Category Archives: Memory

Michael Mannheimer R.I.P.

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Michael Stürzenberger and Michael Mannheimer

We’ve been posting translated material by or about Michael Mannheimer since at least 2010. Now it has been confirmed that Mr. Mannheimer died earlier this month at the age of 67.

Many thanks to MissPiggy for translating this article from Politically Incorrect:

Michael Mannheimer, One of the Very First Islam Critics in Germany, is Dead

The Islam- and system-critic Karl-Michael Merkle, alias Michael Mannheimer, has died of a heart attack at the age of 67.

by Michael Stürzenberger

The Islam critic Michael Mannheimer died on March 13, 2022. It was completely unexpected and unfortunately far too early, at the age of 67. He suffered from heart problems that were exacerbated by taking psychotropic drugs, which eventually caused him to die of a heart attack, according to his sister.

The rumors of “murdered by poison” or speculation about sinister actions by the Mossad, the CIA or other intelligence agencies are all from the realm of untenable mind games, fantasy tales and fake news.

Mannheimer, whose real name was Karl-Michael Merkle, lived in a secret location in Asia and moved there to be far from harassment. Now that he has died, the location can be shared: it was Cambodia.

Three years ago he had told me once by email that the medical care in Cambodia was very bad. He even had to pull a tooth himself, with help of dentist friend in Germany giving him instructions via Skype.

Michael Mannheimer was a valuable fellow campaigner in the years 2011-2015, especially in the matter of Islam criticism. Together we held many educational rallies, hitting the streets at home and abroad. During this time period, we were akin to brothers in spirit.

For example, on March 31, 2012, at the Counterjihad event in Aarhus, we were together at a highly memorable event in Denmark. That Counterjihad rally triggered the largest police operation in the history of this Danish city, which included helicopter support. More than 2,000 partly militant counter-demonstrators from Antifa and radical Muslims kept the city in suspense. At that time, Michael was still clearly in solidarity with Israel, the only real democracy in the Middle East. Together we stood alongside Jews who were in the crosshairs of political Islam.

That same year we re-founded the White Rose Resistance movement together with Susanne Zeller-Hirzel (Sophie Scholl’s best friend), PAX EUROPA (comrades-in-arms from the citizens’ movement), and the “Die Freiheit” Party. Our struggle was directed against every totalitarian ideology — national socialism, socialism, communism and political Islam.

Together with the then-managing director of BPE, Conny Axel-Meier, we followed in the footsteps of the heroic resistance fighters and visited the historic courtroom in Munich, where these fighters for democracy and freedom were defencelessly exposed to the judicial henchmen of National Socialism who brought them to the gallows.

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Michael Mannheimer’s Final Post?

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Hans-Dietrich Genscher

Long-time readers will remember Michael Mannheimer, the German author and activist who was featured here a number of times beginning in 2010 (his archive is here).

A couple of days ago I received this note from a reader:

I think Michael Mannheimer (a.k.a. Karl-Michael Markle) has died. I know you have worked with him in the past.

I noticed he did not blog/comment for a week, I went looking.

His dying comments… He’d been “poisoned”, arsenic.

I don’t know where he lived (in exile), I think maybe Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam or somewhere like that. But he stated he’d never felt so bad, could not get medical assistance. And then all went silent.

It could be that he’s in hospital. But I fear the worst.

Then yesterday an obituary was posted on his website.

I have no independent verification of Mr. Mannheimer’s death. However, Hellequin GB has kindly translated what may be the author’s final post:

NATO expansion to the east: Russia was disgracefully deceived, lied to and duped. Now it is striking back in military self-defense

The reversal of what was once good into absolute evil

After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, at the time of millions of mass shootings, at the time of the Jewish-run gulags, at the time of the three Ukrainian holodomors and later, in the time of the Cold War, the bad guys were the countries of the Soviet Union. And the countries of the West, above all the USA, were considered the good guys. But the further the Cold War recedes in history, the more information from the past decades emerges, and the more questionable the above-mentioned axiom of the good West and the bad East becomes. There is no question: for the majority of the people living there, the West as a whole was considerably freer than the East. But as far as politics is concerned, I see less and less of a difference between the two power blocs. Not the USSR, but the USA is by far the most warlike country in modern times.

USA: over 200 wars since its inception

In the 231 years since its founding, the United States of America has itself fought a total of 219 wars, intervened militarily or been involved in acts similar to war, for example through secret service involvement in terrorist attacks, attempted coups and coups on the territory of another state. The USA itself was not attacked once. The list below on the sources of this chapter makes it impressively clear that the aggressive policy currently being pursued against Russia in the Ukraine conflict is no exception, but has been a tradition for centuries. The systematic warfare of the USA and its vassals has now developed into an essential and important branch of the economy, comparable to mechanical engineering in Germany. Defense companies and the finance and investment industry earn billions from wars and armed conflicts. So we have every reason to be concerned. Because a war against Russia would be just one more item on a never-ending list of more than 200 acts of war committed. Everyone should now be able to answer their own question as to who is the number one terrorist state in the world. Since the end of World War II, from 1946 to the present, US government wars have claimed nearly seven million lives. Mind you, without the dead of both world wars.

The US has eliminated all of its opponents one by one with the help of the CIA, massive arms shipments, military and economic logistics. The US Vietnam War, which is said to have started with a ridiculous attack by a small Vietnamese boat on a US aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin, was a clear false flag action by the Americans.

Henry Kissinger launched what is believed to be the largest wave of bombings since World War II in all of world history against North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. No country in the world, including Germany and Japan, has been as devastated by carpet bombing as tiny Southeast Asian Laos. Without these bombings there would have been no Pol Pot, no Khmer Rouge and no genocide in Cambodia. Nevertheless, Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize for his “peacekeeping mission”. This prize should be abolished for all time without ifs and buts. The mass murderer Arafat received it (billions of euros given to him by the EU for the construction of Palestine were found in his private accounts),Obama even received it before taking up his presidency — and as it turned out later, there was no president in US history who waged more wars during his tenure than the “Nobel Peace Prize Laureate” and Muslim-by-birth Barack Hussein Obama.

The current conflict in Ukraine also came primarily from the United States, which wants to weaken Russia and present it as an aggressor. The military media complex of the US Deep State works so perfectly that the vast majority of people fall for the lies of the media regarding alleged Russian atrocities. But it’s exactly the opposite: since Maidan 2015, the right-wing fascist government in Kyiv, which is close to National Socialism, has brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of Russians. ( I reported in detail: Ukraine: “The daily and bestial terror, including mass murder of Russians living in Ukraine, which was hushed up by the West”). All of them are citizens of Ukraine who have been living there for centuries — whereby the fascist government in Kyiv is massively supported by NATO and also by the unspeakable regime of the Federal Republic of Germany, in which the “fight against the right” and against “National Socialism” is evident in a strange way that is only limited to the FRG, while it is courted with all honors in countries like the Ukraine.

