The View From 1776

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My Friend Tom Emerson emailed the following opinion piece.  It serves nicely as documentation for two recent postings on this website:

Hate Crime: Speaking Ill of Terrorist Bombers

Dealing With a Fifth Column?

Had either Al Gore or Jean Francois Kerry been elected to the presidency, Herr Dapfner would have been condemning the United States with the same scathing words he uses to denounce European socialist appeasers.

Liberal-socialists firmly believe that all human social relations are the conscious product of human rationality.  Thus, they reason, human minds can structure a single, homogenous world society to attain perfect benevolence that will banish economic competition, aggression, greed, crime, and wars.  For these liberal intellectuals, just as for Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, there is no such thing as human nature. 

Didn’t Charles Darwin, one of the saints of socialism, teach us that there is no design or plan to any form of life, that everything is continually evolving.  Accepting that dogma, liberals are confident that they know what the Muslims’ real problem is and how to fix it.  As good secular materialists, liberal-socialists KNOW that all human behavior is motivated only by a blind, animal drive to avoid pain and to slake desires for sensual pleasures.  Thus, what could be simpler?  Just make the jihadists happy by building their self-esteem (the technique that has been adopted in our so-called education system).  It will, in liberal-socialist orthodoxy, be easy to buy off Al Queda by allocating additional material goods via foreign aid.

Thus, for liberals, the real enemies of humanity are those traditionalist, religious Judeo-Christian fools who stubbornly insist that God created the whole universe and that everything and everyone one moves in accord with Divinely inspired, inherent nature.  These traditionalists are threatening “world peace,” “international law,” and the “community of nations” by refusing to hand over our governance to the emerging world government centered in the UN in New York (the site in earlier years, appropriately, of slaughter houses).

In a larger historical context, we are replaying the struggle between Rome and Carthage.  Roman paganism focused on the benign and humane gods of the hearth, the vineyard, and agriculture.  Carthagenians worshipped the dark power of their god Moloch, a religion that required the regular sacrifice of innocent babies, who were burned alive in the furnace before Moloch’s altar.

Liberals preen themselves on being so superior, so scientific and humane in their atheistic materialism.  They are in reality willing flinging the children of Christendom into the furnace of Moloch, hoping to appease the dark powers.

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EUROPE - THY NAME IS COWARDICE (Commentary by Mathias Dapfner CEO, Axel Springer, AG)

A few days ago Henry Broder wrote in Welt am Sonntag, “Europe - your family name is appeasement.” It’s a phrase you can’t get out of your head because it’s so terribly true.



Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives as England and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they noticed that Hitler had to be fought, not bound to toothless agreements.



Appeasement legitimized and stabilized Communism in the Soviet Union, then East Germany, then all the rest of Eastern Europe where for decades, inhuman, suppressive, murderous governments were glorified as the ideologically correct alternative to all other possibilities.



Appeasement crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Kosovo, and even though we had absolute proof of ongoing mass-murder, we Europeans debated and debated and debated, and were still debating when finally the Americans had to come from halfway around the world, into Europe yet again, and do our work for us.



Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word “equidistance,” now countenances suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians.



Appeasement generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore nearly 500,000 victims of Saddam’s torture and murder machinery and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace-movement, has the gall to issue bad grades to George Bush… Even as it is uncovered that the loudest critics of the American action in Iraq made illicit billions, no, TENS of billions, in the corrupt U. N. Oil-for-Food program.



And now we are faced with a particularly grotesque form of appeasement… How is Germany reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in Holland and elsewhere? By suggesting that we really should have a “Muslim Holiday” in Germany.



I wish I were joking, but I am not. A substantial fraction of our (German) Government, and if the polls are to be believed, the German people, actually believe that creating an Official State “Muslim Holiday” will somehow spare us from the wrath of the fanatical Islamists.



One cannot help but recall Britain’s Neville Chamberlain waving the laughable treaty signed by Adolf Hitler, and declaring European “Peace in our time”.



What else has to happen before the European public and its political leadership get it? There is a sort of crusade underway, an especially perfidious crusade consisting of systematic attacks by fanatic Muslims, focused on civilians, directed against our free, open Western societies, and intent upon Western Civilization’s utter destruction.



It is a conflict that will most likely last longer than any of the great military conflicts of the last century - a conflict conducted by an enemy that cannot be tamed by “tolerance” and “accommodation” but is actually spurred on by such gestures, which have proven to be, and will always be taken by the Islamists for signs of weakness.



Only two recent American Presidents had the courage needed for anti-appeasement: Reagan and Bush.



His American critics may quibble over the details, but we Europeans know the truth. We saw it first hand: Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War, freeing half of the German people from nearly 50 years of terror and virtual slavery. And Bush, supported only by the Social Democrat Blair, acting on moral conviction, recognized the danger in the Islamic War against democracy. His place in history will have to be evaluated after a number of years have passed.



In the meantime, Europe sits back with charismatic self-confidence in the multicultural corner, instead of defending liberal society’s values and being an attractive center of power on the same playing field as the true great powers, America and China.



On the contrary - we Europeans present ourselves, in contrast to those “arrogant Americans”, as the World Champions of “tolerance”, which even (Germany’s Interior Minister) Otto Schily justifiably criticizes. Why? Because we’re so moral? I fear it’s more because we’re so materialistic, so devoid of a moral compass.



For his policies, Bush risks the fall of the dollar, huge amounts of additional national debt, and a massive and persistent burden on the American economy - because unlike almost all of Europe, Bush realizes what is at stake - literally everything.



While we criticize the “capitalistic robber barons” of America because they seem too sure of their priorities, we timidly defend our Social Welfare systems. Stay out of it! It could get expensive! We’d rather discuss reducing our 35-hour workweek or our dental coverage, or our 4 weeks of paid vacation… Or listen to TV pastors preach about the need to “reach out to terrorists. To understand and forgive”.



These days, Europe reminds me of an old woman who, with shaking hands, frantically hides her last pieces of jewelry when she notices a robber breaking into a neighbor’s house.



Appeasement? Europe, thy name is Cowardice.

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