[Garsh, and when I pointed all of this out in my first book back in 2007, I was vilified. Pay attention to the new NRA ads, and maybe, just maybe, some of us will survive. For all of you women who think Hillary will be a good leader because she will protect you from the GOOPers’ “War on Women”, please think again. For all of you Blacks who think that you are being oppressed at Mizzou, guess what awaits you under Islam.
Semper Fi and God Bless America!]
Bracken: Tet, Take Two – Islam’s 2016 European Offensive
Posted on November 29, 2015 | 52 Comments
Merkel2-2
TET, TAKE TWO:
ISLAM’S 2016 EUROPEAN OFFENSIVE
By Matthew Bracken, November 2015
More than a decade ago I wrote my first novel, Enemies Foreign and Domestic. Part of my motivation was to establish my bona fides at forecasting social, political and military trends. I didn’t like the direction America was heading, and I wanted to warn as many readers as possible about some of the dangers I saw coming. At the end of 2015, I hope that my past success at prognostication will encourage people to pay heed to this essay.
As we roll into the New Year, we are witnessing the prelude to the culmination of a titanic struggle between three great actors. Three great social forces are now set in motion for a 2016 showdown and collision that will, in historical terms, be on par with the First and Second World Wars.
Two of these great social forces are currently allied in a de facto coalition against the third. They have forged an unwritten agreement to jointly murder the weakest of the three forces while it is in their combined power to do so. One of these two social forces would be content to share totalitarian control over large swaths of the globe with the other remaining social force. One of these social forces will never be satisfied until it achieves complete domination of the entire planet. So what are these three great social forces? They are Islam, international socialism, and nationalism. Allow me to explain the salient aspects of each, and how they relate to the coming 2016 cataclysm.
1. ISLAM
Islam is similar to a self-replicating supercomputer virus. It is a hydra-headed monster, designed by its creators to be an unstoppable formula for global conquest. It’s almost impossible to eradicate, because it has no central brain or control center. Islam is like a starfish: when you cut off a limb, another grows to replace it. The names of the Muslim leaders, and the names of their Islamic groups, are transitory and ultimately unimportant. Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are succeeded by Al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State, but they will all pass from the scene and be replaced by others. While Muslim leaders and regimes have come and gone, Islam itself has remained steadfastly at war with the non-Muslim world for 1,400 years.
Islam does not recognize secular national boundaries. To devout Muslims, there are only two significant realms of the world. First is the Dar al-Islam—the House of Islam, which is the land of the believers. The other is the Dar al-Harb—the House of War, which must be made Islamic by any means, including violent jihad. The expansion of Islam is sometimes held in check for long periods, but more often Islam is on the march, acquiring new territory. Once conquered by Islam, territory is rarely taken back, Spain being a notable exception.
The Muslim world produces almost no books or new inventions. Short of finding oil under their feet, most Islamic nations are backward and impoverished. So wherein lies the power source for Islam’s nearly constant expansion over the past fourteen centuries? The motor and the battery of Islam are the Koran and the Hadith, or sayings of Mohammed. A messianic Mahdi, Caliph or Ayatollah with sufficient charisma can accelerate Islam’s pace of conquest, but individual men are not the driving force.
Secular “Muslim in name only” strongmen from Saddam Hussein to Muamar Qadafi can hold Islamism in check for a period with brutal methods, but strongmen are often assassinated or otherwise removed from power, and in any event, they cannot live forever. Once the secular strongmen are gone, fanatical mullahs are able to stir their zealous Muslim followers into sufficient ardor to reinstall a radical Islamist regime under Sharia Law, according to the Koran.
This pattern of secular strongmen being followed by fanatical Islamist leaders has recurred many times over the past millennia and longer. Do not be fooled by modernists like King Abdullah of Jordan. To the true believer of Islam, any king or strongman is never more than a rifle shot or grenade toss away from being kinetically deposed, and replaced by another Islamist fanatic.
The persistent virulence of Mohammed’s 7th Century plan for global domination means that it is always ready to erupt in a fresh outbreak. Islam is like a brushfire or ringworm infection: it is dead and barren within the ring, but flares up where it parasitically feeds off the healthy non-Islamic societies around it. What produces this uniquely fanatical motivation, from within nations and peoples that otherwise seem devoid of energy and new ideas?
The motivation lies within the words of the Koran and Hadith. Most simply distilled, in the earthly realm, these Islamic texts offer immoral men sanction for thrill-killing, looting, raping, and capturing infidel slaves, and when these jihadists are killed, they are promised a perpetual orgy with seventy-two nubile virgin slave girls in Mohammed’s sick, evil and perverted Muslim paradise. Unlike the Jewish and Christian Bibles, the Koran and Hadith appeal not to man’s better angels, but to the darkest aspects of human nature. (Tellingly, Moses and Jesus are said to have climbed to mountaintops to communicate with their God, while Mohammed received his messages from Allah deep inside a bat cave.)
A meaningful or permanent reformation of Islam is impossible, because a new generation of fanatics, wielding the unexpurgated Koran and Hadith as their weapons, will always declare the reformists to be apostates and murder them. In Islam, the fanatics who are holding the unalterable Koran in one hand and a sword in the other always stand ready to seize complete power and exterminate their enemies.
This latent danger breeds fear and causes nearly all non-Muslims to be carefully circumspect in their dealings with Muslims, lest they lose their heads at a later date. This intentionally fostered fear of Islam is used as a cudgel against those who would otherwise resist its domination. The immutable Koran is the constant fountainhead of bloody Islamic conquest. Radical Islam is the pure Islam, the Koranic Islam, the real Islam.
Anyone who does not understand this bitter reality is dangerously ignorant of the past 1,400 years of human history.
2. INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM
The second great actor or social force is international socialism. It can also be aptly described under the rubrics of leftism, statism, cultural Marxism and communism. These all inhabit the international socialist spectrum. I trace these cultural Marxists at least back to the Jacobins of the 18th Century, a clique of secular humanists who were early globalists aligned with Freemasonry.
The Jacobins moved from Germany to France with a coherent and fully developed plan to engineer a social explosion as a means to take power. The Jacobin destabilization plan became the template for many more bloody “people’s revolutions” to come. Following the French Revolution, we are familiar with Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. We are less familiar with the early 20th Century British Fabian socialists, or the Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, or the German “Frankfurt School” of international socialists, who transplanted their vision to the United States via Columbia University.
Unlike Vladimir Lenin and the Communists, they understood that international socialism’s goals could not be fully accomplished until the strong edifice of Western Civilization was hollowed out and sabotaged from within. In the end, the clandestine international socialist forces which burrowed deep within the Western womb achieved results which were far more permanent than the militarily-imposed revolutionary “war Communism” of Lenin and Mao.
Over the course of the past century, while Communism collapsed in the Soviet Union, the Fabian socialists have been increasingly successful at poisoning the roots of national, cultural and ethnic identity, leaving the inheritors of Western Civilization disorganized and demoralized, with no central belief system to rally behind. Why has this deliberate demoralization and dumbing-down process occurred? The international socialists have believed at least since the French Revolution that it was their duty to impose a top-down feudal order upon the ordinary “dumb masses,” a new world order managed by self-proclaimed experts chosen from among the correctly-educated elites, both for the benefit of the ignoramuses, and as a way to line their own pockets and continue to live an elite lifestyle of wealth and power.
