Culture, politics, science, philosophy.

General manifesto ***** Immigration manifesto
The deep Crisis of the West
Permalinks

Culture matters

Ibn Warraq’s defense of Western civilization

04.02.2012. Bruce Thornton is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of classics and humanities at California State University Fresno. Writes Thornton in City Journal about Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy, by Ibn Warraq:

Occasionally, the mainstream media will let slip something that reveals the incoherence of multiculturalist orthodoxy. Not long ago, the New York Times reported on an Indian casino in California that had begun purging its rolls of members deemed insufficiently Indian. At the end of the story, an official from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, himself an Indian, remarked: “The tribe has historically had the ability to remove people. Tolerance is a European thing brought to the country. We never tolerated things. We turned our back on people.”

Such honesty about the Western origins of goods like tolerance is rare these days among the media, academic, and popular-culture purveyors of multicultural “diversity.” For them, other cultures are just as good as, if not better than, the West’s—but at the same time, these cultures allegedly endorse Western ideals such as tolerance, gender equality, human rights, political freedom, and the other universal boons to which people everywhere aspire. They deem it Eurocentric or racist to assert the superiority of the West because it originated those goods, even as they castigate the West for its racist, sexist, imperialist, and colonialist crimes. But as Ibn Warraq shows in his thoughtful and compelling new book, the ideals that even multicultural relativists profess have their origin and highest development in the West.

Ibn Warraq is the pen name of a Muslim apostate who left his native Pakistan and now lives in the United States. His first book, Why I Am Not a Muslim, earned him death threats and a pseudonym. Over the years he has published frequently on the unique goods of Western civilization, particularly “liberty and individual dignity,” contrasting these with the intolerance and close-mindedness of traditional Islamic culture. Why the West is Best continues the argument, laying out the defining ideals and virtues that have propelled Western civilization to global dominance.

Warraq’s prologue summarizes, in his view, the values that make the West superior: “rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, equality before the law, freedom of conscience and expression, human rights, [and] liberal democracy.” These principles, Warraq continues, are not restricted to Westerners but have universal application. They are “the best and perhaps the only means for all people, no matter what race or creed, to live in freedom and reach their full potential.”

[...]

Warraq also rebuts the charge that the West has been uniquely evil, that its record of slavery, racism, colonialism, and imperialism has made it history’s arch-villain. As Warraq notes, racism and slavery are universal human evils, but “it was the West that first took steps to abolish slavery; that took legal measures to end institutionalized racism; and that voluntarily withdrew from its colonial possessions and abandoned any imperial ambitions.” He dispatches the widespread lie that the West is responsible for the African slave trade. Africans themselves kept slaves and provided the unfortunate people purchased by Europeans. Indeed, in 2000, the president of Benin apologized for his country’s participation in the slave trade. And Warraq reminds us that Muslim Arabs “engaged in the slave trade for thirteen centuries and shipped far more black slaves across the Sahara and the Red Sea than were sent across the Atlantic” during the four centuries of European slave trading.

As for racism, Warraq quotes a thirteenth-century Persian Muslim’s view that “the ape is more reasonable and more intelligent than the Zanji”—meaning black Africans, still called “slaves” in Arabic today.

[...]

Such curiosity about the “other,” Warraq writes, is unique to the West. In contrast, Muslim cultures display little interest in learning from other cultures, with the notable exception of technical expertise. This close-mindedness—reinforced by Islam’s claim to provide a complete guide to existence—is a major factor in the political and economic dysfunctions afflicting many Muslim nations. It stands in stark contrast to “the way that Western intellectuals, writers, historians, and politicians have themselves chronicled the follies of the West, challenging Westerners to rethink their ideas and alter their policies and social behavior.” Out of such self-reflection has come the material and moral progress that abolished slavery and institutionalized respect for human liberty. For the Muslim Middle East to improve, as Warraq says, it needs an “enlightenment” that would introduce “critical thinking about the Islamic religion and culture.”

