Terra Incognita 21 Starbucks, Serbia, Democracy and Indigenous

Terra Incognita
Issue 20
A Publication of Seth J. Frantzman
Jerusalem, Israel

Website: http://journalterraincognita.blogspot.com/

February 9th, 2008

Starbucks, apartheid and the liberal: Starbucks has separate seating for men and women in Saudi Arabia and enforces the seating by calling on the religious police to remove those who transgress the ‘culture’ of Saudi Arabia. The Archbishop of England wants us to introduce Shariah law and declares “an approach to law which simply said-there’s one law for everybody-I think that’s a bit of a danger.” Why does today’s liberal support such apartheid?

The myth of the indigenous and the origins of racism: Recently scholars have decided to label the Palestinians the ‘indigenous’ people of Israel. How did they become indigenous? The myth of ‘indigenous’ people is connected to the Blood and Soil parties of pre-Nazi Germany and they gave rise to myth of the Aryan nation. While there are truly ‘indigenous’ people in the Americas and Australia, it is a myth that people in Asia or Europe are ‘indigenous’ and any insinuation of such a thing inevitably implies other people are not indigenous and thus are not authentic or genuine and therefore, as in Rwanda, deserve to be killed. That is a dangerous things for Scholars to insinuate and they should be ashamed of themselves.

How did real events become 'national myths' or why we should be proud to call ourselves Serbs: The world is waiting in anticipation for Kosovo independence. The same world declares Serbia’s attachment to Kosovo a ‘national myth’ and describes it as a ‘seminal narrative’ of the Serbs and Europeans ask “are [Serbs] at least ready to abandon their sacred myth?” While we condemn the Serbs for loving their history we might not have noticed that their history also includes fighting the Nazis. The Serbs were one of the few European people to have done so. Europeans call Serbian history a myth because Europeans dare not confront the fact that most European countries collaborated with Nazism. They would like to forget that past. The Serbs like to remember it, and the Serbs should be proud to do so.

The Paradox of Democracy: Democracy creates the very seeds of its own destruction. From Weimer Germany to Bhutto’s Pakistan the weaker democratic regimes have tolerated and fostered anti-democratic forces. When the time has come to confront them it has been to late. Is this a paradox for democracy? What can one do when the enemies of democracy use the democratic system in order to destroy it?




Starbucks, apartheid and the liberal
Seth J. Frantzman
February 8th, 2008

In the 1980s the liberals boycotted companies that did business in Apartheid South Africa. We all celebrated that. We thought it was so important to show businesses that doing business with racism would have consequences. But that was the 1980s, when Republicans still believed in balancing the budget and liberals still believed in democracy and civil rights.

All that has changed now. The liberal has undergone a transformation. While he claims to detest religion he fawns and becomes misty-eyed when some lets the words ‘Mohammed the prophet’ roll off the tongue. Liberals like Archbishop Rowan Williams have proclaimed Shariah law the answer to England’s problems. But the greatest liberal sin is that it countenances the evils in Saudi Arabia and supports companies that do business there and in the Gulf and in Iran.

Starbucks is one such company. Starbucks runs coffee shops in Saudi Arabia and Jews are not allowed to purchase coffee in them. Its not really that Jews aren’t allowed, but since Jews and Christians are not allowed in Saudi Arabia, for all intents and purposes Starbucks does not let Jews purchase its coffee. Starbucks makes sure to conform to Saudi Nazi law and segregates its restaurant. Men in one section. Women in another. ‘Families’ in another. This is the Starbucks way. As Brandom Borrman, a company spokesman notes, “Starbucks takes pride in respecting different cultures, and as a global company with locations in 44 countries, we recognize that religious customs, social norms and laws will vary among the communities where we work”

On February 4th an American woman of Jordanian extraction who wears “an abaya and a headscarf, like most Saudi women, out of cultural respect” was arrested for sitting in the family section of Starbucks with a man who was not her husband. She was bundled into a taxi and taken to prison by the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a 10,000-strong police force charged with enforcing dress codes, and sex segregation.

No liberal will protest this. Human Rights Watch will not protest it. The U.N will say nothing. Amnesty International will say nothing. The Liberal will do nothing. No one will boycott Saudi Arabia or Starbucks or anything because of this. That is the world we live in. Those liberals who protested on behalf of the rights of Blacks in the American South and those liberals who boycotted South Africa and those liberals who boycott Israel will not lift a finger in this case. Why? This is the new religion of the liberal. “cultural respect”. “religious customs, social norms.” This is how the liberal lives his life. It is how the west lives its life.

