Those ’Crazy Europeans’

[Don Wassall]

Interesting that though several European countries have experienced "terrorist incidents," they feel no need to install full-blown surveillance/police states like we do here in the "Land of the Free":


http://www.csoonline.com/caveat/060606.html?source=csoupdate
<H1>Society Without Security </H1>
<H2>Where are the soldiers? The cops? Security? Is it possible? Who's crazy here?</H2>


I've been living in Europe now for going on seven months, and I'm beginning to notice something strange, very strange indeed.


It started about three months ago during a visit to the city of Basle, Switzerland, for a carnival celebration called Fasnacht. I was lost and wanted to ask directions. It was then that I noticed it. It happened by accident, really. I was looking for a particular landmark and thought I'd ask someone who wasn't a tourist and could actually answer my question-like a policeman. But there were none to be found. Nada. Not anywhere. Hmmm, strange, I thought-no police during a major celebration with hundreds of thousands of tourists in the city. Were they on strike? I finally had to ask a salesperson at a news kiosk.


"So, ahem, I, ah, noticed there aren't any police around," I managed in my most affected nonchalant way.


"So?"


"Well, I mean, aren't you concerned with all these tourists?" She looked at me as blankly as the Swiss sheep on the mountainside. "You know," I continued, "There could be more crime with all these transient people coming into the city-like pickpockets, muggings, maybe, heaven forbid, a terrorist incident."


She shrugged. "We don't have those kinds of problems here. Besides, if people are having fun and are well-behaved, then why bother?"


Hmmm, a pre-9/11 attitude if I ever heard one. But apparently she wasn't the only one who thought that way because for the three days I was at the festival, I counted exactly four policemen. My security sense began to tingle.


Now mind you, prior to moving to Europe, I worked for many years in New York. After 9/11, I became used to seeing a phalanx of heavily armed policemen, soldiers and bomb-sniffing dogs greet me every day as I commuted into Penn Station. These people were all needed for security-or at least that's what I was told. Didn't Europe have the same terrorist threat? Hadn't there been bombings in Madrid and London? And there in Basle, I had to admit the people were relatively well behaved even if it was a Carnival celebration, but then again they were Swiss-not exactly known for being the party animals of Europe. Maybe it was different in other parts of Europe.


But evidently not. Last month, while I was in the south of France for a week, I drove for hundreds of kilometers throughout the countryside and never once encountered police. Apparently, there was no French equivalent of the Smokey Bears that grace the highways and byways of America with their radar guns and friendly demeanor.


A French friend explained to me that their roads have an occasional speed camera to catch people driving too fast, and if something bad like an accident happened, they have emergency numbers to call for help. But, he merrily chirped, the French love life and see no need to have a lot of police around when people are just out enjoying the countryside and fresh air.


The final straw came when I toured the Binnenhof in The Hague, Netherlands. The Binnenhof is the location of the Dutch Parliament and the most historic, scenic place in The Hague. Tourists are allowed to ride their bicycles through the Binnenhof and walk alongside members of parliament as they go to and from their offices. The tour guide pointed out a small tower where the prime minister has his most important meetings with foreign heads of state and members of parliament. One might say it is the Dutch equivalent of the Oval Office. I was only about a stone's throw away from the heart of the Netherlands' government. Indeed, for all the tour guide knew, I might just have a stone or even something worse in my pocket. I looked around for some evidence of security in the area and counted exactly two guards in a cubicle that was located politely out of the way of pedestrian traffic. The guards were laughing and sharing a cup of coffee. I had to ask the obvious.


The guide paused for a moment with a bemused smirk. "Well, I suppose a terrorist attack could happen," he replied. "We are, of course, living in difficult times. But the Dutch think it is more important that their elected representatives be seen as part of the people. The Dutch prime minister has been known to ride his bike to work the same as everyone else. It's part of our sense of democracy."


OK. Where I come from in the ol' U. S. of A., three strikes and you're out. Were Americans the only people in the world taking terrorism seriously? On the U.S. side of the pond, security experts are hard at work wiretapping telephones, posting a strong police presence in public locations and constantly reminding people to be afraid of terrorists. Here, the Europeans were apparently having a picnic. The Swiss behaving themselves during a celebration without police to keep an eye on things? The French enjoying a drive across the countryside without highway patrolmen? The Dutch political representatives being close to and living like the people they represent? These seem like pretty radical notions in post 9/11 world.


There can be only one explanation: Europe must be crazy.


Paul Raines is CISO of a nonprofit international group in The Hague, Netherlands.

 

[Freedom]

The French have had tons of riots from Muslims. The Turkish "minority" in Germany may pose threats in the future. So Europe is not exactly the best role models either. America needs a new president. A liberal republican or conservative democrat would be best so partisan views could be minimalized.

