THINK-ISRAEL

THE MENTAL STATE OF THE POLITICAL ELITES

by Edward Cline

PART I

This column is about the epistemological epilepsy of our political elite. And the elite's unreal metaphysics.

Or do they also suffer from schizophrenia? A collective neurosis? Group paranoia? Multiple personalities? Anxiety disorders? Bipolar mania? A potpourri of psychoses? Asperser's syndrome?

A reader, whom I shall call Bridget, offered this comment on my Pax Germania vs. Pax Islamia[1] column:

I don't understand why the elites just don't pay attention or understand that Muslim values are different from ours, as is their Shariah law. Crazy, because it's so simple....People are so ignorant.

It isn't so simple to the elites. The elites regard simplicity as a mark of insanity, of brutishness, of arrested epistemological development, or of retardation. They don't think they need to pay attention or understand Islam except to claim that it's a "beautiful religion" and that Westerners should not be judgmental of it. The elitists need nuances, and complexities, and shades of gray. Without them, they'd be just like everyone else, and no one would be willing to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars or Euros to sit at fancy desks and lord it over everyone else, as though they were the guardians of Plato's cave of the ignorant.

What follows is an elaboration of my original answer to the reader.

You see, Bridget, reality for you, me, and for other thinking people, is a pretty straightforward affair, not ever to be questioned or subjected to a mental tennis match. European and American political elites, however, and for the most part, refuse to grant reality any reality, because they've been taught that mind creates reality. They reject the primacy of existence. They reject an Aristotelian approach to reality. Reality must conform to their imaginings of what it should be, but isn't, and can't be, ever. They have never questioned their received wisdom, received, by the way, from a long line of philosophers like Kant and Schopenhauer and Hume, among others, a wisdom which claims that metaphysics is malleable, that it can be whatever one wants it to be, if one wants it badly enough, or if it displeases one.

I think the European elites understand Islam and Shariah and the perils they pose to Western civilization, but their minds are in the grip of political correctness. It's a tight, vise-like hold, tenacious, and ultimately suicidal. It's not an arm-lock. It's a mind-lock. They believe that Western culture isn't superior to any other, that it's unfair to compare Islam with Western culture, which they regard as too "materialistic" and not "spiritual" enough, as they think Islam is.

Islam, they'll say, may not have given the world much of value in terms of material advantages, as Western culture has. Its value lies in the imperative that everyone must submit to it, body and soul, which, according to their lights, is more important than higher standards of living, or technological advances to improve and extend man's life and enjoyment, because it's "spiritual" and will make you a better person. Islam has offered man none of those things — only submission and physical death or slavery, or spiritual death if one submits to it. Spiritual death is raising one's derriere in the air five times a day and reciting some mystical chant and pleading to a ghost to please be nice to you because you've been a loyal and unswerving maquette.

And so I think once you understand that, you'll understand the conflict and why the political elite is vested in "multiculturalism" and "diversity" and surrendering to (or accommodating) Islam, and expects everyone else to surrender to it, too.

Or at least defer to Islam from a decent multicultural, diversity-minded, submissive state of dhimmitude.

In one sense, the elites, in dealing with Islam, are like Snoopy pretending to be a World War One Ace flying a Sopwith Camel, sitting atop his doghouse. But sooner or later the rabid pit bull next door is going to charge over and have him for lunch.

Why would the elite be ashamed of Western culture? Why would they say it isn't superior to Islamic culture, whatever that stagnant, 7th century culture might be? Is it the Christian "sin" of pride that moves them to refuse to acknowledge that Western culture is superior? Are they afraid to defend and uphold values? What values do they hold? Daniel Greenfield, writing as Sultan Knish, wrote a seminal essay on just that very subject, "The Death of Europe."[2] They hold "European" values that Muslims disdain, and even condemn.

It is politically incorrect to point out that Western culture and values make possible, for example, open-heart surgery, while Islamic culture does not, and has not ever done so, and in fact glories in wholesale butchery. This is an inconvenient truth to liberals and all Islamophiles. They avert not only their eyes, but their minds.

For example, the anthropological global warming bloc wants everyone to believe that global warming (it was once global cooling, now it's just "climate change") can be reduced or controlled, and rejects the idea that earth's climate is continually changing and has been for billions of years, that the behavior of the sun has an effect on climate, that there are dynamics governing climate change that are barely understood. This is an example of pretending that something is that actually isn't, even though the evidence is available in Internet abundance. This bloc, politically motivated, upholds "science" and nature, but in fact, rejects both science and nature. Reality is rejected by them in favor of their own "reality" in defense of their numerology-based new alchemy which they call "settled science." Some in the "climate change" bloc are calling for the imprisonment of or even the death penalty for scientists who dare contest the whole business as legitimate science and call it Marxist agitprop.