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The Nothing Tree

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The following post is a personal side journey. It’s unrelated to the mission of this blog, so if you don’t want to stray from the main track, you may want to skip it.

Spending my sunset years as a Counterjihad blogger was not part of my life’s plan. I just kind of fell into it, joining Dymphna at the task after I was laid off in 2006. It seemed like a worthwhile endeavor, so I kept at it full-time for the next sixteen years (and counting).

Before that I had pursued numerous occupations since I graduated from college: taxi driver, tuxedo store manager, messenger for a legal firm, mathematician/programmer, systems analyst, sign painter, painter of ceramic cups, Kelly Girl, seller of mistletoe (seasonal only). I took all of those jobs just to keep the wolf from the door while I did the two things I was put on this earth to do: paint landscapes and write poetry.

I was fortunate enough to be able to paint for a (meager) living for more than twenty-five years. And I was especially fortunate to have married someone who understood my drive to create, and who was willing to help support me via her own employment. For that I will be eternally grateful to Dymphna; may she rest in peace.

As you all know, I ruined my eyesight by sitting outside in the bright sun day after day for decades. My intuition tells me that having my retinas bathed in so much ultraviolet light for all those years brought on macular degeneration at a relatively early age. Since I gave up painting in 2005 I have been reduced to programming digital images on the computer to satisfy my visual creative urge.

When I was eighteen years old I started writing poetry seriously — or as seriously as a callow clownish youth can do at that age. Almost everything I wrote before I was in my mid-twenties was dreadful stuff, and embarrassing to look at now, but a few things were worth saving, and have held up over the decades. By the time I was in my late thirties the quality of what I wrote was more consistent. I really hit my stride in the mid-’90s and early 2000s.

I encountered a fallow period after 2006, when the muse abandoned me for eleven years. I thought she was gone for good, and that my poetic career was over. Then in 2017 she mysteriously returned, and I started writing verse again. At that point it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to self-publish a volume of selected poems.

I gave up submitting my poems to periodicals thirty years ago. By then it had become clear that the type of poetry I write — traditional forms, often with a rigorous rhyme scheme and metrical structure — was out of step with the post-modern age. I got tired of the rejection slips, so I abandoned all attempts at publication. I haven’t published anything since a number of my poems (most of them lousy) appeared in William and Mary’s literary magazine back in the early 1970s.

Until now, that is. Thanks to the magic of self-publishing, I was able to put together a selection in a book entitled The Nothing Tree in Bloom. It contains all the poems from a fifty-year period (1970-2019) that I consider worth reading, and is listed on Amazon.

Self-publication turned out to be very easy, and it cost almost nothing, unlike vanity publishing. Actually, I suppose it is a form of vanity publishing, because I don’t really expect to sell any copies of the book. I just bought a few dozen author’s copies at a low price to give away to family and friends. It’s a satisfying way to wrap up a lifetime’s worth of work in a meaningful fashion. As Wallace Stevens said (in “The Lack of Repose”), the book provides “A few sounds of meaning, a momentary end / To the complication”.

I dedicated The Nothing Tree in Bloom to Dymphna. It makes me sad that she didn’t live to see it published, but she did read an early PDF version of it, which included the cover design. At that point the dedication page read: “For my wife”. In the published version it reads: “In memory of my wife”.

Since I’ve never published any poems since college, I’ve never had an editor. Fortunately, for forty years I had Dymphna to act in that capacity. As most of you know, she was an accomplished poet in her own right.

From 1979 until her death she read everything I wrote, including the most recent poem in the book. She was an incisive reader and critic, and never hesitated to point out infelicities and suggest changes. My oeuvre would have been far less competent without her input.

It was my habit to read every poem out loud to her as soon as I finished it. In later years, as her hearing deteriorated, I would print out a second copy so that she could follow along while I read it. After she died I found a pile of many years’ worth of those printed pages on the bottom shelf of the bookcase next to her side of the bed.

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When I was a teenager attending an English grammar school, I was required to study large quantities of poetry in depth for my O-level and A-level exams. It was like discovering a magnificent palace filled with treasure, and I took to it as if it were my natural environment. At the time I didn’t understand that most of my fellow students experienced it quite differently: it was just something they had to do, to memorize and analyze long enough to pass their exams, and then gratefully forget.

In the ensuing years I’ve learned the hard lesson that poetry is an acquired taste. Most people don’t get it, and aren’t interested in getting it. And that’s especially true of the type of poetry I prefer to write, which admittedly is intellectually abstruse.

With that in mind, I’ve chosen two examples from the book to post here that are somewhat more accessible.

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Requiem for a Sarvisberry Tree

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This post is off-topic. Readers who want to stick to current political trends may safely skip it.

I needed a break from all the horrible topics I have to deal with every day, so I decided to write about something that is important to me, and is only mildly melancholic.

It snowed here at Schloss Bodissey today, the sort of late-winter wet snow that is not worrying because it doesn’t stick to the roads and won’t hang around for very long.

Looking out the back door this morning reminded me of our redcurrant tree, which would normally bloom in a couple of weeks’ time. It won’t be blooming this year, however, because there is no more redcurrant tree, thanks to the blizzard of January 3.

The photo at the top of this post shows the redcurrant tree at its best, blooming in late March of 2007. But “redcurrant” isn’t even its proper name. Dymphna and I called it that for twenty-five or thirty years, because that’s how our neighbor, an old black woman, identified it. Like all poor country black people, she was an expert on anything that grew naturally and could be eaten. She told us that the fruit ripened in June, and could be made into pie or other desserts. She would come over here during the season, and she and Dymphna would pick all the berries they could get. Dymphna would make summer pudding with them, combined with other berries in season.

But it was never a redcurrant tree. Many years later we learned that it was a juneberry, which is what the local nurseries call the tame varieties they sell. It’s also known as a sarvisberry, shadbush, or saskatoon tree.

“Sarvisberry” is my favorite. In the Appalachian Highlands of Virginia, the folk etymology for the word is that the tree got its name because it blooms just after the ground thaws in the early spring, which is when graves can be dug and all the people who died during the winter get a burial service. “Sarvis” is an archaic dialect version of the word “service”, so the association makes sense. However, the word was actually brought to the New World from Europe, where “service tree” can be traced all the way back to the Latin word sorbus, or rowan.

