Category Archives: Books

Islam: No Peace Can Be Made

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Islam: No Peace Can Be Made

What Islamic Leaders Say

Compiled, with minimal editing, by Michael Copeland

No peace can be made between us and the non-believers,
This what Allah… this what our holy book says.
Grab onto the shovel, grab onto the gun and the sword,
Terror struck into their hearts is an end in itself.

Jihad means killing all kafirs around the world.
Push your sword in their bodies and cut them in pieces.
Jihad! Jihad! Jihad is incumbent upon you.
Yes, we will kill them. Of that we’ll not be ashamed.

Kill them wherever they are unless they convert.
Muslims conquered, invaded, and took over countries.
The goal is to rule the world and all mankind.
Any power that gets in the way we fight and destroy.

Power, fighting, jihad, beheading and bloodshed,
Killing, fighting, blood and striking of necks.
These are great, noble, and blessed steps towards order.
Until the last day of our lives we’ll fight and kill.

Sources:

No peace can be made. —Yusuf al Qaradawi
Grab onto the shovel. —Abdullah Faaruuq, Boston Imam
Terror struck into their hearts. —Malik, Brigadier S.K., The Quranic Concept of War
Jihad means killing all kafirs. —Ayatollah Khomeini
Push your sword. — Ayatollah Khomeini. Islam Watch, 4 April 2010
Jihad! Jihad! Jihad! —Child preacher, Abu Ja’far, FrontPage Mag
Yes, we will kill them. — Sheikh Ahmed, member of IS
Kill them wherever. —Ali Gomaa, Grand Mufti of Egypt
Muslims conquered, invaded. —Sheikh Abu-Ishaq al-Huwayni, Jihad Watch
The goal is to rule the world. —Maududi, Jihad in Islam
Any power that gets in the way —Maududi, Jihad in Islam
Power, fighting, jihad. —Imam Hussein Bin Mahmoud, prominent writer
Killing, fighting, blood. — Sheikh Hussein bin Mahmoud, Islamic State
These are great, noble. —Al-Jazoul, Sudanese Cleric, Jihad Watch
Until the last day of our lives. — Sheikh Ahmed, member of IS

For previous essays by Michael Copeland, see the Michael Copeland Archives.

I Won!

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I’ve been watching video clips from press conferences on the débacle in Afghanistan, led by Jen Psaki, Antony Blinken, and other flunkies of the Biden administration. I can’t tolerate much of that stuff, and usually only watch a little bit, but I read most of the transcripts. And, like most people, I have come to the conclusion that the administration’s spokescreatures are totally divorced from reality. Maybe they’re on drugs; who knows?

While reading a transcript this morning I was reminded of the last two lines of the poem “Crow’s Fall” by the late Ted Hughes (from Crow, 1971). I hadn’t read the poem for a long time, so I rolled the big ladder over to the poetry section of the library here at Schloss Bodissey, climbed up to the top, and pulled down my ancient copy of the book, which is now worn and bedraggled and held together by scotch tape.

The poem turns out to be fairly apropos, and also politically incorrect. And others in the book are even more triggering — “Two Eskimo Songs”, for example. If Mr. Hughes were alive today, he would surely be cancelled. And they may yet dig him up so that his corpse can be publicly shunned.

Crow’s Fall

by Ted Hughes

When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.

He got his strength flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun’s centre.

He laughed himself to the centre of himself

And attacked.

At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.

But the sun brightened—
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.

He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.

“Up there,” he managed,
“Where white is black and black is white, I won.”

I noticed in the credits at the front of the book that this poem was first published in The New Yorker, of all places.

Book Review: Tactical Wisdom

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Tactical Wisdom

by Joe Dolio

Reviewed by Jack Lawson
author of the Civil Defense Manual

Rarely does a book catch my attention like Tactical Wisdom. It could have been authored by my alter ego. But the author, Joe Dolio, has created what I consider a companion and must-read book to my book the Civil Defense Manual. His book Tactical Wisdom TW-01 Baseline Training Manual has almost every procedure in it that my book has… presented in a concise and superb manner. He also has a great writing style.

The man clearly must be a genius, if by his definition of the word, we think alike. For those unaware of what I’m talking about, you’d have to read Joe’s opening line in his review of my book. But Joe and I, regardless of our level of intelligence — and I’m definitely not a genius — agree on the way to preparedness, survival and organizing with others for strength through numbers for protection.

This review is not a ‘trade off’ knee-jerk evaluation of the Tactical Wisdom Series from me because Joe wrote a generous review for me… because anyone who knows me well, knows that I won’t praise a poor presentation, incompetence and/or misinformation for any reason. The fact is that this Marine Corps Veteran has written a classic in the Tactical Wisdom Base Line Training Manual.

I know that Joe is more intelligent than I am by one item, as he quotes The Ultimate Base Line Book — the Bible — in his book. That incredible Guidebook that I seemed to have wandered away from, despite being brought up by it. Some people that know me would say: “Lawson, you reading the Bible!?”

Well, I am drifting back to the Bible and Christianity… probably from the insanity to which illogic is bringing our society. I am not reading it because “I’m looking for a loophole” for my transgressions, like W.C. Fields said when one of his friends questioned him, astounded that he was reading the Bible on his deathbed. I have a pretty good idea where I’m going — and it won’t be pretty — but I still hold out hope for Valhalla.

