The Scandal in Vancouver
I am not alone in being utterly astounded by the fact that Dr. Srdja Trifkovic has been refused entry into Canada. This amazing decision is all the more scandalous in that it was taken ad hoc in response to the hate campaign by self-declared representatives of one Bosnian ethnic group carrying out a vendetta against another Bosnian ethnic group. Is this what you mean by “multiculturalism”?
The banning of a peaceful speaker is contrary to the democratic principles which the Western NATO powers, including Canada, constantly preach to the rest of the world. It would be reprehensible regardless of the circumstances. However, upon examination, the circumstances aggravate the case.
The hate campaign launched against Dr. Trifkovic by certain groups claiming to represent Bosnian Muslims is based on distortions, lies and glaring sophistries. I say this as one who by no means shares all of Dr. Trifkovic’s political analyses or religious convictions, but who recognizes that he defends his convictions with an intellectual integrity totally lacking in the attacks against him.
In particular, I tend to consider Dr. Trifkovic’s assessment of an alleged Muslim threat to the West to be misplaced or exaggerated. However, the treatment that he has received from Canada in response to the complaints of a Muslim lobby provides unexpected support to his argument.
One point on which I do agree with Dr. Trifkovic is precisely the point for which he is most fiercely attacked: Srebrenica. I wish to point out the ambiguities in the expression “genocide denial” used to characterize Dr. Trifkovic’s position on Srebrenica.
The ambiguity concerns the difference between facts and interpretation of facts. I must insist that everyone has the right to be wrong about both; Canada has no means to exclude from its territory all the people who are constantly misstating facts and interpreting them erroneously. But I wish to point to a difference.
On Srebrenica, the facts are partly established, partly disputed, and partly unknown. This is because material evidence is by no means as clear and comprehensive as the general public has been led to believe. Independent studies have been hard to carry out, but certain facts can now be considered established. There were a large number of Muslim casualties following the July 1995 fall of Srebrenica, some of them victims of executions, in violation of international law. These were massacres that took place in the context of a bloody three-sided civil war in which massacres were committed by all sides.
Description of the massacres that took place in Srebrenica as “genocide” is not fact but interpretation. It hinges on the disputed question of intention. To some observers, including myself, the crime of genocide implies intent to exterminate a population, and cannot be done by sparing women and children. The Serb forces who captured Srebrenica helped women, children and the elderly leave the war zone for safety. The execution of captured military-age men is more plausibly explained by revenge or by desire to weaken the enemy forces. This would indeed be a war crime, but not “genocide”.
The International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, largely financed and staffed by the NATO countries which took the Muslim side in the Bosnian civil wars, found a way to describe Srebrenica as “genocide” by redefining the term. The three-judge panel accepted a sociologist’s theory that by killing all the men, the Serbs meant to commit a localized “genocide”, since in that “patriarchal” society, the women would not come back without their men. This is not what most people understand by the term “genocide”. The ICTY verdict has subtly deceived the general public, while providing a justification of NATO intervention in former Yugoslavia against the Serbs, stigmatized as responsible for “genocide”.
This stigmatization of Serbs as “genocidal” (which incidentally can be seen as amounting to incitement to racial hatred) is a major obstacle to genuine peace and reconciliation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, over fifteen years after the war was ended. It is deplorable that the Canadian government acts in a way that can only exacerbate dangerous tensions.
The “Bosniak” lobby takes advantage of widespread ignorance and confusion in NATO countries concerning the wars of Yugoslav disintegration to pursue a hidden political agenda under cover of “respect for victims of genocide”. In reality, their activism can do nothing for the men who died. Rather, it is intended to delegitimatize the Serbian entity, Republika Srpska, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, recognized by the US-sponsored 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the war. The purpose is to revise the accords in order to abolish Republika Srpska and create a centralized Bosnia-Herzegovina that would be under full control of the Muslim party, since Muslims are assumed to enjoy a narrow demographic majority. Since the Orthodox Christian Serbs of Bosnia remember their past as second-class citizens in the officially Muslim Ottoman Empire, they fear, rightly or wrongly, being returned to inferior status in a Muslim-ruled Bosnia.
Not being a Serb and not having shared that experience, I may find that fear exaggerated. But it is deeply hypocritical for the West to demand that Serbs must be the only Westerners to welcome Muslim rule over their own historic territory.
Entries(RSS)
Peter,
I think Mr. Abed would call himeslf a patriot of France rather than one of Europe per se, but in any case, I do not think the charge of cosmopolitan nomadism applies here.
