Because of your economic circumstances, you and your wife put off having children for so long that it’s now too late to have them. The burden of taxation leaves you with just enough to be barely comfortable, giving you no hope for any real prosperity.

Walking along the street on the way to work, you push past all the elderly people with their walkers and wheelchairs. You see them crowding the park benches and nodding over their tables in the café or the library.

So how do you feel about all this? Are you well-disposed towards all these crowds of geezers? Do you wish them only the best, and gladly surrender the bulk of your income to keep them in their comfortable retirement?

Or are you just a tiny bit angry and resentful at this, the endgame of the Socialist state?

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Given the above outline — which, remember, is based on a best-case scenario — I see several possible outcomes. I’ll list them below in order of increasing likelihood.

1. The use of draconian incentives to keep people employed well past the age of sixty-five.

As the demographic disaster looms ever closer in the coming years, the planners of the Socialist state may choose to make old-age benefits unavailable to those who are certified as “fit to work”. In Europe, at least, all the certifying physicians will be state employees, so the criteria for determining “fitness” can be ratcheted downward until the required numbers of citizens are removed from full-time retirement at state expense and kept in employment.

Another tactic that would provide incentives for workers to remain employed would be to require that retired people on state pensions live in dormitory-style facilities, which — given the normal tendencies of centralized bureaucratic Socialism — would be very unappealing places to live.

2. The removal of the franchise from those citizens deemed no longer competent.

The full menu of Socialist care will be sustained for a while by the voting power of the elderly, who can be expected to vote their interests as a massive bloc. However, the EU is already an undemocratic political structure, and will become even more so in the next few years. Presumably the interests of the technocrats in charge will allow them to veto the opinions of ordinary citizens, so that the franchise can be taken from anyone the state deems incompetent.

Once again it will be physicians employed by the state who will do the certifying, so the competency of potential voters will be weighed with the interests of the state in mind.

3. Massive civil unrest of the young and the fit against the cosseting of the parasitic elderly.

The geezers will outnumber the young and fit, but they will be no match for them if civil society ever begins to falter. A crushing tax burden and the manifest unfairness of the system can be expected to bring angry masses of young men and women into the streets in protest.

Which will be more important to the nervous authorities at that point, the votes of the ancient and decrepit people in nursing homes, or the mob howling in the street outside their windows?

4. A gradual reduction in the quality of medical care for the elderly

State-financed health care, plagued as it is by chronic shortages, is already rationed in one form or another within the welfare states of Europe.

It would take just a small bureaucratic shift to push the rationed care away from old people, thereby hastening their demise and easing the burden on a highly stressed welfare system.

5. The widespread increase of officially-sanctioned euthanasia.

The Netherlands presents a model for the gradual introduction of state-sponsored euthanasia. It begins with “mercy killing” — assisted suicide for those who have stated unambiguously their desire to die. The next step is for relatives, in consultation with doctors, to affirm that dear Mama or Papa “would never have wanted to live this way”.

The final stage will be a determination by the state — certified by those ever-busy physicians — that the quality of a patient’s life has been so degraded that his or her continued existence is detrimental to the common good of society.

This process will be expedited by the vast numbers of childless old people, who will be much less likely to have anyone to intercede on their behalf.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

All five of the above scenarios could emerge in various combinations, and the first four will tend inexorably towards the fifth. As the state gradually withdraws decision-making power from old people, it will become much easier to shunt them aside, subject them to degrading conditions, and eventually exterminate them.

But, in any case, something will have to give. Things cannot continue as they are indefinitely.

Some of the outcomes described above — or maybe some additional and even less pleasant ones that I haven’t thought of — are inevitable.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

All of this is a fantasy, because the best-case conditions I used as premises are highly unlikely to occur.

In a futile attempt to bolster the existing system, immigration of Third World people, especially Muslims, will continue unabated, and probably increase.

Despite these last-ditch measures, the welfare state will become insupportable and will eventually disintegrate piece by piece.

The effort to postpone the inevitable through high taxation and central control will cause an economic collapse, either in slow motion or as a sudden and catastrophic discontinuity.