That being said, I believe our exclusion of God, his Son and the Holy Spirit by many ‘enlightened’ and ‘elite’ people is the basis of the ongoing destruction of the fabric of society, decency, the family, free enterprise (instead of fascist corporations), individual rights and Constitutional America.

When the huge egos and twisted values of those who become legends in their own minds represents the aggregate essence of a world of peoples, in lieu of the righteousness and principles of an Immortal and Benevolent Higher Power, mankind is well on the way to catastrophe — if not extinction.

I have read just about every survival book out there. Good ones… and bad ones. Fiction and non-fiction, handbooks, manuals and riveting fiction plots, some with excellent common-sense survival information and storylines. And then there are those with the ‘expert’s fantasy’ on how to survive.

What started me off was the late British author John Christopher’s 1957 science fiction novel No Blade of Grass, first published as The Death of Grass, and made into a movie in 1970. A post-apocalypse story where food crops fail, and the world descends into chaos.

But novels cannot convey to you all the necessary methods and explain all the critical information on preparedness and survival, no matter how good a story they are. However, novels will get you thinking in the right direction, and sometimes point out stark issues that the imagination cannot conceive of in normal civility.

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Thanks to Social Marketing, You Will Be Assimilated

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They really, really, want us to get vaccinated.

Whom do I mean when I use the word “they”? Well, for starters, there’s the government. All Western governments, in fact, even that of Hungary. “They” also includes the major media, Big Tech, the MSM, the universities and secondary schools, and all major philanthropic organizations. All of them are pushing relentlessly for all citizens to submit to the injection of an experimental medical treatment that uses messenger RNA, and whose long-term side effects are completely unknown.

For as far back as I can remember, I have never experienced such a relentless full-court press by all social and political institutions in pursuit of a single goal. Perhaps the war effort from 1939-1945 was like this, but I wasn’t alive then, so I don’t know.

Before I started researching the propaganda push behind the vax, I had never heard of the term “social marketing”. It is an important concept in this dystopian age, so we would all be well-advised to learn more about it. The California STD/HIV Prevention Training Center — which is funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and is a joint project of the California Department of Health Services, Sexually Transmitted Disease Control Branch, the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, and the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine — gives the following definitionof social marketing:

Social marketing is the use of commercial marketing principles and techniques to improve the welfare of people and the physical, social and economic environment in which they live. It is a carefully planned, long-term approach to changing human behavior.

So one group of people — presumably quite small — uses subtle manipulative techniques developed by behavioral psychologists to change the behavior of another group of people — presumably much larger — and make them conform to a standard of behavior which the first group has devised and considers optimal.

My instinctive reaction to such a practice is: What arrogance! What hubris!

We ordinary plebs think we know what’s good for us, but they know better. And they see nothing wrong with conning us into thinking the way they want us to think.

I bring all this up because of a paper that was published by The National Center for Biotechnology Information, which is part of the National Library of Medicine, which is a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH, as you may recall, is where Dr. Anthony Fauci rules over a little fiefdom known as NIAID, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The paper is entitled “Key Guidelines in Developing a Pre-Emptive COVID-19 Vaccination Uptake Promotion Strategy” [pdf]. It was published in August of last year, but I didn’t find it until a few weeks ago.

It is beyond my level of analytical competence to peel back all the layers of manipulative strategy found in this paper, so I’ll just highlight a few significant points. I recommend reading the whole thing carefully, if you have the time and the stomach to work your way through all the sociological jargon.

First, a word on some of the terminology used. A person who receives an injection with the experimental mRNA treatment is said to engage in “vaccine uptake”. Those who decline to take the vaccine are said to experience “vaccine hesitancy”.

In the epistemological framework of the paper there is no acceptable rationale for not being “vaccinated”. Those who have not been vaxed are either vaccine hesitant — in which case they will eventually do their duty and get the jab — or they are malicious actors who have been convinced by evil anti-vax propaganda to resist the injection, and thereby put themselves and their loved ones at risk of contracting a dangerous and potentially lethal disease.

In the mindset of the authors of this paper — and all the official pro-vax propaganda — it is not conceivable that one could investigate the available facts, think carefully, and make a reasoned decision not to get the jab.

Citizens are expected to give their informed consent to the procedure, yet it is impossible to give informed consent. The long-term side effects of the mRNA treatment are unknown, and will remain unknown for at least five more years. Therefore no one can be fully informed about the treatment. Giving informed consent is simply not possible.

But none of that matters to those who are pushing the jab. My reasoning is considered fallacious and maliciously motivated, and my arguments would be removed from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other Big Tech platforms if I were to make them there.

There is only one possible outcome from the point of view of the vax pushers. You may be “hesitant”, but you cannot make a decision not to get the jab, and they will prod you and punish you until you do.

The first thing to notice about the NIH paper is that it’s not primarily an American document, despite its being published by an agency of the United States government. The spelling of certain words — for example, “sceptics” — serves as a clue. And it makes complete sense when you see the names and credentials of the four authors:

  • Jeff French of Strategic Social Marketing Ltd and the University of Brighton
  • Sameer Deshpande of Social Marketing @ Griffith, Griffith University in Australia
  • William Evans of George Washington University
  • Rafael Obregon of UNICEF in Paraguay

Mr. French is the lead author, so one may presume that it was his spell-checker that approved the spellings that no native American speaker would use.