I would have liked to have seen such a world confronted with Nazism. The liberals like to write books like IBM and the Holocaust. I had one such liberal roommate who, after reading that book, complained and complained in the most shrill way that IBM and ‘American corporations’ had been in bed with the Nazis. Except for Henry Ford however American corporations didn’t believe in Nazi ideas on race. American companies like IBM were in Germany to do business, sort of like Starbucks in Saudi. American companies accepted Nazi law out of a similar respect for “culture” and “social norms.” So why do the liberals judge them so harshly? Why did the liberals judge companies that did business in Apartheid South Africa so harshly? They were respecting the “culture” of South Africa and the “social norms.” What is the problem with such social norms. Blacks and whites ought not to be together, after all different cultures think differently. So if some cultures think that blacks and whites should develop separately what is wrong with that? Women and men ought not to sit together, after all some men are offended by the presence of menstruating women. So what is wrong with that? Some people abhor the presence of Jews, with their long noses, hunched backs. Why should Jews and gentiles mix? Certainly there should be a separate place for both. Separate lines, separate eating areas. What is wrong with a culture that thinks Jews and women and blacks and gays should have their separate area, or should simply not exist?

I don’t have to answer these questions. I am not a liberal. We conservatives were called ‘racist’ because we didn’t boycott South Africa. We were all called ‘racists’ because our corporations worked in Nazi Germany before the war. But who is more racist; the conservative who went to war against Nazi Germany or the liberal who countenances the evils of Saudi Arabia and supports them under the guise of ‘culture’? Who is more racist, the conservative who, in his heart opposed the regime of South Africa but didn’t boycott companies that did business there or the liberal who wholeheartedly supports cultural relativism and supports Saudi Arabia.

The world has indeed reversed itself. Liberals call themselves progressive and open minded and yet they shop at Starbucks and they say Saudi has a right to do as it wants because it has a different ‘culture’. Conservative Foxnews runs stories daily about the discrimination inherent to Islam. The story about Starbucks cannot be found at the BBC or CNN websites. Instead the BBC includes a lively point by point explanation of why Islamic Law will be a benefit to England and why it is truly a legal system of ‘equality’ that guarantees “women rights”. The same good liberal Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who supports Gay marriage and calls Israel an ‘apartheid state’ is the same one who says “an approach to law which simply said-there’s one law for everybody-I think that’s a bit of a danger”. Yes Mr. Williams, that was the same argument used by the Apartheid government of South Africa. It is funny to see what liberalism has become. Thank you, Mr. Williams, for articulating in such a concise manner the new message of liberalism and ‘progressives’. We conservatives beg to differ, we beg to think that, yes, one legal system under which all are equal before the law, is preferable to a different system for blacks and women and gays and Muslims. Such a legal system was enshrined in the Declaration of American Independence in which the it was noted that “All men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inaliable rights.” One would have never imagined that the people who would come and take those rights from us would be the left and the ‘open minded progressives’.

Who is the liberal today? Who is the progressive? Why is it open minded to accept Nazism?



The myth of the indigenous and the origins of racism
Seth J. Frantzman
February 2nd, 2007


The use of the word indigenous has become more common, but lest we be fooled by this new word, we should realize it is merely a semantic device of the liberal, one whose origins are in racist ideology and one that is used today to sow hatred and division in the world.

The idea of the indigenous, which translates as “originating and living or occurring naturally in an area or environment” or as “innate, intrinsic,” is not new. According to Wikipedia “the term indigenous peoples has no universal, standard or fixed definition, but can be used about any ethnic group who inhabit the geographic region with which they have the earliest historical connection.” Furthermore the adjective indigenous has the common meaning of ‘having originated in and being produced, growing, living, or occurring naturally in a particular region or environment’. Therefore, in a purely adjectival sense any given people, ethnic group or community may be described as being indigenous in reference to some particular region or location. However some scholars have decided that ‘indigenous’ like ‘racism’ has more to do with power than fact. One defines ‘indigenous’ as “a politically underprivileged group, who share a similar ethnic identity different to the nation in power, and who have been an ethnic entity in the locality before the present ruling nation took over power” (Greller, 1997). There have been international conventions on indigenous people including a famous declaration on the rights of the indigenous in 1957 and a Convention concerning indigenous and tribal peoples in 1989. This latest one noted that:
“(b) peoples in independent countries who are regarded as indigenous on account of their descent from the populations which inhabited the country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs, at the time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present state boundaries and who, irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions.
2. Self-identification as indigenous or tribal shall be regarded as a fundamental criterion for determining the groups to which the provisions of this Convention apply.”
Thus the U.N, which runs these ‘conventions’ on indigenous people basicaly sums up the problem with a note that ‘self-idenitification’ is enough for a group to be ‘indigenous. Since this is not a very useful definition we should move foreard and see how scholars have decided to use the term. Professor Sandra Sufian, author of a book on land reclaimation in Israel entited ‘Healing the Land’ noted in a description of her book that: she addressed “contested questions of social organization and the effects of land reclamation upon the indigenous Palestinian population ."(The book implies that the Zionists were ‘racist’ in trying to cure Malaria and rid the land of malarial swamps that affected both Jews and Arabs. Ironically the author does not condemn the Turks for similar attempts at land reclamation or those attempts made by the Lebanese Arab land owning Sursuq family. To Sufian the Sursuqs were more ‘indigenous’ than the Jews.) When this author confronted the ‘scholar’ about her use of the word ‘indigenous’ and pointed out that the Palestinians are no more indigenous to Israel than the Jews are to Spain or the Afrikaners to South Africa and that no scholar claims Arabs are indigenous to Egypt, Iraq or Sudan, places they arrived in at the same time as they arrived in Israel she replied that:
“I use the term indigenous in the book to refer to those populationsthat were born and lived in the land of Palestine (i.e. the Arabpopulation and those Jews born in Palestine), not those that immigrated(the majority of Jews belonging to the Zionist movement). This is thedistinction that most scholars that I know of who work on Israel/Palestinemake.”