Warraq recognizes that Western civilization is threatened not just by external rivals, but also by self-loathing Western ideologies such as multiculturalism and the “promiscuous pluralism that ends in moral relativism.” These ideas go beyond self-reflection to justify “special accommodations” for minorities (like Muslim immigrants) that contradict values such as personal freedom and equality before the law. Warraq advises us to stop appeasing our enemies, do a better job of translating into Arabic and other Muslim tongues Western books that define our core values, and return to teaching our children an accurate history of the West.

We should not be surprised that it takes an immigrant from a country sorely lacking in the social, intellectual, and political goods Warraq discusses to document the glories of the West. Why the West is Best is a timely, passionate reminder of how fortunate we are, and how fragile is our good fortune.

Read the entire book review in City Journal.

South Africa

ANC responsible for genocide against Whites

03.02.2012. South African farmers in Transvaal Agricultural Union lodge formal genocide-complaint at International Criminal Court, The Hague, 2 February 2012, according to Censorbugbear Reports:

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT. BRUSSELS. South African farmers represented in the Transvaal Agricultural Union have lodged a formal genocide-complaint against the ANC-government for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, announced TAU deputy-chairman Henk van de Graaf today.

“The farm murders are not ordinary crimes but fit into the context in which the ANC-regime wants to rid itself of especially its Afrikaner- and other white farmers purely for political reasons. This is in other words, a genocide and a crime against humanity.’

This was the shocking message by the South African Henk van de Graaf, the deputy-chairman of the Transvaal Agricultural Union. He was addressing the European parliament’s international conference, attended by more than 50 European parliamentarians and other high-level functionaries from Great-Britain, France, Italy, Flanders and Austria.

“The farm-murders are encouraged in a deliberate atmosphere of violence created by the ANC-regime against its (white) farmers. The ANC is for instance constantly telling unproven stories about farm-workers being poorly treated – even though the evidence is always sorely lacking for their claims.

Farmers also are unjustly and without any kind of proof, arrested and accused of crimes: one statement by (suspended) ANC youth leader Julius Malema was: ‘Shoot the Boers, they are all rapists’. The ANC is also constantly claiming that ‘the whites own 80% of all the land – when in fact the private-farmland ownership only was 33% ten years ago in 2001 – and has been rapidly dropping ever since. Meanwhile the extent of the farm murders indicates that this is a genocide: with the Transvaal Agricultural Union verifying 1,554 murders, this statistic is very understated, said Mr Van de Graaf. Thus far in January 2012, a total of 17 Afrikaner people were murdered – of whom at least six on farms.

“The Afrikaners are calling on the world to help stop the genocide, the farm murders, in South Africa. To this end the Transvaal Agricultural Union has lodged a formal genocide complaint at the International Criminal Court,’ he concluded.

Euro-MP Philip Claeys, who hosted the conference, said ‘we will do our utmost to continue to place this problem on our agenda over the next months,’ said at the conference’s conclusion.

For additional pictures, links, and details, go to Censorbugbear Reports. See also related articles:

• January 2012: murderous month for Afrikaners. Ten Afrikaner farmers murdered, seven urban Afrikaners murdered, dozens more Afrikaner families attacked by black armed-militia gangs: January 2012 was a murderous month after SA president Jacob Zuma sang Kill the Boer song for tens of thousands of leading ANC-members at Waaihoek.
• Summary of rural ‘farm-attack’ murders in South Africa, January 2012.

Somali pirates

Chop off hostage captain’s arm to elicit $3m ransom

02.02.2012. Somali pirates have started to cut off their hostages' limbs in a bid to extract even greater ransoms from the owners of the ships they capture. The horrific new tactic was used last Friday on the Vietnamese captain of a ship being held in the Somali pirate lair of Haradhere. Chao-I Wu's right arm was cut off after negotiations to pay a $3million ransom for his fishing ship, the FV Shiuh Fu-1, broke down. Afterwards, the pirates allowed Mr Wu's fellow crew members to call their families and describe what had happened. Continue reading in Daily Mail.