Two of the authors list social marketing in their credentials, so we may deduce that the NIH has subcontracted with expert social marketers to produce strategies and guidelines to induce vaccine hesitant Americans to get the needle into their arm as quickly as possible.

The abstract outlines the techniques that will be recommended (emphasis added):

This paper makes the case for immediate planning for a COVID-19 vaccination uptake strategy in advance of vaccine availability for two reasons: first, the need to build a consensus about the order in which groups of the population will get access to the vaccine; second, to reduce any fear and concerns that exist in relation to vaccination and to create demand for vaccines. A key part of this strategy is to counter the anti-vaccination movement that is already promoting hesitancy and resistance. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a tsunami of misinformation and conspiracy theories that have the potential to reduce vaccine uptake. To make matters worse, sections of populations in many countries display low trust in governments and official information about the pandemic and how the officials are tackling it. This paper aims to set out in short form critical guidelines that governments and regional bodies should take to enhance the impact of a COVID-19 vaccination strategy. We base our recommendations on a review of existing best practice guidance. This paper aims to assist those responsible for promoting COVID-19 vaccine uptake to digest the mass of guidance that exists and formulate an effective locally relevant strategy. A summary of key guidelines is presented based on best practice guidance.

The paper’s introduction defines vaccine hesitancy:

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The Kobold of Corona

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Karl Lauterbach is a member of the German Bundestag for the Social Democrats. He is also a professor of epidemiology (among other things) at the University of Cologne. That office, plus his socialist credentials, provide him with impeccable standing as an expert talking head on the Wuhan Coronavirus.

Hellequin GB, who translated the following piece, provides an alternate gloss on Prof. Lauterbach:

The Original: Klabautermann

A Klabautermann is a water kobold that assists sailors and fishermen in their duties on the Baltic and North Seas. It is a merry and diligent creature, with an expert understanding of most watercraft, and an irrepressible musical talent. It is believed to rescue sailors washed overboard.

The New Variant: Klabauterbach

Klabauterbach is an evil vaccine kobold that assists governments and global elites in Germany in their drive to kill and control humanity. It’s a horrible but diligent creature with an expert understanding of how to create fear and doom. It’s believed to sing and dance on the graves of the murdered. This nasty creature can be held at bay with SALT.

The translated article from Politically Incorrect:

Book about Karl Lauterbach: Protocol of a burned-out emergency phone

Karl Lauterbach is THE face of alarmism in this Corona crisis: A pandemic, which probably never was, was exaggerated by figures like him into an almost eternal catastrophe right after it was declared by the WHO — and is still exaggerated to this day.

Thanks to Corona, the SPD “health expert” Karl Lauterbach, previously a kind of eccentric backbencher at best, almost blossomed — and became a permanent guest on public-service talk formats, where he reported his daily Corona water level reports and threw his questionable scientific authority on the scales to give Germans one fright after another. Through his talk show appearances, the obvious madness grew and continues to this day like a red thread.

Hardly anyone has been so wrong with his assessments, prognoses and warnings so often as he has. His reputation — especially among the government factions and the top representatives of the Spahn-Merkel Corona regime — surprisingly sustained no damage through the considerable series of his false alarms: Lauterbach can still spread his bizarre, hysterical visions of disaster unhindered even if they are far removed from the perceived and actual situation. With him there is simply never an all-clear. One wave chases the next. And if it were no longer the case at some point, he would be robbed of his public platforms — he would probably lapse into the most severe depression.

By the way: Before Corona, Lauterbach, who has never worked as a doctor (and in 25 years as an SPD political apparatchik, could not have found the time to look beyond the superficial aspects of the studies he cited and to acquire the scientific authority with which he appears as an “epidemiologist” and “virologist”) had a completely different hobbyhorse in terms of health — and even then an irrational, pathological fear came to light in him: SALT. At every opportunity, Lauterbach warned of the dangers of too much table salt in his food, revealed how he himself prepared pasta and potatoes without salt and that the widespread disease high blood pressure could only be kept under control with a strict low-salt diet.

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The Terror on Utøya and the Nuances of Insanity

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Next Thursday will mark the tenth anniversary of the massacre of 77 people in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik, the Butcher of Utøya. The events of that day turned my life upside down for a few months, but what happened to me is trivial compared to what Fjordman went through.

There were far too many posts on those events for me to link to just one. If you want a refresher course, dig into the archives beginning on July 22, 2011 and work your way forward. It began with a live blog that included Fjordman himself.

I expect that we’ll be hearing from Fjordman in due course, and I’ll write a brief reminiscence of my own. But today I’ll start with excerpts from a post by Ronie Berggren, a Swedish blogger and podcaster. Many thanks to our Swedish correspondent LN for the translation:

The terror on Utøya and the nuances of insanity

July 4, 2021

Ronie Berggren reviews the book Witness to madness [Vitne til vanvidd] by Peder Jensen, about the witch hunt against Islam critics and critics of mass immigration that prevailed after the terrorist attack on the Norwegian island of Utøya on July 22, 2011, for which Jensen himself was pilloried as perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik’s prophet.