It may seem paradoxical that major corporate and banking interests are deeply invested in the international socialist new world order, but when you untangle the threads it actually makes perfect sense. Today’s international banks and mega-corporations are powerful global actors in their own right, and they are now written into each new international trade agreement. In fact, corporate lawyers author most of the pages of the multi-thousand-page trade pacts, which are now coming down like rain. Trade pacts which were never voted on by American or European citizens, pacts which are taking on the force of international treaty law, superseding even the United States Constitution.
From the Rothschilds of Europe to the Warburgs of both continents, to the Morgans and Rockefellers of America and back to the Hungarian immigrant George Soros, for several centuries, millionaire (and more lately billionaire) bankers have written their own laws and cut their own political deals. Today, they literally create billions of new dollars and Euros per day out of thin air, and pass it over to their cronies. In the United States, the creation a century ago of the Federal Reserve—a privately run central bank of, by and for the interests of a cabal of private banking interests—is a glaring case in point.
In the USA, the heads of global mega-corporations and investment firms donate massively to both the Democrats and the Republicans alike, ensuring favorable treatment in an era of corporately directed crony capitalism. The picture is much the same in other countries. These post-nationalist crony-capitalists recognize no sovereign borders and believe that patriotism is a laughable anachronism.
For example, in America, open-border traitors bribe politicians to pass laws to allow them to import unlimited numbers of H-1 visa foreign workers to directly replace Americans at their very desks and work places, and these traitors do not lose one wink of sleep over it. The traitor class of the international business set calls this “agility,” moving fungible proles, peasants and paupers world-wide to where they can be set to work most cheaply and profitably. Ordinary American middle-class workers and their families are just collateral damage in this process. The reality is not much different in Europe.
These super wealthy open-border corporate and banking elites, who paradoxically steer the forces driving international socialism, are able to bribe their way to success after success in myriad ways. Their wealth and political connections ensure that cooperative young players with future star quality are steered to the right universities, foundations, councils, government agencies and media positions. For example, when you see a talking head on television, and his listed expert credential is that he is a member of the entirely private Council on Foreign Relations who has written articles for their house publication Foreign Affairs, you will know that he is destined for high positions, and doors will magically open in front of him.
Over on the Fourth Estate, the global mass media has been almost entirely subverted, scripted and stage-managed for decades by these über-wealthy elites through a thousand channels greased with kickbacks, no-show jobs, and secret payoffs that are disguised as special stock offerings and private land deals. Media figures morph seamlessly into senior political advisors and corporate board members, adding millions to their portfolios with each well-timed transition. Even many retired generals and admirals eagerly wallow in this swamp of sell-out and sleaze. It should not be a surprise to anyone that so many politicians leave Washington or Brussels as millionaires. Just as it should not be a surprise that long-time CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” was for his entire adult life secretly a leading member of the World Federalist Association, a fact he proudly revealed only after his retirement from in front of the camera.
3. NATIONALISM
Nationalists probably comprise most of the population of the non-Islamic world, but there is no way to know their number with any certainty. Opinion polls are so easily rigged that most of them are useless at best, and they primarily constitute false propaganda and dezinformatsiya on behalf of their sponsors.
Nationalists consider themselves to be first and foremost loyal citizens of a sovereign nation. However, it must be borne in mind that the very concept of nationhood is fairly recent in origin. The division of the globe into distinct nation-states only began in the 17th Century, usually marked by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Since then, the world has been divided by national borders, which often (but not always) coincided with a national ethnic group, language and culture.
This national division was particularly successful on the European continent. Shared Judeo-Christian morality, ethics and values promoted notions of fairness and equal rights, leading over time to the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and racial civil rights. During this period of unleashed human potential, Europeans and Americans enjoyed the greatest increase in overall standards of living ever seen in the history of mankind. Great cities, universities and museums were constructed in Europe and in America. Rising European empires—wealthy, cohesive, confident and highly organized—then conquered or otherwise came to control colonies around the world. America picked up much of the business when the colonial era ended after World War Two.
Happy national outcomes were far from universal. During the 20th Century, Communism rose to take complete power in some countries, notably Russia (as the Soviet Union) and China, but their successes did not lead to an unstoppable avalanche of global revolution, as had been foreseen by Lenin, Stalin and Mao. On the other hand, the slow, grinding “Long March through the institutions” of the traitor-class Fabian socialists (including Gramsci, the Frankfurt School and others) proved far more effective and durable.
By the 21st Century, these cultural Marxist traitor-moles had subverted nearly all of academia, inculcating generation after generation of students with a contempt bordering on hatred for their own national and ethnic identities. Most of the media were also subverted, ensuring that mass communications would always reinforce the politically correct international socialist world view that had already been injected and incubated in the schools and universities.
In this era of mass-brainwashing by the cultural Marxists, Christianity was recast as a retrograde social force, obsolete at best in the modern secular world, and at worst an outright danger to humanity. In the new politically-correct secular religion of humanism, European ethnic and cultural identity became the original sin and the mark of Cain. White European skin meant white privilege, and was transformed into a cause for shame.
Meanwhile, emancipated European and American women aimed toward new goals, which increasingly did not include producing a new generation, and demographic collapse began. Both men and women alike were anesthetized into apathy with 24-hour entertainment transmitted by high-def screens and stereo ear buds planted nearly into their brains. This unceasing fountain of entertainment proved an ideal conduit for mass-brainwashing with politically-correct values and ideas. Thus distracted and demoralized, most Americans and Europeans today seem unable and unwilling to stand up and fight in defense of their diminishing cultural and national identities. Brainwashed “social justice warriors,” the latest iteration of Lenin’s “useful idiots,” hasten the demise of Western Civilization, blissfully unaware of what will follow.
Thus rendered supine, the remaining American and European nationalists constitute the weakest and the most threatened of the three major global social forces. In a few European nations, patriots like Wilders of the Netherlands, Höcke of Germany, Orban of Hungary, Farage of the UK, and Le Pen of France lead a rear-guard defense of their national, ethnic and cultural identities, while constantly being disparaged in the socialist-controlled “liar press” as racists, Nazis and xenophobes.
4. WORLD WAR THREE
Going into 2016, I believe that Europe is primed to become the central theater of a third world war. Like an overstrained zipper suddenly failing and bursting open from end to end, the European conflagration could well reignite simmering conflicts from the Ukraine to the Persian Gulf, due to interlocking alliances (NATO, including Turkey, vs. Russia), and the Sunni-Shia divide (Iran vs. Saudi Arabia, which has been imported into Europe).
Yes, World War Three. But why now?
A recurring strategic doctrine of the open-border international socialists, going back at least to the Jacobins, has been, “Out of chaos, order.” Lenin put it this way, when told that there were bread riots in Russian cities: “The worse, the better.” No “people’s revolution” (instigated and directed by traitor-class elites) has ever occurred on full bellies in happy countries that were at peace.
The international bankers and corporate elites are just as happy to underwrite revolutions, as they are to underwrite other types of war. They have regularly provided loans and armaments simultaneously to all sides of European conflicts, always profiting handsomely no matter which side won or lost, or how many people died. They have also funded revolutions, in order to stir the pot for their future profits by getting in on the ground floor with new regimes.
