„Terror in the hearts of their enemies was why there were so many routs during the Muslim conquests."
Ibn Khaldun
Brussels, the capital of the European Union advertises itself as the heart of Europe. That city is dirty, neglected and its street corners are guarded by soldiers and policemen armed to their teeth. When we arrived rather exhausted in June 2017 in our hotel, the bar was closed and we could not call a taxi. In the heart of Europe it was Ramadan and the Muslim 70 per cent of the taxi drivers were still out of service in the evening and already out of service in the morning.
Depending as it was on Muslims, the heart of Europe was a disheartening site in 2017. The shadow of terror threat was omnipresent. Fear and military presence that have been unknown in our happier half of Europe for decades have become part of everyday life there.
Europe as we knew it when we used to stroll through its cities as tourists with our meagre currency allowances does not exist anymore. The „advanced West” we desperately used to long for has been given its eight count. And they know that. They even know more than that. They start beginning to learn the lesson that no terror act can save us from the next one. That is they have to realise that they cannot feel safe any longer. They also know or at least they feel that they have reached a crossroads. The period between World War II and the financial crunch of 2008 is irrevocably over. A new century, a new epoch, and a new era are underway. New directions would be needed; new ideas, a new vision. But there are no new thoughts, no new projects, nor is there any sense of purpose around. There is resignation coupled with increasingly unmistakable hopelessness instead.
The leading positions in Western Europe are filled with people who are unable to part with the illusion of still living in the late 20th century when they could lead careless, affluent and confident lives. They delude themselves believing to be able to smoothly transfer all that into the new 21st century. But as Karl Lagerfeld told us, yesterday’s successes are not creditworthy; nobody cares for yesterday’s collections. What is true in the fashion industry is also true in politics. All is moving on the Western front, I wrote four years ago. Now would say: all is different on the Western front.
The world of the people of the West with its values, its language and its points of reference are those of an endangered species which is forced to accept norms and forms of behaviour which make no sense to them and which make them gradually lose their sense of homeliness. In the implacable culture wars we witness day by day, values that used to be considered vital in the 20th century, like patriotism or free speech and free press are being annihilated, while popular sovereignty is being overwritten by the unfettered self-assertion of globalised elites. Censorship is gaining ground; Facebook has been ordered to be filtered; safe spaces are spreading; hate speech has become a criminal offence and is, not unexpectedly, expanding to new and new areas. Traditional political parties have been tagged closed for refurbishment; very civic organisations who intend to control everything but are reluctant to be controlled themselves claim to be the representatives of the interests of the electorate. Public speech has been paralysed by their politically correct canon and is now gasping for oxygen. This is why there are no new ideas, while new and new gadgets abound.
The effects of the culture wars
„Of all our institutions, public education is the most important. Everything depends on it, the present and the future."
Napoleon
Our days are submerged under intellectual terrorism. Not one segment of our lives is being spared. Hatred bombs are being thrown at our faith, while a frontal offensive has been launched against our system of values. Nation states and Christianity are in the crosshairs. History is not being taught in many schools in the West, which has made entire generations uprooted and nationless. Group identities are being offered as surrogates of national identity, with the result of our sense of community and of belonging to one nation and one community is being shattered. They want to deprive us of our language in order to make it impossible for us to describe reality and experience. Our free speech is being limited; artificial genders are being introduced and enforced by criminal legislation (see Canada,6/24/2017); and the next generation is doomed to be educated without a precise gender identity. The authorities recognised by society are being destroyed in order to erase from the national past everything that could serve as a reference and inspire pride for the new generations. A wave of statues being pulled down and institutions being renamed is swirling through the Anglo-Saxon world; debates and free thought have disappeared from the universities just like it had happened over here during the glorious days of Communism in the mid last century. All this further aggravates the already existing crisis of orientation. People are deprived of their traditions, roots, faiths, systems of values in order to be made apt to play the role of ethnically mixed and fully automated consumer subjects in the brave new world planned by progressives. We know that recipe very well, having been through a period as test subjects of a similar utopian project. Its failure prompted to present day utopians that they should be more indirect and manipulative in their procedures. But their aims and methods are the same, with the only difference that they claim to be the representatives of human rights rather than of the proletariat. They want those rights to be perceived as universal, but interpreted as being available to everyone except if being used against progress in which case legal deprivation and severe sanctions must follow.