It has been ten years since Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb in Oslo’s government quarters and then shot 69 young people dead in a Social Democratic camp on the island of Utøya. It happened on July 22, 2011. An insane world was on view, for which Breivik was sentenced to 21 years in prison.

[…]

I have not read everything that his critics have written. I have read parts of Øyvind Strømmen’s book, whose Swedish translation I bought when it came out. I have not read Simen Sætre’s book about Jensen / Fjordman, but I have seen a lecture by him on YouTube, a 20-minute sleeping pill.

My own impression is that these experts are less knowledgeable than their Swedish counterparts, and especially Mattias Gardell (whom I read most of, and whose research methods I have great respect for even if I do not share his political views, which I consider obscure his conclusions). Gardell’s strength is that he is usually well-read about the subjects he describes, although he often simplifies and paints with far too broad a brushstroke, and creates his own narratives instead of examining the truth objectively. But despite that, he is still knowledgeable, or at least well-read, which Simen Sætre does not seem to be at all.

I therefore judge, based on the qualifications I actually have, that Peder Jensen is much more credible than his critics. Which brings me to the last part of my conclusions.

For the past ten years Peder Jensen has had to live as an outcast from his own country. Social stigma and unemployment are the price he has to pay for living by a principle that should be respected: the search for the truth and the courage to stand up for the truth he believes he has discovered. In a healthy nation, such people are utilized, made into political leaders if they are practical, or professors if they are more theoretically minded. This has not happened in Jensen’s case. Instead, the opposite has happened.

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The Camp of the Sane and The Camp of the Saints — A Book Review

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Long-time readers will remember Max Denken, who contributed a number of essays here several years ago. Mr. Denken retired from the scene to write books about our civilizational crisis. Fjordman has kindly reviewed the first one for Gates of Vienna readers.

The Camp of the Sane and The Camp of the Saints — A Book Review

by Fjordman

It is not every day that you come across a book dedicated to the continued survival of an entire civilization. Yet the author Max Denken has written just such a text. He has previously written under the pen name Takuan Seiyo for dissident online publications such as Gates of Vienna, The Brussels Journal, The New English Review, Quarterly Review, Takimag and others. His well-written and carefully researched book about the future of European civilization is called The Camp of the Sane and The Camp of the Saints: Poland and the erosion of Western sanity, 2015—2020.

The title is a reference to The Camp of the Saints (“Le Camp des Saints”), a novel from 1973 by the French author Jean Raspail. It predicted a Third World mass invasion of Europe, causing the downfall of Western civilization. This process was compressed in time so that what might take fifty years in real life took fifty days in the book. In addition, the bulk of illegal immigrants in the novel came from India. Today, while immigration to Europe comes from every corner of the planet, much of it comes from the Islamic world and Africa.

Apart from that, the novel was remarkably prescient in describing the dysfunctional mindset of the modern Western world. We have become so wedded to unsustainable humanitarian ideals that we are mentally incapable of defending our national existence. When faced with millions of people coming from the global South, we simply raise a white flag and say that they are welcome to colonize our countries. At least, that is what our leaders and mass media do. The EU and Pope Francis react to illegal mass migration in the Mediterranean in almost exactly the manner described in Raspail’s book decades earlier. Europe risks committing suicide because of abstract humanitarian ideals and a Globalist ideology of open borders.

Jean Raspail died in June 2020, shortly before he would have turned 95. He lived to see his native France and other Western countries being partly overrun by migrants. Max Denken completed The Camp of the Sane in the summer of 2020, just as the author of The Camp of the Saints died. Western cities were then engulfed in Black Lives Matter protests, attacks on statues and European monuments and sometimes violent riots. Western mass media presented U.S. President Trump as an extremely evil man, as they had been doing continuously for five years. Some Western media said more positive things about the Communist dictator Fidel Castro when he died in November 2016 than they said about Donald Trump when he won free elections that some month.

Max Denken has Polish ancestry, has lived in California for many years and worked in other parts of the world. He considers the entire Western world to be deeply sick and heading for some form of collapse. This applies to North America as well as Western Europe. Against this crumbling Camp of the Saints, Denken pits what he terms The Camp of the Sane. Roughly speaking, this encompasses much of the eastern half of Europe, or at least the eastern quarter. Ironically, these are countries that were squeezed and bloodied between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War and endured generations of repressive Communist rule during the Cold War. Perhaps their recent historical experiences have provided these nations with a stronger resistance against ideological indoctrination.

Western Europe still has some brave political leaders such as Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini, but they may have emerged too late to save their countries from collapse. The Western world and what remains of its civilization are in freefall. Denken does not rule out the possibility that something sensible can be created in North America out of the disunited Multicultural mess that is present-day USA and Canada. However, he believes that the best future prospects for European civilization lie in Central and Eastern Europe.

The countries of Central and Eastern Europe no doubt believed that they had joined a sensible project for European cooperation and joint prosperity when they joined the EU. Some of them have come to realize that the increasingly repressive EU now resembles a cultural suicide pact. Money from the EU may seem tempting to nations that were left impoverished after decades of Communist rule. Yet these are silver coins laced with ideological poison. For 1400 years, the forces of Islam have been the collective enemy of the peoples of Europe. Now, the EU wants to force formerly independent European countries to take in Muslim immigrants.

