Ideology withstands axe to skull

I just watched a moving documentary about Canadian soldier Captain Trevor Greene who had an axe sunk into his skull whilst he sat down with village elders in Afghanistan.

The Canadians took off their helmets and put down their guns as they usually do to reassure villagers that they were friendly.

A few minutes before the attack, someone moved all the children about 20 metres away – but none of the Canadian troops noticed anything unusual, Schamuhn said.

"There was no weird feelings. There was no gut feeling that something was about to go down. Everything was very calm and similar to the previous meetings."

A minute later, a man who appeared to be less than 20 walked up behind Greene and pulled a half-metre-long axe out from underneath his clothes.

"He pulled an axe out from underneath his clothing and lifted right above his head, standing right behind Trevor," said Schamuhn, who was sitting only about a metre away.

As he lifted up the axe, the man shouted "Allahu Akbar," which means "God is great" in Arabic.

Then, said Schamuhn, "he swung the axe into Trevor's head."

The Canadian soldiers reacted instantly, the military says.

"The Canadian soldiers who were by him, his security force, killed the assailant immediately following the attack," ...

Tragic, but another surprise comes later:

The question was “Trevor do you have dreams about what happened?” Trevor answers “Yes. I’m in Afghanistan, I’m sitting in the village where I was attacked, I am talking to the boy that attacked me, and I tell him, I’m sorry, I’m sorry that my friend killed you, I was there in uniform in your home, with a weapon.”

Crikey. Someone shouts "God is great" whilst sinking an axe into your head. You'd think maybe his reaction might be: I'm sorry, I'm sorry I misunderstood your religion, I'm sorry I believed everyone who parroted that "Islam is peace". Even considering his tragic brain injury and lengthy rehab, it's still amazing that he doesn't question Islam.

'The country' is racist?

I had the misfortune to listen to Bush Telegraph on ABC radio today. The show was about rural identity so I suspected the ABC might be up to no good. Sure enough, host Michael Cathcart replaced almost every use of the expression "the country" with just "country", as seems to be the Aboriginal way of speaking. The program description included:

When we're living on country, who do we think we are?

What is the point of changing our language to speak like Aboriginals? Was it to appease the one Aboriginal guest on the show? Was it just to annoy the mainstream public, since that seems to be the ABC's main skill? Who knows, but maybe it's applying "acknowledge the traditional owners" to its logical conclusion i.e. every time we use the words "the country" we should acknowledge the traditional owners. What better way than to use Aboriginal-speak?

So now every reference to land is loaded with the recognition of its prior owners and potentially other matters that follow i.e. land rights, reparations, compensation. The program description also said:

The media and politicians love to make grand claims about what it means to be Australian...

And the ABC is making grand claims on what language you can use and therefore what thoughts are permissible. George Orwell:

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it...

The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought as we understand it now.

Carjacked: would you like to get stabbed?

Herald Sun

Kane Cashin said he was confronted by his attacker when he went to his car that was parked in his Smith St, Thornbury, driveway about 6am this morning...

"He asked for the keys and when he said would you like to get stabbed, I got a bit shaken up...no one really wants to get stabbed. Soon as I fell over I threw the keys in his general direction, then he took the keys...and stabbed me in the throat." ...

"I can't see any justification for seeing a stab wound to someones neck after he gets what he wanted." ...

The offender is described as skinny, 183cm tall, in his 30s, of Mediterranean appearance, unshaven, wearing a black hoodie with white motif and white sleeves, a black beanie and dark track pants.

Yahoo

"The biggest thing that's got me is, why stab me in the throat after he's got what he wants? I'm dumbfounded by that."

So much random, unjustified, unprovoked violence out there. What could be the cause? Gee, I don't know. Maybe an ideology with a rap sheet as long as its list of excuses?

Tamils playing Canada for fools

Toronto Sun

... 71% of Tamil refugees here in Canada think things back in Sri Lanka are good enough that they’ve gone back home for a vacation.

Canadian immigration officials randomly surveyed 50 Tamils already here, who are trying to “sponsor” more people to come over, too. Of those would-be sponsors, 31 are refugees. And 22 of those admit to going back to Sri Lanka.

