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Saturday 28 July 2012

The myths behind white guilt and the Slave Trade

The myths behind white guilt


Part 1: The slave trade

One of the many weapons which our opponents use against us, and also against others of European ancestry, is often termed historical white guilt. Those who hate us point accusingly to our Empire, and to our involvement in the transatlantic slave trade with the implication that we, particularly the British and European Americans, are uniquely guilty of crimes against other races. They believe that, by making us feel guilty about our past, we will be less inclined to object to what is done to us on behalf of our alleged victims.

However, as in so many areas, the truth does not suit their agenda, so, as ever, they resort to their favoured tactic, and lie with the ease and practiced familiarity of an ageing harlot unzipping her client's pants.

In our schools and on our television screens, they teach an entirely false and misleading version of history, and sadly it is one which at least two generations of our children now accept as unquestioned fact. Our empire, the greatest the world has ever known, and something I plan to focus on in a later post, is presented as being a cruel and oppressive force which was primarily concerned with plundering other nations and exploiting their peoples.

The story they tell us about the slave trade is also a lie, it is a lie which they use primarily against Britain and America and it is upon that lie which I will focus in this post.

The lies and myths about slavery are told with the same cynicism as those who voted to ban hunting with hounds in the pretence that they were motivated by animal welfare concerns. So intent are they in presenting slavery as a white against black crime that they actively seek to play down the fact that an estimated 27 million people are living in various forms of slavery right now in the 21st Century, more than twice the number transported to America during the total transatlantic slave trade with the effect that less is done than otherwise would be to help those currently in slavery but are an embarrassment over which a politically correct veil must be drawn.

Moreover they, our enemies, also misrepresent the truth about historical slavery. Transatlantic slavery did not exist in a vacuum, the slave trade was not invented by Americans or Europeans. Slavery had been part of the human condition since the earliest civilisations, look to the Torah, the Old Testament and the Koran, all of which have copious references to slavery written, a millennium or more before America was discovered and whilst the most Europeans lived in tribes and wore woad.

The historical revisionists of the left keep trying to tell us that cradle of civilisation was in North Africa, but they forget to mention that, if it was, it was built by slaves.

Even during the few centuries in which Europe and America were involved in slavery, we were not even the main players. Slavery was being carried out throughout the world, particularly in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The African, Arab and Asian involvement in slavery existed long before the transatlantic slave trade, and continued well after abolition, and involved far greater numbers of people.

A wrong is a wrong whoever commits it, and it is inequitable, and arguably racist, to hold one group more accountable than another on the grounds of pigmentation. I am not stating these facts in order to excuse the transatlantic slave trade, but merely to set it in context, and in perspective. You can not single out one or two nations for unique condemnation, when, in truth they merely, and briefly, got involved in what almost everyone else was doing, and which other nations had been doing for thousands of years.

This is particularly inequitable given that, in 1807, Britain was one of the fist nations on planet earth to abolish the slave trade and then through her Empire brought about the abolition of slavery across a quarter of the earth's surface a mere 26 years later. (a stunning achievement given that the British Empire included many lands where slavery had been a fact of life for thousands of years, and that this huge task was achieved in an age before aeroplanes, helicopters and satellite communications.)

Furthermore throughout most of the 19th Century the Royal Navy was actively involved in combating the slave trade as perpetrated by other nations by so doing we enforced abolition well beyond our own dominions.

Indeed British and other European colonialism itself, far from oppressing our subject nations, played a pivotal role in freeing them from the threat of being captured by Arab slavers, castrated (unlike in America, there are few descendants of those enslaved by Islam) and shipped to Arabia to be worked to death.

If you look to the history of Eastern Africa in the 19th Century, Britain was the major force in ending the Arab slave trade from places like Uganda, Northern Kenya and Zanzibar. We are repeatedly reminded of the slave caves around the coast of Western Africa, used by transatlantic slave traders, however there are similar caves on the east of Africa from whence the cargo travelled north and east, over far more centuries and in far greater numbers.

Another point supporting the fact that European colonialism brought about the end of slavery is that the only African country where it was still legal to own slaves well into the 1920's was Ethiopia, one of the only African nations which was never colonised and even then it was only abolished in order to gain Ethiopia access to the League of Nations.