Thus we see that indigenous is not so much a term with a scientific definition but rather a political semantical tool used by ‘scholars’ and liberals and leftists in order to impugn and discredit certain people and encourage other people to claim that they are ‘authentic’ and thus encourage violence and genocide between groups of people. What is most fascinating is the current leftist obsession with defining those they support as ‘indigenous’ and those they hate as ‘foreign interlopers’ is merely a repetition of something that has taken place before.

Beginning in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Land and Soil and Blood and Soil parties that came into being in Europe and elsewhere in the west between 1850 and 1950 were responsible for the racist hatred that led to the Second World War. R Walter Darre who was born in 1895 to a German father and Swedish mother became the main ideologue behind the German idea of Blut und-Boden or ‘blood and soil’. The argument was that the Aryan Germans were the natural and authentic inhabitants of Germany, the indigenous people, and that they were fighting unnatural elements such as Jews. They used pseudo-science to prove this. In a supreme irony modern leftists have tried to use DNA tests to prove that Palestinians are related to the Canaanites, thus repeating this pseudo-science-racism.

What is most fascinating is if one considers the way in which Germans romanticized the Native Americans such as Tecumseh and used them as part of their Nazi ideology of ‘blood and soil’ one sees a direct link to the racism inherent in applying the word indigenous in an injudicious manner.

It was not so long ago that the only people known as indigenous were the ‘First Peoples’ of Canada, the Native Americans of the United States and the Aboriginals of Australia. Later the term spread to include many native groups in South America. In a sense any group that Toynbee might have considered a ‘fossil’ was included in this list i.e. people who were original to the land. Archeology theoretically proves that the Native American tribes such as the Apache are direct descendants of the original people to inhabit the Americas. They are thus indigenous. The same is true of the Inuit and the Aborigines.

But for the rest of the world, including Africa, vast migrations, war and genocide have left few traces of the ‘original’ people. Jared Diamond has shown how even places such as Africa have experienced great migrations of people such as the Bantu. With the exception of groups like the Basques there are few people today living where they have lived for five to ten thousand years.

The imposition of the semantical use of ‘indigenous’ upon people who are not indigenous in any way is a scholarly way to revive the old Nazi theories of blood and soil. There is absolutely no other way of understanding why scholars would label Palestinians as ‘indigenous’ and not do the same for all the other people in the world. The Palestinians are as ‘indigenous’ as the Turks are to Turkey, which is to say neither is indigenous. The great irony is that scholars would purposely label Palestinians indigenous in order to discredit Jewish attachment to the Holy Land and thus imply that Jews are not ‘indigenous’. Is it a surprise that modern western scholars would create the same myths as the Nazis regarding the Jews? Is it a surprise that scholars would be at the forefront of pseudo-scientific DNA tests, trying to ‘prove’ that the Palestinians are descended from the Canaanites and trying to ‘prove’ that the Jews are not ethnically homogenous and thus not descendants of the Israelites and thus the Jews, in the best Hitlerite understanding of the term, are a rootless, wandering people without a land. It is no surprise. Perverted Scholarship was at the forefront of Nazism. Nazism had many academic intellectuals who believed wholeheartedly in it. From Heidegger to Rosenberg it was chock full of intellectuals and professors. It had its scientists and social theorists. That is what Nazism was: it was a racialist cleansing based on scholarly theories about cleanliness applied to the nation as a whole. Today’s scholarships also leads us in this direction. By labeling certain people ‘indigenous’ it implies those people have greater rights than others and that they are an ‘authentic’ nation, unlike a ‘proposition’ nation in the words of Darre. The authentic people thus have a right to murder and slaughter the ‘foreigners’ and the ‘colonizers’. Europeans love their race theories. They love to go around the world looking for ‘authentic’ tribes. People have pointed out how European anthropologists have done the same with Bedouin and Gypsys. Scholars label some Bedouin ‘authentic’ while others are not ‘true’ Bedouin. They label some Gypsys as ‘true’ Gypsys. This is a scholarly charade. It is a dangerous charade for scholars to pretend to know what is ‘authentic’ when dealing with a country like Rwanda. When one labels the Hutus as ‘authentic’ possessors of the land or as ‘indigenous’ and says the Tutsis are ‘foreigners’ then suddenly it gives the Hutus the intellectual and scholarly excuse to commit genocide. This is precisely what happened in 1994 in Rwanda. This was scholarship and anthropology in its highest form. The same anthropological pseudo-science employed by the Nazis.

