[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
OPEC members failed to agree an oil production ceiling on Friday at a meeting that ended in acrimony, after Iran said it would not consider any production curbs until it restores output scaled back for years under Western sanctions.
Friday’s developments set up the fractious cartel for more price wars in an already heavily oversupplied market.
Oil prices have more than halved over the past 18 months to a fraction of what most OPEC members need to balance their budgets. Brent oil futures fell by 1 percent on Friday to trade around $43, only a few dollars off a six year low.
Banks such as Goldman Sachs predict they could fall further to as low as $20 per barrel as the world produces more oil than it consumes and runs out of capacity to store the excess.
A final OPEC statement was issued with no mention of a new production ceiling. The last time OPEC failed to reach a deal was in 2011 when Saudi Arabia was pushing the group to increase output to avoid a price spike amid a Libyan uprising.
“We have no decision, no number,” Iranian oil minister Bijan Zangeneh told reporters after the meeting.
OPEC’s secretary general Abdullah al-Badri said OPEC could not agree on any figures because it could not predict how much oil Iran would add to the market next year, as sanctions are withdrawn under a deal reached six months ago with world powers over its nuclear program.
Most ministers left the meeting without making comments.
Badri tried to lessen the embarrassment by saying OPEC was as strong as ever, only to hear an outburst of laughter from reporters and analysts in the conference room.
This is of course an absolutely fantastic development which is part of the reason why securing the Iran nuclear deal was so incredibly important.
Some quick bullet point observations on what this means for the world:
The OPEC countries will have to keep pumping oil in order to maintain their market share in a vain attempt to prevent Iran from taking it.
In such a scenario, oil prices fall significantly because of the glut of oil on the market.
State budgets of oil-producing countries who have not significantly diversified their economies are damaged significantly, sending them possibly into recession and curtailing their geopolitical influence. These include countries like Russia, as well as Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf countries that we can enjoy laughing at.
The price floor could end up being as low as USD $10 a barrel (WTI) if this keeps up.
The price ceiling would also be constricted to around USD $50 a barrel (WTI) as the shale producers who are pummelled by the fall in price (at lower prices shale production is non-viable) either optimise their processes or merge with other enterprises that enable them to have the kind of alternate revenue streams that allow them to ‘park’ their shale operations when the price is low and reactivate them when it reaches $50. By this mechanism, a price ceiling is created.
All oil-purchasing economies benefit from these developments. The European Union benefits, and also most East Asian economies benefit enormously.
In the case of the poorest East Asian states, the fall in oil prices allows those states the ability to carry out internal adjustments that will enable them to expand welfare provisions, optimise food production, and upgrade hospitals and schools in ways that have needed to be done for a long time.
The European Union will be able to diversify its energy supply, thus preventing it from being so easily held hostage to Russian geopolitical demands.
If you’re thinking that this sounds like fun, it’s because it is definitely fun.
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 04 December 2015 04:20.
Trump to Jewish group:
“I’m a negotiator” (goes into fast chatter)
....“like you folks, we’re negotiators…do you want to re-negotiate deals, we, some of us here we negotiate deals, I would say about 99 point 9 ..is there anybody that doesn’t re-negotiate deals in this room? ...this room negotiates uh, .. I want to renega, this room (fades, points around) ....perhaps more than any room I’ve ever spoken to ...maybe more (expression of oy! sympathy) ...it’s ok! I’ve been called on that a couple times too.
You’re not going to support me even though you know that I am the best thing that could happen to Israel…and I’ll be that.
And the rea.. I know why you won’t support me…and you know, you’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money. ..you don’t want to give me money, ok, (begins waving arms comically) but that’s ok ...you want to control your own politician that’s foyne (fine)...good (puts wrist downward dismissively….pause), think about that folks (winces in oy vay expression), don’t worry about it…oy understeeand, hey, foyve months ago I was with you.. who was betta than me..who was betta than me? I gave $350,000 to the Republican Governor’s Association and never even got a letter of thank you!
... not only does he express sympathy with their middleman practices, but even in his gestures, chattering speech mannerisms and style, he acts like one of theirs while pandering to the Republican Jewish Convention.
Last night during the CNBC primary debate, Donald Trump, who to this point in the campaign had been the Republican candidate most closely aligned with the conservative grassroots on immigration policy, seemed to have altered his message in several significant ways.
