Category Archives: Britain

Europeans Are Germanophobic!

Britain, Debt, Economy, EU, Europe

The word for the hatred/fear of Germans is Germanophobia. Europeans are certainly guilty of this anti-German sentiment. It is rooted in, I believe, their jealousy of the workhorse of Europe: Germany. Moreover, these brazen haters seem to think that Germany’s distant, belligerent history makes the German people fair game for gratuitous hatred.

Duly, the programing note for today’s segment of BBC News’ HARDtalk promised that the host, Stephen Sackur, will be asking “the senior economic adviser to chancellor Angela Merkel if Germany has used its power wisely in the high stakes showdown over Greece’s debt.”

Sackur is a smart bloke with a slanted perspective. The segment was thus given over to the brutal bullying of a country that is carrying the deadweights of the EU: the PIIGS of the Eurozone—Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain—are living at the expense of their more industrious, austere neighbors to the north. Germany, in particular, is an industrial dynamo whose highly-skilled workforce produces technology in the first rank.

As Reuters reported, the “Euro zone finance ministers agreed in principle on Friday to extend Greece’s financial rescue by four months. … European Union paymaster Germany, Greece’s biggest creditor, had demanded ‘significant improvements’ in reform commitments by Athens before it would accept an extension of euro zone funding.”

AND:

BILD, Germany’s biggest tabloid and one of the highest-circulation newspapers in the world, is not happy about the support Germany’s political class is giving the Greek deal.

The Greeks have had a lot to say about their democratic right to reject the “deeply unpopular austerity measures.” What of the German people? Do they have a democratic right to refuse to be roped into working to support the Greeks?

Yalta: Where Franklin D. Roosevelt Conceded To Communism

America, Britain, History, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Russia, UN, War

Richard Ebeling at Target Liberty (TL) reminded us in advance that “February 4th mark[ed] the 70th anniversary of the most famous and infamous Yalta Conference between Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin during February 4-11 of 1945,” who

… determined the fates of hundreds of millions of human beings:
All the people of Eastern Europe who were turned into the “captive nations” in the direct grip of Stalin behind the “Iron Curtain.” The destiny of mass of the Chinese population, as Stalin was given an entrée into Manchuria that opened the door for Mao’s communist conquest of China.
The division of Korea into North and South, that handed over the people of the North to a totalitarianism on a Stalinist model that stills rules today, and set the stage for the three-year Korean War that cost the lives of 50,000 American service men, and more than a million Koreans.
And FDR’s “dream” of the United Nations as a U.S. and Soviet-led organization to manage and redesign the world through the use of economic sanctions and global policemen using force to put down rebellions or disagreements with what the “Great Powers” believed was good for mankind.

At least in the excerpt provided at TL, Dr. Ebeling may have been hasty in lumping Winston Churchill with Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. Yes, Churchill rolled over, because he was desperate for FDR’s financial support. But not before he attempted he save Greece, admittedly at a cost to the “rest of the Balkans.”

Franklin Roosevelt, in particular, like many pseudo-intellectuals of his time, explains historian Paul Johnson, regarded the Soviet Union as a “peace loving democracy, with an earnest desire to better the conditions of the working peoples of the world.” FDR’s advisers in Moscow considered Stalin a benevolent, genial democrat. “This monster, who was responsible for the death of 30 million of his own people,” was regarded by the American administration as “exceedingly wise and gentle.” “Grotesquely Stalinist” too were Harold Denny and Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ reporters in Moscow.

In his defense, Churchill was avowedly anti-communist and detested Stalin, which is why FDR thought of him as a “reactionary … an old incorrigible imperialist, incapable of understanding [Stalin’s] ideological idealism.” Against the wishes of Winston Churchill did FDR agree to “give Stalin what was not his to give.”

(A History of The American People by Paul Johnson, pp. 790-791.)

The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability

Britain, Crime, Europe, Foreign Policy, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Islam, Jihad, Judaism & Jews, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Media

“The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… Disaffected, disadvantaged, disenfranchised is how progressives prefer to depict the Muslim murderers in their midst. After all, progressives hail from the school of therapeutic “thought” that considers crime to have been caused, not committed. Misbehavior is either medicalized and outsourced to state-approved experts, or reduced to the fault of the amorphous thing called society.

The most famous advocate of the-Camel-Ate-My Homework theory of criminal culpability is Barack Obama. Obama’s flabby assumption has it that the poor barbarians of France’s burbs have been deprived of fraternité. “Europe needs to better integrate its Muslim communities,” lectured the president.