For example, American bankers funded the efforts of Lenin and Trotsky both before and during their returns to Russia. Once you understand the grand machinations at work behind the forces directing international socialism, this seeming paradox actually makes sense. It’s about control, and brainwashing the idiot proles into the unthinking herd behavior required to manage them under socialism directed from above. But at the very pinnacle of the proletarian worker-bee hive, the controlling nomenklatura elites live like Communist dictators, or Rockefellers, or both at the same time, as they meet at Davos, Aspen, Jackson Hole and elsewhere over champagne and caviar to arrange their next self-dealing international trade agreements.
Now, the elite shot-callers have lit the fuse for the vast social explosion that is imminent in Europe, just as they did in Russia in 1917. How? By throwing Europe’s borders wide open. The Islamist corner of my triad represents a constant threat or push, and Muslims are always eager to fill any demographic vacuum. Their avarice for fresh Islamic conquest is a given or a constant. We see a 1.5-per birth rate among European women, and they see millions of European women with no or worthless husbands, who will soon meet real Muslim men.
The current open-border policies of the European international socialists were intentionally designed to allow hundreds of thousands of culturally and religiously aggressive Islamist fighters and colonists to flood into Europe. The European traitor elites understand exactly what they are doing. They know what will happen. But why do it now?
Twentieth-century Austrian School economist Ludwig Von Mises wrote, “There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.” In contrast, when socialist economist John Maynard Keynes was asked if his self-styled Keynesian credit expansion could continue in the long run, he replied, “In the long run, we are all dead.” Tra-la-la, who cares? It won’t be my problem.
In 2015, the childless homosexual John Maynard Keynes is indeed long dead, but we are still alive, and his “long run” is finally upon us. Now, just before the bank failures begin, seems to be an opportune time for the traitor elites to throw over the table, scattering the cards, chips and cash, while the lights go dark and shots ring out. The evil actors lurking in the background who sometimes engineer major catastrophes always have a plan to escape their worst consequences, including taking any blame, and they even have a plan to profit from the very disasters they created. The first Baron Rothschild, around the time of the Battle of Waterloo, is credited with saying “The time to buy is when there is blood running in the streets.”
Is there any evidence of a concerted effort to deliberately throw Europe into bloody chaos and civil war? I think that there is. Thousand-passenger ferry ships cost tens of thousands of Euros a day to operate. Muslim hijra (jihad by immigration) invaders are receiving free or subsidized passage from Greek isles that are located only a few miles from Turkey, all the way across the Aegean Sea to mainland Greece. From there, chartered buses and special trains speed the migrants from border to border and onward into Germany, France and Sweden, at little or no cost to the muhajirs, or hijra migrants.
Who is paying for the operation of the ferry ships, trains and bus convoys? Who is paying for the smart phones and prepaid debit cards? Who is passing out the hundred-Euro notes seen in nearly every migrant hand, if they are truly arriving destitute after escaping war-torn Syria? Somebody is underwriting the Muslim hijra invasion of Europe. George Soros is spending billions to fund a hundred groups advocating open borders through his Open Society Foundation, so that might be a good place for intrepid researchers to explore.
5. THE TET OFFENSIVE OF 1968
As we roll into 2016, I am reminded of the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive. In January of 1968, before the Tet Lunar New Year celebrations, thousands of Viet Cong fighters were infiltrated into Saigon and other South Vietnamese cities. Their coordinated mass attacks on January 30 came nearly by complete surprise, constituting America’s worst intelligence-gathering failure between 1950 in Korea and 2001 in New York. The experts had all agreed that the VC were too weakened and divided to accomplish mass attacks on a national scale, yet more than 80,000 irregular Communist infiltrators simultaneously struck in more than one hundred towns and cities. The Communists used a declared truce period to launch their attacks, while the American and South Vietnamese forces were on holiday leave. Bitter urban fighting in Hue, Vietnam’s third largest city, lasted for a month. Before they were defeated in Hue, the Communists executed thousands of civilian prisoners, dumping them into mass graves with their hands wired behind their backs.
The Communist bosses in North Vietnam miscalculated that the Viet Cong attacks in the cities would trigger a spontaneous national uprising against the American imperialists and their Republic of Vietnam puppets. This general uprising did not take place, and the VC were largely wiped out by hard-fighting American and South Vietnamese troops. City life went back to what constituted normal in South Vietnam. After Tet, the Viet Cong were largely a spent force, and never regained their former power. (The final takeover of South Vietnam in 1975 was accomplished by conventional NVA troops arriving from the North in tanks and on trucks, after Democrats in the American Congress cut off the resupply of ordnance and fuel to our South Vietnamese allies, leaving them unable to defend their republic.)
Yet back in America, in order to deceive and demoralize America in time of war, “Uncle Walter” Cronkite twisted the story of the Tet Offensive into a tale of rising Communist power and reach, of American military failure, and of the hopelessness of the cause to keep the Republic of Vietnam free from Communist conquest. Why did Cronkite do this? “The most trusted man in America” was secretly a leading propagandist for international socialism, which sees a strong and independent United States as the greatest barrier to their goal of eventual global governance. The case of Walter Cronkite and the Tet Offensive false narrative is just one glaring example of the pervasiveness of the international socialist grip on our mainstream media.
To an American nationalist, Walter Cronkite is a classic traitor, but to a dedicated international socialist, national borders and national sovereignty are no more important than they are to a devout Muslim. To both supranational groups, borders and nations are anachronistic constructs to be ignored, trampled, and discarded over time. Cronkite was a traitor to America, but he is a hero to the cultural Marxists. Typical of his dishonorable breed, Cronkite kept his true allegiance a secret until after he had retired from broadcasting lies and propaganda. I am convinced that the global mainstream media is infested with hundreds of Walter Cronkites today, both in front of and behind the cameras.
6. TET, TAKE TWO
Which brings me to the main thrust of this essay. I believe that Europe is being prepared for a Muslim-jihad version of the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. A vast and concerted act of treason has been taking place across Europe since the creation of the European Union. Under the Schengen Agreement, Brussels promised to guard the outer frontiers of the EU, while abolishing internal border controls. The Eurocrat elites broke the first promise but kept the second, thus opening a wide path for the onrushing Muslim hijra immigration invasion.
Right now, approximately a million new Muslim migrants are engaged in a struggle to find a warm place to sleep in a continent with nothing approaching the capacity to adequately house them. At least 75% of the migrant invaders are Muslim men of fighting age. Native-born ethnic Germans, Swedes and others are being thrown onto the street to provide emergency housing for Muslim “refugees.” Tens of thousands of migrants are currently living in tents, and in temporary shelters like school gymnasiums and underused warehouses.
There will be no means of finding or creating permanent quarters for them before the Central European blizzards come. When the snow is deep in Germany and across Europe, these men are going to enter local houses, demanding to be taken in as boarders—or else. Where it is useful, small migrant children will be held up in front as human shields for their emotional blackmail value; elsewise, they will be discarded. One way or the other, Muslim migrants will be attempting to move inside of German homes and apartments seeking heat and food, and the young Muslim men will be seeking undefended infidel or kafir women to slake their lust (which is their right, under Islamic Sharia law).