That would be like Jews who fled Nazi Germany deciding to go back to Berlin to hear the opera. Sorry, it just doesn’t add up.

The Tamils are playing us for fools. They’re not genuine refugees. Genuine refugees don’t go back to a country that’s persecuting them.

No doubt the same here in Oz.

Turkish Cops to Patrol German Streets

I found this video on AltRight but it really belongs on FailBlog. Will the need for Turkish cops now mark the failure of diversity and cause a subsequent curb on immigration? Of course not, ideology never fails.

NZ campaign to stop land sales to foreigners

ABC Radio, New Zealanders try to Save the Farm

NZ Herald

Auckland lawyer Tony Bouchier says his telephone has been ringing red hot with support for a campaign to stop New Zealand farms being sold to overseas owners.

The Save the Farms Group says foreign buyers are lining up from all countries to buy New Zealand land...

Hong Kong-based company Natural Dairy is bidding to buy 16 Crafar farms being sold by receivers...

'Save The Farms' spokesman Bouchier said the group wanted a national debate on the issue of overseas ownership of New Zealand land and the Government needed to take urgent action...

Asked about the issue Prime Minister John Key repeated his concerns about large tracts of land being sold off.

"That is part of the economic power base and the economic growth story of New Zealand and I don't think we want to end up in the position where we are tenants in our own land," he told Newstalk ZB.

Bravo. And if our Stable Population Party is concerned about the "loss of vital agricultural farmland and diminished food security" then it will likewise take a stand against foreign ownership. Otherwise, they should logically change their name to the Diminishing Population Party.

Sweet and sour: Australian attitudes towards China

Andrew Shearer, director of studies at the Lowy Institute for International Policy has been giving the matter some thought ...

Videos at the Lowy Institute.

Interview with Radio Australia, Aug 20, 2010

SEN LAM: Does the title of your paper, "Sweet and Sour" succinctly describes Australia's ambivalence towards China?

SHEARER: I think it does... What we found in the Lowy Institute's 2010 poll on Australian public attitudes towards foreign policy issues was ... while three quarters of Australians recognise that China's growth is a good thing for Australia, we found ... 70 percent of Australians think that China aims to dominate Asia... and ... almost half of Australians, 46 percent think that there is a likelihood of Australia being attacked militarily by China in the next 20 years.

LAM: Well, that last finding seems to me quite a startling revelation. Did that surprise you as well?

SHEARER; It did Sen, but what I think it reflects is a deeper underlying reality, for something like 200 years now, Australia's strategic interests and our economic interests have run along in parallel. Our major trading partner has always been, either our major security provider or an ally of our major security provider, so first the UK, then for a long time the United States and more recently, Japan. What we're seeing now is profoundly different. China has overtaken Japan as our leading trading partner, but China is a strategic competitor of the United States, our ally ...

LAM: ... Now as the relationship grows in importance, do you think it might also become far more complex and challenging?

SHEARER: I think that is undoubted... I think the divergence between our economic interests and our strategic interest is going to grow. I think that's going to require a very deft management by Australia's next government and that is why I think it is so important that the next government puts in place a durable framework which makes clear that we want to expand our commercial ties with China, while at the same time being absolutely clear that we want to maintain our strategic links with the United States. And that we are not going to compromise our values on questions such as human rights.

Shearer calls for deft management with clear and uncompromising dealings with China. Yeah, that'll stop them. They'll be trembling in their boots. Not. Shearer acknowledges that for 200 years our economic and strategic interests ran in parallel. Does he consider moving back towards that proven security? Nope, that part of his brain doesn't work: suppressed by the ideology of globalisation. He wants to maintain our strategic links with the US, but does he consider the demographic decline of white America puts our alliance at risk once it loses its white identity? Nope, that part of his brain is suppressed by the ideology of diversity. So it's full steam ahead to expand our commercial ties with China because those ideologies cannot be criticised. That's nuts. Making China rich is not in the US' national interest and therefore not in ours. Hence we should be reducing our commerical ties with China, not expanding.

