The counter-jihad blogger known as Fjordman has an essay up at David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine about the situation in Norway.

Norway’s immigrant population is small compared to that in the United States, but the problems arising seem much worse:

In May 2011 [Labour Party activist Eskil Pedersen] pressed criminal charges against a Member of Parliament, Christian Tybring-Gjedde from the rival Progress Party, for “racism.” The case was soon dismissed. Tybring-Gjedde had stated that in the Grorud Valley in Oslo, which has one of the densest concentrations of immigrants in the country, blond girls have to dye their hair dark to avoid harassment, children are threatened with violence if they have pig meat in their lunch box and native boys risk being physically assaulted by immigrants who think they don’t get enough time on the local football team. These are merely truthful statements. In fact, reality is often much worse than this.

The reaction of Eskil Pedersen and others of his ilk to hearing that the natives no longer feel safe in parts of their own country due to the immigration policies supported by the ruling elites is to try to silence political opponents who speak truthfully about this.

“Blond girls have to dye their hair dark to avoid harassment”? And a political leader who calls attention to this problem is subjected to criminal prosecution? Whose “racism” is really the problem, when it is the blondes who are harassed? Norway’s problem is two-fold:

Unlike the United States, it has no cultural tradition of assimilating immigrants;

but also Very much like the United States, it has a substantial number of immigrants who have no desire to be assimilated.

Permit me to hypothesize that a nation which is self-confident — which believes in the virtues of its own culture, traditions and institutions — will be more successful in assimilating immigrants, even though this same cultural self-confidence may manifest itself at times as “racism.”

Excuse the scare-quotes around “racism,” but in recent decades the word has been employed so promiscuously that its meaning has been lost and the word itself has become an obstacle to understanding. Ethnic hatred is one thing — and certainly Muslim immigrants harassing blond girls can be as easily accused of that as anyone — but “racism” is nearly always employed to accuse the majority population of hating minorities whose victimization (real or alleged) becomes a political weapon for the Left.

Eskil Pedersen is just as much a member of Norway’s majority as Christian Tybring-Gjedde, whom Pedersen accused of “racism.” But the embrace of immigrants as victimized minorities enables Pedersen and his party to smear Tybring-Gjedde’s party — to discredit them in the eyes of the respectable bourgeoisie who, in Norway as elsewhere, do not wish to be associated with “racism” — in such a way that the actual problem (i.e., social friction caused by the presence of unassimilated immigrants) cannot be addressed in terms of policy.

Are we discussing policy, or are we just calling names? Whenever the Left’s policies fail (as they inevitably do), they resort to name-calling and accusations of bad faith as tactics to distract the public from the failure and to demonize the Left’s critics. Because the intelligentsia are generally allied with the Left, however, such cheap political tactics are dressed up in the respectable garb of science. Fjordman describes how this has happened in Norway:

In May 2013, on the day when he was about to formally receive his Freedom of Expression Prize, [University of Oslo Professor Per] Fugelli stated that people who worry about such things as crime related to Gypsy gangs or certain types of organized crime need a sedative for their baseless “anxiety.” Professor Fugelli, a medical professional, recommended that politicians should take a Valium pill before they speak about issues related to immigration. . . .

It’s . . . not the first or only time that Mr. Fugelli has indicated, jokingly or otherwise, that individuals who disagree with his views should be treated medically for their alleged delusions, with or without their consent.

During the Multicultural craze of the 1990s, the Norwegian novelist Torgrim Eggen in an essay entitled “The psychotic racism” warned against the possibility of “race wars in the streets” as a result of mass immigration. . . . The solution to these problems [Eggen argued] was not to limit mass immigration but to limit criticism of it. According to Eggen, xenophobia and opposition to mass immigration should be viewed as a mental illness, and the solution to xenophobia “is that you should distribute medication to those who are seriously affected. I have discussed this with a professor of Social Medicine, Dr. Per Fugelli, and he liked the idea.” Fugelli had apparently suggested putting anti-psychotic drugs in the city’s drinking water.