Breitbart News documented some of these changes here.
Trump, who leads many national 2016 polls, granted Breitbart News an interview on the subject. Full questions and responses below:
BNN: The media has been filled with stories about companies flying in low-wage H-1B workers to replace American workers in tech jobs. Adding insult to injury, these American workers have been forced to train their replacements. If you were President, would you put a stop to this practice?
DT: Day one. This is why I got into this race. Because the everyday working person in this country is getting screwed. Lobbyists write the rules to benefit the rich and powerful. They buy off Senators like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) 79% to help them get rich at the expense of working Americans by using H-1B visas–so called “high tech” visas–to replace American workers in all sorts of solid middle class jobs. If I am President, I will not issue any H-1B visas to companies that replace American workers and my Department of Justice will pursue action against them.
BNN: Hundreds of workers at Disney were forced to train their foreign replacements. But while Florida Senator Nelson rallied to their cause, Senator Rubio did not. While Nelson has called for an investigation, Rubio has not. While Nelson has called to reduce H-1Bs, Rubio has demanded more. Senator Rubio has been the top promoter in Congress for expanding the H-1B program even though millions American tech workers are out of jobs. Rubio’s new bill triples H-1Bs and has zero protections for American workers. Advocates for tech workers said Rubio’s bill would “destroy” the U.S. tech workforce. Rubio’s bill is even endorsed by the CEO of Disney. What do you think of Rubio’s bill?
DT: It’s a disaster. It would allow any company in America to replace any worker with cheaper foreign labor. It legalizes job theft. It gives companies the legal right to pass over Americans, displace Americans, or directly replace Americans for good-paying middle class jobs. More than 80 percent of these H-1Bs are paid less than the average wage. Senator Rubio works for the lobbyists, not for Americans. That is why he is receiving more money from Silicon Valley than any other candidate in this race. He is their puppet.
BNN: During the debate, Senator Rubio listed several protections he thought American workers should receive. But the New York Times said Rubio’s bill would does the opposite of what he said, and does not contain a single one of the protections he mentioned. Instead, his bill simply triples the number of H-1B visas given as low-wage substitutes to corporations. Does Rubio have a problem with the truth?
DT: Yes, Senator Rubio is incapable of telling the truth. He should be disqualified for dishonesty alone.
BNN: Do you think agree with Senator Rubio that there is a shortage of talented Americans?
DT: Rubio is dead wrong. America produces the best and brightest in the world. It’s time to stand up for own students–many of whom are racked with terrible, terrible debt and facing a disastrous job market. We are graduating two times more students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) than find jobs in those fields every year. We have a surplus of talented Americans and we need them to get jobs first.
BNN: What should happen with the Florida workers who have been replaced?
DT: I am calling TODAY on Disney to hire back every one of the workers they replaced, and I am calling on Rubio to immediately rescind his sponsorship of the I-Squared bill and apologize to every Floridian for endorsing it. I am further calling on Rubio to return the money he has received from Silicon Valley CEOs and to donate the money to a charity helping unemployed Americans whose jobs Rubio has helped to destroy.
Andrew Anglin’s comment: “The Overton Window ‘hath’ been shifted rightward.”
We might ask, how is protecting natives and native worker’s interests “shifting rightward”? The answer is that it is not.
And will “The Donald” (ug) expose the who too?
Or will he keep the sludge-barge afloat that much longer?
...so that you can breed more White cows for the brown hordes to feed on?
According to friends and business partners Abe Zeines and Meir Hurwitz, who decamped to Puerto Rico from Brooklyn for the tax benefits and live in a 6-bedroom house with several girlfriends apiece, there actually might be.
Zeines and Hurwitz made their money in a field that’s now called merchant cash advance. It’s a legal way to lend money to small businesses at interest rates higher than Mafia loan sharks once charged. Completely unregulated, last year it surpassed the U.S. Small Business Administration as a source of loans for less than $150,000, according to the industry newsletter DeBanked, one of the few places with reliable information. The business was developed a decade ago in a boiler room full of ex-Lubavitcher Jewish teenagers in downtown Manhattan. They figured out how to hook people such as florists and pizzeria owners with promises of fast cash and discovered just how ridiculous the profits could be—even if it meant driving their borrowers into bankruptcy.
