Nationalism Has Indeed Caused Wars

I want to answer this Facebook comment by Diane Granger to my article Imagine No Heaven and Lots of War:

I disagree.Nationalism does not cause wars.Money and power cause wars.Those who profit from wars cause wars.Manipulate and blackmail the traitor politicians into wars.

Every war has generally many causes, but it's impossible to deny the evident historical truth that nationalism has been a predominant cause of war.

Right now I'm reading respected historian JM Roberts' History of the World where he describes events in the 1930s' Middle East:

Unfortunately, the Syrian situation soon also showed the disintegrating power of nationalism when the Kurdish people of north Syria revolted against the prospect of submergence in an Arab state.

This Kurdish example also shows that war is not necessarily to be considered as a negative occurrence, as Diane Granger seems to imply judging from the tone of her comment.

National wars, as well as religious wars, might sometimes have been justified.

But we are not entitled to our own facts, only to our own opinions. Among other obvious examples of factors provoking violent conflicts are Jewish and Arab nationalisms.

And Italian nationalism generated many wars of independence in the 19th century.

Besides, nationalism is not a preserve of "the people". What Diane lists, "Money and power ...Those who profit from wars... traitor politicians" may also have nationalist motivations.

One of the main causes of the First World War (if not the main) was Britain, then the greatest world power, not seeing favourably the economic and military ascent of Germany threatening the "sceptred isle"'s top position. That is nationalism too.

Just because one is attracted to nationalism shouldn't make one blind to reality.

Nationalism is and has been both good and bad, justified and excessive, opening people's eyes and sometimes closing them.

Imagine No Heaven and Lots of War

It's a common, but misconceived, idea that Western people have grown disillusioned with religion because of religious wars in the distant or - in the almost unique case of Northern Ireland - recent past.

People on the Left have taken this view with a bit more consistency than those on the Right.

Think of John Lennon's song Imagine. He saw world peace and unification in the abolition of what he considered as all causes of division and conflict: religion, class, nation.

Lennon was, to put it in euphemistically-correct language, "cognitively challenged", but at least one can't deny his consistency and even-handedness in spreading the blame for war potential among different causative factors.

On the Right, instead, we have activists who condemn religion for provoking wars while at the same time strenuously supporting the value of nationhood.

Let's look at this as scientifically and empirically as we can.

Vast numbers of people have been killed in wars fought along class lines or for socialism, or proclaimed as such, and in their aftermaths: French Revolution, Russian Revolution, China, the spread of communism to Eastern Europe, Spanish Civil War, Vietnam, and these are only the main ones. Lennon's idea of the pacifying effect of the abolition of classes was not very far-sighted.

Many have also been killed in self-declared national wars: European wars, American Revolution, the Two World Wars, wars against colonial powers and so on.

And many have been killed in Christian religious wars; in fact there is an overlapping of several national and religious wars in Europe.

The reasons why I limit myself to Christianity are two: it's always been the religion of the West, and - not coincidentally - it's the only religion that can survive rational examination.

Writers like the New Atheists have had some influence in setting the current debate in terms of simply "religion", as if we could treat all religions in the same way.

But think if we did that with science.

After all, science includes many different theories. Some of them, like Ptolemy's geocentrism postulating the earth at the centre of the universe, have now been rejected. And yet Ptolemaic astronomy is a scientific theory, both in the historic sense that it was for centuries accepted by the scientific community, and because it used the best scientific methodology available at the time.

In the same way as, when we talk about science, we make distinctions between theories - invalid ones like geocentrism or Copernicus' circular orbits and currently valid ones like relativity and quantum physics -, so we should do when the subject is religion and distinguish among greatly different doctrines.

Religions other than Christianity are primitive and constraining: Judaism with its excessive, indeed obsessive, emphasis on a great number of laws and rituals; Islam ordering the slaughter of all infidels to establish a utopian paradise on earth; Hinduism with its plethora of deities representing contradictory values; Buddhism with its withdrawal from the world.

Christianity has represented an immense liberation and step forward for mankind.