In addition to the battles having been waged by the cultural warriors of the 20th century, the culture wars now extend to brand-new fronts as well. Branding opponents Nazis has been common practice by leftists since the first half of the 20th century. Here is what the 1943 guidelines of the Central Committee of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of the Soviet Union teach us on that matter: „Party members and frontline organisations must never cease shaming and discrediting our critics. If they make too much fuss they must be branded as fascists, Nazis or anti-Semites. … All these, if being sufficiently repeated, will become facts in the eyes of the public.”
As we can see, words are weapons. Once you brand your adversaries Fascists, Nazis or anti-Semites – or to be more up-to-date, racists, nationalists, populists or homophobic or again transphobic, you will not have to confront their arguments any more. For by doing so you will have dehumanised them and therefore will be entitled not to consider them as your equals, nor will you have to discuss with them, since they will not have earned your respect. „Eliminating” those denounced as opponents according to the well-known recipes of 20th century dictatorships would only require moving one step further. The politically correct canon actually serves as a moral shield whose role it is to hide intellectual cowardice and the absence of arguments. The latest scene of the culture wars is human genders. The denial of the binary nature of humans (men and women) and the claim that genders can be freely chosen may be traced back to the technology of genetic engineering. And they are just a first step which will be followed within the foreseeable future by dismantling the biological boundaries of mankind (human/animal embryos). All that will deepen an orientation crisis into the gravest crisis of identity.
Politics
„To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is to ask yourself this question: who is it that I am not permitted to criticise?”
Voltaire
Politicians are power-hungry, immoral and corrupt, we hear incessantly. Unlike decisive anti-government actors in business, the arts and the academia who are all knights of the Holy Grail. If the independent, what’s more watchdog media and the equally independent very civic organisations did not keep an eye on public officials, there would even steal the air from us, we are being told. There are some exceptions, of course. Namely, the selfless ones, who only want to play political roles in order to serve the progress of mankind. It goes without saying that criticising them would be illicit, apart from being groundless. People like this include Obama, Clinton, Merkel, Trudeau, Tusk and the latest one, Macron as well as all those who serve global progress. On the opposing side we have the nationalists, branded as populists who derive their own legitimacy from popular sovereignty and national self-determination and intend to represent their nation’s interests. According to the progressives, all of them are corrupt and immoral power maniacs who ultimately stand on the wrong side of history. The likes ofTrump, Szydlo, with Kaczinsky, as well as Fico, Ponta – and Orbán, of course.
Populists are well known for who they are and what they represent. Anyone can enumerate the elements of their creed; outline their set of values and define their objectives. They represent a Europe of nations, their own countries and electorates. But who are the ones who chase the deeply progressive wild goose dream of a supranational European melting pot, convinced as they are of being on the side of progress and therefore on the right side of history? And what do they represent?
2017 has shed and unprecedentedly stark light on the conflict between those two groups. Their clash looks like a life and death struggle, but in reality, this is far from being the last fight. It will not even decide anything. This year is in fact about preparing for the new century. About our continent’s ability to start preparing. About whether our decision-makers will finally realise that rather than being a prolongation of the 20th, the 21st century is the beginning of something new. Just like the 20th century was not the prolongation of the 19th.
The European Union
„The very last decades are the only ones to believe in the moral superiority of the present; in our moral superiority to the past."
Jacob Burckhardt
2017 also foreshadows the spectre of the breakup of the Union. The reason seems to be the difference in the approaches to the migration crisis between the eastern and the western parts of Europe. However, the fundamental difference is to be found in our understanding of the past, because this is what determines our diverging views of the future. By 2017, it has in fact become clear that the intellectual, business and political elites of the West expect the future to restore the past. (And call that future by its pet name – ‘multi-speed Europe’.) Those elites consider the end of World War Two as year zero, because they reject all the preceding two thousand years and feel painful nostalgia for the period from 1945 to 2008. What’s more, they want those years to return. They consider those seven decades as the only past and expect the future to restore it. As far as we are concerned, that past means the years of Soviet occupation from 1945 and totalitarian Communist dictatorship. We are glad to have left it behind; to have regained our national independence and freedom. We have fought hard and made great sacrifices to achieve that just as to achieve all the rest we have attained. We had to rebuild our democratic institutions from scratch; we had to learn what a market economy is about from point zero and then had to adapt ourselves to Union expectations. We have met those challenges and have no intention to turn back; we don’t dream of returning to the world of Utopia. We are not scared of the new challenges ahead, because we are fully aware of who we are and what we want. Our history did not start in 1945; it goes back several thousand years in time. We are proud of our roots that keep us alive, no matter how strong the winds blow. We regard Europe as the best place on Earth whose values we want and will preserve. We are convinced that together we can face the challenge of competition with other continents. We are also certain in our belief that good policies are always about the future and must never be about the past.