Zeines was one of these guys… a curly-haired 33-year-old with a cockeyed grin, he dresses like a tourist, in flip-flops and T-shirts, and speaks with a Brooklyn Yiddish accent that turns -ing into -ink. Zeines knows all the players and all the tricks to separate people from their money, but he styles himself an outsider, someone who appreciates the absurdities of Ivy League-educated financiers getting in on a seedy business.
Zeines kept telling me he was going to sell his company to a hedge fund for tens of millions of dollars. I didn’t believe him, but I told him if it ever happened it would make a good story. Then, one day this spring, I was shown a copy of a letter from Goldman Sachs. It was addressed to Zeines’s company. The bank was offering him $100 million.
Mas. Shabbath 31b
On the house of the Goy [Goy means unclean, and is the disparaging term for a non-Jew] one looks as on the fold of cattle.
Libbre David 37
A Jew should and must make a false oath when the Goyim asks if our books contain anything against them.
Tosefta, Tractate Erubin VIII
When a Jew has a Gentile in his clutches, another Jew may go to same Gentile, lend him money and in turn deceive him, so that the Gentile shall be ruined. For the property of a Gentile, according to our law, belongs to no one, and the first Jew that passes has full right to seize it.
Sanhedrin 59a
To communicate anything to a Goy about our religious relations would be equal to the killing of all Jews, for if the Goyim knew what we teach about them, they would kill us openly.
Ibid:
With no competition, Second Source could charge whatever it wanted. The standard deal it offered small businesses was to borrow $9,000 and pay back $120 a day for six months, or a total of $14,500, equivalent to an interest rate of 250 percent a year. That’s 10 times the legal limit in New York state, which made it a crime in the 1960s to charge more than 25 percent. To get around that, merchant cash-advance companies argue they aren’t actually charging interest—they’re buying the money businesses will make in the future, at a discount. As long as nobody uses the word “loan,” it usually holds up in court, says Robert Cook, a lawyer who advises the industry. Another no-no is chasing down an individual to collect if the business fails. Merchant cash advance is a supercharged version of “factoring,” the age-old practice of trading the right to collect unpaid bills in exchange for cash upfront.
At Second Source, the best customers were the most desperate
Cash advance was no longer a secret. Lots of former colleagues from Second Source were opening brokerages, and venture capitalists and private equity funds were discovering the trade. In February 2011 a lender called OnDeck Capital, which uses algorithms to identify the best borrowers and undercut companies such as Pearl, raised $25 million from Silicon Valley venture firms. CAN Capital, another competitor, raised $30 million in 2012 from early Facebook investor Accel Partners. Others raised tens of millions of dollars more.
Competition brought out Zeines’s ingenuity. Instead of building his own boiler room, he became a wholesaler. He told brokers to send him their shakiest customers. He also came up with ways to squeeze even more money from businesses that already had advances. He offered them a second loan, making it due in just two or three months, so it would get paid off before their existing debt. Other funders would lend only against credit-card sales, but Zeines would fund anyone with a bank account from which he could automatically withdraw payments.
The strategy worked so well, Zeines and Hurwitz say, they were doubling their money a few times a year. They started Pearl with $1 mil and earned $8 million in 2012, their first full year. Profit doubled in 2013, and loan volume reached $100 million.
Ibid:
The borrowers included people like Dermot O’Hare, a 60-year-old immigrant from Belfast, Northern Ireland, who ran an Irish pub with his wife in Susquehanna, Pa. As he was tending bar one day in 2013, worrying about how to get through the winter, a broker called. O’Hare took out one cash advance at about 500 percent, and then another one from Pearl at 400 percent. The daily payments turned out to be unmanageable. O’Hare filed for bankruptcy in February 2014, and a bank foreclosed on the bar. He moved to Ohio to live with his in-laws and took a job at a Lowe’s store. “It broke our hearts leaving the joint, but what can you do?” O’Hare says. “Shame on me for falling for it.”
Introducing Kenneth Griffin, a blue eyed White guy who funds no civil rights or anti-defamation league for Whites:
The billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin is known as an aggressive trader who waits for prices to fall before buying. But when it comes to personal real estate, Mr. Griffin appears to be less price-sensitive.
Over the last two years, Mr. Griffin, the chief executive of the investment firm Citadel, has gone on a multicity real estate shopping spree. He has spent nearly $300 million and set new price records in three cities, according to people familiar with his buying. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the deals.
