Give Us Our SecuriFree !

Massive crowds, estimated at two million people, marched down the streets of Paris on Sunday in solidarity and protest against the Charlie Hebdo murders. The demonstration was led by a coterie of forty presidents and prime ministers reflecting the established Political World Order.  It was all so.... Orwellian.

What was the protest for?  Was it a popular manifestation of shock, revulsion and sadness?  Paris (and other cities across the world) had already seen four days of that.  Was it a protest against an unpopular law or for some economic policy?  No such demands were audible or visible.  If it was a protest against terrorism and fanaticism (and conversely in support of freedom and tolerance) that cri de coeur had also been made.  So what then was the purpose of such a massive demonstration accompanied by an equally massive security operation? 

Cherchez le politicard.

When politicians take to walking down streets, they do so on behalf of an agenda.  What excuses and demagoguery they use to get others out onto the streets is one thing; what they want to achieve by the theatrics is quite another.

Why was Bibi Netanyahu walking one arm-link away from Francois Hollande in centre file?  Is he truly shocked and dismayed at the shooting up of a paper that the CRIF (Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France) had itself accused of anti-semitism?  Oh please. As we discuss elsewhere, Israel is seeking to turn this tragedy to its own geo-political advantage.  Bibi is pounding the streets of Paris because he wants to insinuate Israel into the concept of “Europe” and wants Europe to adopt Israel’s weltanaschauung.

But what motivates Holland, Merkel and Cameron?  The answer is simple and was stated in advance by Manuel Vals, the Republic’s prime minister,

Nous sommes dans une guerre contre le terrorisme.

Le voilá!

Simply put, the vast manifestation was a grand war whoop,  a demonstration of National Unity in the upcoming war on terrorism.

Upcoming?  Ongoing.  We have seen this before, virtually play by play after 9-11. The only difference is that, since the United States lacks a grand central concourse, its public assembly ends up being a  National Tune-in to some staged event  such as the memorial service at which  George W. Bush intoned,

"War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. It is said that adversity introduces us to ourselves. ... This is true of a nation as well. Today, we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called, 'the warm courage of national unity.' This is a unity of every faith and every background ...  And this unity against terror is now extending across the world."

It was with these words that Bush launched the First War on Terror.

The whooping today is the same.  In either case “national sentiment” — the sum of individual emotions — is stirred up in favor of girding up and going out against the Them.  Vals could not have been more explicit,

"What do the terrorists aim to achieve?  To create fear, to divide the French against one another.  We need to be stronger than that.   This is a test — which I have no doubt will make us stronger — for France to rise to the challenge.   It will no doubt be necessary to take new measures to respond to the (terrorist) menace."

Meanwhile, it was quietly reported by the Wall Street Journal that the White House had announced it would convene a summit next month “on ways the U.S. and other governments can counter violent extremism and domestic radicalization.”

Indeed, at the very time the crowds were gathering in La Place de la République, U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder was gathering behind closed doors with his counterparts from Canada, Australia and Europe.  

What are they about?   As reported by Deutsche Welle,

"French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve on Sunday reiterated a call for the European sharing of airline passenger data ...  [T]he dozen EU, US and Canadian ministers who met Sunday at Paris's Elysee Palace, including Germany's interior minister Thomas de Maiziere, also called for a strengthening of controls at the EU's external borders - while respecting fundamental rights, to trace extremists returning to Europe from the Middle East.   .. It would go beyond existing arrangements [which] already share PNR data with security forces ... including names, addresses and credit card numbers." 

According to de Maizier the "hour has struck" for ever more comprehensive surveillance measures.  But the proposals include far more than "mere" data mining and air-travel monitoring.   As Vals said, the aim is to take measures against "violent extremism and domestic radicalization.”

The Cheat of Conjunction. 

As we have pointed out before, whenever hucksters, politicians or lawyers use the word “and” you should know that a fast one is being pulled.  The conjunction serves to unite two things which are not necessarily the same  but which  by virtue of their being conjoined are made to appear in pari materia.   Two things follow.  First,  the second thing appears as conceptually redundant and as a result gets ignored.   Conversely,  justification  for the first thing washes over tacitly justifies the second by mere "association" rather than any logical connection.

Thus, in this case, most people do not hear or think about "domestic radicalization" and what that might mean in and of itself.   At the same time whatever feelings or justifications they attach to "violent extremism" get ported over to "domestic radicalization."   And so, just as we must fight the one, we certainly must fight the other (whatever it is exactly).

  
But taking measures against “violent extremism” and taking measures against “domestic radicalization” are two different kettles of fish.  The first, as reported, involves security measures such as air-port security, visa-controls, surveillance of suspect groups.   The second, however, entails the government taking measures against designated opinions and attitudes.  It entails interdictions  and counter-measures against opinions and political agendas labelled as “radical.”

Free speech?  Market place of competing ideas?  More like Ministry of Adjustments.  Around the world the press dutifully and stupidly cranked the whole thing up as Liberty and Fraternity gloriously making itself heard and felt.

