Your Statements Threaten the Community Harmony
Some items in the news, possibly unrelated:
The Dutch MP Geert Wilders has been refused entry to the United Kingdom despite being invited to visit by a member of the House of Lords, the British parliament’s upper chamber.
The reason? Geert Wilders wants to slow the inundation of paynims into his country, The Islamic Republic of Hollandistan, or whatever it was once called. (snark) His comments offend the Muslims, who, no doubt, are so easy-going, placid, peaceful and so very difficult to offend that the comments, no doubt, must have been outrageous. (end snark). He is being barred from the country because the Islamics have a de facto veto on public movements of famous poeple in and out of the UK. The crown cannot or will not control the multitudes.
See here
Here is the letter given by the British embassy to Mr. Wilders.
Dear Mr Wilders
The purpose of this letter is to inform you that the Secretary of State is of the view that your presence in the UK would pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society. The Secretary of State is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK.
You are advised that should you travel to the UK and seek admission an Immigration Officer will take into account the Secretary of State’s view. If, in accordance with regulation 21 of the immigration (European Economic Area) Regulations 2006, the Immigration Officer is satisfied that your exclusion is justified on grounds of public policy and/or public security, you will be refused admission to the UK under regulation 19. You would have a right of appeal against any refusal of admission, exercisable from outside the UK.
Yours sincerely,
Irving N. Jones
On behalf of the Secretary of State for the Home Department
I have recently been upbraided (in rather unkind terms) for supporting the position that Europeans, by devolving into the soft tyranny of Socialism, are merely pseudo-democracies, without the bold and robust freedoms which Americans enjoy.
I must say that I did not support that position at the time when I was criticized for having it. (The commenter indulged a bad habit of merely attributing to me whatever positions he wanted to vent about, and so I was on the receiving end. This is sort of like kicking the dog when you are mad at your wife, with me in the role of the dog.)
But now? Now, I am not so sure. That position looks more tenable as events accumulate.
I simply do not know what to make of the vision of an ancient and honorable people, once the glory and terror of the world, the most civilized and decent people on the globe simply and softly committing racial suicide in the face of an implacable yet impotent vermin. It is like watching a mastodon surrender to a rat, and an unwell, smaller-than-average rat at that.
Is this the nation of Saint George and Richard the Lionheart? Is this the peoples from whose stock sprung Churchill and Cromwell? Is this the land whose green hills once bore the tread of Queen Elizabeth, who boasted that, despite her feeble woman’s form, she bore the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too! Elizabeth thought scorn that Parma or Spain, or any Prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of her realm! Now that realm is merely proffered to the Moor.
The Nanny-State creates, as its inevitable byproduct, a nation of malingering and whiny nursury-children. Children cannot be expected to be armed and armored for war, to endure the hardship of march and melee. Once cannot expect heart or stomach from them.
Pray for us, Saint James Motomoros.
In a possibly unrelated story, the US Senate passed the biggest naked power-grab orgiastic pork-fest in world history, telling an economically illiterate electorate that the only way to get out of debt was to plunge further into debt, to borrow an amount so astronomical that scientific notation must be used to express it. I regard these events with the same horror as I regard the short story by Edgar Allen Poe ‘The Masque of the Red Death’. In that story, the prince frivolously decided the most amusing way to out-wait the plague was by having a fancy dress ball: not exactly the actions of a virtuous prince determined on the public weal.
The economy, of course, cannot and will not be stimulated by such means, due to the corresponding drain on money markets of the inflation or taxation which must be used to cover the debt. Your children and grandchildren will be in debt for all their lives. In return, Democrat constituencies will be rewarded for their loyalty, bribed with your hard earned tax dollars. No new jobs will be created. This is not the legislation’s purpose. The purpose is to use the sense of emergency to seize control of large sections of private life, things like the banking industry and the medical professions.
You cannot spend your way out of debt. The lessons of Japan in the 1990’s, or of the USA in the 1930’s have been studiously, nay, heroically avoided. Everything FDR did wrong, every policy and spending measure which hindered the recovery from the Great Depression, is here and now being put in place again, but with redoubled force and on a greater scale.
To add insult to injury, the Administration has no plan, no idea, and no notion how or where to spend the money. Do you remember the relief felt among conservatives when Clinton was out of the White House and Bush was first in? The Republicans breathed a collective sigh, and said ‘Thank God a grown-up is back at the helm.’ Well, those days are missed.
The legislation also establishes a board ot review the prices of pharmaceuticals, with the authority to forbid doctors and hospital administrators from proscribing them. A similar board (called, with no sense of irony, the N.I.C.E. — Jack Lewis is laughing in heaven) in Britain, kingdom of babies, determined that old people use more expensive medicines than young people, and so various drugs should be denied them. You have to blind in one eye before the National Health Service will treat you for macular degeneration. (This particular story has a happy ending, but the general principle can be seen at work, nonetheless. Not everyone triggers a national press campaign to pressure 10 Downing Street.)
The legislation does nothing to reform the policies and practices which triggered the financial crisis: namely, the ‘easy-credit’ policies which mandated housing loans be made to debtors who could not repay. If you saw the movie THE DARK K NIGHT, and recall the scene where The Joker burns an immense pyramid of dollar bills, you have the correct mental image of this policy in action.
The White House is already micromanaging the purchases and compensation of private businesses, and telling bank officials whether or not it is permitted, in 2009, to take possession of a corporate jet bought and paid for in 2005.
The Fairness Doctrine is next up.
In a possibly unrelated story, gun sales have skyrocketed, and weapon shops cannot keep ammo in stock.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