But I prefer the highlanders’ explanation. Besides, the assimilation of words to more familiar terms is a very common process in the English language, so it’s quite possible that those early settlers gave the local tree that name for precisely that reason.

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When I first moved here in 1978, the redcurrant tree was about half the size of what it attained before it met its demise. It was all bent over, as if it had a great weight leaning on it. I found out later why that was when I watched Dymphna and our neighbor pick the fruit: they would pull the lowest branches down so they could more easily pluck the berries from them. After years of such treatment, the tree just bent in that direction, as if offering its fruit to those who came to pick it.

Over the decades the most bent-over branch would eventually die off, and a new, vigorous sprout would appear further back, growing into a second trunk, which would also become bent in turn as its fruit was harvested. I think we saw the process repeated two or three times during the life of the tree. Eventually it got ahead of the fruit-pickers, and the highest berries could not be reached from the ground. In later years Dymphna would send me up the tree with the extension ladder to pick the fruit for her.

It often happened that the tree would fill up with cedar waxwings during berry season: the juneberries are apparently one of their favorite delicacies. Suddenly one morning the tree would be alive with dozens of them, hopping around among the branches to get every possible berry. I never saw them at any other time, just during juneberry season. Dymphna, of course, used to curse at them when they arrived.

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On the morning of January 3, 2022, a major blizzard struck Central Virginia. More than ten inches of wet snow came down in a very short period of time, dropping trees and knocking out the power.

Right after the electricity went out, I thought I ought to take a photo of the storm. I didn’t want to actually venture out into the mess, so I just opened the back storm door, stuck the camera out, and took a picture. I didn’t realize until much later that I had just taken the last photo of the redcurrant while it was still standing:

Three hours later the storm had ended and the sun came out. I went out the front door to assess the situation, and then walked around back, where I was astonished to see the following sight:

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The Golden Road to Unlimited Socialism

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My good friend Concerned American at Western Rifle Shooters Association recently wrote to Vlad and me. He wanted to ask our East Bloc contacts who grew up under communism the following question:

“What lessons, if any, can be taken from the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and applied to those of us stuck in the upcoming fall of the US Bloc?”

Vlad and I forwarded his message to a number of our translators who have experienced communism. Four of them have replied so far, and more are expected. I’ve collected the first group below.

I expect WRSA and Vlad to mirror this post, and will add an update with links for the mirrors when they appear.

Update: The WRSA post is here.

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The first report is from DarLink, the only member of the team who grew up in the Soviet Union. She later moved to Israel, and translates both Russian and Hebrew for Vlad and me:

I have a nearly constant sense of déjà vu these days…it feels like my past is inescapable; I simply cannot leave the USSR.

The signs are everywhere:

A senile leader, lying media, a lawless society, corrupt institutions…

The fall is coming and I don’t think we can stop it.

  • Food shortages.
  • Medical supplies shortages.
  • Water, electricity, gas will be shut randomly and for unknown periods of time.
  • The government will run out of money and we the people will be left to fend for ourselves.

Prepare in anyway you can:

Get out of the cities — warmer areas where you can grow your own food are the best, in my opinion.

If you are alone, gather some friends/relatives in a group and do it together — you will go back in time technologically, and living off the land is easier in a group.

Learn to grow anything that can nourish you and your family.

Learn to hunt.

Prepare alternative sources of water.

If you can rig your own electro grid, do it.

Learn a craft others may need and would be willing to pay for in goods.

Money will be useless for a while — have stuff you can trade.

Get guns and ammo to defend what you have — others WILL try to rob you of anything valuable.

The situation, most likely, will be different from state to state, and some will have it harder than the others — if you are in a blue state, leave.

It may not be obvious, but Russians actually had it easier and suffered less than Americans will — they were less spoiled, had less stuff, and their fall was less destructive because there wasn’t much there anyway.

It’s up to us.

Start preparing.

The second report is from CrossWare, who grew up in Hungary under communism. She emigrated to Canada and lived there for a number of years, but returned home when political repression in Canada reached an alarming level:

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From Camelot to Babylon

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Today is the fifty-eighth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I don’t expect much attention to be paid to the occasion; the fiftieth in 2013 was probably the last big fling of the Camelot industry. With the Boomers currently wheezing their way under the sod, the date is passing out of popular recollection and into history.

The image at the top of this post shows the cover of the album “Single Bullet Theory”, by a band of the same name. It’s actually an EP — containing only four songs — rather than a full LP. The cover was too big to put in my scanner, so I had to take a photo of it.

SBT was relatively local to me, in the Richmond area. One member was a friend of a friend, so I actually knew the band a little bit. I heard them play once or twice in the late 1970s.

The image on the album cover was created when irony was just becoming ascendant, so in 1978 it was about as cool and hip as it could get. And at the time it appeared, it would have been instantly recognizable to virtually any American adult.

The original photo — one frame of the 8mm Zapruder film taken in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963 — was iconic. Everyone had seen it. Fifteen years after the assassination, the context of that photo was still totally familiar. It even made its way into an Elvis Costello song from the same period, “Less Than Zero” (especially the “Dallas version”). Everyone knew what the singer meant when he said, “…her husband rides a bumper in the president’s procession” and “calling Mr. Oswald” and “…if you were taking home movies, there’s a chance you might have seen him.”

But forty-five more years have passed since then. How well-known is all that Dallas iconography now? I don’t immerse myself much in popular culture these days, but I suspect the events of 11/22/63 are not as generally familiar as they were two generations ago.

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Any kid who was old enough to pay attention to public affairs — say, ten or older — experienced November 22, 1963 as a watershed moment, dividing the continuum into Before and After what happened in Dallas that day.

I was just starting junior high school at the time. Since I was born after World War Two and was too young to remember the Korean War, I had experienced nothing similar in my lifetime. And I experienced nothing like it afterwards until 9-11 came along thirty-eight years later. I was seasoned and jaded by then, however, so it didn’t make as much of an impact, but it was a similar cultural moment.

As far as I could tell, adults were similarly affected by the assassination. I was in band practice that day when the news came in, and I remember the stricken face of our band teacher as he relayed the news to his students.

That was late on a Friday afternoon. The shock and horror on TV continued throughout the weekend, augmented by the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald on Sunday, which meant that the principal suspect would never face a public trial. The solemn, elaborate funeral for JFK took place on Monday, and we watched it live on TV. Kids got out of school for the occasion, if I remember correctly.