The above conditions make it likely that the rule of law will erode, and that the social contract — the hard-won result of centuries of struggle — will at last be abrogated.

The exact configuration of the final outcome depends upon the order and magnitude of these events. But there’s no escaping it: massive and fundamental change lies ahead for the West, and will arrive within the lifetimes of those who are now under forty years old.

Anyone who concludes that I am advocating any of the outcomes described above has failed to read the text carefully.

I realize that adding this disclaimer is unlikely to do any good, yet I disclaim: this post is descriptive, not normative.

At the invitation of the Q Society, Robert Spencer is paying an extended visit to Australia in late November and early December.

He will be making up for the inadequacy of the Australian news media’s reporting on Islam by giving presentations in a number of major cities across the country. If you live in Oz, check out the Q Society website for the scheduled events — if there’s one nearby, you won’t want to miss it.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:

Vlad Tepes takes another look at the 1,000-terrorists-for-1-soldier deal that Israel just made with Hamas. The woman featured in this video was the architect of the Sbarro restaurant bombing in August 2001, in which fifteen Israelis were killed. She’s now one of the freed terrorists:

Anestos Canelides’ latest essay was inspired by a recent incident in Spain in which dogs were slaughtered by Muslims as “unclean”.

The Jihad Against Dogs Can Only Mark the Beginning of Dhimmitude for the Spanish Infidel

by Anestos Canelides

The recent killing of over a dozen dogs in Lerida, Spain, located in the northeastern region of Catalonia, was appalling. As a proud owner of a beautiful black Labrador, I was at first enraged, but then I realized that as the Muslim populations grows — not just in Spain, but in Europe and America as well — we could well see more of this barbarism. I cannot believe this group represents all Muslims, but it makes me wonder if this is the a beginning step towards forcing dhimmi status on the infidels of Lerida. Currently the largely immigrant Muslim population is 20% of the total population.

Two Islamic groups in Lerida are already asking officials to regulate the presence of dogs in public spaces because dogs are seen as unclean, and their presence in public could offend Muslims. They are also demanding that dogs are banned from all forms of public transportation, which would include all city buses, and areas frequented by Muslims.

There are so many things that offend Muslims. As their population grows, I wonder what will be next on their dhimmi list.

It also makes we wonder what will happen when they make up 30-40% of Lerida’s population. Will they ask for the crosses be removed from churches? Will they want to abolish any other outward sign of a non-Muslim religion? After all, such things would also offend Muslims under traditional laws concerning dhimmis.

Will the Catholic Christians in the city be forced to worship or preach out of earshot of all Muslims, so they don’t get offended? Will the persecution of both Christians and Jews grow as the Muslim population grows?

With Spain’s low birth rate and the Muslim high birth rate it will not be long before the native Spanish are a minority. When the Muslims grow to be 60-70 % of the populations will the Christians minority be forced into dhimmi status? Will they not be allowed to build new churches or the even renovate old ones? How tolerant will the Muslims be? Will the Muslims take over churches and turn them into mosques, or even demolish them? What will be the fate of the Christians when they are in the minority?

Bethlehem was at one time a majority Christian city, but after it came under the control of the Palestinian Authority, Christians became a minority within ten years. Could this become the fate of Lerida’s Christian population? Will there come a time when the Muslims learn tolerance and simply learn to accept other religions? History tells us a different story.

While there are many tolerant Muslims in the world, I don’t see any in Lerida, Spain. I believe that Europeans and North Americans must see take as an object lesson. Is Islamization a real threat to our free societies? Is this really the first step in forcing the people of Lerida under dhimmi status? Yes, I believe it is. People must be aware of this clear and present threat to our culture and freedoms. As I have said in past articles, not all Muslims are evil, but we must wake up!

Previous posts by Anestos Canelides:

2010		May		29		The Last Empire
		Jun		18		The Muslim Devastation of India
		Aug		20		Are They Lying to Us?
		Sep		28		Devshirme: A Muslim Scourge on Christians
		Oct		6		AIFD: Friends of America and Freedom
		Dec		3		A 19th-Century Jihad on American Shipping
2011		May		29		Borders, Language and Culture

In the USA the “Occupy” movement (or, in European terms, the “Indignados”) is a Potemkin operation: a small number of radical leftists and useful idiots funded and choreographed by trans-national socialists, with at least the tacit support of the Obama administration.