Germany, Sweden and other European countries — with state or state-controlled news media in a conspiracy with their governments — suppress news of the rise of rapes[3] by Muslim "immigrants" for fear that such news will prejudice native Germans[4] and Swedes against the invaders. The British authorities have adopted the same deceptive, "nothing to see here"[5] policy in regards to the Muslim sex grooming gangs. They seek to establish a citizenry that will tolerate without complaint the Muslim invasion and the crimes committed against on the citizenry. They seek to assure the citizenry that nothing extraordinary is happening, even though Muslims prey on the citizenry. An ignorant citizenry, they contend, is a "strong" citizenry. It will integrate well with the moral and plitical actions of their predators, and won't cause the untoward business of jailing people for speaking their minds or resisting their own rapes, murders, and robberies.

Let's take a look at the epistemology of three members of the European elite, whom I quoted in my column, "Censorship: Over Here and Over There."[6] And who are the European elite? In 2012 Oxford University Press published The Europe of Elites: A Study into the Europeanness of Europe's Political and Economic Elites,[7] by Heinrich Best, György Lengyel, and Luca Verzichelli. These three professorial gentlemen define those elites as the top and most influential tiers of individual European governments and layers of wealth whose "Eurelitist" status may overlap into the upper bureaucratic and unelected echelons of the European Union.

It starts with the assumption that there is a formal and factual asymmetry between elites and non-elites, in that the former are formally entitled (by laws and constitutions) or factually empowered (by property rights) to make and influence decisions on behalf of the latter. The focus of our conceptual and empirical work is, therefore, the visions, attitudes, and opinions of elites concerning European integration. We address national elites specifically, because we maintain that the multilevel construction of the European edifice still attributes a pivotal role to national political and social institutions, and to the elites who are running them.....

The strong 'Eurelitist' bias in this approach has been systematized in the theory of permissive consensus, which maintains that the process of European unification is mainly driven by the self-interest of elites who enjoy a fairly wide margin of autonomy, as opposed to the general population, in pursuing policies of European integration. According to this approach, European integration is seen by elites as 'a means to advance political goals which they would not be able to enforce alone' ....

We can examine the statements of Federica Mogherini, who is the current High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, basically the EU's Minister for Foreign Affairs. Mogherini made the following remarks at the Call to Europe V: Islam in Europe FEPS conference on June 24, 2015. (Quotations from the following European Union elitists are taken from the article, "The EU Elites' Positive View of Islam,"[8] October 14th, by Fjordman, at Gates of Vienna, which I also cite in "Censorship: Over Here and Over There.")

"The very idea of a clash of civilizations is at odds with the most basic values of our European Union — let alone with reality. Throughout our European history, many have tried to unify our continent by imposing their own power, their own ideology, their own identity against the identity of someone else. With the European project, after World War II, not only we accepted diversity: we expressed a desire for diversity to be a core feature of our Union. We defined our civilization through openness and plurality: a mind-set based on blocs does not belong to us. Some people are now trying to convince us that a Muslim cannot be a good European citizen, that more Muslims in Europe will be the end of Europe. These people are not just mistaken about Muslims: these people are mistaken about Europe — that is my core message — they have no clue what Europe and the European identity are. This is our common fight: to make this concept accepted both in Europe and beyond Europe. For Europe and Islam face some common challenges in today's world. The so-called Islamic State is putting forward an unprecedented attempt to pervert Islam for justifying a wicked political and strategic project."

It isn't a "clash of civilizations." Islam isn't a civilization. A totalitarian ideology subscribed to by countless lobotomized living zombies over fourteen centuries is not a civilization. The West is a civilization that arose from the ashes of the Dark Ages because men rejected slavery and the unreal and rediscovered the glory of man. Islam is a cult that relishes the prospect of returning men to grovel in the ashes and ruins of a new Dark Age in supplication to Allah.

Note the insufferable, elitist arrogance in her words. It's "our European Union," reflecting an inbred presumptuousness that she speaks for all the non-elitist Europeans who are currently chomping at the bit to leave the Union or at least to tar and feather the "higher-ups" who have bent to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's will and arranged for the inundation of Europe by Muslim hordes.