On the other side of the Atlantic, also in 1807, the US Congress banned the importation of slaves and, 54 years later, well over half a million young, white, Americans died in a war fought partly in order to free the slaves. I am aware of no similar gesture on the part of those Arab, Asian and African states which had owned and traded in slaves for millennia before Britain's comparatively brief, three hundred year, involvement, including those, such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Yemen, Oman and Mauritania, which didn't get around to banning slavery until 100 years after the American Civil war (and where some would say forms of slavery continue to this day) or in Mauritania which only imposed a ban last year or Sudan where slavery allegedly still exists.

How odd that we don't hear calls for reparations from those countries where slaves were openly owned within living memory. Of course, silly me, they are not white European nations and can't be held responsible for what they do.

That said, I personally see no justification in holding current generations of Arabs or Africans responsible for the acts of earlier generations (even though those were quite recent generations) Guilt dies with the guilty, inherited or racial guilt is an abstract and unsupportable concept, which is, at its heart racist. However, it is a guilt which we in Europe and North America are expected to carry and acknowledge, despite the fact that the guilt of our forefathers is so much less than the guilt of others and that we have done so much more than others to right a universal wrong.

The staggeringly important fact about the slave trade is not that Britain and America joined in for a while, it is that we, and we alone brought it to an end.

Instead of suffering white guilt over slavery, by comparison with many other nations, we British and our US cousins, have a great deal to be proud of.
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Friday 27 July 2012

The Moslem Winter of 2012: Cultural relativity and unreality.

The Moslem Winter of 2012: Cultural relativity and unreality.

Libya and Syria will fall into the orbit of the 'Islamists'.....

by Ibn Sufi al Kitab

Full Article

The Arab spring of 2011 has chilled considerably into a Moslem winter of 2012. There is no doubt, that across North Africa stretching now into Syria, the 'Islamists' – a word which can mean mostly anything – have already, or soon will take over, control of various states who jettisoned their 'strong men' in a bid to usher in a new reality. That new reality has nothing to do with quaint Western ideals about law, the separation of church and state, free-will, rationality, choice and markets. The opposites are in fact desired by a wide plurality of Arabs in North Africa and the Levantine. The cheer-leading from Western media and pundits that the ossified, corrupt and immoral authoritarian regimes, which had crippled and sacrificed their people's development for power and wealth; was perhaps well-meaning naivete, or maybe, for the more cynical amongst us; a typically misinformed derivative of the culturally defective and deficient notion that all cultures, people, tribes and states are 'the same', and all 'want the same things' out of life. Ergo if Libyans stand up to Gaddafi they must want Western notions of how a state should function in relation to the individual. A nice idea but such a view is of course equal parts absurdity and ignorance.