In fact, the massive farce was utterly transparent: the nations of Europe are being softened up for a Second War on Terrorism.  Those same French masses which oppose military excursions, which are disgusted with Israel’s intransigence and who do not want to live as inmates in a continental prison are induced to swallow their own enslavement.

Charlie lo vult!

It’s an old story.  Freedom is prostituted to fears over security with assurances that Liberty retains her virtue intact.  The poisonous remedies which encompass all are displaced onto the perennial them. Don’t worry, it will not affect you....  Chemotherapy is only directed at the cancer. 

The French and the Germans never understood the first thing about free speech anyways.  It is time they took a page from James Madison

"Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency."  (Federalist Paper No. 10)

Madison’s point, which all too many Americans  are themselves too cowardly to abide, is that liberty entails risks.  You cannot have free speech without giving offense to someone over something.  And if offense is felt deeply enough, as it often is over things of fundamental importance, over-reaction is a foreseeable consequence.

This over-reaction includes lone gunmen as in the case of Charlie Hebdo.  It also includes government acting through the force of alien and sedition laws or laws against “ethnic defamation” or “inciting discredit” and similar labels used to dress up of censorship.

It is too choice for words.  In the name of Charlie Hebdo in sacred memory of “le bête et méchant” (the "dumb and nasty" - Charlie's trademark motto) the governments of the West will now coordinate measures against  "bêtes méchants"  designated as “domestic radicals.”

It is also too hypocritical to stomach.  At the very time the leaders of the "Civilized World" were pounding the pavement on behalf of a free press, Saudi Arabia was inflicting the first 50 of 1,000 lashes on Raif Badawi, a blogger who had dared criticize Islam and who was sentenced to ten years in prison by our ally and oil supplier.    Was anyone chanting Je suis Badawi?  

Give us our Securifree!!!

However, beyond mere hypocrisies, the European power structure is caught in an even greater dichotomy, not simply between its propaganda and its goals but between the goals themselves.

At first, this appears as political dilemma: the political establishment it is being forced into solidarity with the anti-immigrant and anti-Euro right.   In Germany the government is caught between condemning Islamic extremism and denying that Islam presents any threat to social cohesion. In France, Marine Le Pen, head of the National Front, is invited to the presidential mansion but excluded from walking in the national manifestation.

Behind such dilemmas lies the policy contradictions between multi-cultural open immigration and politically correct (i.e. ideologically controlled) national security. 

The warmongering, austerity-imposing ruling class of Europe wants the public to accept open immigration and the concept of a multicultural Europe.   The elites want open immigration primarily because, on various levels, it is the correlative of free-trade in goods and free-flows of capital investment abroad.  They want a so-called multicultural society because that is simply a pretty name for a value-free consumer society without any higher moral, aesthetic or cultural referents.

In a word, the establishment's "all embracing"  liberal cultural values are synchronized with and indeed ensue from its all encompassing (global) economic liberalism.   This is not a question of options but of inevitabilities.

A step back might help to see what is going on.   The so-called multicultural society is the culmination of utilitarian laicisme.  Indeed, in the various Vapeurs du Jour, which filled the air over the weekend, political heads repeatedly talked about vindicating the Spirit of ’89 and the principles of liberal universality.  

Prior to the Revolution, the rule had been eius regio cuios religio.  This was the political formula which ended the disaster of the Reformation War.  It was based on a 17th century species of pan-European multiculturalism, viz.: in each realm, the official and mandatory religion would be that of the realm’s ruler.  Contiguous diversity:  Europe became multi-sectarian on a jurisdictional level. France was Catholic, Saxony was Lutheran, Holland Calvinist, England Anglican, Poland Catholic, Lithuania Lutheran and so on.   This multi-sectarian tableau became the point of departure for modern European national-cultural identities.

 

The French Revolution sounded the tocsin of egalité and began a convulsive yet consistently coalescive process towards economic integration and cultural homogenization.   This is not to say that unifying principles had not existed before.  Indeed, a unifying ideology is what Christendom was all about.  But 1789 changed  the groundwork.  Liberalism became the new foundation. Religion was tolerated so long as it was  either harmless or served to support the all-sovereign state.

The toleration was not all that deep.  One of the major domestic issues in France in the latter half of the 19th century centered on driving the Church out of education.  During Germany's Kulturkampf Bismarck and the National Liberals (that was the name of the party) sought to drive the Church out of politics altogether.    The secular and capitalist nation-state wanted to "clear the path" that lay before it for something it called "progress and development."

We are acculturated into thinking that liberalization is a good thing; and, up to a certain point, it probably is, even if the draw-backs of social conformism have just as probably been exaggerated.  But all things depend on degree.  There is a difference between liberalism and levelling.

As of  2015, the regents of Europe do not want any religion worth its salt. Such a religion might actually dare to call into question the principles of capitalist plunder and exploitation.  No. The regents want the religion of iClouds and iStuff.  Their fetish idol is the fetish of the commodity, in which people themselves must become commodified labor commodities — that is, units of purchasable labor whose “personal” details are themselves bought bought and sold.