Mogherini believes that her European civilization "expressed a desire for diversity to be a core feature of our Union. We defined our civilization through openness and plurality: a mind-set based on blocs does not belong to us." Whether or not blocs belong to it, the blocs will come about; they are doing so even as I write this. Her "mind-set" of plurality and diversity is directly at odds with those of the disdained hoi polloi.

She whines that "Some people are now trying to convince us that a Muslim cannot be a good European citizen, that more Muslims in Europe will be the end of Europe." It does not occur to Mogherini that by definition, a Muslim cannot be European, cannot be anything but a Muslim. He will always be a Muslim, first and foremost. European? Not so much. His first allegiance is to Islam. Mogherini must help to make this concept — that of a tamed, non-violent, European Muslim, loyal to the state, who doesn't feel so special that he expects everyone else to defer to his "needs" — accepted in Europe and beyond. If she must knock some heads together, she won't mind. In the meantime, Europe is dying from the cancer of Islam.

Note that she criticizes those who, "Throughout our European history... many have tried to unify our continent by imposing their own power, their own ideology, their own identity against the identity of someone else." By that, I gather she was making a circumspect reference to Hitler and to Mussolini (Mogherini is Italian). But she would have no qualms about imposing her own ideology and identity on everyone else.

She claims that the depredations of ISIS "pervert" Islam, echoing President George W. Bush and numerous other political ignoramuses. Islam cannot be perverted, even though every atrocity committed by ISIS is chapter-and-verse, by-the-book sanctioned and encouraged in the Koran and Hadith. Islam is intrinsically a perversion of the concept of morality. Islam is a death-worshipping cult, which is why we witness so much death within and without its realm.

There is a blog site, FrontPage, whose motto is: "Inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out." Mogherini is a liberal and one can detect the totalitarian in her screaming to get out. One can see how she would like to "manifest" her wishes onto the rest of the European continent. There is something wrong with a self-made billionaire who turns into a narcissistic, ostentatious megalomaniac.

What is worse and far more offensive is a well-heeled bureaucrat like Mogherini who is a megalomaniac with other people's money and lives.

Up next for the couch is former Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans. He is the First Vice-President of the European Commission. He made these remarks at the First Annual Colloquium on Fundamental Rights in Brussels on October 1st, 2015.

"We have seen the homes of asylum seekers set on fire. And we have heard political leaders declare that their countries would not accept refugees if they were Muslim. Anti-Muslims [sic] incidents are multiplying across Europe. We're seeing a huge spike of attacks. Verbal insinuations, closed-mindedness, prejudice, discrimination. The rise of Islamophobia is the one of the biggest challenges in Europe. It is a challenge to our vital values, to the core of who we are. Never has our societies' capacity for openness, for tolerance, for inclusion been more tested than it is today. Diversity is now in some parts of Europe seen as a threat. Diversity comes with challenges. But diversity is humanity's destiny."

How dare Europeans resent, oppose, and fear the influx of hundreds of thousands of Muslim "refugees" into their countries? How dare they try to take action against the invasion of their countries by barbarians who have been quite frank about their reason for invading those countries: that they're there for the welfare state benefits? The enemies of diversity must all be Islamophobes! And racists, too! And xenophobes! It's not the Muslims' fault that they are of different races and nationalities and have quaint cultural practices! It's not the Muslims' fault that they're not...well...white.

And then one weighs all the crimes committed by Muslims against native Europeans and one sees a strong element of racism in the actions of Muslims. These crimes are not racially motivated? The motto of Bare Naked Islam is: "It's not Islamophobia if they really ARE trying to kill you."[9] Or rape you. Or rob you. Or stab you. Since the beginning of the "asylum seeker" invasion, crime rates in Sweden and Germany and in other European countries have soared, with most of the crimes being committed by...Muslims.

Welfare states attract the worst elements of society. They are inherently evil. Welfare states depend on a fettered productive sector of any society or nation to subsidize their "benefits." They encourage and sustain parasitical mind-sets and attitudes. Europeans can blame themselves for tolerating their various welfare systems. They have been an attraction for the worst kind of immigrants: the ones who don't intend to sustain the system by working or ever pay into it. This is as true in America as it is in Europe.

That being said, Frans Timmermans' epistemology is very, very selective. His words reveal not only a vindictive megalomania, but also a psychosis. He and Mogherini suffer from both maladies. Well, not "suffer," as the term is usually meant. They clearly enjoy and revel in their mental "disorders."