The mainstream media's misinformation and deceit about what is really going on in North Africa reflects their bias of cultural and moral relativity. There are many prisms through which to view history, but the most informative and sometimes the most difficult to understand is that of culture. Culture is King, and culture informs all. It always has if one reads history and the development of states, empires and 'systems'. Western elites reject this fact. Culture is however quite primary, and it emanates from the individual in a family, up to the collective at the state level. What drives an individual forward, whether within a family, or buried deep within the communal mass of a state, and what drives nations onwards in a loose collectivity of different interests, will be the cultural milieu. What are the morals, ethos, and balance between the individual and the collective ? What does the culture hold to be important, irrelevant, or ethical ? What are the attitudes to thinking, education, responsibility, effort, and honesty ? Do free-will, rationality and the Golden Rule inform the theology or 'religion' of the family and state ? Or are mysticism’s, rituals, irrationalities, and lying, violent, petty, personal obsessions the cultural norm ? What does the culture teach the elite who run the state and who will act in their, and by extension, the state's best interests ? What traditions and heritage make up the unit in question ?
What the media never mentions about North Africa or Syria is of course the distorting, corroding and impoverished non-culture of Islam. In fact the media will rarely mention the word Islam. If you read Moslem history and the Koran it is clear that Islam has 3 basic tenets; Moslems must conquer the world because they are superior and are merely the slaves and abettors of the Allah thing [the supremacist-dialectical, inevitability tenet]; women are the slaves of men [the misogynist tenet]; and Infidels are at best dhimmis or near-slaves to Moslems and Moslem interests [the slavery tenet]. There is nothing in the Koran about free-will, free-speech, individuality, the Golden Rule, treating non-Moslems properly; respecting women, or using reason to acquire spiritual enlightenment. Nor is there a division of church and state, or an evolving reformation and adaptation of ideas, morals and ethics to match a changing and dynamic world. Islam is immutable because Moslems – or too many of them anyways – believe that the 'Koran' or 'Recital' is an uncreated magical work of the Allah thing, and inured to change of any kind. Ergo whatever is in this handbook is the 'law' [which makes the 1600 odd verses of violence against Infidels and women rather obtuse and embarrassing for the Marxist apologists of the Moslem cult].
The Moslem culture was carried into Syria and North Africa by savage Arab wars, not of liberation but of occupation, lasting from 636 AD to at least 720 AD in which the Arabs were finally turned back by the 'dark age' Christians at Covadonga Spain. In these 100 years, Roman, Greek, Jewish, Christian and Berber civilization were wiped out. Trade, papyrus production, canals, irrigation, the Alexandrian library [contrary to Hollywood movies to the contrary], farms, industry and monuments were widely emptied, desecrated, or destroyed. There was no golden age of Islam, unless you call squatting on richer civilizations and using their resources, labor and intelligence and renaming non-Moslems with Arab names who in spite of the system were able to make a difference in human existence, a 'great era'. Algebra, philosophy, zoology, metal working, the compass, the astrolabe, horse collars, heavy ploughs, medicine, hospitals, geometry, calculus, steam engines, the dome, keystone arches, libraries, paper manufacture, and complex trade systems and societies – to name a small few -- were developed long before Islam and were simply taken over by the Arabs or Moslems. Squatters are not creators.
Moslem intolerance, and violence – a cultural artefact of Islam and Arab tribalism -- is an immutable fact of North African and Syrian life. Syria for instance was developed and enriched as a Roman province, an entrepot within the greater Mediterranean civilization of Greece and Roman. Under Greek-Alexandrian and later Roman rule, the area of Syria was prosperous, civilized, Jewish, Christian as well as Greek and Semitic; and at the hub of technology and trade. After the Arab conquests of course, the lands of Syria have been in a never-ending spiral of decline, punctuated by faint efforts at rehabilitation, perhaps a faint resuscitation under Western colonialism, but always labouring under the heavy totalitarian control and boot of Islamic culture. Syria never recovered from the devastation of the Arab raids and wars, and was never reconciled with Western and Byzantine culture and traditions which could have revived it. Neither has Syria in the modern age been able to shed its Arab and Moslem culture, even when it was under British or French control.
In Libya, there is euphoria that the Moslem Brotherhood did not win the recent election outright. But they have a strong minority base and will increase by 2013, their grip on local politics. At some point by 2015 or earlier, the MB in Libya will be running the oil-rich country. In Syria the 'rebels' feted by the Western media as freedom fighters are largely Islamic fundamentalists. They want a return to the dark age of Islamic dominance, not the imposition of liberal-democratic politics one finds in a large North American city. In neither Syria nor in Libya can one find much to cheer about. Plus ca change.
Culture informs all. When your culture is premised on Islamic non-culture, itself an imperialist tool of Arab domination; then failure is guaranteed. The only question is when will that failure in all matters of socio-economic and political development manifest itself ? The poverty and uncivilized nature of North Africa and Syria will never be repaired without a cultural change, shift, reformation and indeed replacement.
But that day is far off and will probably never occur.