I am not saying that attachment to one's nation is a bad thing; far from it. I think that - if it doesn't trascend into fanaticism - is a value to cherish.

Many good things can become bad if fanatically supported. That is true of defence of nationalism as well as blind defence of science of the kind that Richard Dawkins has accustomed us to.

I just question the consistency of someone who adduces religious wars as the reason to reject Christianity but doesn't consider national wars as a reason to reject nationalism, despite the fact that violence and massacres were caused by both.

Indeed, the first century after the triumph of "secularism", the 20th century, has seen some of the bloodiest conflicts and genocidal wars in history.

The reality is that the progressive abandonment of Christianity in its home, the West, in particular in Europe, has not been caused by a reaction to religious wars. It has not been a spontaneous process in the consciences of native people, but the effect of instigation and propaganda by few, by elites with their own ideological agendas and alien interests, often damaging to the indigenous population: communists, atheists and ethnic elites, frequently the same people.


"Bundesarchiv Bild 175-14676, Leipzig, Reichsgericht, russischer Panzer" by Bundesarchiv, B 285 Bild-14676 / Unknown / CC-BY-SA 3.0. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 de via Wikimedia Commons.

Christianity Saved Europe from Islam: Je Suis Charlie Martel

Fantastic video from ramzpaul.

It has been the Christian cross and Christian Church that has defeated the invading Islamic armies again and again, throughout the history of Europe, let's never forget that.

Now Europe is losing Christianity, and is losing to Islam: can that be only a coincidence?

Wake up, people! The attacks on Christianity have come from various sources, but none of these sources have had European interests at heart. Sometimes these attacks are repeated by naïve, unaware, possibly well-meaning "useful idiots", but mostly they are conceived and put into effect by those organised groups and elites who have a purpose: breaking up indigenous European coherence and resistance, by depriving us of the core set of principles and values what has kept us united for millennia.

Yes, united even after the Reformation. Protestants and Catholics have fought, but so have English against French, British against Germans, French against Prussians, Florentines against the Sienese, Pisans against the Lucchese, Scots against English, Dutch against Portuguese, English against Spaniards, Italians against Austrians, Russians against Swedes, Poles and Lithuanians against Russians and Swedes, and more European nations against European nations.

In the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in European history, Catholic and Protestant countries on one side fought against other Catholic and Protestant countries on the opposite side.

Our divisions along national lines haven't stopped us from feeling all Europeans and part of the great, glorious Western civilisation; exactly the same can be said about our divisions along religious lines - provided that they relate only to different confessions within Christianity, to which all we Westerners historically and genuinely belong.

The total disaster of multiculturalism has demonstrated that a society cannot survive without a shared central belief.

Do we really want to risk the end of the West, the most beautiful human creation the world has ever seen? And for what? Because we have been subjugated by alien anti-Christian propaganda? Without rebellion, without a fight?

This is based on just empirical truth: if we want to defeat Islam, what else can we resurrect if not the spirit of the Crusades?

What More Reason Do We Need to Stop the Muslim Invasion?

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, more than ever politicians, media and elites reiterate that only a small (indeed, tiny) minority of Muslims commit acts like the recent Paris attacks.

First of all, we must observe that this is not a statement of fact, but rather an expression of hope.

For we don't know the number or percentage of would-be terrorists that the Muslim population in each Western country harbours.

Because to know how many they are would also mean knowing who they are - all of them -, in which case we would have solved the terrorist problem with closer surveillance or, much better, expulsion.

So, almost by definition, we haven't got the faintest idea of their number.

We can't even rely on the figure of aggressions actually carried out as a good indicator, because this is only a fraction of the total of terror attacks planned, most of which have been foiled by police and secret services: many of these we haven't even got to hear about. And the total number of planned offensives, prevented or executed, doesn't offer predictions about future ones in such uncertain circumstances.

What we do know is that in several countries Muslim immigrant populations tend to get more radicalised with each successive generation, so the threat is going to increase. This can explain the by-now thousands of jihadists travelling from Europe to fight in Syria and Iraq and often returning to Europe with terrorist training and intentions.