HonestThinking comments: This is the fault of cowardly politicians and other decision makers. They could have put an end to Somali pirates' ambitions when this scourge was in its early beginnings. Alas, they refused to do so, pointing to 'humanistic principles'.

A pirate who attacks a civilian vessel has voluntarily given up his right to live. He deserves no mercy, and should be eliminated before he is able to harm innocent crew members. In failing to ensure that all such pirates were met with superior fire power, these 'humanist fundamentalists' have ensured the above tragedy. More will undoubtedly follow.

We are governed by cowards, fools, and hypocrites, and this is the result of their folly.

Aftenposten and VG

«Do the Right Thing and Publish Breivik’s Comments»

02.02.2012. Excerpts from an article by Fjordman about the behavior of the two largest newspapers in Norway, viz. Do the Right Thing and Publish Breivik’s Comments:

As a matter of fact, the police investigation has revealed that ABB used many different email accounts and nicknames and left comments on dozens of very different websites, in addition to being extremely active in online games such as World of Warcraft, where he lived in a virtual reality of heroic warfare. Interestingly enough, that apparently includes the online discussion forums of VG and Aftenposten, by far Norway’s two largest newspapers. For some reason, though, they have been suspiciously quiet about what he actually wrote there.

Aftenposten didn’t just temporarily shut down their online debates following the terror attacks, as many Norwegian papers did at that time, but after the identity of the terrorist became known took the drastic step of deleting their entire discussion forum and removing it from the Internet on a permanent basis. This is such a radical move that it resembles panic. It leaves an outside observer wondering: What exactly are they hiding?

VG didn’t remove their own debate forum, but they haven’t said a word about what Breivik wrote there, either. Perhaps they might as well have written that “While he was working on his gruesome terror plan, Anders Behring Breivik repeatedly posted angry comments on VGDebatt.”

I don’t consider this behavior acceptable, for a number of reasons. First of all because it is immoral of these newspapers to publish sensitive information about persons who have recently experienced extremely traumatic events, while they themselves won’t even publish some simple discussion comments.

Most importantly, these newspapers and the press in general are always the first to call for “full openness” from everybody else. What happened to practicing what you preach?

I hereby call on editor-in-chief Hilde Haugsgjerd of Aftenposten as well as editor-in-chief Torry Pedersen of VG to follow the example set by the website Document.no and publish all comments Anders Behring Breivik made in the online discussion forums of their own newspapers.

The public has a right to know. If these newspapers refuse to do this, they and the Schibsted media conglomerate, which owns both of them, should tell the public exactly why they refuse to demand from themselves what they demand from everybody else.

Read the entire article at GoV.

UK immigration

Tougher rules announced

02.02.2012. Thousands of migrant workers will be asked to go home after a few years in Britain under policies to be made public this week. Immigrants from outside Europe who do not have valuable skills or high earnings will lose their right to live permanently in this country. Ministers indicated yesterday that a ‘transformation of immigration policy’ will leave room for only the ‘brightest and best’ to build new lives in Britain. Continue reading in Daily Mail.

Asylum ideology

A discussion of the ideology behind the politics

28.01.2012. All of a sudden one discovers patterns that have previously been invisible, because the perceived problem and the words used are new and detached from previous ideologies. New words are used, and the underlying ideological currents behind them go unnoticed. One has a wish that everything will be new and that this time things will be different, writes Knut Skjærgård. Here are some additional excerpts from his article:

All of a sudden one discovers patterns that have previously been invisible, because the perceived problem and the words used are new and detached from previous ideologies. New words are used, and the underlying ideological currents behind them go unnoticed. One has a wish that everything will be new and that this time things will be different.

After World War Two the nations of the world decided that there would be no more war. The war had created international legal issues, large groups of people had been displaced from their homelands, and solving the refugee crisis was the most pressing task for the newly-founded United Nations. The brutal toll that the war had exacted on the civilian populations led to the creation of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The International Convention on Refugees first saw light in 1951, and its purpose was to ensure equal treatment for all refugees. It also placed legal obligations on the host nations to properly consider each asylum application. Additionally, it required that the host nations refrain from repatriating refugees in those cases where there was a real risk of persecution.

