This reminds me of Noah Carl’s “diversity trilemma” where you “can pick two out of the following three: social stability, civil liberties, non-selective immigration. If you want social stability and civil liberties, you have to be picky with immigration. If you want civil liberties and non-selective immigration, you won’t get social stability. And if you want non-selective immigration and social stability, you’ll have to infringe civil liberties”
We are clearly deep into option 3, whilst maintaining the lie that “hate speech” and “hate crime” are somehow an expression of liberalism.
I'm not entirely sure where this quote comes from but it seems to fit too:
"The common feature which unites the activities most consistently forbidden by the moral codes of civilized peoples is that by their very nature they cannot be both habitual and enduring, because they tend to destroy the conditions which make them possible."
In my next newsletter I'm going to thank my top referrers who are davew and jamesthompson1 - Let me know either of you if you object to being mentioned.
Welcome to Budapest, where Jews go to synagogue without fear, Catholics go to mass without fear, gay men hold hands in public without fear, and the EU withholds money because the country lacks "liberal human rights".
For crime and safety, I'll take Budapest over Boston or Berlin any day.
It is also easily overlooked that the real devil is utopian, mechanistic thinking. At a conceptual level that is what drove Holocaust. And in the modern West’s increasingly manic reaction to such events there are more than grains of that sort of thinking. Forced diversity, breaking down all binaries and an insistence on ideological purity is superficially different from an insistence on racial purity, but at a deeper level it is the same thing.
Another quote
“In his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, the Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet breaks down how generalized anxiety, often produced in part by overly mechanistic thinking, can lead to a (narcissistic) psychological need to exert more and more control over the external world – and ultimately to the delusional need to control all of reality itself. An individual or society’s “flight into [this delusion’s] false security is a logical consequence of the psychological inability to deal with uncertainty and risk.”
The man most likely to be Britain's next Prime Minister has a Jewish wife and children, and removed the whip pretty sharpish from Abbott after her letter.
Quite why, despite this, he served on Jeremy Corbyn's frontbench is another matter.
May be we have to redefine what a liberal society actually is. If we allow the kind of mass immigration that leads to social tensions of all kinds, including antisemitism - the wonder of 'diversity' - and if none of this had been given real democratic consent with either a referendum in favour of immigration and a multi-ethnic society, or at least political parties stating that aim in their manifestoes, then in what sense is our British society liberal - except at an entirely dysfunctional and fake level? So coherent Hungary where Jews feel safer is actually more liberal.
A few years ago, in Germany, someone said to me: "I believe that the Jews are cursed by God and are never permitted to own land again."
Now, what do you think: Was that person (a) a Neo-Nazi, (b) an AfD politician, or (c) an Iranian Muslim postgraduate student? Answers on a postcard please!
(To be fair, I should note that my interlocutor has since cut out that sort of talk. Living and working in a white-collar environment in Germany has mellowed them - or made them more prudent in conversation.)
To halt violent anti-Semitic acts, surely one should identify the perpetrators. Is this coming from the far right or from militant Islamists, who identify the policies of Israel’s governments with their fellow citizens who happen to be Jews?
Because of immigration, and also population implosion, Western Europe is no longer West European. It is changing hands.
Some rather absurd people seem to think that because Western Europe will always be geographically the western part of Europe, it will always have West European liberal values.
But if a leftie cafe's lease expires - and the cafe's new lease is given to white nationalists - those going to the cafe for Marxist discussion will be badly disappointed, even though the cafe is physically almost unchanged.
A good article, except for one or two collapses into the infectious Collective Guilt and Collective Apology that have run riot in recent years.
Security around British synagogues isn't a reflection on our society; only on the bad actors within our society.
As for the shame of European civilisation for the Holocaust, next time you meet Mt European Civilisation, you'll have to tell him to be thoroughly ashamed of himself for it.
And also for slavery, empire, racism, homophobia, misogyny, climate change...
The security around, at least, the central synagogue in Budapest is not negligiable , however (far from it); and, while currently not what they were, there is a (not as influential as it was 10-15 years ago) strand of the Hungarian nationalist movement (most obviously encapusulated as one of the incarnations of Jobbik) that has made a point of building up friendly ties with the Iranian state, twinning towns with them, etc, which one might reasonably think of as threatening to Jews in Hungary.
And there have been occasional government-sponsored love-ins with Erdogan's Turkey and Sisi's Egypt too (most bizarre once to walk around Budapest and see Egyptian flags on every lamppost around the Danube banks) And there is no shortage of blatant antisemitism of a more traditional European kind in Hungary, although it is at least currently less violently menacing than the form now found in France or increasingly the UK....
I think the only places I've been in Europe in which I've been able to go into working synagogues without any obvious hint of a security presence are Tbilisi and Odesa. Both of which have other substantive problems.
The reaction to Abbot’s letter is a bit over the top. She was merely rephrasing the American ideological cant that racism is perpetuated only by white skinned people and experienced exclusively by non white skinned people. The strangest reference was to Irish people not being subjected to historical racism, which is surely nonsense, but caused less furore.
It’s more complicated than you think. Some Jews are pleased about Muslim immigration. Pinchas Goldschmidt, former Chief Rabbi of Moscow, explaining that Muslims ‘are our natural allies’ against ‘old Europe’, which, I suppose, can only mean Christian Europe:
Ed, Orban has destroyed democracy in Hungary and his use of Soros’s image on (not free and fair) election posters was clearly anti-semitic.
Soros advocates an open society. Does he really advocate open borders (i.e. no restrictions on immigration whatsoever)? If he does, please point me to the evidence.
