Saturday, April 28, 2012

One journalist sees the bigger picture

Marine Le Pen, the nationalist candidate in the recent French elections, came in third with 18% of the vote. An English journalist, Richard Waghorne, thought her policies flawed but nonetheless supported her as the only candidate representing a self-governing French nation.

Richard Waghorne has taken the lead in adopting this stance - it is a break from the usual practice in which mainstream journalists toe the two party line. Waghorne summarised his position this way:
Marine Le Pen remains, among an imperfect choice in urgent times, the only candidate capable of saving France’s control over her finances, borders, and identity. She is the only candidate available to conservative voters advancing the case for an exit from the Euro, the one measure which if executed carefully might yet save France from being swamped by foreign debts amassed elsewhere in a European project largely of its own making.

Waghorne isn't taken in by Sarkozy:
Nicholas Sarkozy has campaigned on the theme of a ‘Strong France’. His speeches consciously allude to the Fifth Republic’s founder General de Gaulle, praising an ‘Eternal France’ Sarkozy himself has never been in danger of embodying. Rather, he is the latest architect of the decline of French democracy to something bordering on irrelevance.

The most urgent, the most assiduously avoided challenge facing France is the erosion of its self-government. Sarkozy’s European policy has abetted the long-desired European federalism of the French political class.
Even though one article doesn't change a lot, it does at least set a precedent - so well done Richard Waghorne.

7 comments:

  1. The Daily Mail is a wonderful neswpaper with much high-quality material. I believe they do this because they are intently curious about their surroundings and will take what they can get. They are unaffiliated with any particular ideology except that of curiosity and finding out the truth.

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  2. "A few years ago Mark Leonard wrote a gushing pro EU book "Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century."

    It's now April 2012 and the EU is falling apart with 5 of it's member countries about to collapse under massive debts, most through unrealistic and bloated social programs,citizen tax evasion,corruption,and just plain bad management.The EU's Great Satan the U.S,. provides $100 billion p/a for their defence and over 85,000 American troops are stationed in Europe and NATO can't even accomplish a minuscule ten day bombing in Libya without American help. If Europe had to pony up for their own defence they would be even in more dire straights.

    Another reason that the EU will definitely not run the 21st.century is because in Europe the Muslim population has tripled over the past 30 years. One third of all European children will be born to Muslim families by 2025 and already cities in Europe have majority Muslim populations.
    Egyptian Muslim cleric Ali Abu Al-Hasan: In Several Decades, 'Europe Will Become a Single Islamic State,'" which will know nothing but 'There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is His Messenger.'"And with even a near Muslim majority population Europe will live under Sharia Law because they will have no choice.
    And as Christoper Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe....
    Europeans are politically weak, explains Caldwell, because their leaders have capitulated to political correctness and ideals of diversity, which render them unable to criticize any aspect of Islam. Rather than critically engaging with the Islamic culture of many immigrants, Europe has "bent over backward" to accommodate Islam: "For the first time in modern history, European societies were taking pains to allow residents -- and, increasingly, citizens -- to lead their entire lives in a foreign culture."

    And with Muslim rule, Europe will stagnate and will fade in to a long dark 7th.century Muslim night,which will leave America pretty much alone to defend what is left of the rest of the western world.

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  3. The two leading Presidential candidates think the Le Penn voters can be won over simply with the odd symbolic gesture like keeping the full Islamic face covering illegal. If that's the best they can do they've certainly missed the point.

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  4. On the issue of demographic decline and the extinction of nations, there is a recently-published piece over at the Quadrant site entitled "How Civilisations Die".

    In the article, the author, Dr. Mervyn F. Bendle, cites with optimism figures showing that, unlike the shrinking populations of European countries, Australia's population is on track to expand to between 31 million and 43 million by mid century. While he concedes that Australia shares with Europe the spectre of an ageing populaton due to sub-replacement fertility rates, Bendle claims we are in a much healthier position, demographically, due to ongoing large-scale immigration helping to counter the low birth rate among the native-born population. Bendle argues that Australia should be embracing such mass immigration on the grounds that it not only offsets the effects of an ageing population but also creates "economic dynamism." The alternative, he warns us, is an Australia "sparsely populated by an aged, enfeebled and increasingly vulnerable poplation sustained by a failing welfare state, and facing a world in demographic crisis and economic and political turmoil."