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A Fear of Being Cast Out

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The following story describes the dilemma of a Turkish-Dutch girl who wrote a book denouncing her strict Islamic upbringing, and then decided to quit writing after the resulting outcry. Gary Fouse, who translated the piece, says:

This Dutch article is getting a lot of attention. A Turkish-Dutch girl named Lale Gül has published a book on how bad it was being raised in a Turkish Muslim family.

The translated article from the Dutch daily De Volkskrant:

Lale Gül wrote a book about her strict Islamic upbringing and was denounced: “I was called a nest befouler”

With her debut novel I am going to live, Lale Gül gave a glimpse into the Islamic community in which she grew up. After publication, the community turned against her. Now Gül is putting her pen down out of fear of being cast out.

by Ashwant Nandrum
February 25, 2021

Two weeks after the appearance of her book, Lale Gül has to acknowledge that she has been naïve. She had planned to write a story based on her own life. A book about an Amsterdam girl who breaks free from the grip of a strict Islamic community. She was not afraid of causing a stir at home. Her parents speak broken Dutch: They wouldn’t understand anything from the book. And if, unexpectedly, they heard about it, Gül would claim that she had made it up. It was just a novel.

That plan has failed miserably. The day after she appeared on the talk show Op1 the Gül family phone was glowing red. Family members, acquaintances, even strangers were inquiring. The book would bring shame to the community. “With hands shaking, my father spoke with everyone. At home, I said that I had written a love story. But with every telephone call, my father got a better picture of what was really in the book. He said, ‘Child, what you have done is put our entire family life out on the street.’”

The book entitled I am going to live reads like a long tirade by the principal character. Her parents don’t allow her to listen to music or watch movies with kissing. No wearing of jewelry or makeup, and no taking of selfies. No birthday celebrations and certainly no going out. Not on school trips, nor vacations without a male family member. Friendships with boys are inappropriate, let alone having a boyfriend.

While the main character feels the need to live that way. She asks herself in the book what she is supposed to do with the desires. “Do I have to live like a house plant? Do I have to immediately enter into a marriage where all sex is set out before it has begun because my creators have chosen a completely humorless, Koran-bound a**hole for me? Is God happy with my tragedy?”

The book offers a staggeringly honest look into Gül’s life experience. Fights between mother and daughter are described in detail. Unvarnished descriptions of how the main character has secret sex with her Dutch boyfriend alternate with reflections on Islam. Her parents are disdainfully called “creators”, the mother is nicknamed, “Carbuncle the Cockroach” and “Islamo-fascist despot.”

The poisonous tone was not originally the aim, says Gül. “The plan was to describe the events as factually as possible and leave the judgment to the reader. But during the time of the writing, I became angry with my parents again. Then I decided: Let the reader taste the anger.”

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The Cancelling of Dr. Seuss

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When I was about nine years old I liked to read the Hardy Boys mystery books. The first in the series was published in the late 1920s, and the publisher continued putting out titles until long after I was grown up.

In the late 1950s, as the cultural trend now known as political correctness was just getting started, the publishers ordered a rewrite of the older Hardy Boys books. To be fair, it was only partially for PC reasons. Yes, it’s true that the books’ depictions of negroes in the ’20s and ’30s tended towards the “sho nuff” and “dat sure am good” sort of stereotypes. But there were also rumble seats and roadsters and other dated cultural artifacts that had to be revised in order to make sense to the boomer generation. Needless to say, the new versions were less interesting than the originals. Boys like me held onto their ragged old copies rather than buy the new ones, and fortunately my school library had a lot of the old ones — that was in the days before libraries purged their collections for politically correct reasons.

My favorite books, however, were those by the immortal Dr. Seuss. His early works — before about 1957 — were (and are) timelessly superb. My mother thoughtfully preserved my Dr. Seuss collection, so that when the future Baron came along, I only had to acquire the newer books (some of them — a lot of the later ones are not at all interesting). Reading the old books to him when he was little reminded me of how wonderful they were.

About two-thirds of our combined Dr. Seuss collection here in Schloss Bodissey consists of my old books, most of them worn and tattered and taped together after being well-loved by two generations of kids. Some of the titles from the mid to late ’50s came from the first printing.

Considering what can be found in those old books, it was obvious that Dr. Seuss would someday have to be cancelled. When I saw the list of six titles that were withdrawn from publication a few days ago, I realized that I had four of them on the bookshelf right here in the Eyrie — McElligot’s Pool, If I Ran the Zoo, Scrambled Eggs Super, and On Beyond Zebra. According to various news stories, they are now available on Amazon only as “used” or “collectible”, with prices ranging from about $100 to as much as $2,500. If I wanted to cash out, I could make a fair amount of money on them. But it’s not worth it — I’d rather have the books.

Out of curiosity, I went through those four titles to see what racial heresies they contained to earn the ire of the Woke mob. If I Ran the Zoo was the most obvious — the image at the top of this post is taken from it. Those native bearers are undeniably sambos, and we can’t have that, now, can we?

In addition there was this one:

Yep, they’re definitely slants. Now, maybe if he had dressed them in business suits like real Chinese he could have skated by. Better yet, to make it realistic, he could have had the Chinese businessmen riding on top of the cage while the American boy carried it.