The problem is that the western half of Europe is unable to think in terms of a united European continent. What they incessantly have in mind is a Western Europe imposed on the continent as a whole. They consider the rest of us, central and eastern Europeans as useless deadwood; a bunch of stowaways whom they are trying to re-direct into the right path but in vain, because we talk back; are ungrateful and discontented. That’s a curious attitude. While they perceive themselves as being able to integrate millions of Muslim migrants, they are unable even to tolerate us, who – just like them – have been socialised within the Greek-Roman and Jewish-Christian tradition. They consider aliens as beautiful, but we are too similar to them to be beautiful and are unable to raise to their „progressive” standards. Nor are we forgiven for having abandoned the course of progress without being authorised by them and turned our backs on the „cause” they so enthusiastically espoused. One disappointment after the other.
Our diverging answers to the recent wave of entire populations migrating to Europe stem therefore from our diverging worldviews and strategic outlooks. But open discussion on that matter is being made impossible by the political climate imposed onto the western world by the prophetically minded mainstream elite and its political correctness. They are motivated by incessant self-flagellation which by now has swollen into self-complacency. Germany, Europe’s strongest country wears sackcloth and ashes day and night in atonement for the Holocaust, while the rest of the West is doing so in repentance for its colonial past. As far as we are concerned, we don’t intend to join that rivalry about whose sins are greater. We believe that the future doesn’t require continuous atonement from us. We never wanted nor do we want to rule the world. We don’t want to lead other continents out from darkness into the light or to bomb them into democracy. We would like to be good at meeting our own challenges. That is our job and it is not an easy one. What we need are win-win type compromises to bridge the differences between the two halves of Europe. However, the western half has apparently opted for an about-face and decided to flee back into the past. They believe that once they will remain again among themselves, just them, the well-to-do, then the good old days guaranteeing their welfare and security will be back too. As a matter of fact, however, there is no way back either in time or in history. One can seek escape routes, but rather than to new victories, they will inevitably lead to decline.
We have no intention to turn back. We have had enough experience of decline. We are not afraid of the 21st century. We are free and independent. We have accumulated sufficient amount of historical experience; we consider the past as a resource and know what we want. We want to negotiate ways and means, but to do so we must agree on the goals.
A Space for Pragmatists
„We shall perish because of those roarers!"
Sandor Petőfi
The era of traditional political parties seems to be over. Christian Democratic parties have been de-Christianised, they subordinated their set of values to the expectations of the culture wars waged by left liberals and thus have become indistinguishable. Left-wing policy-making has also become disoriented. Its target group and frame of reference, the proletariat has ceased to exist; the big industrial centres have been worn down and are by now hollow, because industries have been outsourced to the Third World. The left-wing elite not only stood idle by, but also espoused neoliberal economic policies and became their enthusiastic supporter. And having lost its grip on political power, they hang on preserving their influence over culture with the skin of their teeth. West of the Leitha, Right and Left are equally pro-austerity and equally prioritise balanced budgets and low inflation; they race to be first in migrant-caressing and championing LGBTQ causes. The traditional bipolar set up with two parties regularly exchanging each other at the helm makes no more sense because those parties don’t offer differing alternatives any longer. They have switched over to survival mode, that is have become pragmatists, like Merkel, Juncker, Tusk and Macron the newcomer – all of them humblest servants of political correctness. They emit indistinguishable political messages, but more importantly, are completely at the service of the business and media elites which decide whether they should rise or fall. Their role model is Barack Hussein Obama whose political message was confined to „yes we can” or again „change and hope”. Merkel merely managed to say „Wir schaffen das”. But what we can manage and what for, remains unclear. Nor can we know about Mr Macron, the new President of France what he thinks of the World and what the values he will follow in his policies are. The only thing we can be sure about when it comes to people being promoted by the mainstream media is that they are unwaveringly committed to progress, multiculturalism and a new, Muslimised Europe. This is the pragmatic political behaviour that has replaced Social Democracy and Christian Democracy, that is the defining political movements of the 20th century who used to achieve success after success. The hit product of 2017 is therefore the conformist politician devoid of any ideology or conviction; indistinguishable from the others and unreservedly at the service of the cultural and economic expectations of the elites. In issues pertaining to ideology and substance, these people bow to the primacy of the independent media and the very civic organisations. That breed of politicians don’t stick to anything; are value-neutral; unable to indicate a goal that could serve as a Compass. Except of course when it comes to the GDP, inflation and deficit targets. The holy Trinity, which is the basis of it all coupled with multiculturalism, promoting the flow of migrants, LGBTQ issues and climate change. Politicians having all those things on board may survive. It is the task of this pragmatic political class to prepare Europe for ceding is territory to a new blend of Muslimised population. To do so, three conditions must be met – Europe must be de-Christianised; shattered identities must be imposed at the expense of national identities and political governance must be replaced by the rule of bureaucrats. This is what explains the incommensurable hatred and contempt those people feel towards Christian churches; their countries; their own nations; any expression of national interest or I could say towards everything and everybody except themselves. By 2017, it has become crystal clear that the media has turned into an autonomous policymaker which means that in many cases it is not the political class that uses the media, but it is the media that wants to use the political class and succeeds more and more often in doing so.