So many of our intellectuals are really fatalistic commentators i.e. they comment passively on the passing scene with a dash of added rhetoric about tightening the reigns to give the facade of being in control when really they are complicit passengers on the sinking ship of ideology.

Woman jumps from diverse taxi

Woman forced to jump from taxi @ Yahoo!7 Video

Ninemsn

A taxi passenger says she was so scared she had to jump from a moving cab during an attempted abduction in central Melbourne...

"He told me that he was going to the western suburbs and he was going to hurt me," the woman, identified only as Sara, said today...

... the woman opened the right passenger door and jumped from the moving taxi ...

The taxi driver is described as either of Middle Eastern or Indian appearance ...

The Age

"I know I will never, ever, travel in a cab by myself again. That confidence has totally gone."

I guess this literally is a case where ideology meets the road.

Immigrants for open borders: Tanveer Ahmed, etc

Tanveer Ahmed on Dick Smith's Population Puzzle documentary:

... on the documentary, my own feelings was that it sort of felt like a piece of nostalgic nationalism ... I mean, eminent as Dick Smith is, I mean this is the man who gave us Helicopter Jelly and Australian made Tim Tams and it sort of came in with that sort of theme and it was almost like he was sort of retreating from a world that had transformed and was trying to hide from it. That's the impression I got from the documentary. You know, even though we're trying to talk of global solutions, from the documentary I wasn't sure that there was a world beyond Australia and you sort of...

Now, more fundamentally, recent - I think the mobility of people, capital, ideas, is a central plank in human progress and some of the things we're talking about today is almost an idea to try and wall us off from that, to an extent. Now, that may make us wealthy. It may make a whole manner of things. In the past I remember even two or three decades ago, Australia had this reputation around the world of being sort of wealthy but something of a stagnant backwater and the debate I'm hearing here, I think risks placing us back into that sort of reputation...

Well, for one, I'm very pleased that my father here was able to migrate to Australia. I think it gave me a host of other opportunities. You see Bangladesh. This is a country where almost a third of the GDP is from remittance payments. So my father sustains the health and education of an entire extended family and we're talking tens of people: 30, 40 people, and in today's world it's not a simple - there'll be a set of people that will decide to migrate. Some of them will return back. Some of them will go back more skilled, with extra skills. Some people will go back and forth. Now, a point I'll make, one of the key successes - say in India, their IT industry, the city of Bangalore - much of that depended on this to and fro between Silicon Valley in San Francisco and Bangalore. They weren't just living in India, nor did they just migrate to the US and it was fundamental to their development and the whole world is better for it. So there's a lot of complexity in this and I think, increasingly, people don't live just in one country...

Suvendrini Perera on Dick Smith:

It seemed to me that the real elephant in the film and perhaps in this room is consumption because we talk about population but we don't talk about the need for us in the rich world to reduce consumption and I didn't hear that in the film, as well... I mean the quarter acre block, for example, that you talk about, is that really a sustainable way to think about living ...

Pino Migliorino, We need to stand up for multiculturalism:

Multiculturalism is a global phenomenon, perhaps this is why it is not popular in the current election debates, which have been focused (in the words of the Nobel prize winning Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore) within the "narrow, domestic walls" of Australian politics.

None of these people identify with Anglo Australians. They identify with their brothers and sisters back home and are intent on reshaping Australia to benefit their own people. They want open-borders to destroy the dominant Anglo demographic. They have no respect for Anglo Australians who wish to preserve their environment and racial/cultural homogeneity. They mock our culture, and smear us with charges of xenophobia and backwardness. They talk of progress, inevitability, and lifting up the third-world, but they are alien and hostile to our way of life. They are destructive nation wreckers. They hide behind the "moral" ideology of diversity and globalisation, but they are as ethnocentric and self-serving as anybody else.

Big country a defence against suicidal ideologies?

Big country is a defence priority
Paul Cleary

BY the middle of this century, an Australia with today's population of 22 million would have an increasingly precarious hold on a vast continent.

It would be the envy of others.

China, India and possibly Indonesia would have become wealthier and even more populous, each of them having the latest military hardware that would dwarf Australia's capability.