The buying binge includes the purchase last year of two full floors of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Chicago, the city where Citadel is based and where Mr. Griffin, 46, has his main residence. He paid $13.3 million for the 37th floor and $16 million for the 46th floor, totaling just under $30 million. If combined, the deal would be the most expensive real estate purchase in Chicago.
In New York this year, Mr. Griffin agreed to purchase three full floors — totaling over 18,000 square feet — at 220 Central Park South, the condo tower under construction in Midtown. According to people familiar with the deal, the purchase includes a main residence as well as several other apartments that could be used for staff or guests. Mr. Griffin paid around $200 million for the space — a price that brokers say is a record in New York.
Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Monday, 28 September 2015 17:03.
When jokes threaten to become reality
A long time ago at the beginning of this ‘refugee crisis’, people used to make a joke and say, “If this keeps up, liberals might start asking for a bridge to be built so that no one would need to smuggle humans across water any more”. Who could have known that this joke would become a jinx?
Austria’s refugee coordinator Christian Konrad has called for the construction of a 200km long bridge from Al Huwariyah in Tunisia to Agrigento in Sicily. This is after Konrad had previously called for housing solutions to be constructed in Austria as hundreds of asylum seekers currently staying at the Traiskirchen reception centre in Lower Austria are sleeping in tents due to overcrowding there.
Education Minister Gabriele Heinisch-Hosek is tasked with devising proposals on how to integrate refugee into Austrian schools. This integration will likely be of the sort that parents of non-Muslim children will have no ability to veto. Integration of school systems never seems to come ‘organically’.
Social Minister Rudolf Hundstorfer will be looking for ways to ease the strictures of employment laws, so as to make it easier for big businesses to employ refugees, and for the purpose of lowering the standards that govern social bargaining at the enterprise and state level, the standards which Austria actually would have had to agree to have upheld upon joining the ERM back in March 1979. So now they have come full circle, and have ended up considering imposing a very ‘American’ form of social bargaining and employment laws, even though the European approach was supposed to have some significant differences.
Under the so-called emergency, the crisis that ‘demands’ compromise, one of the supposed prized qualities of the European labour market, will be dismantled for the benefit of a certain cross section of large companies which see it as being in their interest to use these migrants as a battering ram against any attempts to have any kind of organised labour movement in the continent. It is against this backdrop of the tendencies within the Austrian ruling class, that this bridge proposal is set.
Construction companies
The construction company STRABAG AG would get the contract for the bridge. STRABAG AG is a company that was created through the merger of ILBAU and STRABAG in the 1930s, both being founded by Anton Lerchbaumer. It acquired Deutsche Asphalt Group in 2002, Waltr Bau Group in 2005, it took on a majority stake in Ed Züblin in 2005, Adanti SpA, KIRCHNER Holding GmbH, F. Kirchhoff AG and Deutsche Telekom Immobilien und Service GmbH in 2008.
In 2013 the Supreme Court of the Slovak Republic stated that it believed that one of the companies of the STRABAG Group participated in bid rigging cartel of construction companies in that country. Amongst the companies involved in that cartel, was a company called Doprastav a.s., which is part of Doprastav Group. The illegal conduct centred around the D1 Highway which was constructed from 2004 and continued to have work done on it and its surroundings up to at least 2010.
STRABAG is managed by CEO Thomas Birtel. The Chairman of the supervisory board at STRABAG is Alfred Gusenbauer. Alfred Gusenbauer is an Austrian politician who until 2008 had spent his entire professional life as an employee of the Social Democratic Party of Austria or as a parliamentary representative. He headed the Social Democratic Party of Austria from 2000 to 2008, and served as Chancellor of Austria from January 2007 to December 2008. Since then he has positioned himself as a consultant and lecturer, and as a member of supervisory boards of Austrian companies, STRABAG being one of these.
Gusenbauer is known for having exploited the occurrence of the BAWAG Scandal, in which BAWAG—the bank of the Austrian Trade Union Federation—engaged in failed bets using risky undocumented derivative instruments held off-balance-sheet. After the losses became unmanageable, Fritz Verzetnitsch resigned from the Austrian Trade Union Federation in disgrace, and Gusenbauer used this opportunity to exclude all of the Trade Union leaders from the ballot lists of the Social Democratic Party, an action which moved the party to the right structurally.