Identity is forged through common history and is a combination of racial, civilizational and geographic factors. As you suggest, it cannot be just picked up and then discarded at will. Mr. Abed probably has some Lebanese ancestry somewhere, but it was the French who decided to take such a strong interest in the Catholics of Lebanon in the first place and turn them into a population of Arabo-Phoenician Francophiles. One cannot, hundreds of years afterwards, honourably say "Ooops...bad idea. Get out.". By that logic, much of Germany would have to be reclassified as Slav because in the Middle Ages German rulers expanded their lands eastwards and Germanified the Slavic inhabitants.
I am not French, but I as I understand it French national identity going back through both the kings and after the Revolution is more of a "civilizational" than a "volkish" thing in any case. It is fundamentally different from the English or German national identities, and if anything, somewhat resembles the Russian one (the way the Russians have copious amounts of Turco-Mongolian admixture in them).
So to carry this reasoning to your example of Red Cliffs, your descendents could become Chinese....after maybe 200 years of intermixing the way Arab and Persian Muslims in the Yuan Dynasty rapidly "Sinified" during the Ming dynasty., because Chinese identity is heavily "civilizational".
However, your descendents would probably never become Japanese...not even after 500 years because Japanese identity is largely "volkish".
The Chinese nationalists spend their time recounting the glories of the Han and Tang dynasties. The Japanse nationalists spend their time talking about how the isolation of the Japanese islands with its mountains and earthquakes, etc, etc, have created a unique breed of humans.
I agree that the focus on white identity is almost uniquely a North American and Australian phenomenon (with its origins in Anglo-Germanic Europe) because these ethnic European populations are a composite of European peoples melded together through bourgeois life. As a result, when they go looking for roots, they tend to gravitate towards either racial supremacism or religious orthodoxy as the be-all-end-all because their is no millenarian history to fall back on. It is perhaps not suprising that racial supremacy ideas took off in Northern Europe (2000 years ago they were painting themselves blue, sacrificing goats...) rather than in Southern Europe (Virgil, the Forum...).
Furthermore, I do agree that America and Australia have different destinies from Europe. Geography has seen to that.
ps. I bring up Mr. Abed simply as an example of an European (I mean that in a very general sense) patriot who does not obsess over Islam as some kind of army out of Mordor coming to beseige the White City, but rather recognizes Islamic penetration in Europe as merely a side-effect of much graver problems.
I should qualify the point about racial supremacism. Racial separatism would be a more representative characterization.
" As a result, when they go looking for roots, they tend to gravitate towards either racial supremacism or religious orthodoxy as the be-all-end-all because their is no millenarian history to fall back on."
Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan! This is pure, unadulterated, juvenile, poppycock dressed up in the clothes of a respected Chronicles poster named, Jonathan. Where on God's earth do you fellows pick this stuff up?
"...it was the French who decided to take such a strong interest in the Catholics of Lebanon in the first place and turn them into a population of Arabo-Phoenician Francophiles."
That was Revolutionary France, which, temporary restorations of the Throne and Church aside, thereafter proved itself ineffectual and distracted in countervailing the doctrine philosophique that the frenzy of 1789 had established as a permanent political delusion. As a question of history it's rather indisputable that the imperial avarice of the Protestant and or secularised European states, above all England and France (prior to American interference which has been wholly calamitous), accelerated the extinction of the Christians of the Near-East. However, excepting the small minority of Melkites, the indigenous churches of the Near-East preferred an Arabian to a Byzantine ruler, and stood in the position of estranged heretics for several centuries before the birth of Mohammed. Moreover they had no political or ecclesiastical intercourse with Europe.
The 'Phoenicians', their customs, language and manners is something we know little about let alone the Lebanese who know nothing. I don't doubt that they are the closest living part-descendants of the Phoenicians but to call themselves such when that society and civilisation has been extinct for millenia is laughable. They are a Christian society within an Arabian-Moslem civilisation in the Near-East. Francophilia, mischievously taught them by some vain humanitarian colonial modernists, is an affectation which grows to puerile lengths when one pretends that Beirut is the "Paris of the East".
I am not French, but I as I understand it French national identity going back through both the kings and after the Revolution is more of a “civilizational” than a “volkish” thing in any case.
After the Revolution, France becomes what Australia and America have always been; quasi-Marxist ideological states. Since you aren't French, but apparently American, it's rather impudent in you to prescribe the necessary national characteristics of the French to forcibly include this person or that. It's not merely "civilizational" which would be purely ideological; there are Gauls, Italo-Roman colonists, Frankish conquerors, Norse raiders, Provencal troubadours and the odd Burgundian abbess, all operating and commingling, which made France. If your father and mother are French, father's father and mother, mother's father and mother, father's paternal and maternal grandparents, etc then you are entitled to that designation. As proof, the French have a common national look, and it isn't Monsieurs Sarkozy or Abed.