And then there’s the sheikh from the Desert of Zind. I’m not sure if he counts as a racial stereotype, but he kind of looks like an Arab, and he’s riding something that looks vaguely like a camel.

The sheikh clearly needs to be cancelled, too.

I couldn’t remember anything racist from McElligot’s Pool, so I paged through it trying to find the offending image. Sure enough, there was this:

Not only does the fellow at the top live in an igloo (with a stovepipe, no less), but the fish with the little furry parkas are Eskimo fish. Oh, the humanity!

It was much harder to discern why On Beyond Zebra had roused the wrath of the Wokistas. The only possible candidate I could see was the Nazzim of Bazzim:

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Fjordman Interview, Part 7: “An Entire Civilization That Has Lost the Ability to Think”

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This is the seventh and final excerpt from a January 11 interview with Fjordman. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.

Below is the final installment of the Document.no interview, recorded on January 7 and published on January 11. It was translated for subtitles by Fjordman himself.

Many thanks to Vlad Tepes and RAIR Foundation for the subtitling:


Video link

For more on Øyvind Strømmen, see:

Video transcript:

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So Here There Be Dragons! (Part IV)

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The essay below is the fifth in a series by our English correspondent Seneca III. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

So Here There Be Dragons!

by Seneca III

Part IV — Lacunae

This part of the series is a short list, with commentary, of some factors contributing to the moral, cultural and political dilemmas we face today, i.e. those either not covered in the preceding parts in detail, not at all or at best only alluded to. A Summaries and an Afterword follow in Parts VA and VB.

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
— William Pitt the Younger — Speech in the House of Commons (18 November, 1783).

“The tyrant’s plea, / excus’d his devilish deeds”
— John Milton — Paradise Lost, Book iv, line 393.

1. Language — its function and evolution

Language uniquely separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. It enables us to organise and cooperate in complicated ways, to clearly communicate ideas (even abstract ones), emotions, intentions, and much else. It is not a sessile but a motile, dynamic construct constantly being expanded by the introduction of neologisms and also contracted through words and definitions, ‘archaisms’, falling into disuse. Language allows and inspires us to jointly explore and mutually contemplate ourselves and the world and universe around us in a variety of ways practical, philosophical and metaphysical. In competent, successful speaking or writing, language and thought are contiguous, and the words chosen offer us an immediate presentation of some aspect of reality.

Yet, we simply don’t know how language originated. We do know that the ability to produce sound and simple vocal patterning (a hum versus a grunt, for example) appears to be in an ancient part of the brain that we share with all vertebrates, including fish, frogs, birds and other mammals. But that isn’t human language. It is suspected that some type of spoken language must have developed between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, well before written language (about 5,000 years ago). Yet, among the traces of earlier periods of life on Earth, we never find any direct evidence or artefacts relating to the speech of our distant ancestors. Perhaps because of this absence of direct physical evidence, there has been no shortage of speculation about the origins of human speech. An understanding of how and why human languages developed is a rich field. Darwin was of the opinion that:

“Music, rhythms, frogs, birds, the nightly howling of canis simensis across the Ethiopian high plateau, the song of whales, communicate in ways limited to their immediate environment, establish but limited or for mating purposes, not that our ways in that circumstances are worthy or would stand well under scrutiny.”

2. The use and abuse of tone poetry and figurative language

Languages come in many variants and from different roots yet most are composed of nouns, verbs adjectives, etc. expressed through vowels and consonants. One exception is the ‘click languages’ of Africa, a group of languages in which clicks function as normal consonants. The sole example of a language using clicks outside of Africa is that of ‘Damin’, a ritual vocabulary of the Lardil tribe of northern Queensland, Australia.

In written language punctuation primarily serves to create sense, clarity and stress in sentences, to indicate pauses in the flow and to emphasise or explain certain ideas or thoughts through words, facts and phrases that are presented in the text, thus structuring and organising the written word. If punctuation is missing, as in the [paragraph] below, and as it is in many legal documents, or in what passes for modern journalism, then the use of emphasis, obfuscation, opinions, conflation, relevance and disambiguation can lead to different or preferential interpretations thus, permitting a situation where to precisely define what is true and what is not is difficult or near impossible.

[In written language punctuation primarily serves to create sense clarity and stress in sentences to indicate pauses in the flow and to emphasise or explain certain ideas or thoughts through words facts and phrases that are presented in the text thus structuring and organising the written word If punctuation is missing as in the paragraph below and as it is in many legal documents or in what passes for modern journalism then the use of emphasis obfuscation opinions conflation relevance and disambiguation can lead to different or preferential interpretations thus permitting a situation where to precisely define what is true and what is not is difficult or near impossible.]

However, oratory and rhetoric, which are essentially verbal streams of consciousness used to educate, motivate, deceive or misinform are slightly different, whereby emphasis or the lack of it, pauses, tautologies, gesticulations and responses to audience responses can and often do project and affirm falsehoods favouring the position supported or being proposed by the orator. Skilful lawyers can and do utilise such techniques during the course of a trial and when making closing statements to juries; politicians, particularly on the hustings when trying to con the electorate, do the same, which is why so many of them manage to slither into Parliament in the first place. Media audio-visual presenters do this as well, and they are pretty good at it. Instead of actually addressing the argument itself they focus on a rhetorical flourish that you may consider overly dramatic, inappropriate or irrelevant then, if you question this, they imply that your emotional response invalidates your case. That is tone poetry.