More ominous would be the relative decline of the US as our protector in the Asia-Pacific region, the result of catch-up by these new powers and its own economic malaise that began with the financial crisis of 2008...

It seems hardly plausible that a tiny population of 22 million would be able to hang on to such an enormous natural resource bounty in the face of inexorably rising demand and increasingly muscular military might.

Without a substantially bigger economy and population, Australians could well lose the lot...

The call by Dick Smith and others for a policy of zero population growth is incredibly reckless when thought of in strategic terms...

Gee. And not a word of criticism for the self-harming ideologies that are causing our economic and military decline i.e. free trade, globalisation, diversity. No acknowledgement that we were safer when we were protectionist, or trading only with our allies. No acknowledgement that our alliances were more secure when we shared a common identity. No, those ideologies are beyond criticism, and that part of Paul Cleary's brain is compartmentalised and suppressed with every morning coffee. No, his left hand never sees what his right hand does. He doesn't deal with cause and effect, only effects. He doesn't deal with action and reaction, just reaction. Fatalism is the new drug, man. Nope, it's full steam ahead to finance the rise of China, India and Indonesia who are (apparently) inherently antagonistic towards us. Well then, goose stepping along with the globalisation cult to our own demise it is then. I'm inclined to call such stupidity "incredibly reckless when thought of in strategic terms" but that would be a tad cruel. The poor journalist would lose his job if he dared question the "great" ideologies of our time. Not to worry, a big country can fix a suicidal ideology, eh? Yeah, sure.

Voting against immigration

Parties Against Population Growth ...

Stable Population Party

Stop Population Growth Now

Parties Against Diversity Growth ...

One Nation

Australian Protectionist Party

Australia First Party

Parties Against Muslim Immigration ...

Christian Democratic Party

More voting details at The Independent Australian

Also Below The Line for checking where your Senate preferences go, or creating your own preferences.

Hawke: "We’re all bloody boat people"

Abbott mad as a cut snake, says 'boat-person' Hawke:

Mr Hawke... said there was no way to "stop the boats" as Mr Abbott had promised.

"We’re all bloody boat people," Mr Hawke said.

"That’s how we found the place." ...

"These people have got initiative, guts and courage and Australia needs people like that."

Men without identity are vacuous, reckless, and dangerous. They cannot defend Australia from becoming an alien and hostile globalised dump. His implication that Australia has a shortage of "initiative, guts and courage" is offensive.

Gold Coast man charged with racist fax to MP

Race-hate words found not illegal:

A staff member working for Broadwater MP Peta-Kaye Croft complained to police after receiving the document from 62-year-old Denis Mulheron of Labrador on June 30 last year.

Christie Turner, 28, told Southport Magistrates Court she was deeply offended when she read the one-page fax which called on the Labor Party to tighten immigration laws against 'niggers' and 'sandnigger terrorists' and Muslim women with circumcised genitals.

The fax also made reference to indigenous Australians as 'Abos'...

Mr Mulheron was charged with using a carriage service, namely a fax machine, to menace, harass or offend -- a offence which carries a maximum penalty of three years jail.

After lengthy consideration, Mr O'Driscoll ruled that Mr Mulheron's words were not enough to invoke criminal sanctions.

"The words used were crude, unattractive and direct but were not offensive to a reasonable person," he said.

Strange how journalist Leah Fineran judged the words as "race-hate" moments after the judge ruled them "not offensive to a reasonable person".

Democracy weakened by charade

Miranda Devine, SMH:

Progressives really believe that by willing something into being, by talking it up and writing about it and employing their combined brilliance they can somehow engineer a mass change in social sentiment. It is a core belief. But more and more the arguments run away from them.

They can belittle and shun people who refuse to accept the genius of their world view but they just make their enemies stronger because all the energy they expend on maintaining the charade that they represent the reasonable middle ground means they fail competently to perform their day jobs - say, running a democratic country.

All true. KRudd tried hard to maintain a nationalist facade, but couldn't hide his open-borders agenda. The focus groups went ballistic when he declared his love for a big Australia. It was all downhill from there. The danger now, though, is that Gillard is becoming the facade that Rudd couldn't maintain. The prospect of Rudd as Foreign Minister pursuing his open-borders Asia-Pacific Union, whilst Gillard maintains the facade of nationalism, is nauseating.