 

[JD074]

"Liberal Republican?" Yuck. We wouldn't be in this mess if Republicans were true conservatives.

 

[Vindicator]

Amen

 

[White Shogun]

Bush IS a liberal Republican.

And so are the Republican front-runners for the 2008 elections, McCain and Giuliani.
Edited by: White Shogun

 

[robcat]

Theres no difference between the democrat and republican parties. George Wallace said this 40 years ago and most Americans still havent figured it out.

 

[Don Wassall]

<H1 align=center>The Sovietizing of America</H1>
by Fred Reed

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Yesterday I got back to Mexico after visiting Washington for a week. Returning to the United States at long intervals is like watching a flower wilt in time-lapse photography. As with the slow but inexorable growth of a tumor, the changes leap out if seen infrequently. Though in historical terms the rot goes fast, very fast, it is not easily noticed day to day.


Perhaps the decay is the inevitable destination of mass democracies. One can't be sure. America is the first instance.


In Washington the stage-managed paranoia leaps to one's attention, the tightening embrace of government of all things. Washington's subway illustrates the point. Admonition is constant, typically in a scolding female voice from the loudspeakers. "Children! Do not run...play...or sit on the escalators. Hold your parents' hand...." Parents are not to care for their offspring. Mother Metro will do it. Or "Stand Back! Doors are closing!" in a calculatedly bossy tone of voice as the train prepares to pull out of the station. Over and over and over, at every stop. Sometimes the doors couldn't close for some reason and for minutes the hostile voice repeated its idiot warning. Is there not somewhere in the country a woman who speaks pleasantly?


The recorded hectoring is very different from a laconic and practical "Doors closing" from the driver. We are now herded by automated nannies. "Please listen carefully because the menu options have changed...." Anything to save a buck.


Between stops come the warnings to watch other passengers, to report any strange behavior immediately to Metro. Oh. Report strange behavior on an urban subway at midnight. Now, that's a good idea. Does this mean the para-schiz arguing with the little voices? The dark brooding men talking in unknown languages? The bag ladies with those suspicious bundles? The Arabs speaking in, of all things, Arabic?


The last time I was in the city, Metro had removed trash cans from the stations because someone might put a bomb in one. Now, I'm told, they have special explosion-absorbent trash cans. Presumably this mummery is fear management to drum up support for an unpopular war. The fact is that you could leave a steamer trunk of TNT on the car and no one would notice.


In a restaurant I saw a warning at the bottom of the menu, which I can't reproduce from memory. It said something like, "The consumption of raw or uncooked fish or eggs or whatever can do bad things of some sort." Why is this here, I wondered? Is there anyone on the planet that doesn't know this? Was the implication that the restaurant was likely to serve putrescent food, requiring a warning to the public? Then why not close it? Later I saw the same warning on the menu of The Village bistro, a classy restaurant in Rosslyn, Virginia, where I have eaten for years. I concluded that it must be governmentally mandated mommyism, presumably from brainless affirmative-action office proles with little to do.


The Sovietizing of America runs apace. It is not imaginary. The Department of Homeland Security? KGB stands for Committee for State Security.


Driving south and then west toward Laredo, we passed through Athens, Alabama, where I lived for a couple of years around 1957. My father was a mathematician working for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville. Athens was then a different America, and to an extent still is. I hadn't seen the town since I was eleven.


After fifty years it had changed remarkably little in its center, though it was surrounded by the usual hideous malls and strip development that blight the country today. The philosophy of unrestricted rapine, whether denominated free enterprise or capitalism or communism, is utterly without esthetic sensitivity. So it was in the Soviet Union. The differences between Russia and America are small, and much fewer than those between France and America.


The town square with its courthouse was much as it had been, though the town itself seemed smaller and more drab than I remembered. The tight segregation of the Fifties had gone. The water fountains on the square were then labeled White and Colored, and gas stations recognized in their bathrooms three sexes: Men, Women, and Colored.


As an unscientific observation the South seems much more genuinely integrated than does the North. In Washington's restaurants frequented by whites, you see the occasional black, but not many. They are sufficiently rare as almost to be objects of curiosity. In restaurants and catfish houses in Louisiana perhaps half of the clientele were black, which seemed to interest nobody. Black waitresses dealt with us with an easy friendliness that contrasted with a certain wariness noticeable in the North. Blacks are easy people to like when they don't carry a chip on their shoulders.


The Limestone Drugstore was still on the square. (Athens is the county seat of Limestone County.) As a Tom Sawyer simulacrum invariably carrying a BB gun, perhaps with my fielder's mitt slung on the barrel, I once passed a slow summery infinity of afternoons there, reading comic books and drinking ice cream floats. The owner at the time, Mr. Chandler (universally called Coochie, perhaps seventy then, with red Harpo-Marx hair) liked little boys, and kept a rack of comic books on the principle of a bird feeder.


