Another day in my continuing series of taking some of my old comments out of the old Jihad Watch archives going back ten years to 2005, shaking off the dust, spiffing them up if they need it, and putting them up here.
On one thread Hugh brought up the Benes Decrees (a sociopolitical process of mass deportations of Germans which the briefly free and democratic Czechoslovakia implemented in the brief window of time immediately following WW2 it enjoyed between being subjugated by two totalitarianisms), someone wondered why we were bringing up dusty old decades when we are supposed to be discussing a present danger:
To which I responded:
For good or ill (sometimes one, sometimes the other) European politics is still, over 50 years after the end of WWII, deeply weighed down by, as Mike Savage puts it, waiting vigilantly and anxiously for that “imaginary Maginot Line”.
I.e., the anxious concern that we never succumb again to what led to Hitler has become an institutionalized and cultural habit in Europe, leading now to a paradoxical effect: in order to avoid “repeating Hitler”, they tend now to identify what is labeled as “Islamophobia” as being that frightening threat of a new Fascism — while at the same time giving outrageous free passes to the most virulent expressions of that type of Fascism today — emanating from the Islamic nebula.
It’s kind of a Catch-22 Paradox: the more a person warns about the threat of Islam, the more that person becomes labeled as the real threat.
And that paradox is so air-tight with so many people, nothing short of a few major cataclysms, perhaps, will shake them of it. Or worse, nothing short of seeing Arabic horsemen taking charge of the village square and rounding up people to imprison, shoot and behead in order to initiate the dawning of a new Caliphate.