Divided we Fall

Once again the mentally delicate lone wolf of peace kills and maims, but in the aftermath of the Berlin Christmas market attack it was, quote ‘too early’ yet to say what part islam played in his crazed decision. I mean, such a random un-forewarned act of violence, coming out of the blue, utterly without precedent could not possibly be associated with any warped ideology, nor be committed in the name of any religious figure, pieces be upon him. The powers that be were literally dumbfounded and without any clues as to the motivation, islamic or otherwise, of the killer they issued a warning to protect the vulnerable.

German police suggested people stay at home and not spread rumours. Rumours? How awful! In the meantime they lit up the Brandenburg Gate in tribute to the fallen of this terrible... vehicle accident. It was too early to jump to conclusions they warned and on no account should the public A) be alarmed, or B) succumb to islamophobia. How silly, of course we’re not alarmed and as far as islam is concerned, what on earth is there to be frightened of? Why, Mr Akhtar at the corner shop has never hurt a fly. Mind you, his son Ahmed Slayer-of-all-Kuffar-and-beheader-of-the Unbeliever Akhtar is a shifty one, but he’s currently on an extended holiday in Syria. Missing, believed daesh.

Anyway, in the wake of all that came the usual divisive bullshit with both sides accusing the other of making political capital out of it. Sides, I hear you ask? Surely it’s just us against them and with them being ISIS and claiming responsibility it’s cut and dried, no? No, because while Europe is certainly divided, ISIS didn’t divide it, although their actions haven’t helped because one side wants to see an end to islamic slaughter and cultural erosion while the other manages to perform whatever ideological contortions are necessary to pretend that wholesale importation of alien societies is both natural and desirable.

The story about deployment of extra police power in Bristol, ostensibly to combat ‘islamophobia’, is a fine example of the useful idiocy of those in thrall to the politically correct. When Donald Trump punted the idea of halting islamic immigration until a great deal more had been done to work out solutions, David Cameron called it "stupid, divisive and wrong" and Barack Obama said it would be "dangerous". Both of those statesmen are now looking like fools while the president-elect took steps to reassert his determination to effectively combat extremism. 

Extremism, of course, takes many forms and as well as the soldiers of islam busily blowing people up, their servants are also working diligently in their host countries to simultaneously radicalise – many mosques have been implicated in direct action – and to work on the psyche of the indigenous populations. Foremost among the latter is the dangerously radical Hope Not Hate, whose name is ironic beyond reason. They have consistently used false information  to proselytise against those who won’t accept the invasion and are currently engaged in attempting to force a retraction from Nigel Farage for his mild rebuke of newly canonised national treasure, Brendan Cox.

Them and us, 'twas ever thus, but this enemy is so much more deadly than swarthy men bearing arms. This enemy uses our own capacity for tolerance and forgiveness against us. They manage to turn the blame, every time, away from the wrongdoers and onto the wronged. And their actions are working; we are gradually becoming a less tolerant society; less likely to keep on turning the other cheek. As the scales fall from our eyes, soon we may become intolerant enough to turn on our fifth columnists and carry out a little social cleansing of our own. 

Expertise

Throughout the EU referendum campaign we were bombarded with horror stories from an ensemble cast of the great and the good who told us, the little people, that we could not possibly know what we were voting for. Christine Lagarde was one among many whose ‘expert’ testimony foretold of the utter recklessness of voting to leave. As head of the IMF her particular warning was expected to carry a hefty weight. It was still ignored. Yesterday Lagarde received a mild rebuke and a slap on the wrist for unwisely using her expertise to commit an offence which would have landed others in jail. Interestingly, part of her defence appears to have been that she did not herself take expert advice... Oh, the humanity!

“She denied any wrongdoing and claimed she had not seen all documents suggesting the payout should not be made. Six others [are] being investigated for fraud.” 

Michael Gove’s partial quote, “We’ve had enough of experts...” became the central jibe in many an attack on the legitimacy of Leave voters’ ambitions. How dare you reject the advice of experts? Who are you to gainsay the considered wisdom of such eminences? The sneers were relentless and the inference clear. And yet... few of the threatened hardships came to pass and the short-term bump in the road for Sterling and the Stock Exchange was based purely on the speculative actions of yet more experts, feathering their nests.

Maybe, in retrospect, expert wasn’t the right word; after all, one man’s sage is another man’s charlatan. And in any case, it wasn’t a reaction against just any kind of expertise, but against the type of expertise that can be bought bespoke. Perhaps the phrase ‘self-serving elite’ better encapsulates who the vote was rejecting. Use that phrase instead of ‘expert’ and suddenly a whole lot comes into sharp focus. The Kinnocks and the Mandelsons losing their tickets to the gravy train. The Cleggs and the Farrons, minor players in thrall to bigger beasts but nonetheless imagining themselves to one day aspire to an EU office. And all the big Bilderbergers the Ken Clarkes and cronies who simply crave the power and influence over those same little people.

In Bill Bryson’s excellent ‘One Summer America 1927’ he describes the taciturn nature of President Calvin Coolidge who was renowned for neither doing very much nor saying very much. He is said to have engaged in a ‘grim, determined, alert inactivity’ as he ‘presided over a booming economy and did nothing at all to get in the way of it.’ Given the constant mishandling of the tiller of the dinghy of state and the unrelenting changes inflicted on western societies, a period of Calvinomics is long overdue.

Change anything too completely and too quickly and stability is usually sacrificed. Was it the indigenous populations of the first world who demanded to be systematically invaded by primitive cultures? Or was it the experts – sorry, I mean self-interested elites – who oversaw this population replacement? The Berlin atrocity of last night was a dose of cultural enrichment too far yet still they will tell us little sheep it is nothing to do with islam, that we don’t understand, that we should work harder to better integrate.

What is so hard to understand about this, experts?

We no longer look to experts to provide solutions – we’ve already suffered too many of those. The problem of islam, the problems of the world, likely won’t be solved by global thinkers and strategic experts; they’ve done enough damage already. It might just be time for governments to back off and let the people handle this...