In retrospect the Kennedy assassination seems to mark the end of one era — which might be called the Post-WW2 Period — and the beginning of another one, for which a succinct name does not come readily to mind. The attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981 did not have the same effect, partly because he survived the attempt, and partly because times had changed by then. The next divide might have been 9-11, but that’s still too recent for me to decide.

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We Are All Rwanda Now

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Our German translator Hellequin GB was in Rwanda at the time of the genocide in 1994. In the following essay he points out the disturbing parallels between the Hutu propaganda of that time — which demonized and dehumanized the Tutsis prior to the slaughter — and what we read in the left-wing media (is there any other kind?) in 2021.

About Rwanda and the Genocide Propaganda

by Hellequin GB

Two major radio stations transmitted hate propaganda to the illiterate masses: Radio Rwanda, and Radio Télévision des Milles Collines (RTLM). Radio Rwanda was the official government owned radio station.
Under the second(?) Arusha Accord it was banned from continuing to disseminate hate propaganda. This led the Hutu Power circle around President Habyarimana and his wife to found RTLM as a private radio station.

RTLM became immensely popular as a young, hip alternative to the official voice of the government. They did the usual — played popular music and encouraged the public to phone in and participate in radio broadcasts. Amongst its listeners, RTLM attracted the unemployed youth and the Interhamwe militia, a Hutu paramilitary organization.

RTLM and Radio Rwanda, before and during the genocide, continued to encourage and direct the killing of Tutsis and moderate Hutus until they were forced off the air by the Rwanda Patriotic Front’s military victories.

Here are a few transcripts in English from the Radio/TV-shows in Rwanda 1993/94. The rest is in French and Kinyawranda, but that should give you enough insight into what was going on.

I’m starting with one that’s from October 21 1990 for you to connect some dots: RR_21Oct90_eng_K036-2134-K036-2138.pdf

The next ones are those that come from the nitty-gritty, although there are some serious time-lapses in between.

Also, when you read the word Inyenzi, that means cockroach (Tutsi). There was an article in one of the papers; I cannot remember its name now, but the headline stuck with me throughout the years:

“A cockroach cannot bring forth a butterfly.”

The editorial argued that the Tutsi, like a cockroach, use the cover of darkness to infiltrate: “the Tutsi camouflages himself to commit crimes.”

Another word you’ll read is Inkotanyi, which means “invincible”, and is the nickname given to the Tutsi rebel army, but it was also used in the connection with “Cutting down Tall Trees”, meaning killing Tutsi.

Like the Nazis did to the Jews of Germany and later in the occupied Territories, and what we’re seeing now, was and is a build-up to genocide, in my humble opinion.

This time it’s just on a monstrous scale never seen before in recorded human history.

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Hi-Yo Silver!

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For his entire career after leaving the army, my father was employed by the NSA as a cryptographer. His work sometimes required him to travel. In the early days, when I was a small child, he often traveled to Germany, the North of England, and Alaska. Many years later, long after he retired, I realized that those locations must have been listening stations where the agency was picking up the SIGINT that he was tasked with decrypting. I also realized that that was the reason why he had a Russian-English dictionary and a Russian grammar on his bookshelf (he also had a Swedish-English dictionary, but I’m not sure why he needed that).

Later in his career, as his work became largely administrative, his travels were generally more mundane. In 1964 he paid a visit to St. Paul, Minnesota (maybe there was an NSA field office up there) and stayed at the Twins Motor Hotel. For some reason he brought back a menu from the motel’s coffee shop, and I’m glad he did, because it gives me a little window into restaurant prices back then. I was still too young to pay much attention to prices and inflation, so I wouldn’t have otherwise remembered.

Just as a thought experiment, imagine that my father bought the “Burger Steak Supreme” with a cup of coffee. Salisbury steak, fries, cole slaw, and rolls for $1.25. Coffee was a dime. My father was decent tipper, so he probably handed the waitress a dollar bill, two quarters, and a dime, and told her to keep the change.

The dollar bill would have been a Silver Certificate, and not the Monopoly money — Federal Reserve Notes — that circulates nowadays.

You could take a $1 Silver Certificate down to the bank and exchange it for a silver dollar. I remember doing just that, and getting one of those beautiful Morgan dollars. I was still little, so it felt huge and heavy in the palm of my hand.

My dad wouldn’t have used a silver dollar, though. They still circulated, and you would occasionally see people spending them (usually the later Peace Dollars, which were much less attractive), but quarters and half dollars were used most of the time.

To continue this thought experiment, let’s imagine that he paid for his meal with two Franklin halves, two Washington quarters, and a Mercury dime. Roosevelt dimes were more common by 1964, but Mercuries (strictly speaking, Winged Liberty dimes) were still in circulation, and were more pleasing to the eye, so I prefer to imagine one of those.

Now let’s imagine that he decided to spare his waistline, forgo his lunch, and use his $1.60 in silver to open a savings account for the benefit of his young son. In those days banks were statutorily required to pay 4% annual interest on savings accounts. I remember my passbook, with occasional small deposits noted inside, and the line where a little bit of interest was added each quarter.

At some point between those halcyon days and 1980 the rules changed, and banks no longer had to pay 4% on savings accounts. Interest rates became paltry, and anyone who wanted their savings to accrue significant interest found other vehicles for their money.

But let’s pretend that somehow that little savings account kept chugging along at 4%. When I reached my majority I eschewed withdrawing the money, and left it in the account. As of today it has managed to increase in value to $14.96.

“Big woo, Baron,” I hear you say. “That doesn’t even beat inflation.”

No, it doesn’t. But the funny thing is, neither does the current value of the silver. More on that later.

If my father had hung onto those five silver coins, and I had inherited them, as of today they would be worth approximately $33.60. If I took them down to the local silver dealer, that’s about what he would give me in Federal Reserve play money for their “melt value”. A savings account would have had to pay roughly 5.5% annual interest in order for the deposit to have accrued that much value since 1964.

Now let’s think about what the same meal would cost you today. As it happens, I ate almost the same lunch a couple of days ago at a diner in the little town in the hinterlands where I went to visit relatives. I had a more upscale vegetable than cole slaw (greens), but I had to order it à la carte. Since the diner wasn’t as swank as the Twins Motor Hotel, we’ll just assume they more or less even out. With the coffee (which costs a LOT more these days) and tip, my meal came in at just over $19 in pretend money. That’s more than the 4% savings rate would have given me on the original $1.60, but less than the current value of those silver coins.