The liberal Infection



Infection

All things converge on biological metaphors, because biology is the vessel the universe chose to hold its autonomous parts.
The metaphor of infection applies to many things, and we learn more every year how behaviors and ideas spread like infections. Information travels between forms and media, even boundaries between individuals.
Behaviors spread this way in the animal kingdom also. When monkeys see another monkey using tools, they learn that knowledge and pass it on. When enough humans repeat a phrase, it becomes a trend, and lives and is spread through others.
When we look at political choices, we see external manifestations of internal values systems. For example, liberals are concerned with equality; conservatives are concerned with results.
However, not all political choices are created equal. Some in fact seem to arise not from concern for goals, but from a need to express oneself through personality acted out as gestures.
Liberalism is one such infection. It is based on dissatisfaction and resentment, like how teenagers socialize by agreeing that their high school sucks and their parents are Nazis. It spreads not because it is effective, but because it makes people feel equally accepted.
The essence of liberalism as a mechanism is that, in a social group, if all the people agree that a certain thing is true, there is no personal penalty for being wrong if it is not true.
In this way, a human social reality made of memes, trends, sayings, media, commerce and government replaces the physical reality we know and can describe through science.
Unfortunately, when this reality is based on collective dislike, it becomes a lynch mob which knows only what it doesn’t want, not what it does. This guarantees that it will fail: it will gather, tear down what it hates, and then make a new version of society that goes 180° in the opposite direction.
However, this approach is doomed because if something was missing from the original society, it is not present in the new one. All that is there is an inverted form of the original, with nothing added. It is a reaction, not a construction of something new.
In addition, it is an effort forever marooned because in uniting itself around dislike of things that it feels impeded its people, it is ceding control of the destiny of individuals to external forces.
To say “I hate this and must destroy it” is generally equivalent to identifying the obstruction that prevents the fulfillment of your needs or dreams. But by projecting that importance upon it, we make it a controlling force.
It is for these reasons that every liberal society ever created has failed. It is fairest to view liberalism as a mass delusion, and a type of mental disease, that exists as a final stage of civilization before death.
Society must be somewhat near death for liberalism to occur, because liberalism is the result of a lack of faith in shared or collaborative goals.
When individuals decide that they must game the system, or in other words deceive and parasitize all other people in their society, they invent something like liberalism: a snake oil sales pitch (equality) hiding a more mundane reality (if I’m equal, you can’t tell me I can’t do anything, no matter how insane).
Like most biological metaphors, the metaphor of infection is plausible here. An idea comes into the head of an individual; the idea wants to live on, so it spreads to others. They unite based on the appearance of the idea (equality) and not the idea itself (decay).
And thus it spreads. Do we trust society? Can we trust each other? With each new grievance, distrust or disorganization, the infection spreads, snowballing into a momentum too powerful for any social bonds.
It is reversed as all infections are. First, remove the bad hygiene — the boring jobs, the terrible parents, the deceptive social scene — and next, inoculate a vanguard.
Others will see that the vanguard lead a better life, and will not understand why, but will be content to emulate that vanguard and inoculate themselves in the hope of a better life.
This is how infections are banished, and civilizations are built. Very few know how to do this, especially in times of mass deception, but as the deceptions unravel, those rare teachers become valuable again.

Thursday 26 July 2012

Defensive personalities



Defensive personalities

Often life is paradoxical because appearance is a result of underlying structure, and not equal to it.
The best way to think about this is the example of a tornado, which does not form itself. Winds of different temperatures cross under the right conditions, and create a tornado.
In the human world, there is an equivalent to this. People say one thing, and use it to hide their actual behavior and motivations.
For example, among us walk those who preach tolerance and pluralism. However, these tend to be the most hateful people in our society.
They are either intolerant of specific groups, or intolerant of anyone who has not ruined a particular aspect — religion, innocence, intelligence, morality, heritage, culture — of themselves.
The tolerant person is “misery loves company” in incarnate form, wishing others to be as deprived as they are. But another factor is in play here.
If I am an angry person, and wish to be intolerant, I need a cover story in order to be able to get away with it. My best cover is as a missionary of tolerance.
That way, I am the official authority on tolerance and can carefully define my own behavior as tolerant, whether it is or not. Don’t change the behavior — change the meaning of the word!
Becoming known as an expert or paragon of some behavior is a type of pre-emptive defense against those who, in the future, might accuse you of violating that same taboo.
This is similar to billionaire philanthropists who gleefully give away 5% of their wealth in order to make headlines for their charity, while hiding their tax-dodging and ill deeds under those headlines.
At the current time, we can see this phenomena in the rising shrillness of global liberalism. Two centuries after liberalism officially became our world order with the French Revolution, the disaster is unfolding.
It is not a single failure — no, liberalism has failed on all fronts, and most importantly has failed to bring about the new Utopia it claimed it would.
A convergence of failures occurs because liberalism fails on all levels: economic, political, social, biological, cultural and even individual happiness. It has corrupted science and religion, destroyed art and alienated the individual.
These intensifying failures work together like notes harmonizing into a chord, showing us that the New World Order we thought was right is in fact a path to death. People are considering abandoning it.
As a result of that instability, those who depend on liberalism for their sense of self-worth are turning up the heat. More fanatical statements, more extremism and greater degrees of illusion are demanded, and the faithful lap it up because their identities are constructed out of the success of liberalism as an idea.
The propaganda grows stronger, the allegiance tests get more absolute, and the leftists appear emboldened, strong and victorious.
But these are not structural traits, but appearance. The underlying cause is a need to hide their fear of total failure that is imminent. They are running scared.
It is paradoxical that the seemingly most confident people are those preaching a dying ideology that belongs to a failed past. But they hope to convince you, and keep the sad farce alive for just another day.