If what happens in the rest of the world, where Islamism and its violence are on the rise, is an indication for the West, the prospects are not happy.

But, even if the number of terrorists were indeed a tiny minority of the West's Muslims, this wouldn't alter the fact that there is a question to be answered: why? Why take the risk? Why deliberately expose innocent Westerners to the threat of being massacred?

We know - nobody disputes it - that Muslims periodically take up guns, explosives, airplanes or what have you to terrorise and slaughter people in buildings, cafes, trains, buses and stores in various Western countries.

We also know that no other group approaches the same level of public, direct physical menace.

Why shouldn't Western nations remove this unnecessary peril?

We can't even say that Muslims belong in Europe, that they have a traditional or cultural foothold on European soil. In fact, they have been our enemy throughout their history. Even Spain and Sicily were invaded and conquered by Muslims, but didn't welcome them.

I know I’m stating the obvious here, but, from the way the talking heads and pundits speak and write, it appears that it needs to be stated.

Something else that public figures are pleased to repeat is that most Muslims condemn this act. In reality, there is no evidence for that either. I haven’t heard of any Muslim demonstration against it. 82% of French people think that Muslims are showing no condemnation of terrorism in France.

One fact of life we’ve learned by induction is that shouting ”Allahu Akbar” is a sure sign that every deed accompanying or following this utterance is of non-Islamic nature, as every time this sequence occurs we are guaranteed that the action is not just non-Islamic but – more strongly - un-Islamic. Such an episode occurred just before Christmas, still in France, when a man ploughed his white van into a Christmas market crowd in Nantes screaming ”Allahu Akbar”, injuring dozens of people - the third incident of its kind in the country in a few days. The man was correctly not described in the newspaper report as Muslim. He might have been anything.

So, is there a benefit - it must be very, very secret as nobody has ever heard of it - that Muslims bring to our lands that compensates for and outweighs the recurring nightmares that they produce and could be even more tragic and numerous if it were not for the enormous expenditure on police and intelligence resources deployed to keep their threat at bay, public-purse money that our over-indebted countries cannot afford?

Not only there is no such benefit. There are indeed additional burdens. Mostly these are not typical of Muslims only, but of general Third-World and mass immigrants. Indeed the problem of the former and the latter are related and difficult to separate. But, since Muslims represent a more specific threat to life and limb than other immigrant groups and there is widespread acceptance of Islam specifically as a negative presence in Europe, this could be a good starting point to tackle the seemingly-intractable immigration question.

A UK 2012 poll found that Britons are far more strongly opposed to immigration, particularly from Muslim countries, than they have been at any time in recent memory. An October 2014 survey showed that three out of four Londoners (74%) think that Britons who have travelled to Syria or Iraq to fight with extremist groups should be banned from returning to the UK.
Here are some issues:

• Economic. In Britain and other countries it has been calculated that Muslims and other immigrants from the Third World, who are disproportionately unemployed in comparison to the rest of the population and have much larger families, cost far more revenue in public services and social welfare than they put in.
  
  What is preached by UK-based Muslim cleric Anjem Choudary is that benefits from the infidel state are a form of jizya, the tax that only non-Muslims have to pay as dhimmis, the condition of submission they are forced to live in under Islamic rule.
  
  In Denmark, “Muslims make up 5% of the population but receive 40% of social-welfare outlays.”
  
  In Germany, foreign nationals are consistently overrepresented in unemployment figures, with Turks being in the worst situation, with an unemployment rate of 23% and comprising one third of all unemployed foreigners.
  
  German Journalist Dr Udo Ulfkotte has a good argument showing that expelling Muslims will even help Europe fight its financial crisis:
  

  Muslim immigrants in Germany up until 2007, Dr Ulfkotte explains, "have taken 1 billion euros more out of our social welfare system than they have paid into our system". To give a better idea of the magnitude of this figure and put it into perspective, he adds that the total debt of the German government is 1.7 billion euros. Expelling Muslims, therefore, will help Europe fight its financial crisis.

  In Sweden, a 15.1% immigrant population burden 60.5% of the entire nations welfare costs.
  