In disarmed Europe, any group of a dozen or more cold, hungry and angry Muslim men armed with clubs and knives will be able to enter any German house or business that they like. Worse, there are now reports of vast quantities of firearms being smuggled into Europe by the muhajirs, with cowed European authorities afraid to search the migrants or their baggage, lest they provoke riots. And weapons are not only smuggled in “refugee” baggage: eight hundred assault-style shotguns were just seized in a single truck in northern Italy, bound from Turkey to Belgium. How many truckloads of weapons and explosives have not been stopped?
In Germany, even before the winter snows, the migrants are flash mobbing and looting shops and stores. Seeking to forestall a social eruption, police do not respond until the mobs have safely departed. For now, the German government is paying these store owners for their lost merchandise, but this cannot continue forever. Businesses are closing and Germans are retreating in fear, as the muhajirs learn that they can invade private property and rob Germans without repercussions, convincing them even further of the docile passivity of their hosts, and the inevitability of their ultimate hijra invasion success.
As attacks mount, the German police will nearly always fall out on the side of the traitor-elite politicians who pay their salaries, and they will not come to the rescue of besieged ethnic Germans. At least, not under official orders, or in uniform. This calculated disregard by the international socialist elites for the safety and welfare of ordinary German citizens will in time lead to vigilantism and death squad actions by “off-duty” German military and police personnel. They will be acting against their “hands off the Muslims” orders, which are ultimately emanating from Brussels. And in time, enough firearms will find their way from the military, police and black markets into the hands of ordinary European nationalists for them to mount an armed resistance.
The accelerated pace of the 2015 Muslim hijra invasion was conceived, planned and executed by Quisling traitors comprising the elite leadership of the European branch of the international socialist movement, headquartered in Brussels. To paraphrase British nationalist patriot Paul Weston, if a farmer deliberately inserts a fox into the henhouse, who is guilty of killing the hens?
Now, today, across Europe the stage is being set for the genocide of the weak, confused and defenseless European hens. Former East German Communist functionary Angela Merkel achieves high marks at both Muslim fox insertion and German hen repression. (Meanwhile, former Soviet Communist KGB Colonel Vladimir Putin evolves to become a Russian nationalist who always advances Russian interests, at least as they are perceived by himself and his cronies).
A few days after the Paris attacks, French police commandos fired some 5,000 rounds down an urban street into an apartment set into a crowded block. A year from now, I predict that when police arrive on that street, they could be met with sniper fire, improvised barricades, IEDs and possibly RPGs. In short, Paris, Brussels and many other European cities will in time resemble Beirut during the 1980s.
To understand Europe’s future, simply ask the Lebanese what follows when a nation takes in tens of thousands of angry Muslim “refugees.” Civil war is what happens, even if it begins among the various competing refugee factions. It is a threadbare hope that a wished-for peaceful silent majority of Muslims will be able to influence the radical Islamists away from violence, and thus forestall the coming European Civil War, any more than imagined peaceful silent majorities could have prevented the civil wars in Lebanon, Bosnia, Syria or a dozen other places. Actual peace-loving Muslims will be as insignificant to the outcome of the coming conflict as were any Quaker pacifists hiding in 1944 Berlin. The only significance of the alleged silent majority of peaceful Muslims is that they will serve as living camouflage for the jihadists to hide among.
It is critical to note that none of the examples I just mentioned (Lebanon, Bosnia, Syria) constituted neat bipolar wars between two national state actors. All were three-sided wars—at least. These formulations are inherently unstable and constantly veer toward violence, as temporary alliances of convenience shift and today’s friend becomes tomorrow’s enemy. In this environment of deception, subterfuge and betrayal, the false-flag terror operation becomes a standard operating procedure. It is a simple matter for Group A to conduct a massacre of Group B while wearing the outward uniforms or other insignia of Group C. And it is no trouble at all for Group C to fire a few mortar rounds into the market square of Group A from the territory of Group B. Ethnic cleansing, reprisal operations and mass executions proliferate like mushrooms in this free-booting environment, which is devoid of the behavioral controls normally inherent in a war fought at the national level between two uniformed militaries.
When any non-Islamic country, such as France, attains approximately a ten-percent Muslim population through dangerously naive immigration policies, violence and civil war become a constant threat. Ten percent of a total national population translates into more than fifty-percent of fighting-age men in key urban districts, due to the concentration of Muslims in Sharia-zone ghettos, combined with aging European demographics. Later, these Muslim ghettos will serve as sanctuaries and bastions for the jihadists, until and unless they are finally pulverized with artillery shell fire or aerial bombs. France and Germany will not be exempt from the lessons of history that were hard taught in Beirut, Sarajevo, and Damascus.
Thousands of the recent Muslim muhajirs currently arriving in Europe were schooled in prolonged and savage religious and ethnic civil wars. Today’s Europeans, deliberately brainwashed with politically correct fairytales about the benefits of multi-culturalism, have utterly no idea what horrors await them. Increasing European discomfort will not change the outcome one iota. Just because the Europeans may tire of the irritating presence of Muslims (both new immigrants and native born), the Muslims will never willingly leave Europe. Nor will the Muslim immigrant invaders knuckle under and turn quiet and docile again.
7. A SCORE OF BESLANS
The hard core of the battle-hardened jihadists now fanning out across Europe understands the tried-and-true process of igniting a civil war through terror. They will calculate that the European military and police cannot and will not sustain the battle against an unceasing campaign of terrorism. Brussels cannot remain on virtual lockdown forever without its economy being wrecked. What will happen when a Paris-type attack, or worse, is a daily event in a dozen European cities?
As I mentioned above, just the other day in northern Italy eight hundred combat-style pistol-grip shotguns were discovered in a truck on their way from Turkey to Belgium. Do the math. The Paris attacks were carried out by approximately eight jihadists armed with Kalashnikovs, shotguns and TATP suicide vests (which can be manufactured anywhere there is a kitchen). Now imagine a “Super Tet Offensive,” with every type of target on the hit list from airports to zoological parks, each being assaulted by an eight-man squad of such killers. Some attacks smaller, some larger, from pairs to platoons in strength.
Today, perhaps only a few short months prior to Tet 2016, there is no Islamic high command located in Europe or elsewhere in charge of planning specific terror operations. There is no OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the supreme command of the German Nazi armed forces) planning an Islamic Operation Barbarossa. Hence, there is no command and control structure for Western intelligence to penetrate and disrupt.
Instead of a central brain directing many hands, think of a vast swarm of stinging jellyfish, all moving in loose formation, with the same generalized attack plan in their collective hive-mind. At the end of 2015, individual muhajirs may have only a basic awareness that they are heading to Europe to conduct a great jihad. As D-Day draws nearer, coded messages will proliferate with cryptic references to portentous events from Islamic history. “Get ready, and prepare to conduct major operations” will be the thrust of the online chatter and encrypted wireless messages. In each European city, targets will be individually scouted by local mujahirs in anticipation of a general outbreak of jihad terror attacks.