However… Restaurant prices haven’t inflated to the extent that other commodities have. Consider what a car or a new house cost you in 1964. Back in the late 1950s my parents paid $22,000 for a custom-built three-bedroom, two-bath brick ranch on a large lot. If I still owned it, that property would be worth about a million in today’s market. In comparison, 22,000 silver dollars are now worth about $460,000 — less than half as much.

So what gives? Why didn’t silver keep up?

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I bring all this up because one of Francis W. Porretto’s recent posts discussed Silver Certificates, the Federal Reserve, legal tender, and currency in general. It got me to thinking about changes in the currency since 1964.

As it happens, 1964 was the last year that the Treasury minted silver coins. At that point no silver dollars had been minted since 1935. From 1965 on dimes, quarters, and half dollars were made of a copper-nickel “sandwich”. People called the ugly new coins “Johnson slugs” because they were introduced during the Johnson administration.

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On the Eve of Destruction

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A gloomy message sent by Seneca III from the multicultural dominion formerly known as England.

On the Eve of Destruction

by Seneca III

CHANGE is both a constant and a variable; a constant because it is always with us, a variable because its flavour and intensity changes over time. In itself this is not a bad thing, but when change takes a wrong turning in the road and descends into an age of national decay and suicidal lunacy such as that which is now upon us, we must either return to the start line and begin again or accept that we will have to sacrifice our integrity, honour, way of life and independence… and our country as well.

Barry McGuire got it spot on. This song is old, but it doesn’t age:

“Better days will return, we will be with our friends again, we will be with our families again, we will meet again.”
— Her Majesty the Queen, 5th April 2020.

Over half a century ago I swore an oath, the same oath that all persons enlisting or commissioned into the British Armed Forces, except Royal Navy Officers, are required to attest to or equivalently affirm:

I _____ swear by Almighty God (or do solemnly, and truly declare and affirm) that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Her Heirs and Successors, and that I will, as in duty bound, honestly and faithfully defend Her Majesty, Her Heirs and Successors, in Person, Crown and Dignity against all enemies, and will observe and obey all orders of Her Majesty, Her Heirs and Successors, and of the (admirals / generals/ air officers depending on the particular Service) and officers set over me. (So help me God.)

[Until recently no oath of allegiance was sworn by members of the Royal Navy, which is not maintained under an Act of Parliament but by the royal prerogative. This is still the case for officers as, by nature of the Navy’s authority deriving from the Crown and not Parliament, the loyalty of naval officers to the Sovereign is taken for granted.]

However, Her Majesty is no more an immortal than you or I. Her time will come as it will for all of us, as evolution has designed us to eventually shuffle of this mortal coil in order to make room for the next lot. The sad thing is that her immediate successor does not inspire confidence in me, to put it mildly, and this causes me to have to seriously reconsider that part of my oath that refers so repetitively to ‘Heirs and Successors’.

Yet there may be hope for the second in line and his charming, duty-conscious family if they have not been too badly afflicted by the verbal ramblings, divided loyalties and ideological circumlocutions of the current Crown Prince. I do hope so. Our Constitutional Monarchy is a wonderful thing, and serves as a safe harbour for all of our hopes and custodian of much of our physical and historic heritage that the Wokists are doing everything in their power to rub from the pages of history. I also have nightmare visions of a Republic led perhaps by a President Blair or Johnson or Starmer or their ilk.

Anyway, enough of me. So where, now, do we find ourselves?

Not necessarily, I suspect, looking out across bloodstained foreign fields and barricades again, but inward, to our homelands, to the cities, the occupied territories where several generations of feral incomers go about their daily business of crime, drug peddling, benefit scrounging, mugging and gratuitous violence mostly beyond the control of an overstretched Woke and Common-Purposed constabulary carrying out selective law enforcement and led by serial incompetents who are supported by a Judiciary fully on board with the same agenda, none of whom our spineless government will or can do anything about, as more reinforcements for these ferals come piling ashore on a daily basis aided and abetted by France.

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The Crash of Civilization

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The Crash of Civilization

by Fjordman

The terror attacks of September 11, 2001 were the type of shocking event where many people remember exactly where they were and what they did that day. Personally, I was living in Egypt at that time. I had started studying Arabic language at the University of Bergen in western Norway. In 2001 I continued these studies at the American University in Cairo.

My linguistic skills in Arabic were mediocre. Since I left the Middle East in 2003 and haven’t practiced the language since, my Arabic has deteriorated and is now quite poor. For me, studying Arabic primarily became a door into studying Islam and Islamic culture. I was far better in this field of study, and continued my personal studies of Islam for years. I am at heart not a linguist, but rather an analyst with a strong interest in history.

Before September 2001, I was already growing more skeptical of Islam based on my own studies and personal experiences. Still, living in the largest city in the Arabic-speaking world during the September 11 Jihadist attacks was certainly interesting. The Mubarak regime imposed a curfew on Tahrir Square and parts of downtown Cairo that day. Perhaps they feared that some local Muslims would publicly celebrate the attacks, the way some Palestinian Muslims did. When Egypt received billions of dollars in aid from the USA, this would not have been good publicity.

I followed the news and newspapers back home via the Internet. They claimed that all Arabs and Muslims were sad and horrified by the attacks. This is not true. I know. I was there. Some of my Egyptian Muslim neighbors celebrated with cakes and said openly that they were very happy about the attacks.

To me, the most shocking thing about this was not that many Arabs and Muslims hated the West in general and the USA in particular. I already knew that. What was truly disturbing was that virtually the entire Western world seemed to be in complete denial about this fact. This was an entire civilization which once used to cultivate logic and reason, yet now seemed to have lost the ability to think rationally. That really scared me.

The Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu completed his book The Art of War around the year 500 BC. Despite being more than 2,500 years old, it remains surprisingly fresh and relevant. This is because Sun Tzu focused mainly on the psychological aspects of conflict. While human technology has changed greatly in 2,500 years, human psychology has changed a lot less. One of the most famous quotes from The Art of War is this:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

From what I observed in September 2001, it seemed that the Western world had forgotten who our enemies are. Far worse, though, was that we had even forgotten who we are, and the roots of our own civilization.

A decade later, another terror attack would have an even more direct impact on my life. Both attacks became national traumas. Yet the 2011 attacks in Norway were carried out by a single individual acting alone, whose alleged terrorist network only existed inside his mentally disturbed head. The 2001 attacks in the USA were carried out by many different individuals from a real international terror network whose ideology has adherents worldwide. Moreover, when a small country is attacked, this is bad for that small country. When a large and powerful country is attacked, this has geopolitical consequences.