The US Supreme Court case in the 1870s on the Chinese Exclusion Act concedes a fictitious right which the Encyclopédisme of America's foundation had implicitly supposed; the 'right' to emigrate from one's native country and settle elsewhere. Immigrationism and Assimilationism are viable, however monstrous, only in the New World. You can't remake
I know what this problem is about, and it only has relevance in countries such as America or Australia; Christian Near-Easterners fear being excluded if perceived as 'Arab', 'half-Persian' or 'western Asian' and therefore non-white (whatever that means) so they propose fictions to connect their loca history with that of Europe, as European has become in the New World a proxy word for 'white'. Chechens are a mountain people and consequently smock-faced, not seldom paler in complexion than some native Spaniards; but Chechens are not and will never be European as they are not a part, as Spain is, of a continuous organic society and civilisaiton.
My point is, that these thoughts are born of the disease of Liberal Modernity and testify to a pernicious diffidence in trusting to how God has made us and in what relation to the world we stand. Would Geoffrey de Villehardouin or cardinal-archévêque Andre-Hercule de Fleury recognise him as a countryman? No.
#54. A beautiful post. Liberal Modernity indeed! A lack of faith and therefore incessant delusional behavior to explain evrerything in the Universe. All the trouble to show that God does not exist, as if then evrything is explainable. In the end people of any faith have a lot more humanity than any agnostic or atheist ever will. The absurd policy of today is to forcibly stop Muslims from believing instead of strenghtening our Christian faith.
#53, robert.
You are right, I realized that I overstretched as soon as I hit the submit button. Racial separatism, or if you like, racial solidarity is what I had in mind. If you strip away the constitutionalist and free-market rhetoric of the Tea Party, what you get is racial solidarity and religious orthodoxy (of a peculiar erstaz Muscular Christianity sort). The class consciousness one might expect is hardly there.
#54, Peter.
"Civilizational" refers to the fact that France is precisely that gradual mix of Gauls, Romans, Germanics, Norse, etc, etc, around whom crystallized the French nation (long before the Revolution)....followed several hundred years later by large numbers of Poles, Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, etc who rapidly assimilated without too much difficulty because the French state made them assimilate and because they generally wanted to. In the interlude, "foreign" statesmen (by your definition) like Cardinal Mazarin helped make France the power it became. Alexandre Dumas by your definition would be a non-entity.
I am describing France as I perceive it. You seem to want them to kick out all the European immigrants who assimilated in the 19th century, plus the Corsicans and the Basques for good measure.
I imagine Sarko's foreigness has as much to do with his penchant for jogging in an NYPD T-shirt as anything else.
This whole "national look" business is only applicable to nations that actually have considerable racial homogeneity by having avoided being swamping by large numbes of foreign invaders who stayed and settled. Lots of nations like to believe they have it, but few actually do. The French are not one of those nations.
ps. I refer to the Lebanese as Arabo-Phoenicians because it is well established that the Muslim Arabs did not supplant the Christian Semitic populations they conquered. Therefore, the Christian Lebanese can safely be considered to be such a mix. That does not mean the ancient Phoenician culture is still intact there.
pps. Perhaps our colleague in Paris can shed some light on this issue, but I am not aware of any substantial political movement in France calling for the expulsion of the Christian Francophile assimilated Lebanese.
I am also waiting to be told that Aymeric Chauprade does not fit the French national look.
http://agoradedroite.fr/?p=1495
After the Revolution, France becomes what Australia and America have always been; quasi-Marxist ideological states. Since you aren’t French, but apparently American, it’s rather impudent in you to prescribe the necessary national characteristics of the French to forcibly include this person or that. It’s not merely “civilizational” which would be purely ideological; there are Gauls, Italo-Roman colonists, Frankish conquerors, Norse raiders, Provencal troubadours and the odd Burgundian abbess, all operating and commingling, which made France. If your father and mother are French, father’s father and mother, mother’s father and mother, father’s paternal and maternal grandparents, etc then you are entitled to that designation. As proof, the French have a common national look, and it isn’t Monsieurs Sarkozy or Abed.