How many mosques have already received a truckload of shotguns or Kalashnikovs? Run the numbers again: eight jihadists per terror attack, eight hundred weapons per truck, 80,000 Viet Cong fighters in the original Tet Offensive, and an estimated 800,000 muhajirs flooding into Europe. Using radical mosques as clandestine armories is S.O.P in the Middle East, so why would the jihadists not use the same tactics in safe and docile Europe? Out of a sense of fairness and respect for European laws? Please. In the words of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…” And bear in mind that anyplace an AK-47 can be smuggled, so too can a few kilos of Semtex.
Imagine a dozen or even a score of Beslan-type school sieges, all happening at the same time, across that number of European cities. Initially, the first string of major surprise attacks will be coordinated by the most well-organized terror networks using currently unbreakable wireless encryption. Many of the attacks will involve numerous captured hostages, often children, with impossible demands being made to guarantee their safety. Or no demands will be made; just rape and slaughter will ensue, as in the Russian Beslan example. This outbreak of major attacks will be the signal for the general jihad offensive to begin.
The Beslan Massacre happened in 2004 at the hands of yet another killer gang of aggrieved Islamists. Two squads of Chechen Muslim terrorists arrived on the first day of school in a Russian town, using false police vans as camouflage. They took a thousand young hostages and held them for three days. The Muslim terrorists murdered over four hundred innocents, often after rape and torture. Now, imagine twenty ongoing European Beslans, with simultaneous infrastructure and “soft-target” (people) attacks happening everywhere in between.
What Hitler’s Nazis accomplished with Stukas and Tigers and motorized divisions, the Islamonazis will attempt to accomplish by a massive “Tet Offensive on steroids,” overwhelming and stunning the European meta-system into immediate paralysis and first psychological, then material defeat. At least, that is the outcome that the Islamonozis will be striving to achieve. The 1968 Tet infiltration and mass-attack strategy didn’t succeed in Vietnam, and maybe it won’t work in Europe, either. It’s more likely that the hoped-for general uprising by all European Muslims against the kafirs will not be triggered, and it may simply stall and sputter out.
In strategic terms, if nothing else, the 2016 jihad offensive and subsequent civil war in Europe will open up a second major front in the war against the Islamic State, causing NATO and the West to turn their attention inward toward their own survival, and thereby take pressure off the other theaters of war in Iraq and Syria.
And for the Europeans to win the coming civil war, they will have to be at least half as brutally ugly as their Muslim invaders, and that means pretty damn brutally ugly. But while the jihadists will be operating at maximum brutality from day one, the placid and polite European authorities will be starting from far behind in that department. For example: a standard jihadist tactic is to flee from a terror attack straight back into the embrace of their co-religionists in the Sharia-zone ghettos, and hide behind their women and children. Then what will the authorities do? Go in and try to arrest them? (Just joking.) Wait for their next excursion with more terror bombs? Or gut the entire suspected block with shell fire? This is what I mean by damn ugly. The French reaction to the Paris attacks gives a hint of how this phase will run.
Best case scenario, and I don’t see this as likely: the 2016 Islamic Tet attackers will be wiped out the way the Viet Cong were in 1968. But if there are enough simultaneous attacks, in total numbers involving anywhere near the 80,000 or so fighters of the Vietnamese Tet, I can’t see how the present European forces can defeat the jihadists in less than a month, if at all. By very simple math, that number of jihadists means ten thousand Paris-level attacks. Think about that. Ten thousand Paris level attacks! All taking place in the same month, the same week, even on the same day, right across Europe. The politically-correct and overly polite European policemen (and even their militaries, at first) won’t be up to mounting successful counterattacks and rescue operations against a score of Beslans happening in schools, hospitals and concert halls. Not while at the same time, airports, train stations, power plants and other targets are being hit by Paris-sized terror squads right across Europe.
And count on this, for it is a standard tactic used by all Islamonazis in this extremely dirty style of warfare: just like in Beslan in 2004, where the killers arrived in false police vans, in 2016, ambulances, emergency vehicles and other official conveyances will either be hijacked or painted to simulate the real thing. Suicide bombers will arrive in official uniforms to sneak past security. This is a standard tactic, I repeat for emphasis. A jihadist dressed in a policeman’s uniform will drive a hundred-kilo bomb straight into the police headquarters in an official, marked police car. Goodbye, police HQ. (And incidentally, good luck at planning the rescue operation for your town’s local Beslan-in-progress, after your local police HQ is cratered, and much of their crisis leadership is wiped out.)
A few examples: I could go on for pages. The milk truck or bakery van will deliver terrorists to the middle school at mealtime. An ambulance will pull into the hospital’s underground parking garage and detonate. The cement truck won’t be delivering cement. Muslim jihadists are very proud of coming up with ever more clever ways to fool stupid infidels by abusing their naïve faith in official uniforms and corporate logos. The jihadists hurry to sign up for suicide driver school, just for the prospect of exploding a massive bomb inside of a crowd of filthy kafirs, and launching themselves straight into the arms of their seventy-two waiting virgins. This is how they will fight in Tet 2016. Forget this lesson at your extreme peril.
Another painful European history lesson has been largely forgotten since the days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In the 1990s, the IRA forced the British to the peace table when it became clear to all parties involved that the Brits could not prevent car bombs from exploding in the heart of the London financial district, costing billions in repair and lost-opportunity costs after each new blast. Essentially, a competent terrorist organization can hold a modern city hostage in this manner.
A few dozen to a hundred (at most) active IRA terrorist fighters managed to pull off this feat. And they were not even trying to kill people, rather, their goal was to wreck important office towers, with the British economy as their primary target. Usually, the IRA detonated their London car bombs during off-hours in these final terror actions of the Irish Troubles. The Muslim car bombers will not be as considerate in the coming European Civil War. They will strike for maximum civilian casualties, in an attempt to terrorize European leaders into surrender and submission to their Islamist demands.
8. HAMA RULES
I predict that the unfolding European Civil War (after the initial Tet 2016 phase) will comprise a steady escalation from Paris-style rifle attacks and suicide bombers, to snipers, to IEDs, to car and truck bombs. This is why I mentioned the possibility of eventually reducing the Sharia-zone ghettos to ruins by air and artillery bombardment. This will indeed happen, after the car bombs begin to explode in European cities. At that point, an urban civil war loses any vestige of civilized norms. Fortified ghetto bastions that provide sanctuary to Muslim jihad terrorists will be destroyed if the Islamic conquest is to be quelled.
This type of no-quarter urban warfare already has a name, “Hama Rules,” from the 1982 obliteration of that Syrian town. Hama was a Muslim Brotherhood stronghold used to launch attacks against the regime of Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current Syrian strongman. These guerrilla (or terrorist if you prefer) attacks occurred beginning in 1976, and didn’t stop until Hama was reduced to rubble, and at least ten thousand Sunni Muslim Syrians were killed among the ruins.
If the Europeans don’t have the stomach for that level and scale of total civil war, then over time they will be defeated, and either forced to convert to Islam, or forced into subjugated dhimmi status, or they will be executed (if they can’t be put to useful work as slave laborers first). Those are Islam’s unchanging options for defeated male foes, at the pleasure of their Muslim vanquishers. The captured girls and women of the defeated kafirs will be taken as slaves – that is a given. So it will be war to the knife, and knife to the hilt, with no holds barred, and no quarter asked or given.