STRABAG’s Gusenbauer and Austria’s refugee coordinator Christian Konrad obviously are not strangers to each other, seeing as they come from the same party and travel in the same social circles. In the world of business and politics, it’s quite often about who you know and who you’ve worked with. Aside from the fact that STRABAG is one of the largest construction companies in Austria, there is also the political connection that would exist between persons within the state and within that company’s structure.
Russian-Jewish Mafia involvement
A notable stakeholder in STRABAG is Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska, a extremely wealthy Russian oligarch, who—when he is not exploiting the mineral and energy resources of impoverished Asians in Siberia—also has for some reason cultivated over the years a very amicable relationship with people who may or may not be associated with former Russian soldiers who had been veterans in Afghanistan who may be part of the presently existing heroin smuggling operations which have been occurring at an ever-heightening rate since the year 2005.
Additionally, Deripaska has a good relationship with the Russian-Israeli Mafia, which helped him with the purchase of Sayansk aluminium plant in Siberia when he was first starting up as a businessperson in the 1990s. He has a especially tight relationship with the Israeli business and crime figure known as Michael Cherney, who personally assessed Deripaska and pulled the necessary strings on his behalf. Deripaska has since operated in the debt of Cherney and the Russian-Israeli Mafia. Cherney also operates security think tank groups, which may or may not be actually just front groups which allow him and his criminal networks to plug into the stream of intelligence exchanges that go on in the War on Terror, so that he can smuggle contraband through conflict zones with less risk of detection. Cherney also publishes anti-fascist publications through the Michael Cherney Foundation which is registered as a ‘charitable foundation’.
Interfacing with activist groups
The proposal for this Africa-to-Europe 200km long bridge, whose construction contract sits at the centre of all of these groups and individuals, also is associated with a local Austrian ‘anti-racist’ activist group. That group is named Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, which in English is ‘Centre for Political Beauty’.
The Centre for Political Beauty refers to itself as a group that “makes art” for the purpose of encouraging the European peoples to adopt a more liberal-humanitarian outlook on the world. Much of what they do is done for the sake of “not rendering void of the legacy of the Holocaust”. One of their members, Massimo Sestini, is perhaps known to Majorityrights readers because he is one of the persons who has consistently been providing ‘humanistic’ photography of the migrants to various media outlets including the British Newspaper, the Guardian, since at least mid-2014. The power of images cannot be underestimated.
The Centre for Political Beauty takes its activism beyond simply creating static pieces of art, and in fact, merges art with political action while invoking shadows of past events which they believe hold immense sway over the European psyche.
Here are four relevant examples of them merging art with political action:
They have removed sections of the Berlin Wall monument, the sections that contain Christian cross logos with names on them. They have removed some of these because they have transferred those crosses to the outer border fences of the European Union, and affixed them there. In some images African migrants are posing with the crosses for photographs. This is a kind of art creation that is apparently supposed to symbolise the idea that the internal wall between the West Germany and East Germany that was removed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is ontologically the same as the border between Europe and Africa which they believe would be removed after the fall of racially cohesive European identity.
They plan to actually cut holes into some segments of the EU border fences on 09 November 2015, during the commemoration of the 25th Anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This would allow migrants to break through the fences at the precise timing of the celebrations, so that they can link the celebration of one thing, with the celebration of another thing that they plan to superimpose onto it.
Since the idea for the creation of a bridge between Africa and Europe is a project that would take them until the year 2030 to complete if it gets started on time and isn’t thwarted in some way, they want to call on Austria to supply state funding for 1,000 rescue platforms to be permanently installed into international waters between North Africa and Italy. The first one of these platforms will be unveiled in the water on 01 October 2015, in Licata Harbour. The press will be invited at 0630 on that day.
Dead African and Middle Eastern bodies will be exhumed and transported from the sea and into the capital city of Germany. The bodies will be displayed and placed into open shallow graves in plain view, so that persons running the media operation can then talk about the ongoing crisis in terms that have allusions to the narratives of the Jewish Holocaust.
They are absolutely serious. It would not be hyperbolic to say that the intention behind these actors who have come together to make these things happen, is that they would like to inflict extreme demographic damage onto the European Union.