By 2011, I had been living in the same flat in Oslo for eight years, since my return from the Middle East. When the July 22 attacks happened, some people blamed me personally for the atrocities. I suddenly found myself near the epicenter of an international news story. This was extremely unpleasant, but in some ways also educational. If the 2001 attacks weakened my trust in Western mass media, the 2011 attacks totally destroyed it.

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Been There. Done That.

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Unless some compelling reason emerges in future years, this will be my last 9-11 anniversary post.

It’s been an educational twenty years, to say the least. The first three anniversaries came up before Dymphna and I started blogging in October of 2004. During those years we had begun our studies of Islam and sharia, eventually launching Gates of Vienna to make our own small contribution to what later became known as the Counterjihad. From 2005 onward, one or the other of us always did a commemorative post when September 11th rolled around.

I still remember what I was doing when I heard the news on that bright, cool September morning, and how the day subsequently unfolded, but I’m not going to write about all that — I’ve covered it too many times before. And I’ll stay away from the political sequelae, except to note that the way the Patriot Act was eventually abused was at least as bad as the most skeptical libertarians predicted, and probably worse.

Over the next decade I spent a lot of time educating myself about Islam and sharia. Beginning in 2009, retired Major Stephen Coughlin was especially helpful in furthering my education. He made me understand the depth and breadth of the penetration of the federal government and the military by the Muslim Brotherhood, to the point that we had written sharia into the constitutions that we devised for Iraq and Afghanistan.

At first it seemed that a combination of ignorance and cluelessness had led to such foolhardy behavior, but as time went by — especially after the Islamophiles in the Obama administration got going full throttle — I realized that there was more than mere ignorance at work. Yes, there were plenty of ill-informed and stupid people at the upper levels of the government and the military, but John Brennan — just to pick an example — was not one of them. There was no way that he could have failed to understand exactly what the Muslim Brotherhood was up to. Thus we can only conclude that Islamization is part of the Deep State’s plan for the deconstruction of Western Civilization.

As the teens wore on, my cynicism and disillusionment about our government got worse and worse. I had started out with the naïve idea that there were decent people among our political leaders who really were attempting to do their best for the country. However, the true state of affairs eventually became ineluctable: corruption and malevolence were (and are) the norm, from the lowest to the highest levels of government. There are a few very rare exceptions, but they play no meaningful role in steering the ship of state.

The five years since Donald Trump stormed onto the political scene have really clarified the extent of the evil rot that has eaten out the core of our political and cultural institutions. The investigation and impeachment of Mr. Trump revealed the true purpose of the Patriot Act. And last fall’s election showed that the Deep State now has full control over the counting of the votes, so that no future elections will show any results other than those they intend. Diehard Republicans who are salivating over the midterms or 2024 are the most clueless of all. If they haven’t yet realized the nature of our new totalitarian dystopia, they probably never will. There’s no voting our way out of this.

So here we are, twenty years later. Afghanistan has reverted to what it was in 2001, except with much better roads, airfields, telecommunications, and surveillance equipment. We just handed the country over to the mujahideen we overthrew back then, lavishing upon them such quantities of state-of-the-art munitions and equipment that they will be the most powerful jihad army ever assembled, courtesy of the United States of America.

Here at home we are entering the full Corona despotism that the paranoid cynics among us have been predicting ever since the start of the “pandemic”. Since I intend to remain unjabbed, by this time next year I don’t know whether I’ll be able to get medical treatment, or eat in a restaurant, or even shop in a supermarket. By September 11, 2022 I might be unable to post a 9-11 commemoration, even if I wanted to.

I remember the ubiquitous “Never Forget” banners that popped up all over the place after 9-11. I didn’t forget.

I remember the “Let’s roll!” spirit that emerged. I rolled as best I could.

I remember when George W. Bush promised to hunt down the evil perpetrators and bring them to justice. And he did manage to round up quite a few of them and stash them in Gitmo until they were released to become ministers in the new government of Afghanistan.

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Danish Days

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Steen has posted an excellent selection of photos of Fjordman taken during the latter’s exile in Denmark.

Now that Fjordman has given permission for photos of him to be published, I dug through my image archives to see what I could find. I have a fair number of photos taken between 2007 and 2013, the last time I was in Europe. It fills me with a kind of nostalgic melancholy to look at them, since I know I’ll never see Denmark again, given that that I won’t be getting the “vaccination”. Even if I could somehow hop a catamaran to cross the Atlantic like Greta Thunberg, the Danish immigration authorities would still want to see my vaccine passport before they’d let me in.

A lot of the photos in my archive can’t be posted, because they contain other people who have yet to go public, and I don’t feel like trying to pixelate all of them out. However, I picked out a small selection to post here.

Steen took this photo of Fjordman and me in Copenhagen after one of our Counterjihad meetings in 2009:

Not all the photos are from Denmark. This one of Fjordman with Tommy Robinson was taken at an event in London in 2011:


Fjordman and Tommy Robinson, 2011

You can see Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in the left background.

As he mentioned in his post on Thursday, Fjordman spent some time in the USA in the spring of 2012 during the trial of Anders Behring Breivik. While he was here, he went to several wine tastings:


Fjordman at a wine tasting, 2012

In the process of digging through various folders, I came across a couple of screen shots of the letter that Anders Behring Breivik wrote and sent to major media outlets in the fall of 2013:

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July 22, Ten Years On

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Ten years ago today Anders Behring Breivik murdered 77 people in Oslo and on the island of Utøya. Of all the Counterjihad activists who were impacted by the political blowback from the attacks, none was more affected than Fjordman. Below are his remarks on the occasion of the anniversary.

July 22, Ten Years On

by Fjordman

Sometimes life can be very strange. When I was eating lunch in my small basement flat in Oslo on July 22, 2011, I did not anticipate that in a few hours my country would be rocked by a brutal mass murder. And I certainly did not expect that these events would also turn every aspect of my own life upside down.

Suddenly and without warning, I was thrown into the epicenter of an international media storm. Less than two weeks later, I had evacuated my home and fled from Norway out of serious concerns for my safety. At this point, I was publicly accused of being a possible accomplice to mass murder, and the suggested brains behind an international terrorist network. If my life in the summer of 2011 had been the script for a film, it would have been rejected as being too improbable to happen in real life. Yet all of this did happen to me, plus a lot more. All because of the actions of a man I have never once met in my entire life, not even for a cup of coffee.

Ten years later, things have calmed down somewhat. I have managed to reestablish a reasonably stable personal life. However, this is a new life in a new country.