This may sound too extreme to be meant seriously, but Fugelli has continued to chastise all those who are critical of mass immigration. Eggen warned that arguments about how ordinary people are concerned over mass immigration shouldn’t be accepted, because this could lead to Fascism: “One should be on one’s guard against people, especially politicians, who invoke xenophobia on behalf of others. And if certain people begin their reasoning with phrases such as ‘ordinary people feel that,’ one shouldn’t argue at all, one should hit [them].”

This tactic of “diagnosing” opposition to the Left’s policies as mental illness and incipient fascism is familiar to those who have studied the Frankfurt School — Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, et al. — and the origins of Cultural Marxism, otherwise known as Critical Theory or, in the vernacular, political correctness.

As with everything the Left does, understanding their motive is the key to understanding their method.

When the prophecies of Marx and Lenin failed — when the proletariat masses did not rally to the revolutionary banner, rise up and slaughter their capitalist oppressors — the Frankfurt School intellectuals elaborated in new language an old idea of Marx’s, “false consciousness.” If a member of the proletariat did not act in accordance with the Marxist prescription of his class interest, then he was obviously blinded by some sort of religious or cultural belief that the capitalist regime had propagated as a means to make the slave embrace his slavery.

“False consciousness” interprets the individual’s allegiances to faith, family or flag as impediments to the realization of the Left’s radical-egalitarian utopian dream. Accusing the average American (or average Norwegian) of “racism” or “xenophobia” or some other irrational prejudice, diagnosing the Left’s opposition as suffering from psychiatric disorders that threaten the nation with fascism, are tactics so familiar that it is truly surprising that so few people recognize them as what they really are, a species of Marxist propaganda.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West has been suffering a Cold War hangover. Most people never bothered to study the origins and history of Marxism as a philosophy, nor were the methods of Communist subversion ever widely understood. With the collapse of the Soviet threat, most in the West dismissed the danger as having passed, even while a host of intellectuals who had invariably allied themselves with Marxist-Leninist enemies during the Cold War era embedded themselves in academia. This is how the discredited ideas of a failed revolutionary philosophy have been rehabilitated, and invested with an artificial aura of intellectual respectability, over the course of the past two decades.

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”

– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

What do the Norwegian Left’s accusations of “racism” tell us about opponents of mass immigration in Norway? Nothing useful. But these accusations do tell us a lot about the accusers: The Left is fearful of debating policy on its merits, and therefore resort to dishonest smears intended to discredit their opponents. And unless these opponents are strong-minded enough to reject the proffered diagnosis, there is the danger of internalizing the Left’s deceptive critique and developing a defensive flinch-reflex. Anthony Bialy examines the disgusting weakness of the West’s apologetic elites:

Those who feel compelled to apologize for liberty continue to puzzle why we’re so wretched, but they’re sure we painted a target on ourselves. Winning sides don’t ask how we’re supposed to placate our enemies . . .

The perverse tendency to self-loathe is manifested most horrifyingly in America by those who think we have to qualify the freedom to live as we wish. . . .

The assumption that Muslims possess uncontrollable rage over the slightest perceived slight is a scary reflection of the faith if it’s true and of the patronizing pacifists who accept it as doctrine if it’s false.

Life must be tough for despicable lunatics who can’t decide between whether villains didn’t commit the crimes of which they’re accused or if they’re heroes for assaulting the innocent. Do the most doltish of dunces want to free Jahar because they think he didn’t do it or are sick enough to embrace his unbearably hideous assault? Is Mumia a framed victim or someone who stuck it to society by executing a police officer? Their blogs are never clear.

America cannot survive if we embrace the self-loathing worldview of such idiots. If we are afraid to defend our own culture because it is unfashionable among the intelligentsia to do so, we’re like those blonde girls in Norway, dyeing our hair dark to avoid harassment.





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