I will discuss the mental whirligigs of the third EU bureaucrat, Vera Jourova, in Part Two.

But here's an example of "diversity" to ponder: Locking a man in a cage with an orangutan, a gorilla, and a troop of baboons. What do you think would happen?

PART II

Again, this column is also about the epistemological epilepsy of our political elite. And the political elite's unreal metaphysics.

As noted in an illustration tag in Part One, the sustainability of a European Islamic State, which is all the Continent's current immigration policies can lead to and end with, will depend in large part on the ignorance of its itinerate and hapless citizens — Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Once it reaches that stage, and Shariah law becomes the legal byword, non-Muslims will be obliged to assimilate into a largely Islamic culture.

Rank-and-file Muslims will be naturally ignorant and will have no problem adjusting to the new society of diversity. Non-Muslims, however, will have great difficulty keeping their mouths and minds shut as they are relegated to second-class citizen status.

To ensure that Germans, Swedes, French, and so on participate peaceably in this unprecedented reverse assimilation with the least possible problems, non-Muslims must, first, remain ignorant of the true peril to their lives and futures by becoming dhimmis, and, second, be prohibited from voicing their objections under the penalty of Shariah law. For Shariah law will replace whatever legal codes exist now in those countries. Current legal codes, amended to conform and mirror those of Shariah, will be but paper tigers. The judicial status of non-Shariah law will be but a sham.

The European Union Commissioner who advocates across-the-board censorship of any opposition to the conversion from Western legal codes to Islamic codes and the subjugation of Europeans to Islam, is Vera Jourova, a Czech who is the EU's Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, in the Juncker Commission. Her remarks, voiced and recorded at the Colloquium on Fundamental Rights — Tolerance and Respect: Living better together in Brussels on October 2, 2015, are the most blatantly evil of the trio of bureaucrats I have discussed here. As Fjordman noted in his Gates of Vienna article, "The EU Elites' Positive View of Islam"[10] from October 14th, "Commissioner Jourova indicated that the EU will clamp down even harder on so-called 'hate speech' directed against immigrants."[11] Here are her venomous recommendations at the Colloquium:

"If freedom of expression is one of the building blocks of a democratic society, hate speech on the other hand, is a blatant violation of that freedom. It must be severely punished. As some of you noted, over the past few weeks, we have witnessed a lot of solidarity towards refugees. But we have seen a surge of xenophobic hate speech. Some of you advocated enrolling the help of online intermediaries such as Google or Facebook to take down hate speech from the web. Other participants rather underlined promoting the use of counter-narratives. You also highlighted the need for clearer procedures to prosecute those who spread hate speech online. I was pleased to hear media and Internet providers' experiences and to hear their commitment to work with us. I fully agree with you on these lines of action.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel pulled an Obama-style "hot mike" gaffe of her own when she was heard imploring Mark Zukerberg of Facebook to do something to curb or eliminate "hate speech" from Facebook. The Washington Times[12] reported on September 30th that:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was overheard on a hot mike confronting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over anti-immigrant posts, amid complaints from her government that the social network isn't doing enough to curtail racist comments.

The two were overheard exchanging words on a live transmission broadcast on the United Nations website, as participants took their seats at a U.N. development summit in New York on Saturday, Bloomberg reported.[13]

Well, that would be a spectacle: a high-tea summit on "hate speech" between two portly frumps who would want to plot the best way to wash your mouth and mind out with soap, or perhaps with battery acid. To continue with Jourova's own brand of hate "speech":

"As was said this morning, Internet knows no borders. I intend to bring together IT companies, business, national authorities and civil society around the table in Brussels to tackle together online hate speech. I will discuss this with EU Justice Ministers next week. Let me now address the burning issue of hate crimes and data collection. We clearly need better and serious recording of hate crimes to ensure appropriate investigation, prosecution and sentencing. It is indeed high time that Member States fully implemented EU law to combat racism and xenophobia."

She makes no distinction between "hate speech" and "hate crimes," as defined by Western legal codes (in Shariah law, they are mere instances of blasphemy). The very concept of "hate crimes," however, is illegitimate in the first instance, because a crime committed and motivated from "hate" should be treated as a mere felony. Speech (other than libel and slander) and motivations should not be treated as "crimes." Allow that to happen, and you're on the road to censorship.

However, Jourova's notion of "hate speech" as "hate crime" echoes Winston Smith's observation that "thoughtcrime" does not entail death. Thoughtcrime is death. It's guaranteed. Think bad thoughts, and you're doomed. It's best not to think.