Going into 2016, a peaceful de-escalation is improbable, not with up to a million fresh muhajirs of fighting age currently cast all about Europe without housing or prospects as winter comes on. This rapid mass influx of hundreds of thousands of unattached Muslim men into Europe is the equivalent of pouring a jug of nitroglycerin down the barrel of a cannon, then loading a double gunpowder charge, ramrodding three or four cannon balls on top, and lighting the fuse. It is the perfect recipe for a disastrous explosion.
The 1968 Tet Offensive involved approximately 80,000 armed Viet Cong infiltrators sneaking into Vietnamese cities and towns, (unnoticed by the “experts” in intelligence, I will add.) How many of the almost a million muhajirs now loose in Europe will take up arms for the cause, after the first initiating wave of Tet 2016 terror attacks? Does anybody really have any idea? There is a point when stealthy hijra transitions into overt jihad, and I believe this will occur in the coming year. Historians will look back and marvel at what I think of as the coming European Jihad Tet Offensive of 2016. Or perhaps they will call it the European Trojan Horse Civil War. (I only hope that they don’t call it The Final Islamic Conquest of Europe.)
Historians will study how this mass hijra invasion, and the consequent Tet 2016 and European Civil War came to happen. The truth is it was an inside job by the traitor class, the cultural Marxist open-border international socialists. First, they numbed and dulled their own compatriots into apathy, before opening the gates to the Islamist barbarians. They injected the paralyzing curare of multi-cultural political correctness into their own societies, in order to render them unable to defend themselves from the planned attack.
In reality, the international socialists and the Islamist forces have agreed upon a murder pact, wherein their common enemy, the nationalists, will be removed as a threat to either of them forever. In 2016, European nations will deliberately be torched, in order to finish off their people’s last remaining notions of national pride and cultural identity. In effect, the coming conflict will constitute an agreement about the dinner menu made between a jackal, a hyena, and a supremely stupid bliss-ninny lamb, who was raised on Utopian multi-cultural fantasies. The lamb believes that by its own sweet example, the jackal and the hyena can be turned into vegetarians—but the choice for the dinner entree is already a foregone conclusion. European nationalists will be shot and stabbed in their fronts and their backs until they go down and are consumed by both of their rapacious destroyers.
And depend on this: standing before the crater, in front of the smoking building, after the tenth car bomb to explode that month, telegenic media traitors will mangle the truth into a false narrative that supports the inexorable spread of international socialism as the only possible solution to the “tragic cycle of violence.” The liar press will call patriots Nazis, and Nazis patriots; they will damn saints and praise mass-murderers. These media presstitutes are loyal only to their traitor-class paymasters, and to their common international socialist vision of global tyranny imposed from above by the all-knowing elites. “Out of chaos, order,” will be in their minds if not on their lips.
9. THE END GAME
If the traitor elites can imagine sufficiently far into the future, then they must surely see international socialism lining up next for its climactic struggle against Islam, which shall be fought atop the still-warm corpse of European nationalism. Will these traitor-elite international socialists be able to hold the line against the ultimate victory of Islamic supremacism in Europe, or anywhere? Let us compare their assets and armaments.
The traitor elites control vast wealth and many levers of power. But will the ready offer of unlimited wealth and fast-track career promotion outweigh the fear of the Muslim assassin, kidnapper, and beheader? Which motivating force will prove stronger in the long run, the proffered bribe, or the kidnapped child and her threatened decapitation? International socialism and world Islamism are both evil totalitarian ideologies rooted in a quest for absolute power, but I believe that more socialists will convert to Islam than the other way around, tending to tip the final outcome in that direction. Why? Because you can live without accepting a suitcase full of Euros or a juicy job offer as a bribe. But you cannot live with your head removed from your shoulders.
Another enduring but rarely examined weapon in the Islamic conquest armory is the offer of amnesty to well-placed infidel leaders who agree to convert to Mohammedism. Can I see Angela Merkel wearing a hijab? Yes, certainly. Whether the badge she wears on her suit is red or black won’t matter to the former Communist, not if it is a matter of saving her neck while retaining her status. Study the history of Islamic conquest, and you will find numerous cases where Western leaders announced—after clandestinely opening the city gates to hijra invasion—that they had already converted to Islam.
As reward for this valuable service, well-placed defectors to Islam are often allowed to preserve their wealth and positions by taking fresh Muslim names and swearing fealty to the new Islamic regime. It’s intentionally made very easy to convert to Islam. The shahada conversion prayer is only a sentence, a handful of words. Sincere inner belief is not required, only publicly outward submission, which is the true (and nearly always obscured) meaning of the Arabic word Islam. Submission.
So when it comes to last-stand defenses, and head chopping time draws near, will the secular humanist international socialists fight to their last breath against Islamism? Not likely, not when simply repeating a silly and trite incantation about Allah and Mohammed can save their inherently dishonorable and traitorous lives. Simply stated, they will submit to Islam.
I think that in the end, Mohammed’s evil and satanic Koranic blueprint for world conquest will prove to be even more virulent and persistent than the evil and satanic blueprint of the international socialists, going back through the Jacobins, Marxists and Communists. The unchanging Koranic blueprint for global domination is still replicating and advancing after fourteen centuries, while the international socialist blueprint is only two and a half centuries old. Based on proven longevity alone, a betting man would have to favor the Islamic formulation for conquest and tyranny over the international socialist version.
And in the event that Islam either destroys or co-opts international socialism, I would expect the strife to continue until there were only Sunni or Shia Muslims left alive. Then there would arise schisms and conflicts among new competing sects, because of the innately violent instructions central to the Koranic blueprint. But without an external host for the parasitic Islamic ringworm to feed upon, (having killed and consumed the golden goose of productive Western society), Islam itself will most likely fester and decay. What would succeed a failed global Caliphate, I can’t imagine. By that time, the last believing and practicing Christians in Europe will be lying cold and forgotten in their unmarked mass graves.
10. ALTERNATIVE ENDINGS
But perhaps the conflict between the three major forces will turn out differently. Perhaps, after the Islamic Tet Offensive of 2016 is turned back, European nationalism will experience a miraculous resurgence, following a rejection of the international socialism which dragged the EU nations toward disaster. Sometimes invading forces badly miscalculate their chances and underestimate the resolve of their enemies, and after sweeping to early success, they are rolled far back from their high-water marks. Napoleon and Hitler in Russia, and the Greek experience in Anatolian Turkey from 1919 to 1922 come readily to mind.
Or perhaps the Islamists will take their jihad a step too far, and a nuclear device or other WMD set off in a Western city might finally provoke a commensurate counter-strike against the nexus of Islam in Mecca and other Muslim holy sites, such as Karbala in Iran. Certainly Vladimir Putin can be expected to evince more steely-eyed resolve than the current crop of effete and dithering Western European leaders.