Ideas such as international cooperation and globalization arose as a direct result of the International Declaration of Human Rights. The idea of a United States of Europe attracted support from a new generation of politicians and visionaries. The influence of the UN kept increasing, and so did the support for globalization. A big international treaty of co-operation eventually saw the light of day.

But in the 1960s and ‘70s, long after the refugee problems of World War Two had been resolved, something happened in the West. The labor migration from the East began. This immigration came as a surprise to the Western nations, although it wasn’t necessarily unwelcome. Manpower was needed. The old colonial powers welcomed huge numbers of citizens from their former colonies. But the scale of this immigration was relatively modest, and assimilation went fairly smoothly.

[...]

Another typical trait that characterizes totalitarian ideologies is the denial of reality. The fact that we now have an ideological, authoritarian asylum regime with religious overtones is evident when the advocates completely close their eyes to the enormous economic and social costs of this policy. When the King and the Prime Minister in their 2012 New Year speeches failed to mention anything about the massive challenges that Norwegian society is facing as a result of the mass influx of asylum seekers, it is incomprehensible, considering that most outside the nomenklatura read, see and hear about these problems every day. The unpleasant reality is covered up and is not talked about; thus the problems do not really exist other than as delusions among the common people. So far the authorities have managed to sweep clear signs of ethnic and religious conflicts under the rug in Norway, problems which in Western Europe, however, are about to destabilize nations such as France, England and Germany. The problems are serious, and they have the ability to transform Norway into a new society divided by class, characterized by religious and group identity. In the future individual security will not be determined by being a citizen of the Norwegian state, but by belonging to a strong ethnic or religious group.

The only thing these two heads of state mentioned in their respective speeches was the Utøya atrocity committed by an ethnic Norwegian. Some people probably wondered if these two were in fact talking about Norway. Their speeches show a strong display of ideological normative force, a strong consensus culture which is sufficiently based in itself. The king and the queen had even visited a Muslim family and found that everything was normal!

This removal from reality can only be explained by the fact that all authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies distort reality. All such ideologies share a deceptive (seductive) character, and by agreeing to achieve a stated goal, they tolerate endless violations of ordinary citizens, none of which presents any ethical problems for them. Those who do not agree are excluded and lose their careers.

After the collapse of communism in Europe, after members of the ’68 Generation abandoned their utopias about armed revolution, we all believed that the notion of the ideal society, the classless society, was history. What we are seeing now is that the era of the great social experiments is back again, but in a modern form, justified by arguments based on human rights and tolerance.

The socialists and the Left will never relinquish their ideas about designing the ideal society, far removed from their original roots, their traditions and their culture, and a lineage that goes back several thousand years. No one knows the cost of this; no one even knows if these projects are feasible. Just as in other failed social experiments, the end could be tragic.

The notions of a multicultural society can in many ways today be recognized in surviving traditions of thought that have strangely resurfaced in the West. Fortunately, people are waking up to dangers. I’m not saying that everybody with a positive attitude towards the multicultural society necessarily has a totalitarian disposition, but it is important to shed some light on the underlying ideological currents and name them. When the authoritarian aspects are more clearly defined, most liberal and conservative politicians will reject the multicultural experiment. For the time being, we are talking about a form of false consciousness that must be exposed, and it is then essential to do this among the ruling class.

Read the entire article at GoV (originally published in Norwegian at Document.no).