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So Here There Be Dragons! (Part II)

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The essay below is the second in a series by our English correspondent Seneca III. Previously: Part 1.

So Here There Be Dragons!

by Seneca III

Part II — Ragnarök, männerbunden, eudemia and eufemia

“The centre of the Vikings’ cosmos was the ash tree Yggdrasil, growing out of the Well of Urd. Yggdrasil holds the Nine Worlds, home of gods, man and all spiritual beings. The gods live in Asgard and Vanaheim and humans inhabit Midgard. Giants live in Jotunheim, elves in Alfheim and dwarves in Svartalfheim. Another is the primordial world of ice, Niflheim, while Muspelheim is the world of fire. The last world comprises Hel, the land of the dead, ruled by the goddess Hel.” —From “An Overview of the Culture and History of the Viking Age”

“It is not that trash accumulates in human cities — it is that cities turn what accumulates in them into trash.” — Don Colachio

Ragnarök

In Norse mythology, Ragnarök is a series of events, including a great battle, foretold to lead to the death of a number of great figures (including the gods Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr, Heimdallr, and Loki), natural disasters and the submersion of the world in water. After these events, the world will resurface anew and fertile, the surviving and returning gods will meet and the world will be repopulated by two human survivors.

In the Poetic Edda, the event is referred to as Ragnarök or Ragnarøkkr, old Norse for ‘“Fate of the Gods” or “Twilight of the Gods”. Wagner titled the last of his Der Ring des Nibelungen operas Götterdämmerung, meaning “Twilight of the Gods” in German.

Männerbunden, eudemia and eufemia

In those peoples that are called ‘primitive’, but which most often represent only the degenerate and ensavaged remains of more ancient races and civilizations, the phenomenon of the ‘Männerbunden’ has often attracted the attention of observers.

In such peoples, the individual, to be considered as a merely natural being, is up to a certain age left to the family and especially to maternal care, under the feminine-maternal sign, beneath which these societies locate everything which has bearing for the material, physical side of existence. But at a given moment a change of state occurs. Special rites, which are called ‘rites of passage’ and which are often accompanied by a preliminary period of isolation and hard trials, bring about, according to a schema of ‘death and rebirth’, a new being, which alone can be considered a true man. Indeed, before this, the member of the group, no matter his age, is held to be a member of the women and children, indeed even of the animals. Once he has undergone his transformation, the individual is therefore united to the so-called ‘Männerbunden’. This society, having an initiatic (sacral) and warrior character, has the power of a group. Its right is to be differentiated in terms of its responsibility and its functions. It has the power of command. It has a structure similar to that of an ‘Order’.

With the epoch of the revolutions, there began a mighty assault against whatever could conserve the semblance of a ‘Mannerbünden’, proceeding so far as a complete inversion of values and ideals.

While in the last century [19th century] there was a tendency to derive the State from the institution of the family, a more modern current has rightly located the origin of sovereignty precisely in the phenomenon of a ‘Männerbunden’. The scheme which is now indicated effectively contains the fundamental elements which appropriately define every order, and specifically every political order, and which do so with a clarity that one would seek for in vain amidst the crumbling and degraded theories of our days on the origin of sovereignty. In that schema we encounter above all the idea of a virility in an eminent and spiritual sense, the quality of man as vir (as the Romans would say) and not as simple homo. To this is tied, as has been seen, a ‘break in level’, or a change in state; in its simplest expression, it is the detachment from the sensible, vegetative, physical state. Then there is the idea of a specific unity, much different from any other of ‘naturalistic’ character (as the family, the simple ‘people’, etc.). Finally, there is the idea of power as something connected essentially with this higher plane, so that originally it was recognized as possessing the character of a force from on high, of a ‘sacred power’ (auctoritas and with it imperium in the ancient Roman idea).

Therefore, we can with good right regard all of these matters as ‘constants’, that is, basic ideas which, in very different applications, formulations and derivations, appear recurrently in every major political organization of the past. On account of the processes of deconsecration, of rationalization and of materialization, which have grown ever more accentuated in the course of the times, these original meanings were forced to conceal themselves and to recede. But this remains ever unchanged: where these meanings have been totally obliterated, so that they no longer exist even in a transposed and debilitated form, without any longer even a background of initiatic or sacral character, there no longer exists a true State; every concept has been lost which, in an eminent and traditional sense, makes political reality, in its specific dignity and difference with respect to all the other spheres of existence and, in particular, with respect to all that which has an exclusively economic or ‘social’ character.