People do not like to think that their professors are Nazis. Professors like to use the word ‘Nazi’ about politicians and the military but most students would never countenance the idea that their professors are at the forefront of racialism and Nazi race theories. But today’s professors, especially in some of the social sciences, are in fact delving into this field. Their decision to begin labeling people ‘indigenous’ based solely on politics is a Nazi-like decision. The decision by Prof. Sufian to claim that the only people ‘indigenous’ to Israel were those people born in the country before 1917 or 1948 is a precise replication of the Vichy law that declared half the Jews of France to be ‘foreign immigrants’. In 1940 when the Nazis asked for the lists of French Jews, the Vichy regime retroactively declared that Jews who had not been French citizens since the early 1930s were not ‘French’ and thus were not ‘indigenous to France’ and thus could be deported to the gas chambers. Is it a surprise that today’s intellectual apes the Vichy? Scholarship can be a dangerous thing. In the wrong hands it is loaded with many vicious, racist and discriminatory statements that should be critiqued. When a scholar says “this is the distinction that most scholars that I know of who work on Israel/Palestinemake” one should be very weary. There is no such thing as ‘most’ scholars. There is no such thing as a distinction. The distinctions made today by scholars are those that will tomorrow be used as excuses for genocide.



How did real events become 'national myths' or why we should be proud to call ourselves Serbs.
Seth J. Frantzman
February 2nd, 2007

The headline at Haaretz on February 2nd read 'Serbs vote on a national myth'. The article refers to the vote in Serbia that is overshadowed by the coming declaration of independence by Kosovo and its Albanian chauvinist-terrorist government. The 'myth' refers to the battle of Kosovo Polje, the historic battlefield where the ancient state of Serbia met its fate against the Ottoman Turkish hordes. On that day in 1389 the Serbian forces under Tzar Lazer faced 40,000 Ottoman soldiers under the command of Murad I. That Lazar and and Murad died is a fact. That the Serbs lost is a fact. That it was a Serb nobleman named Milos Obilic who killed the Ottoman Sultan is widely accepted. That Lazar spoke to an angel before the battle and the angel gave him a choice of heaven on earth or heaven up above is part of the 'myth'. But just because stories regarding supernatural events surrounding a historical incident doesn't make the incident itself less genuine. This is the confusion that revisionist historians who glory in tearing down 'national myths' revel in. They seek to impugn history by taking every event that people hold dear and condemning the event based solely on the fact that people hold it dear.

Jesus is derided as fake when his existence is most likely a fact. That he was not the son of a virgin or that he did not bring people back from the dead might be said to be part of a Jesus 'myth'. But once again we see that people seek to castigate Jesus the fact simply because un-provable events surround his existence. That Joseph Smith was a real person is a fact. That he founded the Mormon church is a fact. That he found secret tablets buried in a forest and that an angel named Moroni helped in translated that is part of the Mormon theology and is thus part of a 'myth'.

Our modern historians seek to take all things that have attached themselves to historical memories and destroy them. The historical ride of Paul Revere, which actually took place, is derided as a myth. But the only thing mythical about it is that he may not have been the only rider who warned the colonists of the British troop movements. That there was a Boston Massacre is a fact. That only six men died is also a fact.