I quietly moved back to Norway in 2017, to see whether it was possible for me to have a normal life there again. The answer was no. Three and a half years of applying for jobs turned out to be futile. I got no job whatsoever, not even as an unskilled laborer in factories, butcheries or the fishing industry. I applied for such jobs, too, not just for work in offices or shops.

In early 2021, I therefore decided to leave Norway again, for the second time in less than ten years. It is unlikely that I will return in the foreseeable future for anything other than short visits.

A decade of smears following the July 22 attacks by Anders Behring Breivik has left its mark. Norwegian media still publish new articles suggesting that I inspired mass murder. New comments are still being published on social media claiming that I have the blood of children on my hands. Not every month, fortunately, but from time to time.

Being quoted in Breivik’s confused compendium/manifesto is by far the greatest curse of my life. Nothing else even comes close. But perhaps it is possible to be cursed and blessed at the same time. I was also blessed with being surrounded by kind people. Both old friends and new friends alike.

I was homeless for some time. Friends in Denmark referred to me, only half-jokingly, as a political refugee from Norway. My first temporary home was with my friend Steen Raaschou in Copenhagen. He was exceptionally patient, and allowed me to occupy his sofa for months at a time. I also stayed for a while with professor emeritus Bent Jensen and his lovely Russian wife Tatjana. In the spring of 2012 I spent several months in the USA, and never lacked a bed to sleep in. My friend Ned May from Gates of Vienna helped me with this arrangement*. Not all of those who helped me probably want to be named. But they know who they are, and they have my gratitude.

In 2011, I had a part-time job in Oslo, working with young people suffering from autism. After the massive and extremely negative media focus on me in July and August of 2011, it was impossible for me to keep doing this job. Frankly, it was probably dangerous for me to even stay in my old flat. So I suddenly no longer had a job or steady income at the same time as I had to spend money on lawyers.

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A Summer of Madness

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Ten years ago I walked this street; my dreams were riding tall.
Tonight I would be thankful, Lord, for any dreams at all.

— Robert Hunter, from “Mission in the Rain”

Tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attack in Norway. On July 22, 2011, a man named Anders Behring Breivik detonated a truck bomb in central Oslo next to government headquarters, killing eight people. While police and emergency services were dealing with the aftermath, Mr. Breivik drove to the island of Utøya, where a summer camp for Socialist Youth was being held. There he methodically shot and killed sixty-nine teenagers with a high-powered rifle. When police finally arrived at the island, he calmly surrendered.

Anders Behring Breivik was a neo-Nazi, but that fact did not emerge until several years later, when he wrote a letter to multiple media outlets and admitted that his declared affiliation with the Counterjihad movement had been a strategic misdirection, to spare his Aryan nationalist comrades from persecution. That part of his letter to the media was widely ignored, and was never publicly reported by any major outlet. To this day he is widely identified as an anti-Islam ideologue.

Before he committed his atrocities, Mr. Breivik had arranged the media distribution of his manifesto, or as he preferred to call it, “the compendium”. It was a lengthy, rambling treatise. It contained some of his own writing, but most of it consisted of extensive quotes from various English-language writers, the most prominent of which were Fjordman and Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch.

Those writers and others mentioned in the manifesto became the focus of a media frenzy beginning the following morning. Progressive pundits applied their usual pseudo-syllogism to the Utøya massacre:

1.   Breivik admired Fjordman.
2.   Breivik massacred innocent people.
3.   Therefore Fjordman was at least partially responsible for the atrocity. Q.E.D.
 

As I mentioned above, the Butcher of Utøya did not really look up to Fjordman; his admiration was a feint. So even the pseudo-syllogism was wrong. But none of that mattered; any information to the contrary was ignored by the left-wing media. Fjordman became an object of universal loathing. In Norway he was Public Enemy #1, in some ways eclipsing Breivik himself.

Up until that time Fjordman had only published his essays under a pseudonym. Beginning on the morning of July 23, the press and internet sleuths began an intensive effort to unmask him. It was only a matter of time before his real identity was uncovered, so after retaining counsel and making himself known to police, he outed himself via an interview with the tabloid VG. After that he fled the country and went into hiding.

And it’s a good thing he did: there were calls for him to be arrested and tried as Mr. Breivik’s accomplice, despite the fact that the two had never met, and Fjordman had never advocated violence in any form. But Norwegian public opinion did not bother itself with such trivial matters as facts and the truth. The slaughter on Utøya required a scapegoat, and Fjordman was chosen for the role.

He lived outside of Norway for a number of years, and only returned when the risk of arrest had diminished. However, he was unable to find work. Any prospective employer who was aware of who he was would refuse to hire him, and if he somehow found a job, even a menial one, he would be discharged as soon as his employer became aware of his identity. Now, ten years after the attack, he is living outside the country again, since he is unemployable in his homeland.

And, regardless of Mr. Breivik’s admission that his admiration for Fjordman was a ruse, Fjordman is still widely known as “Breivik’s mentor”.

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I won’t go into the Breivik affair in great detail, since this is primarily a reminiscence about the effect the atrocity had on Gates of Vienna and the Counterjihad in general. To learn more, check out the archives for the period from July 22, 2011 to ca. November 2011. Or look up the relevant items in the Fjordman Files. The trial of Anders Behring Breivik sucked up a lot of our blogging oxygen in the spring of 2012; see Circus Breivik for a relevant sample.

Because Gates of Vienna was the main venue for Fjordman’s writings, and was mentioned repeatedly in the killer’s manifesto, this site was put under the media’s klieg lights beginning the day after the massacre. We were thrust into a prominence we had never seen before (or since). It was a hideous kind of fame that I would never have asked for — they say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but my experience in the summer of 2011 makes me vehemently disagree.

In the first few weeks we received hundreds (maybe thousands) of emails. Some of them were simply requests for information, but they were mostly hate mail, sometimes in Norwegian and Swedish. Various media outlets wanted to contact Fjordman, and I dutifully passed the messages on to him, but he didn’t respond to any of them.

The number of comments at Gates of Vienna (which was still on blogspot at the time) rose into the hundreds for each post, many of them from obvious trolls and provocateurs employed by one or another state intelligence service. They soon became unmanageable, so we reluctantly closed the blog to comments for a couple of months. When we reactivated them, we made them subject to moderation, and they’ve been that way ever since. It’s frustrating and annoying for commenters to have to wait to see their contributions appear, but otherwise Dymphna and I would have been unable to cope with all the trolls and provocateurs.

By the beginning of the week following the attack, media outlets started contacting me. They somehow managed to obtain my phone number, and I received calls from newspapers in Norway and the UK. Needless to say, I declined to say anything to them.