Fact and Fantasy: Turkey's Ergenekon Investigation

Between Fact and Fantasy: Turkey's Ergenekon Investigation (PDF)
By Gareth H. Jenkins
August 2009
Central Asia-Caucasus Institute
Silk Road Studies Program

Preface
by Svante E. Cornell
Research Director
Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program

Two years since its inception, the Ergenekon case has mushroomed beyond all expectations. In over a dozen predominantly pre-dawn raids, hundreds of suspects have been detained and/or questioned, and almost two hundred have been charged. Prosecutors have so far produced two indictments running a total of several thousand pages, and both a third and a fourth indictment are rumored to follow in coming months. But far from convincing its critics, the Ergenekon investigation has become ever more controversial. On the one hand, it has clearly uncovered information on wrongdoing on the part of some of the accused, and certainly on the prevalence of democratically questionable views among a section of the Turkish elite. But that said, the prosecution appears to have failed to live up to the high judicial standards that Turkey’s population were entitled to expect, leading to serious doubts concerning the investigation’s conduct, and ultimately, its motives.

Several factors have fed these concerns. Firstly, every pre-dawn raid appeared to net an increasingly unlikely batch of suspects. Gradually, a pattern emerged whereby prosecutors could show little or no evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of a substantial proportion of the suspects, many of whom appeared to have nothing in common except their political opposition to the AKP in particular and to Islamic conservatism in general. Secondly, as the investigation dragged on, concerns mounted regarding the length of time suspects spent in detention without being formally charged with any crime. Third, it gradually became clear that the case not only made claims that defied reason – such as implicating the supposed Ergenekon organization in every act of political violence in Turkey’s modern history – but also that the investigation included deep inconsistencies and internal contradictions. Fourth, the systematic leaking of evidence from the investigation to the pro-AKP press, which appeared to serve the purpose of intimidating the opposition, had by mid-2008 become a serious concern that compromised the integrity of the investigation. In sum, at the time of writing, the Ergenekon investigation has led to a climate of fear spreading in the ranks of the substantial section of the Turkish population that is opposed to the AKP government and to Islamic conservatism...

In view of the Ergenekon investigation’s massive impact on, and far-reaching implications for Turkey’s society and politics, it is all the more surprising that it has been subjected to so little analytical treatment. Indeed, studies of the case seldom go beyond newspaper-length articles that can at best highlight only limited aspects of the issue. This is in all likelihood a factor of the sensitive and infected nature of the case, as well as a result of the prohibitive size of the indictments, which has deterred even those scholars that do have a command of the Turkish language from acquiring a serious enough knowledge of the case to speak authoritatively on the subject.

Yet that is exactly what Gareth Jenkins has done. A long-time and respected observer of Turkish politics and society, Jenkins is ideally placed to understand, as well as explain, the intricacies of the Ergenekon investigation. His published works to date include monographs both on the Turkish military and on Turkish political Islam, both key ingredients in the maze of relationships that make up the context of the Ergenekon investigation. Not standing at that, Jenkins is among the few to have studied both indictments in the case in detail. It was therefore natural for the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program to commission Jenkins to conduct an in-depth analysis of the case. The result is the present paper, whose conclusions concerning the Ergenekon case should form essential reading for anyone seeking to understand contemporary Turkish politics. Those conclusions, however, are not encouraging. They suggest, in fact, that the prevailing Western view of the Ergenekon investigation as a step forward in Turkey’s democratization process is misplaced. Indeed, they also imply that the Western tacit encouragement of the investigation – though diminishing in emphasis as concerns have mounted even there – should be tempered with a much more acute concern for the investigation’s breaches of the rule of law and due process. Coupled with other developments of concern in Turkish affairs, not least the growing intimidation of independent media, the Ergenekon investigation is certainly worthy of much closer monitoring and analysis.

