Austrian MP Excoriates the Tolerance Romantics
For decades, we have seen a spurious "tolerance" used to help undermine Western traditions and transform Western nations. Under this phony "tolerance," Western symbols are banished and non-Western symbols exalted. "Tolerance" views with suspicion any expression of national sentiment by Westerners, while indulging all expressions of such sentiment by non-Westerners. "Tolerance" also demands unlimited non-Western immigration into the West and decries any effort to assimilate non-Westerners. Thus, "tolerance" leads to crucifixes being removed from European classrooms even as minarets begin dotting Western skylines and to formerly European cities becoming Islamic enclaves even as Islamic nations continue to harass and persecute Christians.
One European who is fed up with this phony tolerance is Austrian MP Ewald Stadler, who seemed to embody the spirit of Eugene of Savoy in responding to the Turkish ambassador's criticism of Austria for failing to treat Turkish immigrants with sufficient "tolerance." Those who are interested in Stadler's spirited denunciation of the Turkish ambassador and European "tolerance romantics" can find a video of Stadler's speech to the Austrian parliament with English translation here.
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Inspiring video. Everyone should watch it.
Inspiring, courageous... and long overdue!
He gets my vote as the only politician in recent memory to embrace, and even embody Don Juan of Austria! Now I understand why Austria has been a favorite destination of mine - because they still have capable of such action! I think if Sir Walter Scott were still around he would pen a novel about such a man.
No one has come up with some dirt on him? He did get a lot of applause for his speech, but perhaps that would give his enemies even more of a reason to find something to discredit him.
And then Sir Walter Scott would tell the exact opposite of what happened, as he did when he represented Crusaders as a petty evil people, and the brutal Salah al-Din as a virtuous and moral person in The Talisman.
In fact, I am astonished Harry Colin has just said that Walter Scott would show this Austrian MP as a hero, considering Walter Scott betrays the same traits of self-hating Westerner who loves genocidal foreign Saracens more than his fellow people.
Which is something that goes back 200 years to even times of Walter Scott. Of course, it is my opinion that if self-hating Westerners have existed for so long, it can only be because of something genuinely wrong with European society, although self-hating Europeans, self-hating Jews, self-hating males, and all kinds of self-haters are typical of what is wrong with it.
I fear Mr. Sanjay has read but little Walter Scott. Having read most of his verse, fiction, published letters and diaries, I feel I can say with confidence that Mr. Sanjay could not be more wrong. Scott was more fully a man of the West than anyone of his time or since, and it was Scott's imagination which woke up many in England and Europe to the significance of their own traditions. His novels of the Crusades are not among his better books, but they are an imaginative attempt to grapple with a complex set of events. It had been conventional to admire Saladin from the days of Richard I, however based in reality that admiration was. The Crusaders were a mixed lot, some pious gentlemen, some unscrupulous adventurers, but, then, what noble project has ever been without scoundrels? The one place Scott goes wrong on the Crusades is his unflattering depiction of the Eastern Empire and its rulers, but such an evaluation was conventional and Gibbon, while fonder of the Byzantines than he liked to admit, did little to address the mistake. If anyone wants to gain a more three-dimensional understanding of the Crusades, there are, fortunately, accounts set down from the perspectives of all three sides. Froissart and Joinville, for example, and Raymond d'Aguilliers and Anna Komnena, daughter of Alexios Komnenos.
There is no more important writer in the English language since 1800 than Scott, and I recommend very strongly than people read, at least, Waverly, Guy Mannering, the Antiquary, Ivanhoe, The Heart of Midothian.......that is just for starters. Scott is not an easy read at first. He can be long-winded and the Scottish dialect spoken by some of his characters can be quite difficult. Be sure to read him in an edition with his own notes, which are a delight in themselves.
"There is no more important writer in the English language since 1800 than Scott..."
And no wonder then that in "Aspects of the Novel", the jealous and incompetent EM Forster completely condemns Scott's novels on account of what he found to be implausible plotting. He says that Scott's style is primitive because it focuses far too much on story and that it fails to transmit values. By "values" Forster obviously means his own anti-foundational values. After reading Forster's condemnation, I went and got copies of Waverley, Rob Roy and Ivanhoe, and look forward to devouring them.
Tolerance is a virtue of sorts that any human group must practice to a degree. However,it is this "one way tolerance babble" that leads to intolerance, those melting pots who slander ancestors to better welcome the stranger, who slander the immediate and familiar while exalting the exotic and foreign, who embrace strange customs while destroying familiar ones, and who love humanity but hate their neighbors. It is this type of liberal tolerance that is the friend of mankind and enemy of Christian civility. And this is true because it proscribes Christian courage as intolerant while mistaking false humility for a Christian virue.