Soros
„Soros is too smart to be an insider trader; his weakness is that he's a megalomaniac."
Taki
In 2017, George Soros stepped out into the light; step down from his poster and took up their arms of open political struggle in various parts of the World. He launched a frontal attack on President Donald Trump of the United States, mobilising the all-encompassing network of his organisations and his extensive media positions in order to topple him. But he also wants to topple Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Viktor Orbán. (I will now only focus on the three of them, leaving the rest of the targeted politicians aside.) Soros is nowadays the most determined engine of the new Moslemised world he plans us to live in. Anyone wondering why Trump, Netanyahu and Orbán happen to stand in Soros’s way; what is it that they prevent him from doing; what makes them his main enemies, will soon realise that all three of them are stumbling blocks in front of the muslin expansion promoted, what’s more, financed and supported by whatever means by Soros. In his very first executive order, Trump suspended the immigration of a significant part of them to the United States, and Soros tried to block or at least delay that move with the help of judges supported by him. Netanyahu represents the resolute Israeli policy which is targeted by Soros who is considered to be biggest supporters of the Palestinians with all means at his disposal. More than that, Soros would prefer to see Israel itself as part of a Palestinian state. As for Orbán, he obstructed his most successful and most important operation – muslin immigration into Europe about which Soros wrote articles, gave speeches and held a thousand background talks to strike a deal with the competent personalities. (We saw his demonstrative appearance in Brussels, where Juncker and five of his commissioners were lined up in front of him to assure him of their humble allegiance.)
2017 opened and undeniably new chapter by making it clear to the broader public that political battles in an increasing number of European countries are not any more waged by parties supported by their electorates; it is not elected politicians that try to win a political mandate, but it is an unelected representative of global financial capital itself, a person without any public office who steps out onto the political scene to fight the elected politicians who don’t bow to his interests. But who is George Soros? An old man, who got rich and decided to struggle for a better future as he sees it on his own, just following his sincere conviction and philanthropist commitment? This is what he and the people on his payroll want us to believe. I for one wouldn’t bet too high on that horse. It looks more plausible that the 87-year-old is pushed forward by groups representing one particular segment of speculative global capital to fulfil all he had promised to them. Lest they withdraw the money from behind him and look for a replacement.
Where to Go from Here?
At stake is nothing less than the future of the European Union. Brexit has fundamentally changed the balance of power in Europe. Will there be, can there be a Franco German axis as being so often predicted at a time, when united Germany is in the middle of Europe rather than on its periphery and on the eastern front as it used to be when those two countries became allies? It is no accident that Macron rushed to receive Putin – which accidentally was not at all found reproachable by anyone, most probably because what is permitted to Jupiter… Nor can Europeans avoid recalibrating transatlantic ties, for both security and economic reasons. New strategic thinking is also necessary with regard to Russia, Ukraine and Turkey. Not unlike regarding China and India. We haven’t even asked ourselves the questions that are waiting to be answered. Although all of them are of decisive importance for the kinds of positions the Union can fill in the new World. But we can find the right answers only if first we repeal the massive pressure of population transfers threatening our continent. Our chances for the moment are not too rosy. It would be salutary for the leaders of the Union to wake up from their Sleeping-Beauty-dream and come to their senses, because while they are slumbering, further hundreds of thousands of Moslem men of military age continue to penetrate Europe in order to irrevocably alter its ethnic composition. Were the western half of Europe versed in history, they would know that population transfers, demographics and religious-cultural differences are not a game. They shouldn’t be taken as lightly as they are taking them.