But why is the mythmaking of others not subjected to the same skepticism by western revisionists? The Albanians of Kosovo also have their national myths. Why are their elections not derided as being based on 'myth' and their history not impugned by claims that it is based on 'myth'. Much of the national histories of the Palestinians, black South Africans, Albanians and Irish is based on myth. The histories of Israel, England, the Afrikaners and Serbs are not more myth ridden than others. Yet we have come to accept that where the Palestinian history is genuinely made up of massacres and suppression the Israeli history is primarily a 'Zionist legend' or 'myth'. Tom Segev speaks of the 'myth' of 1948. The myth he refers to is the Israeli war of independence when a small band of well trained Jewish militias drove out the Arab armies. The 'myth' is that they were a small band and that they were a militia and that the Arab forces constituted armies. History has supposedly shown us that the Jewish forces were not as outgunned as originally thought and that despite the potential of the Arab countries to recruit men their armies were actually quite puny. But it doesn't mean 1948 is a myth. If it is a myth for anyone it is the Palestinians who have turned it into a national tragedy in which they all became refugees. They have turned Deir Yassin into their Boston Massacre or their Kosovo Polje if you will. Yet we do not often hear that the Palestinian elections are based on a national myth. Why? When they vote about the 'right of return' are they not voting on a myth?

Every western history is today directed at 'exploding' national myths. The Magna Carta is derided as a bourgeoisie scam. Greek democracy is shown to be undemocratic. The battle of Tours is said to have made Europe intolerant rather than having saved it from the Islamic hordes. The Barbarians who opposed Rome are said to be more civilized than the Romans. Surely historians have claimed the English defeat of the Spanish Armada is a myth. Oddly enough this epic encounter hasn't become a myth, perhaps because most English today have forgotten about it. But the ingredients of mythmaking were there: A gargantuan fleet of warships funded by the Pope and led by the greatest generals of the greatest power in Europe, Spain. All thrown against a tiny Protestant kingdom led by a weak and feeble woman whose country could barely muster a few regiments of foot soldiers to defend the island. And yet after days of skirmishing with English pirates turned admirals, the Spanish fleet was dashed by a storm and destroyed. That’s a myth people could be proud of. Except there is one problem. Its not a myth. It actually happened. The only part that is mythical is the fact that the queen was not weak and feeble, despite the fact that she herself claimed she was when addressing the troops on the cliffs of Dover ("I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm… we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people."). 360 years later the magazine Punch would depict Churchill as a latter-day Francis Drake playing bowls while awaiting the signal that the Nazi menace had launched the invasion of England. Were it not for the recordings of his famous broadcasts we might be convinced by some historian that Winston was but a myth.

Leftists and academics speak of myths because they themselves do not believe. Their lack of faith in God has meant that they find all things to be as the Bible is to them. While academics speak proudly of the 'prophet' Mohammed and lavishly tell the tales of mythical aspects of Islamic history such as the 'Golden Age of Muslim Spain' they do not wax so eloquently about our own history or heritage. It is strange that a lack of faith in God causes a person to deride facts so easily. The secular critique in faith is that it is full of superstition. They claim that science in the answer. But if they were so devoted to science, rather than fiction, then why would they pervert history and pervert even language by calling genocide 'peace' and calling murder 'justice'? This is the enigma of liberalism. Whereas it claims to seek truth it admits readily that there is no truth and that all things are 'relative' and in doing so it makes myths of new things and derides the old things as 'myths'. But which is more of a myth: Kosovo Polje or claim that terrorists are really 'militants' and 'freedom fighters'. Which myth has been responsible for more deaths: the story of the Angel Moroni or the claim that terrorism is caused by poverty? I'll take Moroni over terrorism any day of the week, even if it is improbable that an angel's name would rhyme with a type of lunch meat.