During our fifteen minutes of lurid fame we were mentioned in The New York Times and The Washington Post, among other illustrious publications. The following report from the NYT told its readers that Anders Behring Breivik had commented on Gates of Vienna several times:

What they said was quite true. Fortunately, I had already been alerted to the fact by a European contact, who told me the pseudonym that had been used by Mr. Breivik, so I was able to track down all his comments. Some people urged me to delete them, but that’s not the way we do business here at Gates of Vienna. First of all, nothing ever disappears completely from the Internet; it can always be found in the Wayback Machine or other web archives. But more importantly, I don’t believe in hiding the truth, whether it makes me look bad or not. So I collected all of the Butcher’s comments and reposted them.

Other things published by major media outlets, particularly the British tabloids, were not as accurate. The Washington Post published my name and something about me that was completely, factually false. I sent them an email demanding that they retract and correct their error, but I knew that nothing would happen. All I could do was post about what they did and ridicule them. If I had been a famous movie actress or best-selling novelist who could afford to retain high-powered lawyers, I might have had more success. But the WaPo knows it has nothing to fear from minnows like me.

Other papers, especially the tabloids, published even more ludicrous falsehoods about Gates of Vienna — who we were associated with, where we got our funding, etc., etc. And they asserted various bogus things about other people in the Counterjihad whom I knew personally — so-and-so is funded by the Koch Brothers, or the Mossad, or whatever. Just absolute nonsense.

That summer taught me not to believe ANYTHING that I read in the media unless it is corroborated by multiple independent sources and has a breadcrumb trail that leads back to verifiable facts. Which doesn’t leave much. Reading media news reports has become a form of entertainment for me, like reading mystery novels or watching The Simpsons.

The general effect on the Counterjihad was catastrophic. A lot of sites, especially those in Europe, closed down for good. A number of Counterjihad activists I knew personally soiled their breeches and fled the field at the first whiff of grapeshot. I must admit that I became exasperated with them — I said, “You knew how serious this work was when you got into it. What did you think we were doing, playing tiddlywinks??”

However, in retrospect, I’ve had to acknowledge that they did what they had to do. Unlike me, most of them had day jobs. They stood to lose a lot if they were exposed. Some of them had families to support. I can’t judge them. They dropped out of sight, and I haven’t heard from them since.

A few people urged me to shut down Gates of Vienna. But my Scots blood comes to the fore at such times, and my natural response is defiance. I said, “F**K THAT S**T!” [emphasis in the original] and soldiered on. It was a rough time, and I didn’t get much sleep for the first couple of months. But we weathered the storm.

On the whole, however, it was a major setback from which the Counterjihad never fully recovered. The resistance to Islamization has never returned to the level of July 21, 2011. Freedom of speech has been eroded even further, and sharia is now de facto in force in much of the West.

Dymphna and I always thought that Anders Behring Breivik’s machinations had been guided and assisted by a certain three-letter agency with the assistance of Norwegian intelligence. His “compendium” was obviously in large part not his own work, and his selection of “mentors” was exquisitely chosen to do maximum damage to those who opposed Islamization, at the exact time when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in the thick of collaborating with the Muslim Brotherhood in what eventually became known as the “Istanbul Process”. Resistance to Islam was a thorn in her side, and Anders Behring Breivik helped remove it.

I don’t think mass slaughter was part of the plan, however — the Norwegians would never have co-operated with such an operation. I think the intention was to let Mr. Breivik put together his scheme, and then roll it up at the last moment before it was executed. There would have been a prominent arrest, followed by maximum media publicity for his manifesto.

However, just before the plans matured, Wikileaks released a damaging series of documents showing some of the things [agency name redacted] had been up to in Europe, which forced them to shut down their presence in the American embassy in Oslo and withdraw Mr. Breivik’s handlers. The Butcher of Utøya was then let off his leash, and the rest is history.

Whether mass slaughter was intended or not, the plan was a great success. The Counterjihad was hobbled, the spread of sharia proceeded apace, and the Obama administration became a servant of the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Biden administration is, in effect, Obama’s third term.

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Before I close these remarks, I’d like to address an appalling issue that has emerged surrounding the mass murder committed by Anders Behring Breivik. When it first came up it was very distressing, but I’ve had ten years to get used to it. Now it’s just something that I have to endure whenever the topic is broached on this site.

In those early days I was shocked by the number of people who supported Mr. Breivik and considered him a hero for what he did. And I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and Aryan supremacists, but more mainstream people who oppose mass immigration and hate socialism. Every time I post something about the Butcher of Utøya they pop up again and express their admiration for him.

I’m not going to tolerate such comments, and will delete them when they appear. You might as well spare yourself the effort. If you want, you can visit Storm Front and similar sites and make your remarks there, where you’ll get a sympathetic reception and find a lot of people who agree with you.

I’m familiar with the arguments that people make to justify their opinion: Mr. Breivik was targeting future socialists, who would otherwise have grown up and entered politics and invited even more of the Third World into Norway. But that’s a specious line of reasoning, in my opinion. The mass slaughter only hardened public opinion against those who oppose mass immigration, and made it even more difficult to restrain such immigration. Killing all those kids inspired no sympathy for the Aryan cause; it had the opposite effect.

But that’s just the practical, utilitarian argument against it.

Mr. Breivik’s strategy was a recapitulation of one of the major trends of the 20th century: the mass extermination of entire classes of people. For him it was Young Socialists. For Hitler it was Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, and the feeble-minded. For Stalin it was counter-revolutionaries, “wreckers”, the bourgeoisie, kulaks, and Ukrainians. For Pol Pot it was the intellectuals. For the Hutus it was the Tutsis. For Muslims it was Jews, Christians, Hindus, and other infidels.

What all the architects of those atrocities have in common is that they considered it morally justifiable, and even laudable, to engage in the mass slaughter of people based on their membership in a particular class — a race, a social class, an occupation, a nationality, etc. Individuals meant nothing. Those who engineered the massacres were not required to determine whether their victims were guilty of any crimes, or even subscribed to a particular ideology. They were members of a class, and for that reason they deserved to die. Men, women, children, invalids, the elderly and enfeebled — all had to go.

That is a pernicious mindset, and I’ll have none of it. It was the bane of the 20th century, and we’ve no business extending it into the 21st.

I know the counter-arguments — we’re in a war, and war sometimes requires us to do horrible things, etc., etc. If we want to win, we have to grit our teeth and do what is necessary.

Well, if that’s what it takes to win, then I don’t want to win. I’ll go down to defeat rather than jump into that particular boxcar to hell.