Standing Up Against the Reactionary Right

Girls stand up to Neo-Nazis. It’s happening in Europe. Strong, empowered teenage girls have the courage to stand up to Nazis. Lucky for them that they are living in Europe. In many other parts of the world they would not be quite so lucky.

Is it a victory for feminism or yet another mindless empty gesture?

It reminds us of Tienanmen Square in 1989. A man courageously walked out onto the street to stand in front of a row of tanks. The man stood there and the tanks were stopped in their tracks. The image has become iconic. Eventually, some citizens pulled him away from the confrontation.

Eventually, the tanks went on to do what they were ordered to do. Once their path was unobstructed and the press was muzzled the tanks roared into Tienanmen Square, breaking up the democracy movement and murdering many of the student protesters. But, we love empty gestures and we remember the tank man’s moment of glory.

Now we have a brave Czech girl scout, Lucie Myslíková standing up against a right wing, apparently Neo-Nazi protester in the city of Brno. She was protesting for social justice, against Islamophobia, and apparently, in favor of more Muslim refugees. More girl power, please.

Strangely, enough the Neo-Nazi engaged her in conversation. He asked her to raise her consciousness and grasp the fact that she ran a high risk of being raped by one of the refugees she was defending. To which the Girl Scout declared that she would get over it, because the wounds would heal. She would be willing, she was really saying, to martyr herself for her idealistic cause.

Susan Goldberg comments:

A girl wearing a Scout uniform willingly acknowledged that she could be raped by an immigrant, something that is happening to women across Europe in record numbers. Then, she essentially reasoned, I’ll get over it, and the Western world lifts her up as a hero. She justified rape in the name of political discourse. A Girl Scout opened herself up to sexual assault for the sake of her political beliefs.

What Myslikova said was profound. Profoundly scary. What, exactly, is the Girl Scout movement teaching young women today? That they must sacrifice themselves on the altar of “diversity, peace and understanding”? If they’re expecting Myslikova and her Scout sisters to live up to the Girl Scout law of being “responsible for what I say and do,” that’s pretty damned horrifying.

So, why was this Girl Scout not marching against rape culture? Why was she taking such a carefree attitude toward her own possible rape? One suspects that she had no idea what she was saying or doing.

Blinded to the dangers of Islam young idealists across Europe and America want to allow more Muslim refugees. After all, they have figured out that their true enemy is the radical right, the reactionary right, the alt-right and the fascist right.

This means that they are in bed with Islamic radicals and proponents of Shariah Law. They are welcoming people who believe in wife beating and honor killing. Full-throated defenders of free speech they are happy to welcome people who murder heretics, apostates and blasphemers. And who consider homosexuality a capital crime.

Have they not noticed that the effort to shut down dissenting opinions on college campuses bears a deep resemblance to the blasphemy laws that good liberals have been fighting for decades now? And don’t they understand that their efforts to destroy professors who have heretical opinions or who have converted to conservatism resemble the Muslim treatment of apostates? Apparently not.

By the way, what do those who are marching against rape culture think of the rape culture that exists in Muslim countries? In Dubai, when a Norwegian nurse went to the local authorities to report that she had been gang raped, what did they do? Why, they threw her into jail for having had sex outside of marriage. Eventually, thanks to media exposure she was released. Is that the culture that the Girl Scout wants to see more of in the Czech Republic? Would she, like the authorities in Dubai, dismiss the rapists because they belong to a culture that countenances such activity?

Have these girls been enabling those who want to murder and rape them?  Are they suffering from a modern version of Stockholm Syndrome? Are they so terrified of what Muslims would to do them that they reflexively sympathize with them?

So, today’s enlightened elites do not much worry about the danger posed by Muslims. But they have declared war on a reactionary right whose influence has grown because the elites have done nothing to defend their nations from the influx of Islamists.

Andrew Sullivan is up in arms about it all. He explains that today’s reactionaries are fighting modernity. He does not seem to understand that  Islam, throughout the world, is the strongest reactionary anti-modern force.

In his words:

What are this generation’s reactionaries reacting to? They’re reacting, as they have always done, to modernity. But their current reaction is proportional to the bewildering pace of change in the world today. They are responding, at some deep, visceral level, to the sense that they are no longer in control of their own lives. They see the relentless tides of globalization, free trade, multiculturalism, and mass immigration eroding their sense of national identity. They believe that the profound shifts in the global economy reward highly educated, multicultural enclaves and punish more racially and culturally homogeneous working-class populations. And they rebel against the entrenched power of elites who, in their view, reflexively sustain all of the above.

Sullivan is fighting the wrong war. He ignores the reactionaries who would, given the chance, kill him, but he denounces conservatives who want to restore a sense of national identity. Those would be the Brexiters and the Trumpists.

But, the Brexit vote was not about ending free trade. It was about having one’s nation’s business controlled by unelected Brussels bureaucrats. One understands that the elites in Britain and throughout Europe want to hold on to their power. Thus, they defame and despise the Luddites who voted for Brexit.

Does Sullivan believe that working class populations, more culturally homogeneous than the great cosmopolitan metropolis, deserve to be punished? What exactly is he getting at in his reward/punishment meme?

And, what is the special virtue associated with mass immigration? Do we really need more people who want to murder Andrew Sullivan? Do we need more people who want to shut him up?

One understands that Britain exited the EU because did not want to receive any of Angela Merkel’s army of immigrants. Whatever you think of outgoing French president Hollande, he did not allow any increase to the French Muslim population. Even so, the nation has been in a state of emergency for months now, thanks to unassimilated and radicalized French Muslims.

Can you blame the British public? After all, it had already seen hundreds of school girls “groomed” by Muslim men in Rotherham into sex slaves. Where were the opponents of rape culture when that was happening? Remember the silence of the lambs?

Why, they were doing what the Rotherham constabulary was doing: proclaiming that they could not shut it down because that would make them Isalmophobic.

Besides, no one is effectively supporting a return to mercantilism. The British government wants to negotiate new trade deals. Not even Donald Trump, in his anti-trade rants really believes that we should shut down free trade. Trump has suggested renegotiating trade deals, making them fairer to America. This is not the same as rejecting free trade.

One also notes that Trump told Chinese president Xi Jinping that he would give China a better deal on trade if China helped him to deal with Kim Jong-un. It’s not the mark of an inveterate opponent of free trade.

It suggests that the people who first negotiated these deals did not know how to negotiate. Surely, we all understand that the Iran nuclear deal was a catastrophe. And the North Korea nuclear deal, negotiated by Bill Clinton has produced the looming nightmare we are currently facing on the Korean peninsula.

As the world thrills to the picture of young girls standing up to injustice, we should note that a somewhat older female, Angela Merkel, is responsible for welcoming men who will happily rape these intrepid social justice warriors. Tell me again why putting women in power will best protect women’s interests?