For the most part, I like this articulation. However, Alexandre Dumas was only 3/4 white French. It may be overkill to say that all of one's ancestors four generations must have been born in France in order for you to be "French." On the other hand, Mazarin, whilst a lawful French subject, would certainly not have been considered "French" in his day. But need the French say the Caesars of Rome were French to revere them for their contributions to French culture and civilization? Or Our Lord Jesus Christ? Or Notre Dame, whose cult owes no small debt to the popular devotion of the French people?
I live in and love France. I have blond hair and blue eyes and can pass for French if I do not speak or if I take care not to speak too quickly. I would fight in a war for France and die for her. Maybe my descendants will be French wine merchants in the Bordeaux region. But I will never have the pretension to call myself "French."
The reference to Sarkozy as a foreigner is mostly due to resentment. It's just another soundbyte... "I don't like the French president... Ah, well, at least he's not French!" It's all in good fun; it keeps us laughing instead of crying about these problems.
Finally, it is true that Lebanon, whatever it has been in the past--Phoenician, Semitic Christian, Francophile--has changed. And it is true that it is easier for a Lebanese Christian immigrant in France to be considered "white." If not, are the Sicilians "white" enough for you? It is not true that the quandary is exclusive to North America and Australia.
The question of "race" versus "civilization" in the definition of nationality may be roughly analogous to the "nature" versus "nurture" debate in biology. Just as the proportions are never totally disconnected and are not uniform from trait to trait, so it may be from country to country. To imagine that there is any such thing as a "pure" race is a fantasy. On the other hand, to deny the homogeneity and isolation of, say, Iceland over the past 1200 years and the impossibility of an African immigrant becoming "Icelandic" is pure idiocy.
One other mistake to guard against is to suppose that "true" French history *ends* with 1789. It is manifestly not true that the Bourbons "learned nothing and forgot nothing" upon the Restoration; the degree to which they accepted the new social order and administrative anatomy of their old kingdom is quite revealing of how much they were willing to forget.
For example, there are French people today whose families made their fortunes or forged the paths that led them to where they are in the 19th or the 20th century. Are these not part of the French patrimony? On Saturday I had dinner with a good friend of mine, a Breton now living and working in Paris. Talking about our respective pasts, and the degree to which some people are disconnected from theirs and it is of their choosing, I said that an attachment to and roots in the past may be good things, but to the extent that they hide the only true Light they can and should be cast off. This does not always mean reaching back for a more distant past; sometimes it means creating anew. Rather than wholesale rejection or acceptance, one picks and chooses those elements of one's patrimony that are compatible with the good eternal vision. That is much harder to do, but nothing worth having is ever that easy.
Enough already. We've wandered far off topic--but in any case today is Mardi Gras and I have decided to ban myself from the Web during Lent. Looking forward to singing the Ash Wednesday benediction and Mass tomorrow. Be praying for all of ye.
I agree entirely with NGPM on the difficulty, indeed the impossibility of answering the question of race/ethnicity v. civilization, both in general and in any specific instance. The Irish imbibed Romanitas and Christianity without ceasing to be Irish. St. Columba became a missionary after an armed struggle with a rival monastery over possession of a psalter resulted in carnage. Now that the Micks are abandoning the Church and with it Romanitas some of them are going back to the repulsive folkways of their pagan ancestors. Their distant cousins, the Bretons, as described by Balzac in Les Chouans, are reminiscent of the more dangerous kind of redneck. The French, with a good deal of difficulty, became a sort of nation, though it is not clear to me that there are not still rather serious differences.
To what extent can we detect the Phoenician element in the modern Lebanese? The ancient Phoenicians were basically gentile Jews who lived on a higher level of civilization. Ancient Judea and Israel, from one perspective, can be looked upon as backward cultural provinces of greater Phoenicia. The Phoenicians were known to be intelligent, enterprising, daring, ruthless, and the sort of businessmen that only a Greek or Jew could hope to compete with. They were also fractious. The Lebanese I know have all been intelligent and enterprising, and if one can believe news accounts of their civil wars, they have not entirely lost the capacity for cruelty. How much of the Lebanese national character is inherited form the ancient world, how much derived from Arab conquests, the influence of Christianity and Islam, I would not presume to judge, but it does strike me as odd that of all the peoples of the Middle East, they have achieved economic success and maintained standards of civilization. Those I have met are charming people, and the charm derives in part from their hybrid nature, a Semitic Middle Eastern people who have embraced France.
I would very much be interested in the background of the person who refused to let Dr. Trifkovic into B.C. Sometimes we must look outside of the box and check these people out. The best reading I have ever done was a recent book called "Unembedded" by Scott Taylor.
Former Yugoslavia was the bitgest mistake of 20th century civil wars.