The condescension liberals use to describe other people is fascinating. Haaretz writer Assaf Uni describes how Serbia's "seminal narrative" was "enhanced by the Serbian Orthodox Church, perhaps forgetting that the seminal 'narrative' of every religion and people has been 'enhanced' which is what makes it a myth in the first place. The very use of the word 'narrative' to describe history is the liberal way of implying that there is no truth. Its odd the liberals don't speak of a 'John Kennedy' narrative when speaking about the 1960s or a 'black civil rights narrative' when speaking about the civil rights movement. If there is no truth perhaps John Kennedy is still alive, along with Elvis, rather than living on a dead man hovering over American politics alongside his utopian myth called Camelot. Uni asks whether the Serbs "are at least ready to abandon their sacred myth." One wonders why liberals won't abandon theirs? When liberals abandon their myths, for instance about American genocide of Native Americans, or their narratives about Kennedy, perhaps conservatives could be encouraged to compromise. Another arrogant liberal, Edward P. Joseph of the notes in his article in the Herald Tribune that "Serbia has lost years of productive activity while mired in anachronistic debates, most related to Kosovo. The Serbian electorate is now as concerned about historic budget slashing as it is about ancient history, but it too is marked by bouts of irrationality." He ponders whether the Serbs ready "to rid the country of its nationalistic shackles and to join the community of democracies that still stand ready to welcome them." What lies and hypocrisy. The liberal first condemns Serbian democracy for being democratic, in the sense that Serbs dare to have elections and debate things close to their heart. Perhaps Serbs wonder why in the United States democracy takes the form of one upsminship on who opposes abortion more. The condemnation of Serbia for being concerned about its 'ancient history' is interesting coming from Europeans. Perhaps if England is prepared to give up London or France would like to surrender Paris then the Europeans can tell Serbia to give up part of her country. Its odd that almost a million American died to save the Union and yet American leftists are happy to ask other countries to divide themselves and split themselves apart. And those same leftists dare to eulogize Lincoln. They should be mourning Jefferson Davis given their penchant for partitions and breakaway republics and succession. But the greatest hypocrisy is that the left is ordering Serbia to be more democratic while the same left is in love with Shariah law and Saudi Arabia. Why does the culture of moral-relativism not apply to Serbia. Perhaps its form of government and its elections are part of its 'culture'. What will it gain by joining the 'community' of western democracies who so undemocratically bombed the Serbian people and slaughtered Serb civilians and countenanced the ethnic-cleansing of Serbs? I would not join such a club. The western democracies, the same countries that gave in to Hitler and cheered him while the Serbs were going into the hills to form partisan bands in 1940. It is the west that should be joining Serbia, not the other way around. But the west is always quick to forgive former Nazis, in fact the west elects them to run the U.N, but the west will never forgive a country like Serbia that is proud of having fought the Nazis and proud of having fought the imperialist Turks.

In 1389 the Serb militants and freedom fights, unhappy about the poverty that would be accorded them under Ottoman colonialism and not wishing to be enslaved by Islam rose in battle against the cursed foe. Their prince accepted a kingdom in heaven as opposed to one on earth and his men were slaughtered. The Ottoman Sultan, far away from his debauched Harem that included princesses from Europe and other female slaves, was cut down by a Serbian sword and thus prevented from raping and enslaving anymore Slavs. Serbia lived under Ottoman colonial rule for more than 400 years. That liberals would still like it to be occupied by Islamic imperialism is no surprise. But like the blacks of Southern Sudan the Serbs preferred independence to slavery. Their sin was that they chose to assert themselves when Europeans had tired of the 'old ways' of nationalism. Thus while Europe had cleansed itself so perfectly of minorities like the hated Jews, the Serbs who dared protect their homes in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo were condemned as the new 'Nazis' and like the Jews they were relegated to the 'past'. In the words of Toynbee, they were a 'fossil' civilization. And fossils belong in museums, alongside myths.


The Paradox of Democracy
Seth J. Frantzman
February 2nd, 2008.


The paradox of democracy is that the greater freedom you grant people the more they hate you. In short, if you want to keep people loyal you should use a firm hand with them and make dissent punishable by death. Iranians are fanatically loyal. The Russians were loyal to Stalin. The Germans were loyal to Hitler. People loved the Shah, until he started to let them protest. The people loved Franco. All dictators are widely adored, until they start to let the people run wild, or as the British said of the empire ‘run amok’. After the velvet revolutions everyone always said how they had always ‘secretly’ hated the dictators such as Ceacescu, but in reality they loved him.

Why does this paradox exist? Why do states that grant women equal rights and the greatest freedoms find that many of those women prefer to be sold as sex slaves to brothels in foreign countries than remain in their own country? Why do they find that those women prefer a Muslim husband in Saudi and prefer loyalty to some other country such as Cuba, than their own? Why does one always find that regimes that allow the greatest openness, such as the Wiemer republic, engender their own destruction because the people hate and critique them the most? Why are the most extreme democracies with the most freedoms inherently weak and self hating?

