LONDON (AP) -- Britain barred a far-right Dutch lawmaker from entering the country Thursday because of his anti-Islamic views, touching off a wide-ranging debate in the U.K. about the limits of free speech.
The British government has said that Wilders was not welcome because he posed a threat to ''community harmony and therefore public security.''
Wilders was invited to Britain by a member of Parliament's upper house, the House of Lords, to show his 15-minute film ''Fitna,'' which criticizes the Quran as a ''fascist book.''
The film sparked violent protests around the Muslim world last year for linking Quranic verses with footage of terrorist attacks.
Uh, don't tell the AP but those were MUSLIM terrorists. I mean Islam, Muslims, Quran... terrorists.... Nope, no connection. Move along folks, nothing to see here.
Wilders told The Associated Press he had no regrets about the trip, attacking what he called ''the cowards in the U.K. government,'' and accusing British Prime Minister Gordon Brown of having a servile attitude toward Islam.
Wilders told the AP by telephone it was ''a sad day for Britain and freedom of speech.''
''You would expect something like this to happen in Zimbabwe or Jordan,'' he said
Yes. Yes you could. You can now add the Caliphate of England to that list.
NYTimes
The Brussels Journal has an article in it titled "P. D. Ouspensky and the Nightmare of Revolution," by Thomas F. Bertonneau. It is an appreciation of "Letters from Russia" (1921), by Peter Damian Ouspensky.I confess to have never heard of it which is my loss. Bertonneau notes:
the (book) boasts the twin virtues of its brevity (less than sixty pages) and its moment of composition, the year 1919, during the fantastic and homicidal tumult of Russia’s Civil War.....fled St. Petersburg when the Communist coup d’état erupted but could not find his way free of embattled territories until 1920,...In his role as mathematician and philosopher, Ouspensky had written about the fourth dimension, so he had some experience in trying to come to terms rhetorically with odd notions and fantastic, counterintuitive theses. The first of the five installments of Letters from Russia establishes the book’s pervasive, nightmarish tone as Ouspensky describes upheavals of ordinary life so gross and brutal that he must search out a new language of indirection by which to convey them to the blissfully uninitiated....
In a subsequent sentence Ouspensky feels compelled to put the phrase living in the old way in quotation marks and supply for it a gloss, but the attempt fails. “You do not even know the significance of the words… you have not the necessary perspective; you cannot get away from yourselves and look at yourselves from another point of view.”
At the Tiflis railway terminal, where Ouspensky stopped (or rather was halted) on his way from St. Petersburg, Bolshevism manifested itself as “terrifying cries and shouts… heard on the platform, quickly followed by several shots.” A soldier told passengers that he and his comrades had executed a “thief.” By morning they had executed three more thieves. The abuse of language is characteristic. In any case, shooting summed up Bolshevism, which, having “no constructive program,” could only destroy and did so prodigiously and gleefully. Ouspensky anticipates Solzhenitsyn in identifying Bolshevism (Marxism) as a pernicious German invention seized on by Lenin and his followers to justify their orgy of violence against a world they hated because it had the temerity to exist apart from their desires and wishes. “As a general rule,” writes Ouspensky in the fourth letter, “Bolshevism based itself on the worst forces underlying Russian life.”
I shall read this book. I think it shows what all "isms" bring, and that would include the terror"ISM" of radical Muslims and living in a society where extremists Muslims can shut down free speech merely by threatening to riot.
Ouspensky repeats a refrain in all five letters that Bolshevism, being barbarism with a fancy vocabulary, constitutes a threat not only in Russia, but anywhere, hence also everywhere, because it is a destabilizing condition of ordered life, so arduously achieved, always to carry with it “barbarian forces existing inside [the] society, hostile to culture and civilization.” I could not help connecting a recent remark made by Sean Gabb in a Brussels Journal entry with the foregoing words by Ouspensky.
In a discussion of “hate speech” laws and their selective enforcement, Gabb notes that, “the soviet socialists and the national socialists kept control by the arbitrary arrest and torture or murder of suspected opponents,” but that these methods are currently “not… acceptable in England or in the English world.” Nevertheless, writes Gabb, censorious speech-legislation involving intimidating criminalization of certain words or verbal attitudes “has nothing really to do with politeness,” but is, rather, “about power.” So it is as well in the United States and Canada. Wherever governments and elites seek to control expression, whether or not as Gabb observes it has to do ostensibly with “diversity and inclusiveness,” the real agenda is to achieve “the unlimited power to plunder and enslave us, while scaring us into the appearance of gratitude for our dispossession.”
To steal an expression of what use to be the world's oldest governing body of a free people, England's Parliament, "Here Here!"
I would say that “hate crime” and “hate speech” laws represent a trial balloon of totalitarian methods. Such methods are barbarous. They betray the basic decency of the Western achievement. They take root in “the worst forces,” as Ouspensky says, “underlying our life.” Now “ought” is a counterfactual word. But it strikes me that if history taught only one lesson to the civilized it would be that as soon as any visibly power-hungry group succeeds in an agenda of intimidation, no matter how minor, sensible people dedicated to their own freedom ought to respond with all necessary resistance until the aggressors have themselves been intimidated into a retreat.
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3792">Link
If you ever wondered how a civilization could slide down into darkness, look no further than what the English have done.
A great country has died. Not from Spanish shot or French cannon balls or German bombs, but the poison of self hatred that was self made, self taught and self administered.
It shall be missed.
Dear England. Rest In Peace. Your children have deserted you.