Today, liking little boys would be considered prima facie evidence of what would be called a "pederasty problem," and the comic books would doubtless have to carry warnings. In a less admonished age, Coochie just liked little boys. We carried great piles of comic books to the tables, Superman and Batman and the Green Lantern and Archie, and read them ragged. I doubt that the Limestone ever sold a comic book. It wasn't why they were there. Today some green eyeshade at corporate would notice that those books cost twenty bucks a month, and demand that they be kept in a locked glass case. Unrestricted rapine....


But the Limestone wasn't a chain, so Coochie was corporate, and ran his store as he pleased. Freedom, you might call it.


The inside of the store had been expanded and looked like most drug stores, but...lo!...the soda fountain was as it had been these many years ago! Apparently someone had a fondness for the past. It was empty, no comics were in evidence, and of course no pile of BB guns (mostly the four-dollar Red Ryder kind, though mine was an upscale Daisy Eagle). These, like everything, would today be illegal. It still had the marble bar, the stained glass behind, the black-and-white checkered floor.


I ordered an ice cream float in memory of the splendid, variegated, and free country that I had been born into, and that somehow disappeared, and then we got in the car and headed for Mexico, still free.









June 13, 2006
Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed98.html

 

[Colonel_Reb]

The best thing we could have in America is Congressional term limits and a viable Conservative third party.

 

[Freedom]

Great article Don. Its true. The US has taken to the foreign ways a little too much. Like other countries, the US is seeing rising totalitarianism!

I blame the companies created by "laissez faire" capitalism ironically. They have too much power. If they want illegal mexicans, they get illegal mexicans from the government!

Well, maybe we agree? What's a true conservative?

 

[JD074]

Well, maybe we agree? What's a true conservative?

Pat Buchanan would be a good example.

 

[White_Savage]

Of course, Pat Buchanan was in an interview the other day, and the liberal douche asked him "You just don't want America to become Hispanic and gay, isn't that right Pat?"

I consider the correct answer to the question "Hell yeah that's right." That was not Pat's answer, so now I wonder about him.

On to crazy Europeans...Let's not paint the picture too over-bright, Europe is leftist and totalitarian to a default in some ways. But yeah, they do mostly seem to have a more mature view about the risks of lives than most Americans. In America, if you fly a small airplane into a hill, your family sues the bejeezus out of the manufacturer and collects, whether or not the government's own agencies find any evidence of fault with the airplane. Airframe manufacturers got plenty money don't they? Your family deserves to hit the lottery because you were a moron? So goes the thinking of the 12 dumbest people the lawyers can find, and why airplane manufacture ceased in this country for years, and why a piece of basically 1940s technology signifigantly less complex than the average new car costs over $100,000.00 typically.

In Europe, you were a moron who flew into a hill.

Being around the Medieval fighting community, I've noticed that groups doing European Medieval martial arts in Europe almost exclusively use steel, while the biggest group of head-bonkers in the U.S. uses disassembled rattan lawn furniture. Apparently in Europe "I got hurt fighting with swords, someone should give me a ton of money" does not fly .

 

[JD074]

Of course, Pat Buchanan was in an interview the other day, and the liberal douche asked him "You just don't want America to become Hispanic and gay, isn't that right Pat?"

I consider the correct answer to the question "Hell yeah that's right." That was not Pat's answer, so now I wonder about him.

First, it's the correct answer if you want to get fired! I would rather see Pat Buchanan watch his words and live to fight another day than get ostracized for saying the wrong thing. If you were on NBC and MSNBC, wouldn't you want to stay on NBC and MSNBC? I would!

It's good to be strategic. I say we put on the same "two face" that other people put on for us. Gently push the envelope... gently.

Second, it's the correct answer for an overt racialist (that has nothing to lose.) Buchanan is not an overt racialist (and has a lot to lose.) He knows that mass Third World immigration will "change our culture," and that's implicitly racialist, in my book. He knows that there's a big difference between having a 2000 mile border with 100 million brown people and 100 million white people.

Edited by: JD074

 

[White_Savage]

JD:
Perhaps you are right.

I think alot of White (true Conservatives) don't know their racialists but embrace cultural values that only Whites have use for in any numbers, soooo, allies wherever you find them. Now if they could just see that I'm more akin to them than that black Baptist Afflete down the street, even though I have long hair and believe God weilds a hammer...but that is a personal bias I suppose

 

[Freedom]

Pat Buchanan would be what I consider to be a liberal Republican. Anti-Immigration and protectionism are usually policies adopted by labor unions and those that benefit from him. The Republicans appear to be dominated by complete capitalism marked by little government interference. The liberal Republican is one that would interfere with capitalism to prevent massive immigration, and a decline in American wages often done by tariffs or more recently, incentives for domestic manufactures.