This reminds me of Noah Carl’s “diversity trilemma” where you “can pick two out of the following three: social stability, civil liberties, non-selective immigration. If you want social stability and civil liberties, you have to be picky with immigration. If you want civil liberties and non-selective immigration, you won’t get social stability. And if you want non-selective immigration and social stability, you’ll have to infringe civil liberties”
We are clearly deep into option 3, whilst maintaining the lie that “hate speech” and “hate crime” are somehow an expression of liberalism.
I'm not entirely sure where this quote comes from but it seems to fit too:
"The common feature which unites the activities most consistently forbidden by the moral codes of civilized peoples is that by their very nature they cannot be both habitual and enduring, because they tend to destroy the conditions which make them possible."
In my next newsletter I'm going to thank my top referrers who are davew and jamesthompson1 - Let me know either of you if you object to being mentioned.
Welcome to Budapest, where Jews go to synagogue without fear, Catholics go to mass without fear, gay men hold hands in public without fear, and the EU withholds money because the country lacks "liberal human rights".
For crime and safety, I'll take Budapest over Boston or Berlin any day.
It is also easily overlooked that the real devil is utopian, mechanistic thinking. At a conceptual level that is what drove Holocaust. And in the modern West’s increasingly manic reaction to such events there are more than grains of that sort of thinking. Forced diversity, breaking down all binaries and an insistence on ideological purity is superficially different from an insistence on racial purity, but at a deeper level it is the same thing.
Another quote
“In his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism, the Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet breaks down how generalized anxiety, often produced in part by overly mechanistic thinking, can lead to a (narcissistic) psychological need to exert more and more control over the external world – and ultimately to the delusional need to control all of reality itself. An individual or society’s “flight into [this delusion’s] false security is a logical consequence of the psychological inability to deal with uncertainty and risk.”
The man most likely to be Britain's next Prime Minister has a Jewish wife and children, and removed the whip pretty sharpish from Abbott after her letter.
Quite why, despite this, he served on Jeremy Corbyn's frontbench is another matter.
May be we have to redefine what a liberal society actually is. If we allow the kind of mass immigration that leads to social tensions of all kinds, including antisemitism - the wonder of 'diversity' - and if none of this had been given real democratic consent with either a referendum in favour of immigration and a multi-ethnic society, or at least political parties stating that aim in their manifestoes, then in what sense is our British society liberal - except at an entirely dysfunctional and fake level? So coherent Hungary where Jews feel safer is actually more liberal.
A few years ago, in Germany, someone said to me: "I believe that the Jews are cursed by God and are never permitted to own land again."
Now, what do you think: Was that person (a) a Neo-Nazi, (b) an AfD politician, or (c) an Iranian Muslim postgraduate student? Answers on a postcard please!
(To be fair, I should note that my interlocutor has since cut out that sort of talk. Living and working in a white-collar environment in Germany has mellowed them - or made them more prudent in conversation.)
To halt violent anti-Semitic acts, surely one should identify the perpetrators. Is this coming from the far right or from militant Islamists, who identify the policies of Israel’s governments with their fellow citizens who happen to be Jews?
Because of immigration, and also population implosion, Western Europe is no longer West European. It is changing hands.
Some rather absurd people seem to think that because Western Europe will always be geographically the western part of Europe, it will always have West European liberal values.
But if a leftie cafe's lease expires - and the cafe's new lease is given to white nationalists - those going to the cafe for Marxist discussion will be badly disappointed, even though the cafe is physically almost unchanged.
A good article, except for one or two collapses into the infectious Collective Guilt and Collective Apology that have run riot in recent years.
Security around British synagogues isn't a reflection on our society; only on the bad actors within our society.
As for the shame of European civilisation for the Holocaust, next time you meet Mt European Civilisation, you'll have to tell him to be thoroughly ashamed of himself for it.
And also for slavery, empire, racism, homophobia, misogyny, climate change...
The security around, at least, the central synagogue in Budapest is not negligiable , however (far from it); and, while currently not what they were, there is a (not as influential as it was 10-15 years ago) strand of the Hungarian nationalist movement (most obviously encapusulated as one of the incarnations of Jobbik) that has made a point of building up friendly ties with the Iranian state, twinning towns with them, etc, which one might reasonably think of as threatening to Jews in Hungary.
And there have been occasional government-sponsored love-ins with Erdogan's Turkey and Sisi's Egypt too (most bizarre once to walk around Budapest and see Egyptian flags on every lamppost around the Danube banks) And there is no shortage of blatant antisemitism of a more traditional European kind in Hungary, although it is at least currently less violently menacing than the form now found in France or increasingly the UK....
I think the only places I've been in Europe in which I've been able to go into working synagogues without any obvious hint of a security presence are Tbilisi and Odesa. Both of which have other substantive problems.
The reaction to Abbot’s letter is a bit over the top. She was merely rephrasing the American ideological cant that racism is perpetuated only by white skinned people and experienced exclusively by non white skinned people. The strangest reference was to Irish people not being subjected to historical racism, which is surely nonsense, but caused less furore.
It’s more complicated than you think. Some Jews are pleased about Muslim immigration. Pinchas Goldschmidt, former Chief Rabbi of Moscow, explaining that Muslims ‘are our natural allies’ against ‘old Europe’, which, I suppose, can only mean Christian Europe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2JQYPY7ueU
Lawrence Auster, a Jewish convert to Christianity, explaining ‘Why Jews Welcome Moslems’:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002368.html
Wonderful piece.
Ed, Orban has destroyed democracy in Hungary and his use of Soros’s image on (not free and fair) election posters was clearly anti-semitic.
Soros advocates an open society. Does he really advocate open borders (i.e. no restrictions on immigration whatsoever)? If he does, please point me to the evidence.