Why do the great critiquers always come from democracies while dictatorships rarely produce them? The answer is simple: democracy is not conducive to loyalty and success. The Roman Republic was a failure. It is no surprise the Roman Empire was more successful and lasted longer and controlled more people. All democracies have proven to be failures. The current fad of democracy in Europe, Africa, Latin America and the far east merely bares this truth out. They will all fail in good time. They will be done in by their low birthrates, immigration, intellectuals and extreme freedoms that encourage people to hate the very thing that gives them the right to hate. This is the paradox of democracy; the right to hate. Democracy and its freedoms implicitly encourage people to tolerate the intolerant and to allow those who would subvert democracy to preach the very subversion of the system that allows them to preach thus. This is the evil, the cancer, the sickness, and the undoing, the lies at the heart of all freedoms: the desire to be rid of those freedoms. The dogmatism found among those ‘liberals’ in the west, the ardent desire to hate so many things, their mass protests against benign things such as Globalization, and the way in which they march in lock step merely shows the degree to which ‘liberalism’ and its supposed support of Democracy is merely a mask for the pursuit of dictatorship and the denial of freedom, the very freedom that allowed it to gain popularity in the first place. This is always the conundrum of the dictatorship and the democrat. The greatest dictatorships are always derived from those movements who first gained popularity under a regime that granted them freedom. Communism and Nazism were both the products of a free society that allowed these movements to prosper on the streets, in the halls of power and in the academy. The direct result of such movements is always the most extreme curtailment of freedom. The same was true of the Islamist regime that took power in Iran in 1979, it was engendered when the state allowed the smallest bit of freedom. The creation of Fidel Castro’s monstrous regime in Cuba and the regime of Hugo Chavez all stem from the previous regimes’ tolerance of freedom. Fugencio Batista, reviled by leftists and liberals and democrats, was far more democratic than Castro’s regime. The Batista ‘dictatorship’ lasted a mere ten years, Castro’s has lasted almost 50. This is what freedom produces: dictatorship. Freedom also produces the admiration for dictatorship. Leftists the world over campaigned for democracy while at the same time supporting Communism, Castro and Communist parties, showing the direct link between the support for democracy and the support for its overthrow go hand in hand, for only in a democracy can the seeds be lain for the communist, fascist or Islamist seizure of government. The present support after 2001 for ‘democracy’ in the Muslim world has shown, once again, that democracy results in the coming to power of those who would destroy democracy. Thus the creation of a democratic system in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Egypt will eventually result in a similar Castro-like dictatorship that will be far more brutal than those that proceeded it. Thus the relative ‘freedom’ of the Mubarek-Abbas-Siniora-Maliki regimes will result in the barbarism of a Saudi-Taliban style Islamist regime. Lest one forget how the Taliban emerged from the rubble of ‘democracy’. Lest one forget that the most brutal regime in Pakistan’s history, that of Zia al Huq, came about because of Bhutto’s liberalization. Nawaz Sharif resulted in the emergence of Musharref and Musharref’s eventual liberalization has already resulted in the death of Benezir Bhutto.

Shall we play the record again? On January 30th, 2008 the Jerusalem Post published a lengthy letter to the editor from a Saudi woman by the name of H.A. She had disguised her name lest she be beheaded for having relations with the Zionist entity. She takes great pride in her country “I want to point out this is the land that Islam was introduced in; the land the prophet was born in, the same land that contains Mecca and Medina, two of the holiest sites in Islam. It makes sense not to allow another religion to be practiced in such a sacred place.” She takes great pride in her ‘religion’; “While it is true that men can marry up to four women, there are still consequences that comes with it. First, this is a part of our religion which gives no one the right to mock us about it.” She takes great pride in her country’s education system: “AS FOR OUR education, it is well on its way to becoming one of the best in the world.” She takes great pride in the clothing women wear in her ‘religion’: “Yes I do wear an abaya, but we do not necessarily have to cover our hair or faces; again this is a personal and cultural choice…, abayas are not a big deal to us, we actually embrace it and design lovely abayas that portray our personalities.” She takes great pride in her ‘freedom’: “Our way is our choice. Nothing is forced upon us.” She takes great pride in everything to do with her life and her country: “I am happy in Saudi. My life is not any different that it was in the United States. One day my country will rise and shine above all, and I am sure when that happens the world will suddenly want to befriend us.” This woman is evidently a very educated woman in her country and she is surely an example of an ‘empowered’ woman. She lives in the most repressive dictatorship in the world, one in which she, as a woman, may not even drive a car, and one in which she, as a woman, may not leave the country without the permission of her husband or male guardian. Yes she has pride in it. In the freedom loving west you would be hard pressed to find an empowered feminist woman who is well educated and who loves the west in the same manner this woman loves her country. Most well educated western women hate their countries, protest against them and are full of nothing but critique for their own religion, heritage, leaders, form of government, and history.

This is the paradox. Give people freedom and they hate you for it. Teach the slaves to read and they will read Locke and they will come to demand freedom and then they will kill you for it. Nat Turner learned to read. Spartacus no doubt was exposed to education and so was the leader of the great slave rebellion on Barbados in the 19th century. Teach the poor to resent their lives, as Marx did, and they will come for you in the night.