"Racism and xenophobia"? Aside from the expected Weimar period Communist-Nazi style enmities and street battles between Sunnis and Shi'ites, Turks and Somalis and what have you that are occurring in Sweden and Germany, Muslims to a maquette hate infidel whites and Jews[14] (who are nominally "white" though I hate having to make the distinction) and will rape, murder, or assault them at the first opportunity. And, given the record of Muslim "foreigners" in terms of their behavior in Western countries once their ongoing hordes have invaded the Continent — by leaving behind mountains and fields and train stations and town squares of trash, feces, food, water containers, donated tents, baby carriages, and furniture and other things behind in their wake — can anyone blame especially the Germans for fearing them? Or the Austrians?[15] Or the Hungarians?

She makes no mention, of course, of the "hate speech"[16] of Muslims in print and on the Internet and in the airwaves, nor of the "hate speech" spoken in countless mosques in Europe, the U.K., and the U.S., speech calculated to incite hatred for infidels, for the Western countries these imams and their congregations have settled in, and for Western civilization in general. After all, Jourova and Merkel say, Muslims have been victims of "racism" (even though Islam isn't a race, it comes in a variety of colors and hues) and "xenophobia," never mind the "no-go" areas of every major European capital into which infidels and especially infidel women venture at their own peril. Who can blame them for being so angry at non-Muslims and their Allah-condemned legal and social institutions? They're all "victims."

It's of no concern to Merkel and Jourova that while Muslims maintain their own Shariah-bound satrapies in these cities, which not even European police and fire fighters and many Western journalists want to enter (not that they're much welcome anyway) because they get stones[17] and other objects thrown at them, the male residents don't mind making forays into Dar al-Harb for a bit of rape, robbery, gang assaults, and murder.

Jourova and Merkel might admit that these crimes are deplorable, but they won't acknowledge that these regularly recurring crimes are not considered crimes at all by Islam and Islam's chief scholars and spokesmen, that they are part and parcel of Islamic ideology. They don't want to know it, and if you persist in telling them or anyone else that, they will want to have you arrested and punished for "defaming" a "great religion."

The Koran and the Hadith they've read must have been translated by Walt Disney.

And not wanting to know about it, not wanting to hear about it, not wanting to see the abundant evidence of it, points to a very serious —and, as it turns out, a very dangerous — state of mind that would best be contained in the same kind of insane asylum in which Antonio Salieri expired.

The European Union — shortly to be unofficially known as the European Caliphate — is being run by men and women who have displayed marked symptoms of dementia, a condition that is quite in sync with Islam's own brand.

Footnotes

[1] http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/pax-germania-vs-pax-islamia

[2] http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-death-of-europe.html

[3] http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5195/sweden-rape

[4] http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6527/migrants-rape-germany

[5] http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6630/sexual-slavery-Islam

[6] http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2015/10/censorship-over-here-and-over-there_15.html

[7] http://www.amazon.com/Europe-Elites-Europeanness-Political-Economic/dp/019960231X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid= 1445976427&sr=1-1&keywords=the+europe+of+elites%3A+a+study+into+the

[8] http://gatesofvienna.net/2015/10/the-eu-elites-positive-view-of-islam/

[9] http://www.barenakedislam.com/

[10] http://gatesofvienna.net/2015/10/the-eu-elites-positive-view-of-islam/

[11] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_SPEECH-15-5765_en.htm

[12] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/30/angela-merkel-caught-on-hot-mic-confronting-mark-z/

[13] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-26/merkel-confronts-facebook-s-zuckerberg-over-policing-hate-posts

[14] http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/10/muslim-preacher-oh-allah-annihilate-the-jews-let-us-kill-them

[15] http://gatesofvienna.net/2015/10/austrians-are-buying-guns/

[16] http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/10/pamela-geller-as-jihad-advances-huffington-post-still-pushing-muslim-victimhood-myth

[17] http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/10/sweden-journalist-stoned-while-trying-to-film-in-no-go-zone

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Edward Cline writes on capitalism, free speech and censorship, contemporary political trends and religion, particularly Islam. He has also authored many novels, including the Sparrowhawk series and the Cyrus Skeen mysteries. Part I was submitted October 28, 2015; Part II was submitted October 29, 2015. Both have appeared on many internet sites. They are archived at
http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-mental-state-of-political-elites.html and http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-mental-state-of-political-elites_29.html, respectively.