Concervatives in Norway

A traditionalist’s guide to Norwegian politics — Norway’s AltRight

18.01.2012. In December of 2010, I wrote that “with the exception of a handful of half-mad recluses and obscure blogs, the Norwegian non-aligned Right does not exist”, a statement for which I was criticized by Ole Jørgen Anfindsen in an otherwise positive assessment. Although I think Ole Jørgen misinterpreted my comment somewhat (it was meant as a gently self-deprecating quip, not an indictment – in fact, I cribbed the phrase “limited to a few half-mad recluses” from Roger Scruton, who used it to describe the state of British conservatism around the time his book The Meaning of Conservatism was published), he probably had a point. As I’ve learned since, Norway has more erudite and committed authors, bloggers, and intellectuals who may be considered friends or members of the “alternative Right” – which I will here define as the segment of the Norwegian Right that is not aligned with any of the mainstream non-socialist parties – than I thought. Here are some of them. Continue reading at Dispatches from the North.

Germany

Attempts to silence criticism of Islam

14.01.2012. German authorities have officially confirmed that they are monitoring German-language Internet websites that are critical of Muslim immigration and the Islamization of Europe.

According to Manfred Murck, director of the Hamburg branch of the German domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), his organization is studying whether German citizens who criticize Muslims and Islam on the Internet are fomenting hate and are thus criminally guilty of "breaching" the German constitution.

The BfV's move marks a significant setback for the exercise of free speech in Germany and comes amid a months-long smear campaign led by a triple alliance of leftwing German multicultural elites, sundry Muslim groups and members of the mainstream media, who have been relentless in their efforts to discredit the so-called counter-jihad movement (also known as the "Islamophobes") in Germany.

Continue reading this article by Soeren Kern at Stonegate Institute.

Øyvind Strømmen

«His book The Dark Net fisked by fellow Norwegian»

04.01.2012. Øivind Østberg filed the following review of Øyvind Strømmen’s book, ‘The Dark Net’ at Document.no, published on 30.12.2011. Østberg’s review exposes the shallowness and overt bias of the author’s book, which entirely excludes the circumstances in which the anti-Islamization movement was born. It’s as if the opposing of Islam took place within a bubble, with no other outside influences of Islam itself. For further comments, and a complete English translation of Østberg's review of Strømmen's book, continue reading at the Vlad Tepes blog.

PS: For those of you who wonder about the spelling of certain Norwegian names, Mr. Strømmen's first name should properly be spelled Øyvind, not Oyvind, i.e., with Ø (O-slash) rather than a plain O. And Mr. Østberg's first name is indeed spelled Øivind, i.e., with i rather than y as the second letter. As a matter of fact, Øivind and Øyvind are both common male's names in Norway, and are pronounced identically.

Home

Permalinks to older articles

HonestThinking is dedicated and committed to the art of thinking honestly. Yet honest thinking is not the same as true thinking, for it is possible to think honestly, but be mistaken. For the same reason, honest thinking is not identical with objective thinking either. Honest thinking is striving to get things right. This involves being truthful about whatever one publishes, but just as importantly, it involves an uncompromising dedication never to suppress relevant data, even when data collides with dearly held prejudices. Such an approach may sometimes cause hurtful revisions in one’s belief system. That’s what HonestThinking is all about! Read the entire manifesto.

Provoked or enthusiastic?

Please send e-mail to postmaster at honestThinking.org (replacing ' at ' with '@') if you would like to tip us about a web resource that we should link to, or if you wish to submit an article for publication here. Quality contributions are welcome from anyone.

The current European immigration and integration policy is profoundly disrespectful of both Muslims and Islam, because it is built on the tacit assumption that the Muslims will become like us. One claims to have respect for Islam and for Muslims, but one also expects Muslims to give up their orthodox faith when they come here. At the same time one is assuming that Islam will be reformed and modernized as soon as the Muslims become integrated and understand and appreciate how superior our Western culture is compared to their own. This is cultural shauvinism and arrogance indeed! The unspoken premise for this scenario is that Western socities are superior to Islam. Read more.

Human rights and democracy are under pressure. One threat comes from the Western world, in the form of lack of or dishonest thinking. There exists a peculiar Western "tolerance" which is so "tolerant" that it even tolerates totalitarian or anti-democratic ideologies. A tacit assumption underlying such an attitude is that all cultures, world views, and religions are really equally good. As a consequence of this assumption one is cut off from the possibility of critically examining the above mentioned ideologies. Read more.