Éric Zemmour: “Israel’s Struggle is That of Our Civilization”

In the following video, the popular French commentator and former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour discusses the attack by Hamas. He describes its connections to the Muslim Brotherhood and the global jihad against unbelievers.

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

Video transcript:

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The Ascendancy of the Neocons

Karl-Olov Arnstberg is a Swedish writer, ethnologist, and retired university professor. His essays are posted at his blog, Invandring och mörkläggning. Below is today’s installment of his “Sunday Chronicle”. Many thanks to our Swedish correspondent LN for the translation:

Sunday chronicle: America’s neocons

by Professor Emeritus Karl-Olov Arnstberg
July 9, 2023

NATO’s mission, just after the organization was created in 1949, was summarized by Secretary General Lord Ismay in a three-line sentence:

Keep the Russians out
The Americans in
and the Germans down

Keep the Russians out referred to the spread of communism. The US was far more concerned about communism than it ever was about Nazism. The Americans in also had a specific meaning, namely that the Americans would remain in Europe and keep the two Western power blocs on either side of the North Atlantic together. The United States absolutely could not turn its back to Europe, as it did with its isolationist policy after the First World War.

And the Germans down meant that Russia and Germany could not unite under any circumstances, because it would mean a new superpower to challenge the US. This was the main reason why the US admitted West Germany to NATO in 1955, the idea being that the country would be so embedded in the Western sphere, that an alliance with the Soviet Union would be impossible. In 1959, Eisenhower even advocated providing West Germany with nuclear weapons.

With reference to Lord Ismay’s three lines, a related expression has been coined in neoconservative circles:

Keep Russia down,
The US in,
and China out

Here the interpretation is more problematic. What does Keep Russia down mean? That it should be defeated in the Ukrainian war? Or perhaps — which was an idea that flourished among neoconservatives in the 1980s — that the huge country should be divided into small states that mostly fight with each other and thus become completely harmless in world politics? And what does The US in mean? The situation today is completely different from that after the First World War. With all its military bases, the US is already inside large parts of the world. In practical terms, there is no possibility for them to withdraw.

Perhaps And China out is clearer? The risk of China joining forces with Russia is greater than the risk of Russia and Germany joining forces after the end of World War II. However, neither Russia nor China allows itself be affected or controlled in any way by the US.

Neoconservatives, or neocons for short, are a political grouping that emerged in the United States in the 1950s, partly as Democrats and partly as a right-wing faction of the Socialist Party of America and its successor, the Social Democrats. They hated spineless politicians, military weakness and American isolationism. Above all, they wanted to destroy the communist and the totalitarian Soviet Union. To them, communism represented a monstrous evil. Their motto: The United States is the greatest force for good among the nations of the earth.

Leo Strauss

There are two persons that the US neocons have been deeply influenced by, although neither called themselves neoconservatives. One is the “father of neoconservatism”, the German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1972), who received a Rockefeller grant in the early 1930s and who emigrated from Berlin to the United States. Leo Strauss was a philosopher, but also a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Critics say that based on Plato’s The State, he turned his students into both elitists and imperialists. One of them, Nicholas Xenos, said that:

“Strauss wanted to return to an older pre-liberal age of blood and glory, of imperialist domination and authoritarian rule, that is, of pure fascism.”

The Wolfowitz Doctrine

One of Strauss’ students at the University of Chicago, Paul Wolfowitz, later Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Bush Jr. administration and then head of the World Bank, wrote the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine. A first draft was leaked to the New York Times in March 1992. The imperialist tone led to a public outcry. It said, among other things:

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The Red Evolution IV: The Subversive Left, the Destabilising Left, the Antecedents of Generation Snowflake and the Ultimate Surrender of Rationality (Part One)

The essay below is the latest in an occasional series by our expatriate English correspondent Peter on the history of the Socialist Left in Britain.

The Red Evolution IV: The Subversive Left, the Destabilising Left, the Antecedents of Generation Snowflake and the Ultimate Surrender of Rationality

by Peter

ONE

Having lived through it, I believe the period from 1960 to 1975, commonly known as the ’60s, was a carefully devised trap into which we all propelled ourselves, willingly and of our own volition, a knot with a multitude of apparently loose strands which, when drawn tightly together, ensnared us all. The summer of peace and love did not happen, at least, not the way they said it did. With the wisdom of hindsight, I believe that what did happen in the 1960s was mass-indoctrination; the first of a succession of generations to move into Communism, not by force, but by stealth, subversion, sex, drugs and rock and roll by way of a process which began many years before.

World War II finally ended on 2nd September 1945 with the signing of the Peace Treaty with Japan on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo harbour, Germany having surrendered to the Allies four months earlier, after Hitler had thoughtfully put himself out of everyone’s misery. As a result, the Soviet Union had acquired East Germany and much of Eastern Europe, upon which by means of the eradication of political institutions, terror campaigns, purges of dissidents, mass murder and other tried and tested methods of enforcing totalitarian control, the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ruthlessly imposed communist rule in defiance of assurances extracted from him by his allies at Yalta in February 1945 that free elections would be held. He guessed rightly that Western leaders had had enough of war and would not take up arms again — at least, not then, and not over Eastern Europe.