The resources being allocated to these plans, and all such operations, stand in stark contrast to the fact that countries in the South of Europe have been placed under austerity policies so harsh that civil society in countries like Greece are breaking down, and money allocated to even basic state functions like national defence have been so low that the topic of whether enough counties are meeting the basic NATO obligations is often raised.
Yet, mysteriously, certain richer state governments of north-western and south-central Europe seem to be very capable of sourcing funds for extravagant migrant rescue operations and even funds for building a 200km long bridge. Where is it coming from? It’s coming from your bank account via taxation.
Kumiko Oumae works in the defence and security sector in the UK. Her opinions here are entirely her own.
Posted by Kumiko Oumae on Sunday, 27 September 2015 12:53.
Why not? Seriously, why not? It’s all the same to the conservatives at the National Review, right? That’s what they themselves are saying! So let’s do this.
After being heckled on Twitter for being an apparent ‘cuckservative’ or something to that effect, National Review contributor David French decided to take to the safe space that is whatever CMS the National Review uses, to write out a long and rambling article where he claims that the ‘far-right’ and the ‘far-left’ are the same thing because they both disagree with him on the racialised-classised nature of reality itself, and they both disagree with him on the exact same issue for the exact same reason.
It has not crossed David French’s mind yet that the reason that both the ‘far-right’ and the ‘far-left’ disagree with the National Review, is because the National Review is denying biological realities while clinging desperately to a portrait of Jesus of Nazareth.
It’s almost like no one at the National Review has even the slightest sense of self-awareness.
Conservatives should reject those on both extremes of the spectrum. We defend a culture, not a race. The foundation of that culture is a faith that makes no distinction among races but rather declares, unequivocally, “All are one, in Christ Jesus.” Shunning the slur disempowers the trolls and forces the radical Left to confront the race hatred that fuels its own rage.
The last time conservatives tried that one, they got punched in the head from both sides. That’s what happens when their argument is trash.
But since ‘far-right’ and ‘far-left’ are all the same to David French now, I might as well quote Leon Trotsky being correct about a thing which is obvious, since it doesn’t really matter which side of the spectrum I choose to source this argument from:
And who are all these democratic moralists? Ideologists of intermediary layers who have fallen, or are in fear of falling between the two fires. The chief traits of the prophets of this type are alienism to great historical movements, a hardened conservative mentality, smug narrowness, and a most primitive political cowardice.More than anything moralists wish that history should leave them in peace with their petty books, little magazines, subscribers, common sense, and moral copy books. But history does not leave them in peace. It cuffs them now from the left, now from the right. ‘Clearly’ – revolution and reaction, Czarism and Bolshevism, communism and fascism, Stalinism and Trotskyism – are all ‘twins’. Whoever doubts this may feel the symmetrical skull bumps upon both the right and left sides of these very moralists.
[...]
Moralists of the Anglo-Saxon type, in so far as they do not confine themselves to rationalist utilitarianism, the ethics of bourgeois bookkeeping, appear conscious or unconscious students of Viscount Shaftesbury, who at the beginning of the 18th century deduced moral judgments from a special “moral sense” supposedly once and for all given to man. Supra-class morality inevitably leads to the acknowledgment of a special substance, of a ’’moral sense’’, ’’conscience’’, some kind of absolute which is nothing more than the philosophic-cowardly pseudonym for god. Independent of “ends”, that is, of society, morality, whether we deduce it from eternal truths or from the “nature of man”, proves in the end to be a form of “natural theology”. Heaven remains the only fortified position for military operations against dialectic materialism.
[...]
Classical philosophic idealism in so far as it aimed in its time to secularize morality, that is, to free it from religious sanction, represented a tremendous step forward (Hegel). But having torn from heaven, moral philosophy had to find earthly roots. To discover these roots was one of the tasks of materialism. After Shaftesbury came Darwin, after Hegel—Marx. To appeal now to “eternal moral truths” signifies attempting to turn the wheels backward.
That’s completely applicable as a description of what the National Review is doing.
Of course, Leon Trotsky is not the only person who has said this. Much like how Leon Trotsky is not the only person who has announced that fire is hot.
Since conservatives, or ‘cuckservatives’ if you like, refuse to learn the basic building blocks of reality and apply them, I anticipate that we will all meet David French once again somewhere out there, and David French will once again find himself being punched on both sides of his face, from both the left and the right.
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 18 September 2015 07:31.