Executive Summary

... However, whether among those formally indicted as part of the Ergenekon investigation or those detained in the police raids and subsequently released without charge, many appear to have been guilty of nothing more than opposition to the AKP. In fact, there is no proof that the Ergenekon organization as described in the indictments exists or has ever existed. Indeed, the indictments are so full of contradictions, rumors, speculation, misinformation, illogicalities, absurdities and untruths that they are not even internally consistent or coherent...

However, some of the inconsistencies in the evidence presented to the court have led to accusations that the investigators have amended material to try to reinforce the charges against the defendants. Such accusations have been dismissed as unfounded by those involved in the investigation. But it is difficult to be as dismissive about the frequency with which material – particularly the transcripts of what appear to be recordings of telephone calls involving either the defendants or critics of the investigation – has appeared in pro-AKP media outlets and websites. In most cases, the victims of the apparent wiretaps have claimed that, although substantially accurate, the recordings and transcripts have been doctored to try to incriminate or discredit them. Government officials have dismissed suggestions that the transcripts are based on wiretaps by AKP sympathizers in the TNP, claiming that the equipment required to tap telephone calls is freely available on the black market. While that may be the case, it does not explain why it is only critics and opponents of the AKP who have had their telephones tapped and purported transcripts of their conversations published in the media. Nor does it explain the failure of the law enforcement authorities to investigate the apparent wiretaps. Under Turkish law, tapping a telephone without judicial approval is a crime, as is publishing the transcript of a wiretap.

The law enforcement authorities have also displayed a marked reluctance to pursue other accusations of wrongdoing against those associated with the AKP. Even after a German court ruled in September 2008 that close associates of leading members of the AKP in Turkey had been involved in the embezzlement of at least €16.9 million in donations to the Deniz Feneri e.V. Islamic charity. When members of the Doğan Group, Turkey’s largest media holding, reported details of the German court’s findings, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan instructed party supporters not to buy the group’s newspapers. On February 19, 2009, the tax authorities abruptly fined the Doğan Group TL 826 million (approximately $525 million) for alleged tax irregularities; charges which the group has resolutely denied. On April 13, 2009, one of the Doğan Group’s executives was detained overnight on suspicion of links to Ergenekon. On April 21, 2009, all of the companies in the Doğan Group were banned from bidding for state tenders for a period of one year.

This context has inevitably reinforced suspicions that the Ergenekon investigation cannot be explained solely by the investigators’ penchant for conspiracy theories. Significantly, despite its proponents’ claims that it represents a final reckoning with the some of the darker pages in recent Turkish history, the Ergenekon investigation has made little attempt to investigate the numerous well-documented accusations of abuses by Deep State operatives during its heyday in the 1990s. Indeed, the fear is that it represents a major step not – as its proponents maintain – towards the consolidation of pluralistic democracy in Turkey, but towards an authoritarian one-party state.

File under: This is complete nonsense, everybody knows that Islam is a religion of peace, case closed, nothing to see here, move along you Islamophobes.

Peter Hitchens: Turkey's growing repression

Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail:

A deeper change is under way. Deliberately unremarked by Western commentators for some years, Turkey has a fiercely Islamist Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Even now, Barack Obama, like George W. Bush before him, still bleats about how Turkey should be allowed to join the EU. And establishment commentators, encouraged by liberal Turkish intellectuals, absurdly continue to insist that Erdogan is in some way 'moderate'.

How odd. Back in the Nineties, this supposed moderate was railing that: 'The Muslim world is waiting for Turkey to rise up. We will rise up! With Allah's permission, the rebellion will start.' Erdogan was even imprisoned for quoting a fervent Islamist poem that declared: 'The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers...'

Now he is Prime Minister, he has not stopped thinking this. He simply knows better than to blurt it out.

Fashionable liberals in the West prefer to worry about the sinister Deep State, or Derin Devlet, which they claim really governs Turkey through a combination of military power and thuggery. And they have a point, though not as much of one as they used to.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the dictatorial-founder of modern Turkey, was almost as ruthless as Stalin, using military and police power in the Twenties to sweep away the fez, the turban and the veil, impose Western script and emancipate women. His inheritors are the Turkish army, who have emerged from their barracks four times since the Second World War to stage a putsch, hang a few politicians and drive the mullahs back into their mosques. Even further out of sight, and based on a Cold War organisation designed to perform acts of resistance in the event of a Soviet takeover, are profoundly secret networks of government agents committed to safeguard Ataturk's secular order.