Wednesday 25 July 2012

Surrogate reality , or Right Reason

Surrogate reality

We live in a time of confused cause-effect because, since the Enlightenment, we have made ourselves deciders of reality based on our whims and the collective popularity of ideas.
Equality as a political concept means that each person is valid, whether their ideas/views are realistic or not; since each is valid, all must be accommodated, which results in a state called pluralism where many different points of view are considered true at once.
At that point, the deeper issues in life are dead because they are un-decidable.
We went from having kings and popes deciding a singular reality, to having each individual decide reality, and all of us be commanded to “tolerate” each other’s realities in order to keep the peace. There is no truth to decide, only the presumption that all is true.
With the deeper issues dead, all that exists for us as “truth” are the surface issues. How we present ourselves to others; how popular we are; how well we uphold memes, laws, media and other trends. We are how we appear. (The medium is the message.)
For this reason, we live in a state of duality. We have obligations, like jobs and not committing murder, and everything else is time for us, so we take as much as we can. During that time, we have “hobbies” which are unpaid pursuits that we hope entertain us.
Our hobbies rapidly extend to cover anything not mandated by the society itself. In our personal lives, and in our families, we exert dominion over the surface.
This is a form of surrogate reality, or the creation of an alternate reality which is not particularly important, but through which we live as if it were more important than reality itself.
Like the symbolic reality of morality, popularity and economics, this is a case of a few parts of the whole standing for the whole; in other words, we pick the areas in which we do have power and crowd out the rest.
One major area where this comes into play is the idea of control itself. Instead of having people work with us on a shared vision, we indulge in the thought that we can force them to do what we need. This however ignores the degree, or quality, of their compliance, as well as any secondary or incidental effects of our control on them. Those who wield control are perpetually surprised by unintended consequences.
Another area is tolerance. When we are at a weak point and deserve a break, we are annoyed by other people treating us as if we were not at a weak point, because from our perspective it seems like an assault on our weakness. Our retribution is to demand “tolerance” for all ranges of behavior, which means that weakness and strength are indistinguishable. But then we live in a society designed around weakness, and so it moves slowly, encourages incompetence and penalizes efficiency. We suffer more this way, as the result of our fear.
These surrogate realities are composed of notions in which the visible aspect of an act is considered equal to the cause of an act, e.g. flowers grow because they are flowers, not because of a complex interaction between sunlight, water and seed.
To enforce our surrogate realities, we cherry-pick information. Out of a thousand factors, we select the one that is important to us, and pay attention to the data that reinforces it, discarding the rest.
Through these reality substitutes, we eventually create a human-only world of emotions, judgments and feelings. This distances us from reality and thus, the only meaning we could have in seeing our ideas realized and tested.
As a result, we become lonely and bitter, locked away in labyrinthine castles of our mind mind and cryptic religions of our own populist morality, forever wondering what we’re missing.

Sunday 22 July 2012

The Cultural Destruction of England

The Cultural Destruction of England

The forces that are working to destroy Southern culture are certainly not unique in the world. Similar attacks on nations and cultures have been happening in many places that were once solidly Western European culture.
The BBC broadcast a documentary titled Rivers of Blood. It begins with one man – Enoch Powell – using his position of leadership to warn his countrymen of the grave threat they face as the gathering storm begins to assail English culture and turn England into a land completely alien to those who inherited one of the greatest nations on earth. He warned that England was losing her sense of national identity, the shared values and traditions and history, the common thread that unites the English as a people. When Mr. Powell made his “Rivers of Blood” speech forty years ago, the term “political correctness” had not yet been coined, but that is what was at work
The force that destroyed England was a political establishment that used uncontrolled immigration as a weapon. Most nations can absorb small numbers of immigrants from other cultures without damaging the existing culture. In small numbers, immigrants are assimilated into the culture as long as they are not concentrated in certain areas. In large numbers, immigrants become an invading and occupying army. From there, they spread their influence beyond their enclaves of occupation.
The forces that are destroying our once-great land are not new and our experience is not unique. What is happening now in places like Dearborn, Michigan may soon be happening across the country – including our beloved South. The question is – will we recognize the threat and take action to stop it?

Saturday 21 July 2012

Nelson Mandela the Terrorist

Mandela the Terrorist 

 

As it was Nelson Mandela's birthday this week I thought I would reproduce a blog from 2008

from here

Flaming liberals and other dangerously misguided souls, the kind that led to the destruction of once peaceful and prosperous South Africa, are now out to sanitize the "saintly"terrorist Nelson Mandela (wolf in sheep's clothing, who knows how to talk to white people) and his toxic organization - the terrorist African National Congress (ANC) - and have them removed from the United States' terrorist listwhere they belong (HR 5690). Don't let them succeed!