 Catholo-fundamentalism

The traditionalist Society of Pius X is the last thing the politicians want.  Even Le Pen does not want it, although she likes to give off an air that perhaps she personally has Tridentine sympathies. Ideological irredentism (of whatever stripe) obstructs the ideal of a "non-judgemental" consumer society based on free-flows of capital and labor.

Multiculturalism is simply the mask worn by an economy that in fact produces global cultural homogenization.  If Marx were alive he would call it the (new)  opiate of the masses.

It is not merely that the political establishment wants only that kind of diversity and free expression which coincides with and promotes the consumer state.  It  is more that a civilization which forsakes any higher referent other than being a secular and neutral mechanism for the pursuit of profit and gratification ultimately will engender a junk culture wrapped in meaningless tolerance.   That is what all the Kumbaya is really about.
   
In similar fashion, the ruling elites only want that kind of "right of asylum and migration" which serves, without jeopardizing, their economic interests.  The so-called mandate for "open" immigration policies is not a choice made in the abstract.   Just as "multiculturalism" is the dressing for consumption, "immigration" is the dressing for production.  Although it might seem paradoxical, flows of people "in" is the correlative to sourcing jobs "out."  The are both facets of the dynamic of globalization.

Expressed in diplomatic terms: France cannot  maintain "economic relations" with its former African colonies without also maintaining "human relations" (i.e. open migration) with them.  Expressed in military terms:  Europe is pushed into conducting or cooperating in military operations abroad and, by the same token, pulled into protecting itself against blow-back.   

The distilled result of these faceted ruling-class interests is that the multicultural "human right" requirement of open immigration actually reinforces the need for surveillance against undesirables and, as a result, to put all of civil society under surveillance.   Policing the borders and policing inside the borders become coincident objectives.

It is a neat trick. 

It is of course true that most governments have always controlled immigration and have sought to limit or encourage the types of people who were allowed into a country.  The present difficulties arise from the fact that governments are not limiting themselves to filtering out “types” so much as they are seeking to filter attitudes, propensities, thoughts.  This precisely is why politicians speak of “violent terrorism and domestic radicalization.”

It is easy enough to bar entry to a known terrorist or to someone bearing a Kalishnikov under his robes.  It is another matter to allow entry to an ordinary looking Muslim and thereafter monitor his writings, his emails and his contacts to ensure that he is not changing his value-structure by undergoing “radicalization.”

 

There is nothing wrong and everything right with respecting differences and with recognizing the essential humanity within every hue and every gender.   However, the problem with the whole “diversity” slogan is that it actually states an impossibility when it is applied to any unitary society.  Once again English.

Diversity means "a state of difference; dissimilitude; unlikeness."  It derives from di-versus meaning "in different directions."  How can something be convergent and divergent at the same time?   It cannot.  Multiculturalism is only possible when it is fundamentally meaningless. What the “diversity” banner masks, in social fact, is a reductionism in which cultural and ideological differences are trivialized and replaced by a commonality of fungible "styles." 

Of necessity, economic globalization produces cultural equalization.  This is not a problem in the United States because that country was founded on the principle of a-culturalism,  which is what Puritanism was all about. But it remains an ongoing problem of regret in Europe which has two millenia of identity at its back.

On the other hand,  because economic globalization is based on immigration into first world countries in tandem with economic penetration into third world regions,   Europe of necessity must open itself not only to "differences" but to resentments which flow form its exploitation of other peoples and its  suppression of their cultural identities through the force of economic globalization.

It is this fact which "islamo-terrorists" repeatedly complain of to a tone deaf West which just as repeatedly  ignores its own terror from the skies and ongoing attempts to pilfer resources for itself.  From the highlands of the Andes to the fertile crescent, indigenous people understand very clearly the connection between economy and culture -- between economic penetration and cultural colonialism.

To the Marie-Antoinettes in the First world, the rhetoric from Third sounds retrograde, primitive and brutal.  While that may be true in the abstract, in real terms the Jihadists see more clearly and feel more immediately the West's agenda, double talk and double standards.   

This is not to excuse anyone's barbarities.  Where the human race is concerned there is enough obscenity to go around.  It is to point out that  the converse to the West's colonialist multiculturalism is anti-colonialist fundamentalism.  Each side resorts to that cultural ideology (howsoever labelled or mis-labelled) which suits its geo-political purposes.   If the West were as sincerely multicultural as it claims to be, it would at least acknowledge and address the grievances that lie behind the word "Jihad."  But the power elite of the United States and Europe have no interest in any of that.

Instead,  the European power structure is encouraging the very thing (open multi-ethnic immigration) which is then used as the justification for extending the tentacles of the Orwellian state.   What Manuel Vals calls a "war against terrorism" is more accurately described as a war for colonization and security behind a shield of prettified, politico-cultural homogeneity.   What the neoliberal regimes of the world are actually imposing is austerity and security on colonized and colonizers alike all in the name of "universal human rights."  The whole thing is a canard and it is a dismal sight to see le tout monde walking and  like quacking ducks into the pen.

©WoodchipGazette 2015