Two of the Five Pillars of Islam literally revolve around the black moon rock set into the corner of the Kaaba in the center of Mecca. After 1,400 unchanging years, Islam cannot simply erase two of its five pillars and continue with business as usual. “Allahu Akbar” means our god is greatest. If Mecca was turned into a vast, glowing crater, this would be visibly untrue. When the Aztec and Inca man-gods were visibly thrown down by the Spanish conquistadors, those religions and social systems collapsed. If Mecca were to be destroyed, eliminating two of the five pillars, it’s an open question as to what would happen in and to the worldwide Muslim community. “We used to think our god was greatest” won’t be an effective rallying cry. But I don’t suppose I’ll be around to see how this all plays out. For 1,400 years, uncounted millions of Christians and other infidels have died not knowing if Islam would ultimately prevail or be vanquished.
I’m not sure if there is a future ahead for sovereign nation-states as they have been constituted for the past four centuries, especially nations with their own unique histories, cultures and languages. I don’t know if the wealth and influence of the traitor-elite international socialists can overcome the constant threat of terrorism contained within the deadly Koranic conquest plan. And when it comes to how the approaching European storm will affect China and Asia, my crystal ball is cloudy on the other side. It’s hard to imagine a world war extending from Scandinavia to the Persian Gulf not going nuclear at some point. Perhaps the patient and cautious Chinese will simply inherit the ruins of the West. Perhaps they will be drawn into the world war.
No matter what else happens over the coming decade, 2016 is shaping up to be an epic year in European and world history. I hope that whatever develops across the Atlantic might at least provide clear lessons that will be valuable for the defense of a free and sovereign United States of America – including lessons about the extreme danger of importing millions of Islamic muhajirs.
And lastly, thank God—through our Founding Fathers—for the First and Second Amendments to the United States Constitution. Unlike the Europeans, we are at least still free to warn one another of impending dangers, without our being silenced by the traitor elites who operate the levers of state power. And because of the Second Amendment, we will never be pulled down to the ground like helpless lambs by the Islamist hyenas and socialist jackals. When one-too-many ravenous foxes are placed into the henhouse by socialist traitors, in due time both the foxes and the traitors might just get a face full of buckshot.
Just remember: never, ever give up your guns.
You’re going to need them.
So remember: never, ever give up your guns.
You’re going to need them.
ummaheuropa
islam jellyfish
Matthew Bracken was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1957, and attended the University of Virginia, where he received a BA in Russian Studies and was commissioned as a naval officer in 1979. Later in that year he graduated from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, and in 1983 he led a Naval Special Warfare detachment to Beirut, Lebanon. Since then he’s been a welder, boat builder, charter captain, ocean sailor, essayist and novelist. He lives in Florida. Links to his short stories and essays may be found at EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com .
PS: Matt’s essay is running concurrently at Gates of Vienna; volunteers to help in translating this work should sign up there. Please also help spread the word about Matt’s generous offer below:
Justplainbill's Weblog 
Imprimis 9/16 – Restoring America’s Economic Mobility
Restoring America’s Economic Mobility
September 2016 • Volume 45, Number 9 • Frank Buckley
Frank Buckley
Author, The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America
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Frank Buckley is a Foundation Professor at Scalia Law School at George Mason University, where he has taught since 1989. Previously he was a visiting Olin Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, and he has also taught at McGill Law School, the Sorbonne, and Sciences Po in Paris. He received his B.A. from McGill University and his LL.M. from Harvard University. He is a senior editor of The American Spectator and the author of several books, including The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America and The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.
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The following is adapted from a speech delivered on July 11, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.” Today the story of American politics is the story of class struggles. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. We didn’t think we were divided into different classes. Neither did Marx.
America was an exception to Marx’s theory of social progress. By that theory, societies were supposed to move from feudalism to capitalism to communism. But the America of the 1850s, the most capitalist society around, was not turning communist. Marx had an explanation for that. “True enough, the classes already exist,” he wrote of the United States, but they “are in constant flux and reflux, constantly changing their elements and yielding them up to one another.” In other words, when you have economic and social mobility, you don’t go communist.
That is the country in which some imagine we still live, Horatio Alger’s America—a country defined by the promise that whoever you are, you have the same chance as anyone else to rise, with pluck, industry, and talent. But they imagine wrong. The U.S. today lags behind many of its First World rivals in terms of mobility. A class society has inserted itself within the folds of what was once a classless country, and a dominant New Class—as social critic Christopher Lasch called it—has pulled up the ladder of social advancement behind it.
One can measure these things empirically by comparing the correlation between the earnings of fathers and sons. Pew’s Economic Mobility Project ranks Britain at 0.5, which means that if a father earns £100,000 more than the median, his son will earn £50,000 more than the average member of his cohort. That’s pretty aristocratic. On the other end of the scale, the most economically mobile society is Denmark, with a correlation of 0.15. The U.S. is at 0.47, almost as immobile as Britain.
A complacent Republican establishment denies this change has occurred. If they don’t get it, however, American voters do. For the first time, Americans don’t believe their children will be as well off as they have been. They see an economy that’s stalled, one in which jobs are moving offshore. In the first decade of this century, U.S. multinationals shed 2.9 million U.S. jobs while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million. General Electric provides a striking example. Jeffrey Immelt became the company’s CEO in 2001, with a mission to advance stock price. He did this in part by reducing GE’s U.S. workforce by 34,000 jobs. During the same period, the company added 25,000 jobs overseas. Ironically, President Obama chose Immelt to head his Jobs Council.
According to establishment Repub¬licans, none of this can be helped. We are losing middle-class jobs because of the move to a high-tech world that creates jobs for a cognitive elite and destroys them for everyone else. But that doesn’t describe what’s happening. We are losing middle-class jobs, but lower-class jobs are expanding. Automation is changing the way we make cars, but the rich still need their maids and gardeners. Middle-class jobs are also lost as a result of regulatory and environmental barriers, especially in the energy sector. And the skills-based technological change argument is entirely implausible: countries that beat us hands down on mobility are just as technologically advanced. Folks in Denmark aren’t exactly living in the Stone Age.
This is why voters across the spectrum began to demand radical change. What did the Republican elite offer in response? At a time of maximal crisis they have been content with minimal goals, like Mitt Romney’s 59-point plan in 2012. How many Americans remember even one of those points? What we remember instead is Romney’s remark about 47 percent of Americans being takers. That was Romney’s way of recognizing the class divide—and in the election, Americans took notice and paid him back with interest.
Since 2012, establishment Republicans have continued to be less than concerned for the plight of ordinary Americans. Sure, they want economic growth, but it doesn’t seem to matter into whose pockets the money flows. There are even the “conservative” pundits who offer the pious hope that drug-addicted Trump supporters will hurry up and die. That’s one way to ameliorate the class struggle, but it doesn’t exactly endear anyone to the establishment.
The southern writer Flannery O’Connor once attended a dinner party in New York given for her and liberal intellectual Mary McCarthy. At one point the issue of Catholicism came up, and McCarthy offered the opinion that the Eucharist is “just a symbol,” albeit “a pretty one.” O’Connor, a pious Catholic, bristled: “Well, if it’s just a symbol, to Hell with it.” Likewise, the principles held up as sacrosanct by establishment Republicans might be logically unassailable, derived like theorems from a set of axioms based on a pure theory of natural rights. But if I don’t see them making people better off, I say to Hell with them. And so do the voters this year. What the establishment Republicans should ask themselves is Anton Chigurh’s question in No Country for Old Men: If you followed your principles, and your principles brought you to this, what good are your principles?