They have made some unsavoury allies. Their existence gives credence to the genuinely creepy Ergenekon trials, aimed at a misty and possibly non-existent secret network of conspirators. The plotters are supposed to have sought to foment a fifth military coup. Personally, I think it a swirling tub of fantasy. In a brilliant demolition job (Ergenekon: Between Fact And Fiction: Turkey's Ergenekon Investigation), Turkish expert Gareth Jenkins has gone through more than 4,000 pages of indictments. And he accepts some wrongdoing has been uncovered.

But he concludes: 'The majority of the accused...appear to be guilty of nothing more than holding strong secularist and ultranationalist views.'

As the case wears on, Turkey slips decisively towards the more alarming end of the Islamic spectrum...

Foes of the Islamist government are arrested in surprise dawn raids. One of those scooped up in the arrest net was a 73-year-old woman, head of an educational charity, in the final stages of cancer. Many of the 200-odd accused have been held for years on vague charges. But their arrests fuel the government's claim that it is threatened by a vast alleged conspiracy to bring it down. This supposedly implicates everyone from army officers to journalists.

Above all, the charges are aimed at the army, the force that has kept the mullahs in check, and incidentally kept the women unveiled, in Turkey for the past 90 years.

The supposed plot has now become so enormous that a special courthouse has been built in the suburbs of Istanbul to handle the hearings.

Ilter Turan, Professor of Political Science at Bilgi University, Istanbul, says: 'Erdogan has authoritarian proclivities. He will take journalists to court if he does not like what they write about him. He scolds them for writing critical things. He asks editors, "Why don't you come and tell us about the problem in private before printing it?" He's a potential autocrat who likes to engage in acts of personal generosity, like an old-fashioned monarch.' ...

Under Turkey's proportional representation voting system, Erdogan can - and does - choose all his candidates. Critics and opponents can be easily got rid of. His power is about to increase if he wins a planned constitutional referendum set for September 12. If voters want increased 'human rights' they will also have to increase Erdogan's power to appoint judges and other key officials...

One such intellectual is so nervous about Erdogan's thin skin that he asks me not to name him. Some of his allegations against the government - of corruption and Judophobia - are so alarming that I can only hint at them here.

And he flatly contradicts Ahmet Altan about Ergenekon, saying: 'All the government is trying to do is to humiliate and intimidate the army, and make sure it is powerless to interfere in politics in future. This coup attempt is supposed to have been hatched years ago, and never took place - because it had no support in the army. Among all these dozens of people in the dock there is not one who has the power or the prestige to lead a putsch. They're just nonentities. The documents in the case come from nowhere. '

Even more emphatic is an impressive retired general, Haldun Solmazturk, a quiet professional who certainly can't be dismissed as a Westernised intellectual. He told me: 'Ergenekon is a tool to intimidate democratic opponents. I cannot call Erdogan a democratic leader. He has no interest at all in progressive Turkish democracy.

'They have shown no interest in finding a middle way. Ergenekon is a huge pot into which they throw anybody associated with any kind of opposition - the military, the universities, the media. There are people still in prison after three years, with no convictions. Many friends of mine have been arrested. I have no doubt that the majority of the suspects didn't commit any crime.'

Wasn't the general afraid? No. 'They can't intimidate everybody. I am not afraid of them. That is exactly what they want.'

But he is contemptuous of Western politicians who fail to see the direction Turkey is taking. 'I, and many like me, are angry with those in the United States and Europe who have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to attacks on democracy here.' ...

We in Western Europe have long assumed that the world that was created in 1945 would last for ever. But we have not paid enough attention to the rising new nations to our East, or to the new powers, fat with oil and gas, heedless of the old laws of liberty, which are gathering strength as America weakens.

Now we may have to pay attention. Among the bayonet-like minarets and helmet-like domes of ancient Istanbul an East wind is blowing, which I think will chill us all.