Also guilty of a social determinism that flouts their philosophy of individual freedom are libertarians. For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society and libertarian saddle the state: U.S. foreign policy, in particular. A war of aggression, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and torture are thus “principal catalysts for this kind of non-state terrorism,” argued Ray McGovern.

“The-state-made-me-do-it” argumentation apes that of the left’s “society-made-me-do-it” argumentation. Both philosophical factions, left and blowback-libertarian, are social determinists, in as much as they implicate forces outside the individual for individual dysfunction.

Myself, I despise U.S. foreign policy as deeply as any Muslim. But it would never-ever occur to me to take it out on my American countrymen.

In the context of free will, and in a week in which we remember the Holocaust, Viktor E. Frankl rates a mention.

Dr. Frankl came out of Auschwitz to found the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. The philosopher and distinguished psychiatrist said this of his experience in the industrial killing complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau: “In the camps one lost everything, except the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

To plagiarize another Jews (myself): “You can see why liberals have always preferred Freud to Frankl [my family included]. They retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian fiction that traumatic toilet training is destiny.”

Dr. Frankl lost his beloved young wife in Auschwitz, yet told poignantly of finding her, if figuratively, in a tiny bird that flitted close by. If this man was able to discovered the reality of free will and human agency in a laboratory like Auschwitz; so too can Muslims find the will to respond adaptively to events that enrage them and are indeed unjust: Western foreign policy.

The idea that the Brothers Kouachi and thousands of their coreligionists in the West who’ve joined ISIS were driven by “disaffection” to do their diabolic deeds conjures a skit from the “Life of Brian,” John Cleese’s parody of Judea under Rome. …

The complete column is “The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability.” Read the rest on WND.

UPDATED: Cameron On Criminal Culpability (Vs. Obama)

Britain, Crime, Free Will Vs. Determinism, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason

Disaffected, disadvantaged, disenfranchised: This is how progressives have been depicting the Muslim murderers in their midst. Progressives, after all, come from the school of “thought” whereby crime is caused, not committed. Misbehavior is either medicalized or reduced to the fault of the amorphous thing called society.

According to this pervasive, widely accepted, therapeutic worldview—rapidly colonizing conservative thought, too—the poor barbarians of France’s burbs were driven to do their diabolic deeds.

Feelings are what count in the progressive perspective, for progressivism does not follow logic or a systematic thought process, as Jim Ostrowski points out in his book on the topic.

Likewise do libertarians, for their part, reduce immoral conduct to the fault of the state. Thus the state is said to have driven the barbarians of the burbs into a death cult that counsels killing.

Under the heading “AGAINST DOG-ATE-MY-HOMEWORK ARGUMENTATION, the column “Apartheid South Africa: Reality Vs. Libertarian Fantasy” exposes this libertarian logical contradiction—for if one holds that human beings have free will, thinking of human beings as determined entirely by forces beyond their control doesn’t fit.

From “AGAINST DOG-ATE-MY-HOMEWORK ARGUMENTATION:

For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society, and the lite libertarian saddles the state. In its social determinism, the lite libertarian’s “the-state-made-me-do-it” argumentation apes that of the left’s “society-made-me-do-it” argumentation. Both philosophical factions implicate forces outside the individual for individual- and aggregate group dysfunction.

In other words, Muslims have the capacity and freedom of conscience and will to decide how to respond to events that enrage and are indeed unjust: US foreign policy.

That’s my own political philosophy.

It’s therefore encouraging to see that British Prime Minister David Cameron does not give credit to the-state-made-me-do-it argumentation about the Islam-inspired killing of innocent Europeans. Flanking progressive Barack Obama—who does saddle society with blame for the erupting burbs of France, and contra Ray McGovern—Camerson said:

You can have, tragically, people who have had all the advantages of integration, who’ve had all the economic opportunities that our countries can offer, who still get seduced by this poisonous, radical, death cult of a narrative.”

UPDATE: “Obama: Europe needs to better integrate Muslim communities…”

Obama the progressive feels (for he does not think) that Islam-inspired crime is the fault of the French. They did not dish out sufficient freebies and fraternité.

“Our biggest advantage … is that our Muslim populations feel themselves to be Americans and there is this incredible process of immigration and assimilation that is part of our tradition,” he said.

“There are parts of Europe in which that’s not the case… it’s important for Europe not to simply respond with a hammer and law enforcement and military approaches to these problems.”

MORE moron.