September 2016 • Volume 45, Number 9 • Frank Buckley
Had Marx been asked what would happen to America if it ever became economically immobile, we know what his answer would be: Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. And also Donald Trump. The anger expressed by the voters in 2016—their support for candidates from far outside the traditional political class—has little parallel in American history. We are accustomed to protest movements on the Left, but the wholesale repudiation of the establishment on the Right is something new. All that was solid has melted into air, and what has taken its place is a kind of right-wing Marxism, scornful of Washington power brokers and sneering pundits and repelled by America’s immobile, class-ridden society.
Establishment Republicans came up with the “right-wing Marxist” label when House Speaker John Boehner was deposed, and labels stick when they have the ring of truth. So it is with the right-wing Marxist. He is right-wing because he seeks to return to an America of economic mobility. He has seen how broken education and immigration systems, the decline of the rule of law, and the rise of a supercharged regulatory state serve as barriers to economic improvement. And he is a Marxist to the extent that he sees our current politics as the politics of class struggle, with an insurgent middle class that seeks to surmount the barriers to mobility erected by an aristocratic New Class. In his passion, he is also a revolutionary. He has little time for a Republican elite that smirks at his heroes—heroes who communicate through their brashness and rudeness the fact that our country is in a crisis. To his more polite critics, the right-wing Marxist says: We are not so nice as you!
The right-wing Marxist notes that establishment Republicans who decry crony capitalism are often surrounded by lobbyists and funded by the Chamber of Commerce. He is unpersuaded when they argue that government subsidies are needed for their friends. He does not believe that the federal bailouts of the 2008-2012 TARP program and the Federal Reserve’s zero-interest and quantitative easing policies were justified. He sees that they doubled the size of public debt over an eight-year period, and that our experiment in consumer protection for billionaires took the oxygen out of the economy and produced a jobless Wall Street recovery.
The right-wing Marxist’s vision of the good society is not so very different from that of the JFK-era liberal; it is a vision of a society where all have the opportunity to rise, where people are judged by the content of their character, and where class distinctions are a thing of the past. But for the right wing Marxist, the best way to reach the goal of a good society is through free markets, open competition, and the removal of wasteful government barriers.
Readers of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose will have encountered the word palimpsest, used to describe a manuscript in which one text has been written over another, and in which traces of the original remain. So it is with Canada, a country that beats the U.S. hands down on economic mobility. Canada has the reputation of being more liberal than the U.S., but in reality it is more conservative because its liberal policies are written over a page of deep conservatism.
Whereas the U.S. comes in at a highly immobile 0.47 on the Pew mobility scale, Canada is at 0.19, very close to Denmark’s 0.15. What is further remarkable about Canada is that the difference is mostly at the top and bottom of the distribution. Between the tenth and 90th deciles there isn’t much difference between the two countries. The difference is in the bottom and top ten percent, where the poorest parents raise the poorest kids and the richest parents raise the richest kids.
September 2016 • Volume 45, Number 9 • Frank Buckley
For parents in the top U.S. decile, 46 percent of their kids will end up in the top two deciles and only 2 percent in the bottom decile. The members of the top decile comprise a New Class of lawyers, academics, trust-fund babies, and media types—a group that wields undue influence in both political parties and dominates our culture. These are the people who said yes, there is an immigration crisis—but it’s caused by our failure to give illegals a pathway to citizenship!
There’s a top ten percent in Canada, of course, but its children are far more likely to descend into the middle or lower classes. There’s also a bottom ten percent, but its children are far more likely to rise to the top. The country of opportunity, the country we’ve imagined ourselves to be, isn’t dead—it moved to Canada, a country that ranks higher than the U.S. on measures of economic freedom. Yes, Canada has its much-vaunted Medicare system, but cross-border differences in health care don’t explain the mobility levels. And when you add it all up, America has a more generous welfare system than Canada or just about anywhere else. To explain Canada’s higher mobility levels, one has to turn to differences in education systems, immigration laws, regulatory burdens, the rule of law, and corruption—on all of which counts, Canada is a more conservative country.
America’s K-12 public schools perform poorly, relative to the rest of the First World. Its universities are great fun for the kids, but many students emerge on graduation no better educated than when they arrived. What should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor. One study has concluded that if American public school students were magically raised to Canadian levels, the economic gain would amount to a 20 percent annual pay increase for the average American worker.
The U.S. has a two-tiered educational system: a superb set of schools and colleges for the upper classes and a mediocre set for everyone else. The best of our colleges are the best anywhere, but the average Canadian school is better than the average American one. At both the K-12 and college levels, Canadian schools have adhered more closely to a traditional, conservative set of offerings. For K-12, a principal reason for the difference is the greater competition offered in Canada, with its publicly-supported church-affiliated schools. With barriers like America’s Blaine Amendments—state laws preventing public funding of religious schools—lower-class students in the U.S. must enjoy the dubious blessing of a public school education.
What about immigration? Canada doesn’t have a problem with illegal aliens—it deports them. As for the legal intake, Canadian policies have a strong bias towards admitting immigrants who will confer a benefit on Canadian citizens. Even in absolute numbers, Canada admits more immigrants under economic categories than the U.S., where most legal immigrants qualify instead under family preference categories. As a result, on average, immigrants to the U.S. are less educated than U.S. natives, and unlike in Canada, second- and third-generation U.S. immigrants earn less than their native-born counterparts. In short, the U.S. immigration system imports inequality and immobility. If immigration isn’t an issue in Canada, that’s because it’s a system Trump voters would love.
For those at the bottom of the social and economic ladder who seek to rise, nothing is more important than the rule of law, property rights, and the sanctity of contract provided by a mature and efficient legal system. The alternative—in place today in America—is a network of elites whose personal bonds supply the trust that is needed before deals can be done and promises relied on. With its more traditional legal system, Canada better respects the sanctity of contract and is less likely to weaken property rights with an American-style civil justice system which at times resembles a slot machine of judicially-sanctioned theft. Americans are great at talking about the rule of law, but in reality we don’t have much standing to do so.
Then there’s corruption. As ranked by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, America is considerably more corrupt than most of the rest of the First World. With our K Street lobbyists and our donor class, we’ve spawned the greatest concentration of money and influence ever. And corruption costs. In a regression model, the average family’s earnings would increase from $55,000 to $60,000 were we to ascend to Canada’s level of non-corruption, and to $68,000 if we moved to Denmark’s level.
In a corrupt country, trust is a rare commodity. That’s America today. Only 19 percent of Americans say they trust the government most of the time, down from 73 percent in 1958 according to the Pew Research Center. Sadly, that is a rational response to the way things are. America is a different country today, and a much nastier one. For politically engaged Republicans, the figure is six percent. That in a nutshell explains the Trump phenomenon and the disintegration of the Republican establishment. If the people don’t trust the government, tinkering with entitlement reform is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
American legal institutions are consistently more liberal than those in Canada, and they are biased towards a privileged class of insiders who are better educated and wealthier than the average American. That’s why America has become an aristocracy. By contrast, Canadian legal institutions aren’t slanted to an aristocracy.
The paradox is that Canadians employ conservative, free market means to achieve the liberal end of economic mobility. And that points to America’s way back: acknowledge that the promise of America has diminished, then emulate Canada.