Stalin and his cronies had planned the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe well before 1939, so that when the Red Army had ‘liberated’ those countries, police forces, both conventional and covert Communist party structures were already in place and awaiting activation. In the late 1940s, with the Soviet Empire now a work in progress, Stalin was intent on extending Soviet influence, believing it was only a matter of time before Western Europe fell into its clutches, but there were several restraining influences.

While Western Europe was nearly destitute and primarily engaged on rebuilding what remained of its society and its cities, thanks in a large part to the Marshall Plan, it was still prepared to defend itself, and if it were to fall short in this enterprise, then America stood ready, willing and able to pick up any deficit. Additionally, the Soviet Union had paid a terrible price for its own role in what it called The Great Patriotic War, far greater than any other participating country. Stalingrad was not the only Soviet City to have been reduced to rubble during hostilities. In Western Russia alone, the degree of desolation caused by a scorched earth policy exercised by both sides had all but obliterated 1700 towns and approximately 70,000 villages, along with 32,000 factories and 65,000 kilometres of railway track. In addition, the loss of life suffered by the population of the USSR as published by the current Russian Government totals 26.6 million people, two thirds of which were civilians, but this has been called a conservative estimate by Russian scholar Boris Sokolov, who believes there were around 43.3 million Soviet lives lost, 27 million of which were civilians.

Therefore Stalin’s options for Soviet expansion through direct assault appeared limited, but there was one option, a proxy war in the east. This would require a minimal call on Soviet manpower while ascertaining firstly whether the West still had the stomach for a fight, and secondly whether his newly-acquired Chinese allies would rally to the cause. The Korean Peninsula had been occupied by the Japanese since 1910, and following their surrender in 1945 had been divided along an area just north of the 38th Parallel between the Soviet-backed north ruled by the Communist Kim Il-Sung and the US backed south led by President Syngman Rhee. It would be fair to say that Soviet support for the North Korean leadership was lukewarm, while the Americans regarded Rhee as the best of a particularly nasty bunch, whose only positive characteristics were his fluency in English and his aversion to communism.

Throughout 1949 and 1950 the North Korean military had been receiving large quantities of Soviet tanks, artillery and aircraft as well as intensive combat training, while its numbers had been enhanced considerably by the return of battle-hardened veterans who had fought on the Communist side in the Chinese civil war. By contrast, the South Korean army had little more than small arms with which to defend itself. A North-versus-South conflict appeared to be a very unequal contest, and this encouraged Stalin to give the word for his North Korean client to invade the South, which it did on 25th June 1950.

Although the invasion caught the Americans by surprise, the UN reacted with amazing speed, compared to the lethargic Arab-dominated talking shop it has now become. On 27th June it authorized a US-led multinational force from what would eventually become twenty-one countries to repel the North Korean invasion. After the first months of the conflict, coalition troops were very much on the back foot until a seaborne UN counter-offensive landed at Inchon cut off North Korean troops and effectively altered the course of the war. The retreating North Korean forces were pursued northwards to an area close to the border with China, whereupon in response to an earlier commitment made to Stalin, Mao Zedong ordered the Communist Chinese army into the war, dispatching a massive force across the border into Korea, compelling the UN armies to retreat in the face of its ferocious advance.

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Vittorio Sgarbi: “If we start from this premise of dogmatic secularism, we’re dead”

The following video is from the Italian TV show “Virus”, an excerpt hosted by Vittorio Sgarbi that aired the day after the Bataclan attack in Paris on November 13, 2015.

The “tragic premise of Florence” mentioned by the host refers to a decision by a school that viewing certain works of art would be Islamophobic, so the visit to the museum was cancelled. The Pakistani guest who appears with Mr. Sgarbi is named Reas Syed.

Many thanks to Elle Bowlly for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Video transcript:

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The West’s Dilemma with North Korea

The Right Angle asks where our moral obligation begins:

Notice their comparison between what the Fat Boy is doing and how the Soviet Union got rid of supposed troublemakers. Instead of bothering with show trials for the big shots, though, North Korea’s dictator just kills ’em out of hand:

A number of high-profile North Korean officials are known to have been executed in recent years, including Hang Song-thaek, Mr Kim’s uncle.

Mr Jang, who was vice-chairman of the Workers’ Party’s Central Commission, was arrested in November 2013 and found guilty at a special military tribunal of “anti-party, counter-revolutionary factional acts in a bid to overthrow the leadership of the party and state and the socialist system”. He was killed by a firing squad in December that year.

Some of the executions are grisly indeed but you can hunt those up on your own. They are certainly being documented.

The speakers’ refusal to liken North Korea to the Nazi regims is historically correct. The same goes for all the other Communist/socialist tyrannies, including the one only ninety miles or so south of the U.S. mainland.

Now the question remains: what is a moral nation to do in the face of well-documented abuse by another country of all its citizens? Or is the West waiting for an attack on Japan or South Korea?