Read for yourself about terrorist Nelson Mandela's crimes(most have never heard of, denied the opportunity by the liberal media) and then immediately call the U.S. Congress to warn them not to pass this treacherous legislation to take the African National Congress off the U.S. Terrorist List where they belong. Former failed presidential candidate John Kerry (D-Mass) is shamefully sponsoring a companion bill for the Senate. Call Kerry's office and give him a piece of your patriotic mind at 202-224-2742 and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-NV) office 202-224-3542.
* The full list of munitions and charges read as follows:

• One count under the South African Suppression of Communism Act No. 44 of 1950, charging that the accused committed acts calculated to further the achievement of the objective of communism;

• One count of contravening the South African Criminal Law Act (1953), which prohibits any person from soliciting or receiving any money or articles for the purpose of achieving organized defiance of laws and country; and

• Two counts of sabotage, committing or aiding or procuring the commission of the following acts:

1) The further recruitment of persons for instruction and training, both within and outside the Republic of South Africa, in:

(a) the preparation, manufacture and use of explosives—for the purpose of committing acts of violence and destruction in the aforesaid Republic, (the preparation and manufacture of explosives, according to evidence submitted, included 210,000 hand grenades, 48,000 anti-personnel mines, 1,500 time devices, 144 tons of ammonium nitrate, 21.6 tons of aluminum powder and a ton of black powder);

(b) the art of warfare, including guerrilla warfare, and military training generally for the purpose in the aforesaid Republic;

(ii) Further acts of violence and destruction, (this includes 193 counts of terrorism committed between 1961 and 1963);

(iii) Acts of guerrilla warfare in the aforesaid Republic;

(iv) Acts of assistance to military units of foreign countries when involving the aforesaid Republic;

(v) Acts of participation in a violent revolution in the aforesaid Republic, whereby the accused, injured, damaged, destroyed, rendered useless or unserviceable, put out of action, obstructed, with or endangered:


(a) the health or safety of the public;
(b) the maintenance of law and order;

(c) the supply and distribution of light, power or fuel;
(d) postal, telephone or telegraph installations;
(e) the free movement of traffic on land; and
(f) the property, movable or immovable, of other persons or of the state.

Source: The State v. Nelson Mandela et al, Supreme Court of South Africa, Transvaal Provincial Division, 1963-1964, Indictment.

censorship of the internet [REDACTED]



[REDACTED]

Censorship is an essential tool for every government on earth, even anarchy and egalitarian democracy.
Information that blatantly contradicts the status quo is not dangerous for what it says, but for how often it is seen. When people see it enough, they feel safe in repeating it.
This is why censorship exists: to make sure that people see the information infrequently, and then can’t find the source again, creating the impression that that information is irrelevant.
Controlled societies censor by owning all the printing presses. They print, film and type what they want us to know. Those who deviate may be killed, or simply relocated to someplace unpleasant.
Free societies censor by generating public outrage at a behavior, or the perceived type of person who engages in it. They then tie this behavior to the unlawful information.
Those who repeat that information are then socially ostracized, and thus financially ostracized, eventually becoming dependent on the government for their sustenance.
Every few months the internet-culture “community” gets riled up about some bill or another that will (say this in a Vincent Price voice) destroy the internet as we know it. The presentation is always that apocalyptic.
From a more realistic view, however, censorship is unlikely to be apocalyptic. More likely, it will be recognized and accepted as normal, and then creep into everyday life.
People will know that what they see is censored, but they will not act on that. No one wants to be the first to buck a trend, because there’s huge risk that the rest of the Simian lynch mob will simply turn on you, and enrich themselves with your losses.
The internet is not censored by governments, at least not effective ones. It is censored by your fellow citizens and those that provide them services. Unpopular opinions detract from the value of those services, and so they are blocked.
That cannot matter, you think. Your fellow citizens thirst for information and lust for freedom so much that they’ll “do something” about that.
Except that your fellow citizens are interested in cheeseburgers, shiny gadgets, beer, movies and pornography. They’re so distracted you could pick them off one by one, so long as you didn’t put articles in the media saying it would happen.
The censorship of the internet will not come from government or media, but from you, the average citizen. You will demand stability. You do not want to read disturbing news or thoughts. You want happy news, happy commentary, and a pleasant vision of the future that suggests you’re doing everything right.
Subconsciously, you will reward that vision of the world with your dollars while shying away from any less-uplifting visions.
Your purchasing preferences, and your complaints about disturbing facts or ideas you encounter, will censor the internet — and society at large.
And yet you never hear of this in the media. Why, you might ask?
Because it’s an effective control mechanism. Not by government, but by you. You are controlling your fellow citizens by making them docile, so you can sell them whatever goods and services are linked to your job or business.
It’s all about you, after all. You don’t want your experience marred by discontent. You want only pleasure, and profits. While you’ll never admit it, you’re a more effective censor than totalitarianism.