In the video below Ezra Levant talks about the Canadian version of the Occupiers — what Vlad calls a “faux-test” — and the blatant taxpayer-supported propagandizing of it by the CBC.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:

The news feed is light tonight, for some reason. One item that isn’t in the feed (because it’s in German), a comment at Politically Incorrect, claims that Geert Wilders has been shot. As far as I can tell, this is a hysterical mistake or a hoax, because nothing new about Mr. Wilders has appeared in the media websites all day long. If anyone hears any credible information about this story, please leave a link in the comments.

The Occupy/Indignados movement continues to stage colorful street events all over the Western world. More incidents occurred in the USA, and the cleanup after last weekend’s demonstrations in Italy will reportedly cost more than half a million euros. Meanwhile, the Iranian state media claim that the Occupy uprisings prove the effectiveness of Iran’s “soft power”.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Gaia, JP, PM, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.
The news feed is light tonight, for some reason. One item that isn’t in the feed (because it’s in German), a comment at Politically Incorrect, claims that Geert Wilders has been shot. As far as I can tell, this is a hysterical mistake or a hoax, because nothing new about Mr. Wilders has appeared in the media websites all day long. If anyone hears any credible information about this story, please leave a link in the comments.

The Occupy/Indignados movement continues to stage colorful street events all over the Western world. More incidents occurred in the USA, and the cleanup after last weekend’s demonstrations in Italy will reportedly cost more than half a million euros. Meanwhile, the Iranian state media claim that the Occupy uprisings prove the effectiveness of Iran’s “soft power”.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to C. Cantoni, Fjordman, Gaia, JP, PM, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Pat Condell’s video about the Palestinians came out a couple of weeks ago, but it is reprised here with Hebrew subtitles. Many thanks to Rachel L for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

“It is impossible for a Muslim to be a democrat.”

Vlaams Belang sent us a link to the video below, and included the following note:

Attached you will find an online video of Cities Against Islamization (CAI) concerning the spread of Islamic extremism in Europe. It is a compilation of stunning quotes by Abu Imran, the leader of the fundamentalist organization Sharia4Belgium.For example, he declares that a Muslim can never be a democrat, that all Muslims are obliged to support terrorism as a part of Jihad, and that every insult to the Prophet should be dreadfully avenged.

In the video you’ll hear the Sharia4Belgium representative being brutally frank about his vision for Belgium’s place in the coming Caliphate. It’s obvious that there are no laws against sedition in Belgium — or at least none that are enforced against Muslim fanatics.

You’ll also hear Filip Dewinter’s excellent responses to Sharia4Belgium:

The following story from Germany concerns a sort of rehab program for leftist fanatics. The translator includes this note:

Here is a brief article that is almost a parody, as only the Germans can do it.

I wonder if there is a twelve-step program. Do you call your sponsor at midnight and say: “Help! I can’t stop thinking about Lenin!”

What I find interesting in this story is that the reporter is willing to refer to the clients of the program as “Left Extremists”. In the English-speaking world, such phraseology is all but unheard of. There are “progressives” or “activists” on the Left, but only right-wingers can be “extremists”.

Many thanks to JLH for translating this article from Junge Freiheit:

Thursday October 6, 2011

Security Services Begin Exit Program for Left Extremists

Berlin — The federal intelligence service has initiated the first Exit Program for Left Extremists. An announcement by the intelligence service says: the program is part of a series of government measures against “extremism and violence, and toward more tolerance and democracy” and is intended for persons who have decided to leave the leftist extremist scene, but are unable to do this on their own.

Since Thursday, a 24-hour contact phone number has been available to them. Those willing to exit the movement can also contact the staff of the program by e-mail. Anyone in this situation who turns to the organization is assured of absolute confidentiality.

Through the exit program, leftist extremists will be helped above all with everyday problems, for example, looking for a residence or a job, alcohol or drug therapy or debt counseling. Beyond that, the exit program offers a counseling venue for family members and friends of people in the leftist extremist scene.