Sunday, January 31, 2010

From Such Tiny Acorns

This excellent comment by Hard Rain was posted at the International Free Press Society on the thread accompanying the video of Geert Wilders’ opening comments at his trial last week:

The most troubling aspect of this case is that Geert Wilders is being prosecuted not by Muslims in a Muslim state, but by our own increasingly submissive Infidel legal system.

That European courts are now allowing themselves to be utilised as weapons in the religious war being prosecuted against us is sharply and depressingly underlined by the faces of the judges in the courtroom, which look every inch the epitome of staunch Dutch respectability.

The real problem isn’t about opposing Islam in debate with the Muslims themselves. There’s little chance that we could ever sway more than a very few. The real challenge is in presenting our case, clearly and convincingly, to our own people, while effectively averting the inevitable negative accusations that are levelled at us along the way. Just look at Geert Wilders and Mark Steyn.

It is a salutary experience to realise how few of us there are speaking out about the global jihad threat. Even though to we few this threat is a transparently obvious, self-evident truth, we are nonetheless, little more than the sound of a voice crying in the wilderness.

The fact that there are so few of us, and that our opinions are considered so very controversial, places us firmly outside the flow of mainstream opinion in the West. Ironic then, that we are so often characterised as hawkish right-wing reactionaries or absurd Canute-like traditionalists attempting to hold back the historic tide of human growth from our thrones on the beach.
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This attempt to dismiss us as retrograde defenders of the status quo is very far from the truth. The perceived wisdom of today is, after all, based firmly upon staunch political correctness and irreversible multi-culturalism. Not our kind of status quo at all. In fact it is precisely the current status quo that stands in the way of any widespread public comprehension of the real threats our nations face.

That we are so very few in number and that our message is perceived to be so controversial, and so widely condemned by our governments and our media, and as a consequence, by the man in the street, means that we are an entirely different animal from our media portrayal.

We no longer represent the view of The Establishment, or of any establishment view currently displayed by any government on Earth. We are, indeed outsiders, but as such find ourselves liberated from any accusation that we represent the forces of reaction. The truth is that we as a group have become the dissenters. Ours is the voice of the agitator and the subversive.

In a very real sense we have become revolutionaries.

The mildest description we could give of ourselves might be pro-democracy activists. Yet the very fact that we might need to describe ourselves as such in our own democratic countries, and that by merely doing so we attract criticism from other democratic Westerners, is in itself a damning indictment, not so much of any evil state of play within our societies, but of how far into retreat we have allowed ourselves to be driven.

Of course, there is another way to describe a small group of people who, though widely criticised and viciously attacked, persevere in the face of all odds to profess their crucial yet unwelcome message to the world. And that word is vanguard.

In years to come the world will look back on the Geerts and Roberts, the Pamelas, Hughs and Marisols, and yes, many of the folk who post their thoughts in these threads, and see them for the visionaries they really were, way back in the early 21st Century. So maybe that’s how we should view ourselves and our fellow antijihadis: dissenters, subversives and revolutionaries, yes, reviled by many, yes; but also the vanguard of a new awareness that could, if we only persevere, grow and offer at least some hope for our humanity and the values of civilisation.

John the Baptist was in his time, a starving, ragged voice crying in the wilderness, yet he was the vanguard of a religious movement that swept the world and transformed empires. And it is from such tiny acorns that mighty oaks grow.


Hat tip: Vlad Tepes.

4 comments:

Thrasymachus said...

"The real challenge is in presenting our case, clearly and convincingly, to our own people, while effectively averting the inevitable negative accusations that are levelled at us along the way... ...That we are so very few in number and that our message is perceived to be so controversial, and so widely condemned by our governments and our media, and as a consequence, by the man in the street, means that we are an entirely different animal from our media portrayal."

A depressing example of this for me just yesterday in London. Four very old friends, I commented how strange it was that the Wilders trial had had so little coverage in the UK. And then attempted to explain my stance, I was stunned at their naivety and there inability to comprehend it.

And right away these old friends, as if programmed came out suggesting I was racist. The reductio ad Hitlerums flew. I was being offensive. The conflation between "race" and the religion of peace was so total as almost impossible to untangle. My views would inevitably send Jews to the gass chambers. Such ignorance.

It was staggering, their three positions were essentially:
(1) That nightmare scenario your posit will never happen. (It already has!)
(2) What's wrong with change, change always happens. (But it is the rate of change!)
(3) And this is the kicker, what their views essentially boiled down to: It will all be fine if people like you (i.e. me) keep quiet and we just, essentially, hope for the best.

We, the counter-jihad community, must do something. Author a declaration, or write a brief informative booklet. It should be a colaborative work between people like Fjordman and the Baron. But most inportantly it must be short, and laden with incontravertable demographic data.

thll said...

Galileo's astronomical investigations confirmed the Copernican and thus he was seen as a threat by an establishment that was fully behind the Ptolemaic.

It's hard to imagine that every establishment philosopher and astronomer was able to maintain his support of the geocentric explanation in the light of these new findings, but the fact is that the vast majority continued to support the old paradigm publicly because their positions depended on it.

I see a parallel here with the situation in Europe. Geert Wilders is a modern-day Galileo. He is confronting the existing paradigm with its own contradictions. The establishment has got where it is by accepting the ruling paradigm unconditionally - in fact their positions depend on their unwavering support of it and so naturally they must act in its defence - whether they truly believe any more or not.

I recall my (undergraduate) reading of Thomas Khun's classic 'The structure of scientific revolutions' - the salient point of which (if my memory serves me well) was that a paradigm lasts only for as long as it is able to answer questions asked of it. And then, as if by magic, in spite of the dogged defence of interested parties, the old paradigm collapses and is replaced by the new.

Is that not where we are at this time? The old 'equality' paradigm (because it is from that that the West's troubles stem) is now being asked questions that it can't answer without contradicting itself, hence the establishment's efforts to prevent those questions. It's happening throughout Europe.

It won't work.

In Hoc Signo Vinces† said...

@thll

" ... was that a paradigm lasts only for as long as it is able to answer questions asked of it. And then, as if by magic, in spite of the dogged defence of interested parties, the old paradigm collapses and is replaced by the new."


But those magic bullet questions are so elusive for the counter jihad, they have to be man-stopping long before the target can catch his thoughts, think and scream islamophobe, nazi or racist as he has been conditioned to do.

thll said...

Sooner or later reality always disturbs the fantasy. The Copernican succeeded because it made more sense, because it was closer to reality - the counter jihad makes more sense, it is closer to reality than the multicultural fantasy and more are moving to our view than are moving away from it. We are not the vanguard we are the precursors.