Sunday 15 July 2012

Turkey: Center of the New Caliphate


Turkey: Center of the New Caliphate

by Dr. Steve Elwart

The Arab Spring and the rise of Islam in the region may prove to be the key to Turkey’s emergence as a true regional and world power. The stated goal of both Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood is a restoration of the Muslim Caliphate with Turkey as its head, as it had been for over 600 years.
While Syria’s Assad Regime enjoys the backing of both Russia and China as it goes through a program of systematic atrocities against its own people, the nation Assad truly fears is neighboring Turkey.
Turkey, a NATO member and the most powerful military force in the region, helped foster the creation of the Syrian National Council, Assad’s main rebel opposition group.
Turkey operates nine refugee camps along the Turkey-Syria border and has been an increasingly vocal advocate of the establishment of a “buffer zone” inside Syria to protect Syrian refugees.
Turkey is also publicly discussing invoking two international agreements, both of which would provide political cover for an armed intervention in Syria.
One instrument is the 1998 Adana Agreement. The other is Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which says an armed attack against any single NATO member constitutes an attack on all NATO members.
Turkey and Syria both signed the Adana Agreement after Turkey threatened to invade Syria because the Assad Government was harboring the senior commander of the Kurdistan Workers Party—the PKK, a Kurdish organization which has been fighting the Turkish state for greater political rights for the Kurds in Turkey.
The language of the agreement, however, is not limited to just the PKK. It also states that Syria “will not permit any activity that emanates from its territory aimed at jeopardizing the security and stability of Turkey.”
Turkey already harbors 25,000 to 30,000 Syrian refugees inside its borders and expects even more. Turkey is sending diplomatic signals that this surge of refugees across its border violates that treaty.
NATO Article 5 offers another legal avenue. On April 9, Syrian security forces fired across the Turkey-Syria border and wounded four people in a refugee camp in one of Turkey’s western provinces. That constituted an armed violation of Turkey’s border. Turkish Prime Minister Endogen angrily claimed that “NATO has responsibilities to do with Turkey’s borders, according to Article 5.”
All this is occurring at a time when Turkey is reemerging as a significant regional power. This country, spanning two continents, is in the process of returning to its former glory when it was the center of Islam, embodied in the Ottoman Empire.

End of an Empire

At end of World War I, the price of Turkey fighting on the side of a defeated Germany was the end of the Ottoman Empire. Though its political borders had changed, there was one thing that remained constant—Turkey’s fear of Russia.
For its part, Russia also feared Turkey. Turkey had the capability of exploiting a part of Russia’s strategic vulnerability—its access to the oceans.
Russia is a country that is almost land-locked. Much of Russia’s coastlines are inhospitable to a seaport; the ports of St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, and Murmansk experience near zero or subzero temperatures most of the year. Their access to the oceans is also constrained by potential adversaries. The Port of Odessa is the facility Russia possesses that gives that nation ideal year-round naval power projection. The city is located on Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and is the home port to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
Russian interest in the Black Sea extends over more than two centuries. Catherine the Great annexed the Crimea in 1783. Odessa serves as a major freight and passenger gateway to Ukraine and to Russia.
For any Russian sea traffic to gain access to the Mediterranean and the world, it has to pass through the Bosporus Strait and Istanbul, controlled by Turkey.
One goal of Russian national policy is to gain control of the Bosporus Strait—both to prevent a blockade and to project its power into the Mediterranean.
Therefore, the Russians have had a particular interest in reshaping Turkish sovereignty. Part of the reason that Russia is backing Syria in the current revolt is to try to stop Turkey’s expansion into that area.
In World War I, the Ottoman Turks aligned with the Germans, who were fighting the Russians. After World War I and during World War II, when the Soviets were weak or distracted, Turkey remained neutral until the closing months of the War, when it declared war on both Germany and Japan.
After the Second World War, when the Soviets were powerful and backed a planned coup in Turkey, the Turks allied themselves with the United States and joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), despite their distance from the North Atlantic.
In the post-war world, Turkey had very few options. The Soviet Union emerged from World War II with an economy in ruins, but militarily powerful. One consequence from the global war was that the Soviet Union rivaled the United States in geopolitical influence.
Turkey had very limited options. Western Europe was in shambles, Mainland China had turned to Communism, and Soviet military stationed on Turkey’s northern border formed an existential threat to that country’s sovereignty.
The Soviet Union knew that to secure its access to the seas it had to exert control over the Bosporus and Asia Minor. The subjugation of Turkey was of extremely high interest to the Soviets.
So important was Turkey to the Soviet Union that one of the demands the Soviet Union made to end the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis was the removal of U.S. Jupiter Intercontinental Missiles from Turkey.
Unable to deal with the Soviets alone, Turkey‘s only option was to ally itself with the United States. From the United States’ point of view, Turkey was of strategic importance. Turkey faced the Soviets to the north and two Soviet clients, Syria and Iraq, to the south. An alliance with Turkey was a crucial part of the United States’ overall global strategy.
This strategic logic dissolved in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union.