  Despite all attempts to make immigration look good, in the UK we see that, while European immigrants bring a net economic benefit to the country, non-Europeans take in benefits and services £100 billion (or 14%) more than they put back. In 17 years they cost the public purse nearly £120 billion.
  
  This differential, indeed opposite, effect of European versus non-European immigration on British economy makes Nigel Farage, leader of the fast-rising populist, anti-EU and anti-immigration party UKIP, sound absurd when he concentrates his efforts on stopping Bulgarian and Romanian immigration instead of the much more ruinous Asian and African invasion. But obviously he doesn’t want to be called racist..
• Social. Muslims, like other immigrants, make the competition for limited resources - hospitals, doctor surgeries, school places, housing, jobs - much harder for the local Whites..
• Law and order. Muslims, as well as other Third-World immigrants, are also overrepresented in other-than-terror crime statistics, from those particularly peculiar to them, like honour killings, sex-slavery paedophile rings and female genital mutilation, to more general ones including rioting, looting, wife beating and rape.

Yet for our leaders and commentators the possibility of a Muslim-free Europe is not even a remotely conceivable possibility. Listening to them is a surreal experience: they talk as if Muslim presence in our countries were an ineluctable fact of life, like death and taxes, and not a deliberate choice of corrupt politicians and self-serving elites.

They make you feel as if Muslims had profound roots on our soil and were part and parcel of Western civilisation, both of which are as far from the truth as they can be.

Maintaining the Islamic presence here is for them the Kantian categorical imperative, nay it's more than that: it's a religious commandment. "Thou shalt welcome, feed, house and accept to be killed by Muslims, and never reject or deport them en masse."

Whereas the sensible solution would be to stop Muslims from taking up residence here and expel those who have already done so.

In fact, credit should be given to ‘Amru Adib, a very popular Egyptian TV show host, for this remark he made after the Charlie Hebdo attack:

He asked pious Muslims who cannot tolerate a word against Islam, “So why are you, of your own free will, moving to these godless nations[the West] in the first place.”

During the same show he pointed out that, to many Muslims, the fact that the Egyptian president Sisi entered a Christian church on the eve of January 7, the Coptic Christmas, demonstrates that he must be an infidel. The Salafi party immediately said: "We will never congratulate the Christians on their festivals. What’re you crazy?!". Adib answered these many Muslims by saying:

Okay, I get it, you hate Christians. But can you please be consistent? Why do you cooperate with them in other regards? Why do you go to their nations [reference to the West]? Why do you go to their doctors? Please, let your hate be consistent.”

I have no doubt that 3/4 of those hearing me are cursing me now — saying “he’s an infidel, an apostate!”…

In short, our situation is not very far from collective madness, although I can spot a few signs that greater numbers of people, at every new atrocity, find it increasingly difficult to believe in the TV and newspapers interpretations more than in what their own eyes and ears tell them.

Paris Attacks Confirm Fallaci's Islam Insights

These are some of the things that Oriana Fallaci wrote after 9/11. So little has changed that she could have written them now, after the Paris attacks, which also confirm how right she was.

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The enemy is in our home

The canard of "moderate" Islam, the comedy of tolerance, the lie of the integration, the farce of multiculturalism continue. And with that, the attempt to make us believe that the enemy consists of a small minority and that small minority lives in distant countries. Well, the enemy is not a small minority. And he's in our home. He's an enemy that at first glance does not look like an enemy. Without a beard, dressed in Western fashion, and according to his accomplices in good or bad faith perfectly-assimilated-into-our-social-system. That is, with a residence permit. With the car. With family. Never mind if the family is often made up of two or three wives, never mind if the wife or wives are constantly beaten up, if he sometimes kills his blue-jeans-wearing daughter, if sometimes his son rapes the 15-year-old Bolognese girl walking in the park with her boyfriend. He is an enemy that we treat as a friend. Who nevertheless hates and despise us with intensity. An enemy whom in the name of humanitarianism and political asylum we welcome in thousands at a time, even though the reception centres are overflowing, bursting, and we no longer know where to put him. An enemy whom, in the name of "necessity" (but what necessity, the necessity to fill our streets with peddlers and drug dealers?), we invite through the Olympus of the Constitution. "Come, dear, come. We need you so much." An enemy who turns mosques into barracks, training camps, recruitment centres for terrorists, and who blindly obeys the imam. An enemy who, thanks to the free movement required by the Schengen Agreement, roams at will across Eurabia, so that to go from London to Marseille, from Cologne to Milan or vice versa he doesn't have to produce any documents. He can be a terrorist who moves around to organise or put into effect a massacre, he can carry all the explosives he wants: no one stops him, no one touches him.