Dr Fleming,
What is your opinion, if any, regarding Steven Runcimen's material on the Crusades? I noticed he relies heavily on the sources your cite and his treatment of the Eastern Empire was seemed more deferential than Scott's must have been. Preferential might describe it better. Thank you.
Thank you, Dr Fleming for your spirited defense of Scott; after reading Mr. Sanjay's remarks I thought perhaps I had lost my mind!
I must share my recent good fortune in finding at a used book shop that was holding a going out of business sale an (almost) complete hard back set of Scott's works for pennies on the dollar! The sadness of losing yet another bookstore was tempered by the enjoyment I experienced with Scott's prose. Since I'd been blessed to have already read some of the ones you've mentioned I decided to tackle 'The Monastery" and "The Abbot;" perhaps not his best efforts but even his worst prose puts many a wordsmith to shame - and makes comparison with current novelists simply ludicrous at the thought. .
Runciman was a fine and careful historian with a decent prose style. He was fluent in most of the languages he needed for such a work and he was quite cheerfully indifferent to the usual biases. I have read a good deal of his work and while I have never been struck by a brilliant insight, I have always benefitted from his analysis. Catholic historians in general like to ridicule him, but those same Catholic historians--I would rather not name names--have nothing like his erudition. Even if he were too pro-Byzantine, it is a useful corrective to the anti-Byzantine bias of the West. Those of us who live in a rapidly declining Empire should take heart from the repeated revivals of the Byzantine East and the bravery with which they met their end.
Scott has many flaws, not the least of which is his uncertain grasp of English, which was not his native language. He could often be quite indifferent to the working out of his plots, so much more interested in character was he. He once described a plot as nothing more than a peg from which to hang his characters. Forster could not possible appreciate him, but, then don't discount Forster. After reading A Passage to India in college, I loathed his very name, but after reading some of his essays I turned to his fiction, and, frankly, The Longest Day and Room with a View are not only quite good as novels but they teach very old-fashioned values. I once published articles, both in Chronicles and The Spectator in defense of Forster, which touched off even more neoconservative hatred.
The Monastery and the Abbot are not Scott at his best but they are not at all bad, and his even handed portrayal of Catholic and Protestant bigotry is quite humane. For a real chiller, try Old Mortality.
PS Scott was once regarded as second only to Shakespeare as a writer of literary fictions in English. He, along with Johnson and Hume, are perhaps the most inspiring writers for conservatives. I appalled my friend Peter Stanlis by writing in The Spectator that Scott and Johnson were more valuable to conservatives than Burke. (This is not to say that I lack respect for Burke, only that his thought is unsystematic and he could not quite make up his mind which side his was one.)
Dr. Fleming: Do you mean that Scott's native language was Lowland Scots as opposed to true English, or was he actually raised a Gaelic speaker?
Here is a good piece by Runciman,on the Fourth Crusade:
http://www.myriobiblos.gr/texts/english/runciman_crusades.html
Apologies for the hastily typed and poorly edited post.
Thank you Dr Fleming. And thank you Robert for the article.
Scott did not speak Gaelic and while pretty positive about the Highlanders he must have shared some of their hostility. No, he spoke the language my dissertation director Douglas Young once dubbed "Lallans", a language as different from Southern English as, say, Chaucer's language is from our own. Naturally, there is a gradation from Edinburgh into northern England, but at the extremes two naive speakers of the two languages would have communicated with considerable difficulty. Of course educated Scots learned English from school and books and from frequent intercourse with the southerners, but neither Scott nor Hume had mastered the other language--a fact that English reviewers leapt upon in glee.
I have shown this video to a few of my history classes since yesterday to give them a nice refreshing dose of Catholic Action. Its great when things are laid out in black and white instead of the incessant modern ambiguous nonsense that pours from these peoples mouths yet never answers anything. The truth hurts sometimes. Get used to it.
It is not at all clear to me that the introduction of current news videos is a proper use of time in a history class.
No, not at all Dr. Fleming. I offered to shown it to those of my history students on their free time after lunch. Most of my students were interested in viewing it. Im sorry I didnt clarify that.
Truly an amazing video clip with powerful content. It's good to know that statements like this are being made in the corridors of power in Europe. thank you Mr. Piatak for your words and the accompanying link. Thank you Dr. Fleming for your always illuminating comments. I do wish we had a few political leaders with the courage of MP Ewald Stadler.