Paul Gottfried

November 27, 2008

Allow me to express my utter amazement at the way my friends on the right here and in Europe change their tune, as soon as one broaches the topic of letting Turkey into the EU. Those who had been going on about the depravity and despotism into which Western Europe had sunk, suddenly start making it appear as if they’re living in a modern democratic paradise. Apparently the problems in Europe such as censorship, managerial despotism, and the bureaucratic destruction of social normality, national identity, and gender distinctions, are not as bad as I had thought. They pale by comparison to the authoritarian nationalist government that Ataturk had mischievously erected in the 1920s. In any case Europeans are now free of those horrible gender inequalities that had beset them in the eighteenth century, when they still reproduced. And I may be overdoing it when I complain about dumping loudmouths in the can for not teaching PC history, given the alternative, which is intellectual freedom. By the way, for those who haven?t noticed, in today?s Europe one can incur social and professional ruin for doing a lot less than explicitly denying the authorized account of the Holocaust.

I?ve also learned that the drug-using, sexually kinky, nation-hating inhabitants of European countries, who are (perhaps wisely) refusing to procreate, are descended from those who had built an earlier Western civilization. If that is so, should we congratulate our contemporaries on their undemocratic ancestors, before noticing the ethnocidal path they?re taking? And why should we be angrier at the Ottoman Turks for their conquest of Constantinople in 1453 than we are at the present grave-diggers of European civilization, ensconced in the EU?s human rights agencies. European traditionalists (I would think) have far more reason to detest the EU than to rage against Mohammed II or Suleiman the Magnificent.
For those who may have missed my conclusion, I am all in favor of keeping Turkey out of the EU, insofar as I?ve no desire to see a sick Europe further overwhelmed by the diversity it has recklessly fostered. But I don?t buy the view that Turkey is politically or morally more contemptible than the decadent Europe it would like to join. It is after all Turkey that is seeking to dump its riffraff on those who crave it; and even if Turkey does not get its way here, the Europeans might still find other ways to finish themselves off.

There is one last point that I made obliquely to Derek Turner in a short blog yesterday and which needs to be expanded. It doesn?t pay to imitate the platitudes of the other side about the wonders of contemporary democracy in order to achieve a particular end. That was the tactic pursued by the American conservative movement, or at least that part of it that did not go opportunistically crawling after the neocons in the 1980s, when sincere anti-Communists allowed themselves to be snookered into offering Cold War liberal reasons exclusively for opposing Soviet tyranny. Thereafter the only allowable reasons for opposing the Communists became predictable leftist ones, until the point was reached when WFB?s Firing Line began featuring homosexuals who had gripes against the homophobic Fidel Castro. The worst thing that we on the right can do is to offer our enemies? arguments for anything we oppose. Let?s find our own reasons, which are consistent with what we believe.