    Leaving aside the fact that immigration is not a long-term solution to an ageing population (the huge number of immigrants we would need to keep importing ad infinitum to maintain a stable old-age dependency ratio makes it an unworkable pyramid scheme), and that there is no positive correlation between population size and economic dynamism (many of the world's most advanced, innovative, prosperous economies are those with small and stable national populations), Dr. Bendle seems to overlook the fundamental truth that immigration on such a scale does not replenish a country’s population - it replaces it. Dr. Bendle would presumably like to see Australia preserve its Western cultural heritage. Yet by advocating what amounts to a policy of population replacement, he is also supporting, ipso facto, the replacement of the culture, traditions, heritage, and values of that population. To quote the late American conservative writer Samuel Francis: "You cannot expect to switch populations and demographic majorities through massive immigration ... and not expect also to switch civilisations and symbols that represent them. You cannot expect millions of aliens from one civilisation to enter the country, abandon all loyalties and values of their old civilisation and sign up with all of those of the new one they have entered."

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  5. [Continued from above]

    Perhaps Dr. Bendle genuinely believes Australia can remain, culturally, a Western country even if the majority of its population are no longer of Western (i.e. European Christian) origin. However, it seems like a stretch to assume that a population comprised mainly of peoples from non-European lands will care much for the maintaince of a civilisation built by Europeans. To doubt the likelihood of Australia replacing its population through mass immigration and remaining the same Western society it has been since the first British settlers brought their way of life to this continent is not to argue that “race determines culture,” nor is it to deny that cultural assimilation can occur on an individual level. It is unrealistic, however, to expect such assimilation to occur when (1) Australia is receiving a never-ending influx of non-Western peoples, leading inexorably to Australians of European descent becoming a minority of the population in the coming decades; (2) an aggresive, state-sanctioned doctrine of multiculturalism is attacking, in almost every field of public life, our Western culture as illegitimate; and (3) Australian society, largely as a result of the multicultural movement, is no longer passing its Western cultural heritage and historical memory on to its youth, let alone to newly-arrived immigrants, and has practically abandoned the assimilationist ideal.

    Far from being a surivor of the demographic winter that is setting over the Western world, Australia, if it continues down its current path of population-replacing immigration, will be among one of the first Western nations to voluntarily extinguish itself.

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  6. I'll have to read Bendle's column more carefully, but my first impression is that he's not being honest in his optimism.

    He writes, for instance, that Australia's pioneering frontier spirit consisted of men wanting to hand over something to their children, but he then recommends a policy which would mean handing things over to those born overseas rather than to one's own children.

    It doesn't end up being consistent or logical.

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  7. What the left just cannot understand is that there are really two types of migrants to Australia. One group will be law abiding and the other group will not only not assimilate, but will do everything to change our very way of life to that of 8th.century deranged third world tribespeople.
    Thirty-eight Middle Eastern men have been prosecuted on terrorism-related charges in Australia "A $10 million counter-terrorism offensive will be launched across Sydney in a bid to rescue young people involved in violent extremist groups and potential home-grown terrorism. The Federal Government announced it will pay community groups to identify young people involved in fanatical groups who pose potential terrorism threats." ..Daily Telegraph...- How long before they succeed and pull off the big one? ".No money for our handicapped, homeles, schools, medical research and hospitals etc. but unlimited funds for anyone who can get here, even if you are from a violent fanatical religous society who will think nothing of killing your naive hosts.

    And every week more boats arrive carrying even more from Afghanistan, Iran.Iraq etc.These people have destroyed or "lost "their papers and I.D. but giving in to the refugee rights mob they will soon be released in to our cities where they will go on welfare for years and and produce many more children as they do in their culture, and who will undoubtably, join gangs,and even more Australians will pay the price, some with their life for those "fruits of multiculture"
    One has to wonder when the rights of migrants ends and the rights of Australians begins?

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