Empowerment seems like it merely teaches people to down tools and take off their chains. But in truth empowerment and freedom is merely a tool for the destruction of freedom. Who led the American revolution? It was not the uneducated poor. It was not the slaves and the native Americans. It was the wealthiest, most well educated men who resented, in truth, those freedoms granted to them by the crown. They demanded more freedoms. In truth the American revolution is one of the few examples where the ends were not worse than the means. The means is freedom. Often the end is tyranny. John Wilkes Booth believed as much when he shot Lincoln. It was precisely the freedom granted by Lincoln that allowed men like Booth to survive the Civil War.

So how to understand this? A dictatorship educates people like H.A in Saudi and they become rapid nationalists. A religion that denies women basic rights and subjugates them finds that the greatest defenders of that religion, known as Islam, are women. Muslim women in Europe, where they are free supposedly to do as they please, choose the headscarf and their own subjugation as a way to define themselves and a way to show pride in their religion. Western women, granted the same freedoms, choose to work as strip clubs and pose nude as a way to express themselves and they speak of how ‘empowering’ it is to be ‘masters of our own bodies’. This is the paradox. Give the dog food everyday at a given time and the dog is obedient. Feed the dog irregularly and give it the freedom to play with other dogs and to hunt its own food and it will come one day and gore its owner. This is, in affect, the parable told by Orwell in Animal Farm, although he did not realize it. The farmer in the story is only thrown out of his farm because he has been lax with his beasts, rather than harsh.

The moral of story is too fold. Dictatorships result from the granting of too much freedom. Dictatorships ensure their own survival because they create a slavish devotion to themselves and a burgeoning patriotism among their citizens. Attack a dictatorships such as Stalin’s Russia or Islamist Iran and the people, no matter how suppressed, will rally to the flag. Attack a democracy, as Hizbullah did to Israel or Bin Laden did to America, and the democracy will doubt itself and hate itself and many of its members will have understanding and support for the enemy.

America has waged two world wars in defense of democracy. It successfully defeated the German monarchy and the Nazi dictatorship. The result of those wars has been the theory that a democracy, despite its self critique, is better prepared and more flexible when fighting wars against dictatorships. It is not given to self delusion and it prevails on the battlefield when the chips are down. Israel is the ‘evidence’ for this equation. It has beaten back Arab dictatorships again and again.

But some forget that America did not wage war without first taking its gloves off. It rounded up Japanese and German nationals. It imprisoned them. Had they rebelled they would have been shot. Had they tried to make common cause with the enemy they would have been shot. Yet today given our present degree of freedom, must of our national consciousness makes common cause with the enemy. Our greatest celebrities, wealthiest people and tallest intellectuals make common cause with the enemy. The enemy is Islam. Make no mistake. That is what the entire world struggles against. There is no coexistence between Islam and the World. There cannot be. Wherever there is Islam there is dictatorship and rape and genocide. Wherever there are non-Muslims there is diversity, democracy and tolerance. That is what the world is made up of. There is Saudi Arabia and there is America. These are the twin poles that are emerging in our world. We deny it. We pull the wool over our eyes. The American President visits the den of Satan in Riyadh. The question is: has our freedom crippled us to the degree that we can no longer even see the enemy? This is not like other wars of the 20th century where armies fought and there were borders. This is a war between two ideologies. On the one hand there is an ideology of hate. An ideology that seeks to conquer the world and make all of us slaves. It seeks to force us to submit to a false god, a god of hatred and a god of genocide. It seeks to make us love a book which tells the story of a child molester, a slaver, a rapist and a murderer who encouraged his followers to wage unending war against others in order to take their women and booty. On the other hand there are the free peoples of earth. These are all the people who do not adhere to this religion called ‘Islam’. There are no ways of being a member of both. Just as there is no way to be a communist and a democrat and there is no way to be a Nazi and a democrat, there is no way to be a Muslim and a member of the world at the same time.

So while the American president cavorts in the pleasure palaces of Saudi, while he is served water by slaves of the Saudi regime, we ask ourselves: which is better, democracy or dictatorship? Do we need a dictatorship in the west in order to foster patriotism and love for our country? Do we need a dictatorship in order that our leaders will no longer sip from the blood stained chalice of the Saudis? What will it take before our politicians stop demanding we ‘talk to Syria and Iran’. There is no talking to be done. We did not talk with Hitler and we all know what talking to Staling got us. FDR talked to Stalin and he sold the souls of the people of Eastern Europe to him in exchange for ‘peace’. It was peace at too high a price, just as Czechoslovakia was peace at too high a price in 1938.

The same liberals in the west who damned the United States for defending dictators like Pinochet, Saddam and the Shah are the same ones who demand we ‘talk’ to Iran and Syria. Why? Why are their good dictators and bad dictators? Why are their Batistas and Castros?