File under: Things David Cameron and Barack Obama will never know.

James Arvanitakis: anti-White, open-borders fatalist, with a dash of smugness

James Arvanitakis, Population: Size Doesn’t Matter:

Yes, recent migrants often congregate together in certain suburbs, but as we have seen with the Greek, Italian and Vietnamese migrants, within a generation of two they disperse. Migrants have always made Australia a more vibrant society...

We are part of a global community and reap the benefits. The challenge of population numbers is an international issue and by simply putting up a fence around Australia and saying ‘no more’ does not solve anything. We rely on the rest of the world for our economic, social and cultural vibrancy – we are unlikely to benefit if we turn our back on such issues and the results are difficult to predict...

In hindsight, the Indigenous people standing at Sydney Heads and watching the First Fleet arriving in 1788 would argue that the 1,500 migrants were way too many – and this has nothing to do with numbers. As George Mombiot noted, it is “no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be blamed.” It is time we left the numbers debate behind and concentrated on real issues of sustainability.

Arvanitakis, presumably of Greek origin, is rolled-gold proof that, within a generation, immigrants disperse into open-borders anti-White activists. He is a living-breathing argument against diverse immigration. His love of vibrancy insults White culture by implying it is deficient.

Guess why the Aborigines didn't like the First Fleet? Because they preferred homogeneity over diversity. Guess why Whites don't like diversity on mass? Same reason. Guess why Arvanitakis doesn't like White Australia? Same reason: because he doesn't like being a dominated by a foreign demographic. It's a sign of the times when we have smug fatalists like Arvanitakis posing as academics, whilst reason struggles to see daylight.

NPI: The Cost of Diversity

Edwin S. Rubenstein and the Staff of NPI (PDF):

Putnam is hardly the first learned man to weigh in on the culture-trust relationship. An overwhelming anti-diversity consensus, backed by data quantifying the negative impact of diversity on economic development, is found among serious scholars:

There are scholars who have assessed empirically the influence of cultural diversity on economic development. The primary argument—which can be traced to Aristotle—suggests that diverse states are more susceptible to development-inhibiting internal strife than their homogeneous counterparts are…. Following Tocqueville (1873), Duetsch (1953), and Banks and Textor (1963), Adelman and Morris (1967) gather the data for 74 less developed countries from 1957 to 1962 and rank each country on a 10-point ordinal scale of diversity. Their results, based on factor analysis, support their hypothesis: homogeneous countries typically had higher growth rates. Haug (1967) finds a negative correlation between per capita GNP and cultural diversity based on the data of 114 countries in 1963. Reynolds (1985) compares 37 less developed countries from 1950 to 1980 and, again, indicates that cultural diversity results in lower growth rates. He suggests that this may be due to a sense of alienation among peoples. In other words, reaching a consensus on policies favorable to economic development, especially for the long run, may be difficult when groups have different interpretations of the past and different goals for the future. 25

Culture includes learned patterns of behavior, socially acquired traditions, ways of thinking and acting, attitudes, values and morals. Culture standardizes relationships by allowing people to make reasonably confident assumptions about the reactions of those with whom they interact. There are many dimensions of culture, but race, religion, ethnicity and language are the principal sources of diversity.

When societies are multicultural, the ethnocentric differences of race, religion, ethnicity and language often lead to enmity. Even if different groups live together peacefully, the lack of a common language and common norms reduces cooperation and increases the cost of economic transactions.

Economist Gerald W. Scully summarizes the benefits of mono- as opposed to multi-cultural societies in a 1995 paper:

Cultural relativism has made the study of the role of culture in human controversial. But there is little disagreement that intergroup enmity is widespread in culturally heterogeneous societies. 26

Free markets, private property, rule of law and eventually representative democracy and universal suffrage arose in culturally homogeneous Western societies where all members of society had equal rights to compete in the marketplace. On the other hand, culturally heterogeneous societies are less likely to adopt the institutions of liberty. Since control of economic resources is essential to political control, dominant cultural groups structure economic institutions to serve their self-interest. And when private property and economic rights are allocated along cultural lines, economic inefficiency is inevitable and societies are less prosperous. 27