A New Paradigm

For the first time since the start of the early 20th century, Turkey didn’t view Russia as a threat. The largest component of Turkish foreign policy was gone and with it, Turkey’s need for protection from the United States.
Turkey’s relationship with the United States was close for a time, but that relationship radically changed in 2003 with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Turkey viewed the Iraq invasion as a destabilizing influence in the region. It saw the invasion as unnecessary, aiding Iran in becoming the regional hegemon, and disrupting Turkey’s internal politics. For the first time since the end of the Second World War, Turkey not only refused to participate in an American initiative, they also refused the Americans the use of Turkish facilities to mount the invasion.
Once Turkey decided not to collaborate with the United States, its foreign policy could never be the same. Turkey’s diplomatic break with the United States left the Turks free to consider other relationships.
One option was joining with Europe, which, on the whole, also opposed the American invasion. Turkey’s refusal to accommodate the Americans was not enough to win Turkey membership into the European Union, a goal for Turkey since the formation of the Union.

Turkey and the European Union

Membership in the EU was not seen in terms of foreign policy alone. For secularists it symbolized the goal of reshaping turkey into a European country committed to European values. For Islamists, it provided a vehicle for capturing Europe peacefully.
Ever since the time of the Crusades, Muslims have tried to capture Europe for Allah. This jihad was effectively ended with Suleiman’s Siege of Vienna in 1529. The siege signaled the pinnacle of the Ottoman Empire’s power and the maximum extent of Ottoman expansion in central Europe.
The creation of the European Union provided a new avenue for a Muslim takeover of the continent.
The free movement of persons within the European Union is granted to EU member citizens by treaty. The concept of free movement of persons within the EU came about in 1985, which abolished border controls between EU countries.
While the illegal immigration of Muslims from Turkey is a problem for Europe now, Turkish membership in the EU would have made the problem even worse. European members worried that Turkey’s membership into the Union would not only provide an entry for Turks into Europe, but also any immigrant using Turkey as their gateway.
Europe’s rejection of Turkey into the EU actually worked to Turkey’s benefit in that it left Turkey with a more dynamic economy today than most of Europe and without liability for Greece’s debt.
This also left Turkey as an emerging great power.

The Rise of Turkey

The Arab Spring and the rise of Islam in the region may prove to be the key to Turkey’s emergence as a true regional and world power. The stated goal of both Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood is a restoration of the Muslim Caliphate with Turkey as its head, as it had been for over 600 years.
The rise of Turkey, the Arab Spring, the reemergence of the Muslim Caliphate, along with Iran’s dream of preparing the way for the Mahdi, Islam’s prophesied redeemer, all point to a convergence that could very well take events foretold in Biblical prophecy and put them on today’s front page.
This article was originally published in the 
July 2012 Personal Update NewsJournal.

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Saturday 14 July 2012

A prophet yet an outcast: 100 years after his birth Enoch Powell has been vindicated on crucial issues

Powell was a man of conspicuous moral greatness, something that, alone, made him unsuited for politics, because it meant he could not keep what he perceived to be the truth to himself.

He had a gift denied to most politicians, which was of making prophecies that were right.

He was right about Europe; right about the single currency; right about economic management; right about Lords reform; right about devolution; right about American imperialism; and, with even Trevor Phillips, the figurehead of the Equalities Commission, now arguing that multiculturalism has failed, right about that, too.

Fourteen years after his death, and almost half-a-century after he sat in the Cabinet, his influence on political thought is not only undiminished: it continues to grow.