The crucifix will disappear

An enemy who, right after settling in our cities or countryside, engages in bullying and demands free or semi-free housing as well as the right to vote and citizenship. All of which he gets easily. An enemy who imposes his own rules and customs on us. Who attacks the teacher or the principal because a polite schoolgirl kindly offered to her Muslim classmate a rice pancake with Marsala, namely "with a liqueur". And-careful-not-to-repeat-the-insult. An enemy who from kindergartens wants to ban - indeed bans - Nativity scenes and Father Christmas. Who removes the crucifix from the classrooms, throws it out of the windows of hospitals, and defines it as "a naked little corpse put there to scare Muslim children". An enemy who in Britain stuffs his shoes with explosives in order to blow up the Paris-Miami jumbo flight. An enemy who in Amsterdam kills Theo van Gogh, guilty of making documentaries about the slavery of Muslim women, and after killing him opens his belly and sticks into it a letter with the death sentence of his best friend. The enemy, finally, for whom you will always find a lenient magistrate, ready to release him from prison. And whom Eurobean governments (note: this is not a typo, I just mean Eurobean, not European) don't expel even if he is illegal.

US Anti-Abortion Film Gets Italian Teacher Sacked

Giorgio Nadali, a religion teacher in Milan who had taught for 26 years, published 9 books and contributed to several magazines, has been suspended from teaching the Catholic religion.

His “crime” was to show his secondary school students the famous 30-minute documentary The Silent Scream (whose video is above) in Italian.

The film was made in 1984 in the USA, narrated by obstetrician and gynecologist Bernard Nathanson, MD. It illustrates the abortion process via ultrasound and portrays an abortion taking place in the uterus.

It's a vivid representation of a voluntary termination of pregnancy from the viewpoint of the victim, for a change.

Dr Nathanson introduces the short ultrasound video by explaining that foetology, a medical discipline that has existed only for the last few decades, has helped to better understand the complexity of the human foetus.

No claim is made in the film about the foetus' capability to feel pain, which is still largely unknown. From Wikipedia:

The hypothesis that human fetuses are capable of perceiving pain in the early stages of a pregnancy has not received sufficient evidence to be proven or disproven; the developmental stage of research and instrumentation is so far insufficient to this task.

Some authors,[3] however, argue that fetal pain is possible from the second half, or even the second tremester,[4] of pregnancy.

Dr Nathanson also shows how the number of abortions per year in the United States dramatically increased from 100,000 in 1963 when abortion was still illegal, to 750,000 in 1973 when legalisation through the Roe v Wade decision was introduced, to 1,500,000 in 1983, the last year for which figures were available when the film was made. He recounts that an abortionist doctor and a radical pro-abortion feminist involved in the editing of the documentary were so shocked by it that they stopped their respective involvement in abortion.

This observation has an autobiographical angle: Nathanson himself, who grew up Jewish and helped to found the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws to oppose restrictions on abortion, later became a pro-life activist. For more than 10 years after he became pro-life he described himself as a "Jewish atheist", but in 1996 he converted to Catholicism. So we can talk about a double conversion.

Some students of the Liceo Scientifico Cardano in Milan and their families complained to the school, and the religion teacher who showed the film was removed from his job.

The schoolgirls were 16–17, so the idea that the documentary was too shocking for them is not a good excuse. After all, pupils much younger than that, primary school children, are taught in school the "progressive" nature of homosexuality and onanism.