Furthermore Buchanan's desire for American cultural preservation is also more characteristic of a Democrat than a Republican. Republicans, with the exception of TR, have always been anti-conservation of any kind.

Buchanan differs from the Democrats because of his emphasis on moral values.

Maybe my term "liberal Republican" was ambiguous with a nationwide audience. I'm from a pre-dominantly Republican town that is anti-immigration(10 years ago, you would not always even want an Irish, or Portuguese surname in some parts of it), let alone a Spanish one.

 

[JD074]

Savage, I totally agree, allies wherever you find them. We can benefit from the work of people who aren't perfect racialists or WN's. Buchanan, Minuteman Project, Lou Dobbs, Tom Tancredo all come to mind.

Freedom, I think "populist Republican" would be a good description of Buchanan. Most Republicans are free trade ideologues because it suits their corporate agenda. I saw Dick Armey, a Republican, on television today arguing that raising the minimum wage is wrong because it would hurt the least skilled workers. Gimme a break! Like he gives a sh*t about them! It's okay to outsource millions of blue collar jobs, it's okay to bring in millions of Third Worlders to depress wages for blue collar workers, but when it comes to the minimum wage, all of a sudden our beloved GOP becomes so concerned about the plight of the poor and working class. Yeah right! They'll feign concern for our working class when it suits them, and ignore them when it suits them. Buchanan is a little different, and I'm grateful for that.

As for liberals desiring "cultural preservation," woah! They seem to destroy culture- especially white culture- wherever they go. Edited by: JD074

 

[Don Wassall]

That's it, "allies wherever you find them." Party labels mean nothing anymore, at least Democrat and Republican party labels.

 

[Jofreidr_1488]

Interesting that though several European countries have experienced "terrorist incidents," they feel no need to install full-blown surveillance/police states like we do here in the "Land of the Free"

Well Western Europe has lived with terrorism for decades. The Irish Republican Army and ETA come immediately to mind. Because they have dealt with it before they are alot more rational about it. Also having more homogenous populations then the US (filled with mexicans, negroes, and jews) helps as well.

The tour guide pointed out a small tower where the prime minister has his most important meetings with foreign heads of state and members of parliament. One might say it is the Dutch equivalent of the Oval Office. I was only about a stone's throw away from the heart of the Netherlands' government.

I have heard that up until the 1950s White folks could just go to the White House and have Lunch on the lawn there. That is almost unimaginable today given the dangerous, diverse World we now live in.

(Some of my friends have described the frisking they had to get just to go on a White House Tour once)

 

[Don Wassall]

Well Western Europe has lived with terrorism for decades. The Irish Republican Army and ETA come immediately to mind. Because they have dealt with it before they are alot more rational about it. Also having more homogenous populations then the US (filled with mexicans, negroes, and jews) helps as well.

I have heard that up until the 1950s White folks could just go to the White House and have Lunch on the lawn there. That is almost unimaginable today given the dangerous, diverse World we now live in.

(Some of my friends have described the frisking they had to get just to go on a White House Tour once)

The U.S. lived with far more danger in the late1960s and early '70s than we do today. For a while there airplanes were being regularly hijacked to Cuba, student radicals were blowing up buildings and fomenting revolution, there were major race riots in big cities, the Black Panthers and other militant blacks were encouraging violent revolution,and lots of other things were happening, but the government did not construct a police state and the people didn't want one.


There has been a lot of conditioning of Americans since then to make them so fearful and irrational about "terrorism." Lots of years of hysteria about kidnappings of large numbers of children (grossly exaggerated), a few school shootings, and the "pro-Semitic" media sending out the message that all Arabs are terrorists or potential terrorists.


The system has been especially adept at manipulating women's emotions to make them more supportive of the police state, though of course it's never referred to by the system as a "police state." But men are almost as bad.

 

[Jofreidr_1488]

The system has been especially adept at manipulating women's emotions to make them more supportive of the police state

Well I certainly agree that the media have done very well in creating alot of hysteria. When it comes to manipulating the females I am in total agreement, and if you watch closely in stories about terrorists/ arabs (the same thing in the zionist media) they always try to show muslim females in full on hijabs and other total bodily coverings to get the females scared and willing to go along with the police state.

The Truth of the matter is that these types of clothing are indeed very rare in muslim societies only being used by the taliban mostly and in fact in Iraq (which we are constantly being told is a front on the war on terror) Saddams Baathism philosophy was secular with only some lip service paid to islam and women dressed in a modern manner.