With the epoch of the revolutions, there began, in Europe, a mighty assault against whatever could conserve the semblance of a ‘Männerbunden’, which is to say, an assault against the very political principle itself, against the principle of every true sovereignty, proceeding so far as a complete inversion of values and ideals. Indeed, in one form or another the societarian ideologies have reigned for some time now — ideologies which represent simply the anti-State, and also a kind of protest against the virile principle on behalf of all that which, for its connection to the simply physical life of a society, and according to the aforementioned view of the origins, has an analogously ‘feminine’ and promiscuous character. While for the ‘Männerbunden’ honour, battle and dominion are values, for the simple ‘society’, on the other hand, peace, the economy, material well-being, the naturalistic life of the instincts and of the sentiments, and petty security are values: and, at their limit, hedonism and eudaimonism, as against heroism, rank and aristocracy…

[Julius Evola: The Crisis of Modern Society]

In my youth, joining the brotherhood of the military was a rite of passage, an entry into Männerbunden. Now, ‘military’, in the full meaning of that word, is slowly being hollowed out by the enforced entry and the affirmative-actioned fast-track promotion of women, racial minorities — particularly Muslims despite their being acolytes of a belief system dedicated to the subjugation or extermination of Judeo-Christians — and every possible sexual, ideological and moral deviant imaginable, most of them being unsuited for the purpose to which they are assigned, the defence of the realm. In the West our Nation States are in dire jeopardy.

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Book Reviews II: The Koran

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A year ago Michael Copeland posted his first selection of reviews of the Koran. Below is his second selection.

Book Reviews II: The Koran

Compiled by Michael Copeland

  • “…this indigestible book, whose every page makes healthy human reason quiver.” — Voltaire (1694-1778)
  • “This book is a long conference of God, the angels, and Mahomet, which that false prophet very grossly invented…” — George Sale, Introduction to “The Koran, commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed”, 1784, belonging to Thomas Jefferson.
  • “The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God.” — John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), 6th President of the United States
  • “…incites violence, disturbs public tranquillity, promotes, on grounds of religion, feelings of enmity, hatred, and ill-will between different religious communities…” — The Writ Application in The High Court at Calcutta
  • “The Koran is not the solution to Islamic radicalism, it is the cause.” — Daniel Greenfield
  • “To tell you the truth, I didn’t find anything I liked.” — Ashin Wirathu, Buddhist monk activist, Myanmar
  • “…a confusing and tedious book that most people don’t enjoy.” — Ali Sina, ex-Muslim
  • “It offers nothing but ignorance.” — Apostate Prophet
  • “a unified message of triumphalism, otherworldliness, and religious hatred” — Sam Harris
  • “a clearly-written, us-versus-them hate-crime book, endorsing a permanent might-makes-right death-threat.” — Uncle Vladdi, comment
  • “a pretty tedious screed of exhortations to violence against unbelievers interspersed with an occasional thought on the Last Judgment.” — Kepha, comment
  • “It’s horrendous. Shocking. Disgusting.” — OP, comment
  • “…the worst major religious work of all time, … exceedingly repetitive, stupid, boring, nauseating and disgusting ….” — Wellington, comment Jan 31, 2020 at 6:16 pm

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Of Burkas and Bare Bottoms

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Once again, our Israeli correspondent MC weighs in on the Culture Wars.

Of Burkas and Bare Bottoms

by MC

Perhaps a measure of civilization is the amount of freedom we give our wives and daughters; freedom to live their own lives. Or do we lock them up for our own private consumption?

Anybody who has read A.J. Cronin’s Hatter’s Castle will remember the tyrannical father who throws his accidentally pregnant daughter on the street after her fiancé dies in the Tay Bridge railway disaster (1879). This was Victorian England, and women were held to higher moral standards than their menfolk. The idea of Eve as the intellectually inferior ‘temptress’ was still with us.

In the Garden of Eden, Eve got it all wrong and in so doing destroyed poor, poor Adam. But read it carefully and a different picture emerges; somebody (Adam most likely) told her not to even touch the tree, which the serpent was able to prove was a pack of lies and so erode confidence. The woman confesses that she was deceived by the serpent, Adam blames everybody but himself.

So why does society see Eve as the stupid tart when it was Adam’s arrogance that caused all the problems? Our churches and synagogues are still filled with women of faith and wisdom; it is the men who usually fail to stand up.

Barbaric male-dominated societies seem to be obsessed with ‘virginity’ and ‘purity’, and are ready to murder if they deem that their penile honour has been compromised.

I am not female, and I do not necessarily believe that recreational sex is a good thing, but it happens, especially when people have feelings for each other. Yet in a society where women have equal rights, then I have to accept that it is the woman’s absolute right to choose her sexual partner, and at a time or place of her choosing.

Provided, that is, she fully understands the risks involved. The same goes for the males, of course, and the risk of pregnancy, even despite precautions, is a shared responsibility.

Virginity as such, belongs solely to the girl or woman in question, and is not the plaything of any relative, male or otherwise. This can be very hard for a father to understand, even in this modern society.

However, young girls need to be protected, which means that their rights are violated, but that protection needs to be provided by parents and by society as a whole. Most 12-year-olds (and many 16-year-olds) are not capable of informed consent, and are thus ‘easy meat’ to any handsome male targeting them. The problem here is that girls can get pregnant, and are thus a special case in society, and the younger the girl, the more dangerous the pregnancy can be.

The Islamic habit of regarding unguarded children as fair game is thus a depraved and deplorable attack on the equality of women, and one must ask: where are the feminists demanding that Muslim rapists and sex-slavers be justly punished? But it’s all gone quiet over there because ‘racism’ trumps all.

In the 1980s professional soccer players wore short shorts. In the Victorian 1880s they were somewhat longer. But then along came the influence of Islam, and FIFA had to make rules about the length of shorts and the removal of tops. The players of 40 years ago would often exchange tops after a big game. It was innocent, but not to Islam…

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