Word has it that Juncker is socially conservative and therefore does not relish the migrant crisis; but he is a businessman who is looking after business interests for himself, business constituents and to maintain his position as an EU representative of those interests.
That is why he felt constrained to put across a plan to try to preserve the Schengen zone by diffusing responsibility among its members and (in his theory) that might dilute the impact of the migrants.
An additional aspect to the psychology of his position is that he is from Luxembourg, one of the smallest European nations. One can imagine business persons from small countries finding the delay and tedium of having to go through border controls as they move in and out of a Luxembourg every 15 minutes an insufferable handicap.
Nevertheless, from a WN/ethnonationalist perspective, particularly until such time as the borders of the entire zone are secure from non-European imposition and those who are already here are drastically reduced in number by means of repatriation, the Schengen zone will have to give way to tighter national border controls.
From an ethnonationalist point of view, in any event, there has to be more national accountability to their own and to European people as a whole.
Sep 16 2015: In last week’s State of the Union speech, European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker referred to the Schengen Area – a border-free travel zone made up of 26 European countries – as “a unique symbol of European integration”. After Germany’s recent announcement that it would be “temporarily reintroducing border controls”, some say that unique symbol is in jeopardy.
A look back at the past 30 years since the agreement was signed can help clarify what exactly is at risk.
What is Schengen?
The Schengen Area is made up of 26 European countries that have removed border controls at their shared crossings. The agreement was signed in 1985 by five members of the EU, and came into force 10 years later. Following the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, the Schengen agreement became part of European law. That meant all new EU members had to sign up to it, although Britain and Ireland had already been given the right to opt out. As the map below shows, four non-EU countries – Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein – are also members of the area.
Why are people talking about the end of Schengen?
We are experiencing a global refugee crisis. Around the world, 60 million people have been forced to flee war, violence and human rights abuse – levels not seen since World War II. Hundreds and thousands of those people have attempted the often perilous journey to Europe in search of a better, safer life.
Some of them haven’t made it – while the image of Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body on a beach in Turkey shocked the world, many more have died trying to get to Europe. According to figures from the International Organization for Migration, 2015 could end up being the deadliest on record.
Of those who do make it over, the majority have been heading to Germany. The country expects to take in 1 million asylum seekers by the end of the year, more than all other EU countries collectively received in 2014. It is in response to these huge numbers that Germany decided to re-impose its internal border controls. The country’s interior minister said the move aimed to “limit the current inflows to Germany and to return to orderly procedures when people enter the country”.
Some have been quick to emphasize the temporary nature of this decision. But with countries such as Austria and the Netherlands now following suit, others think Schengen’s days are numbered.
Has anything like this happened before?
The option for a country to temporarily reinstate border controls was actually built into the original agreement, as the European Commission pointed out last weekend: “The temporary reintroduction of border controls between member states is an exceptional possibility explicitly foreseen in and regulated by the Schengen Borders Code.”
In the past, countries have chosen to exercise that right. For example, in 2006 Germany reinstated border controls when it hosted the FIFA World Cup. France did the same in 2005, following the terrorist attacks in London. In what was perhaps a precursor of the troubles to come, during the post-Arab Spring mass migration of 2011, politicians in France and Italy called for deep reforms to the agreement.
So what’s different this time?
Even in Schengen’s early days, critics pointed to one big flaw: freedom of movement within the Schengen area only works if the common external borders are fortified. With many frontline countries such as Greece already experiencing crises of their own, the task of strengthening those external borders has become even tougher.
The stakes were raised this summer after a heavily armed terrorist suspect was apprehended on board a train travelling between three Schengen countries. The ease with which he had moved around the area prompted some to refer to Europe’s open-border policy as a terrorist’s paradise.
Perhaps more importantly, people’s attitudes within the area are starting to change. This recent crisis is just one in a long line of turbulent events for Europe these past months and years. Whether they are right to do so, some blame the union for these developments. While Schengen and the free movement of people might be at the core of the European project, for some that no longer seems worth fighting for. A poll back in July showed that the majority of western Europeans would like to see Schengen scrapped, and last year former French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for it to be “immediately suspended”.
But with so many people now displaced by conflict and violence, others argue that the European project – which has brought peace to a continent previously locked in war – has never been more important.
As plans to share out asylum seekers more equitably across the European Union make little progress, many will be closely watching the developments for hints of what it means for Schengen.