The real reason for the protest and sacking was that in our "post-Christian" society being against abortion is a much deadlier sin than abortion itself.

Women and Children First? Only Thanks to Christianity

My friend, Italian journalist Alessandra Nucci, has translated this article by Rino Cammilleri from La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana.

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An ancient law of the sea says that, when at risk of shipwreck, women and children must be helped into the lifeboats first. This is what was done on the Titanic, in the most notorious shipwreck in history. On that famous ship the orchestra continued to play to buoy the courage of those who were doomed to drown, including the musicians themselves. And a Catholic priest gave confession and absolution to all those who asked for them, himself going down with the ship. Old-fashioned gentlemen?

Nope, Christians. Because the unwritten rule of «women and children first» dates back to when Christianity empowered the weak and commanded the strong to take care of them. Before then, it used to be the law of the jungle that applied, because not even the super-civilized Romans gave any weight to women and children.

Please take note, as you rummage in your historical and anthropological reminiscences: only in Christian civilization has there ever been the habit of treating women and children with kid gloves, so much so that even today, when anyone holds the door open for a lady, he is termed “chivalrous” [deriving from the French “chevalier”, or “knight”]. This is a reference to the “macho” warrior whom the Church had taught to defend the widow and the orphan, the poor man and the oppressed.

For example, when the much-praised Native Americans (once known as redskins) travelled, the squaw went on foot, laden down with the luggage and with her papoose on her back; the husband was up front, riding a horse.

Assuredly, many of the gentlemen who went down with the Titanic were not religious at all, and many were Freemasons and anti-papists. But they were born and raised in a culture that was nineteen centuries old, a culture that could hardly avoid calling itself Christian, as even liberal Benedetto Croce had to admit.

Now let's listen to soprano Dimitra Theodossiou, one of the passengers on the Italo-Greek ferry that went up in flames a few days ago: «I was beaten and dragged down, as they tried to pull me off the ladder. But I reacted vigorously. I said: 'It's our turn!'».

Her words were confirmed by many other female passengers who underwent the same treatment. The men in the helicopters did indeed try to embark the women, children and the elderly first. But among them «there were at least some fifty men (…) who, in order to take their places, beat them, pulled their hair and threw them out».

In this reported sentence, the phrase omitted and replaced by dots included: «mainly Turks, Iraqis and Pakistanis». One of the rescue pilots said: «In order to try to save the children, the women, the elderly and the wounded first, as we always do, I had to yell and threaten to go away in my helicopter and leave them all there, over and over again.»

«As we always do». Quite. But not in the places of origin of those who (in the words of a Greek truck driver aptly named Christos) «had no consideration for the women and children at all».

However, why should the protagonists of this act, which to us is simply disgraceful and cowardly, be ashamed of themselves or feel like vile human beings? In their “culture” (I place the word decidedly in inverted commas) the women and children don't count at all.

These men have on their shoulders fifteen centuries which have accustomed them to thinking in this way. Back when I was studying Political Science, there was still a subject called Comparative Cultural Anthropology. That was before political correctness and relativism rendered it useless, as the 1968 protesters spread the idea that the Sioux were better than the cowboys and that the English first, and all the other Westerners after them, needed to be taught everything by Hindu gurus.

Today, whoever dares say that our civilization, moulded by Christianity, is superior to all the others risks a jail sentence or at the very least a lynching in the media. Yet the very ideology of relativism has been possible only in a Christian environment, and politically correct thinking itself believes it is superior to all the others.

What ludicrous imbecility this is, however, was summed up best by one of the men shoving the women aside in order to take their places in the rescue seat: «Why, aren't we all supposed to be equal?». What he implied was that, now that women have achieved equality, they can no longer expect preferential treatment. But it just so happens that he was universally deprecated (by the ex-Christians [or post-Christians]).

There's nothing to do: the latest ideology in vogue (again, among the Westerners) is no match for a culture that has become rooted in consciences precisely because it is the closest to the project that the Creator had in mind. And those who try to save their skins by climbing into lifeboats in place of women and children still remain cowards and vile human beings.