A short while ago I “throwed” (as we say in the country) up a post on PEGIDA (or “Pegida,” as it’s commonly, but incorrectly, rendered), the “Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the Occident” movement which started in Dresden and now has a good deal of the hand-wringing class in Germany up in arms.
Since then there has been quite a bit of turmoil within the ranks, to the extent they can be said to have ranks. The fellow who was the founder of the outfit, Lutz Bachmann, was forced to bail out when it became widely known that he had put up a picture of himself on Facebook wearing a Hitler moustache and with the famous ill-combed hair hanging off the side of his head. He also expressed some opinions about immigrants and asylum-seekers that were fairly pointed and crude. In truth he does in that picture bear something of a resemblance to Hitler, perhaps not as eerie as the fellow who played him in Downfall. Bachmann’s not giving the Hitlergruß in the picture, which is good for him, because that’s a criminal offense in Germany, nor are there any Nazi symbols, uniforms, tracts, etc. to see. But still, no matter where you go in the world there’s Shit You Don’t Kid Around About, and in Germany that’s one of them. So he had to go. By the way, the effort by mainstream politicians to tie him formally to AfD, Alternative für Deutschland, the rising fourth party in the country, hasn’t worked.
More seriously, Bachmann’s efforts, notwithstanding his resignation from the leadership slot, to pull the levers and control the movement, has lead another four members of the leadership to resign, among them Kathrin Oertel, their public speaker. They were unwilling to continue onwards with Bachmann’s interference, and also, it seems, not with him associated with the movement at all, given his public statements. They took a stand on principle, in other words. You can oppose unlimited mass immigration from places that are irredeemably hostile to Western culture without sliming the actual individuals themselves. They were willing to do the former but not the latter. Good for them, I suppose.
Of course, this makes the question of who’s calling the shots all the more important. PEGIDA wouldn’t be the first mass movement to have its original leadership effectively purged, whether quasi-voluntarily or not, and then be taken over by people a helluva lot less scrupulous than they were.
Be all that as it may, among the “concerned” rhetoric of the hand-wringing classes is the insistent question of just what does “Islamization” mean. Asking the question that way is of course supposed to highlight that all these PEGIDA trolls don’t even know or understand what it is they’re protesting against. I mean, unless you can “define” Islamization you can’t be against it, can you? And by “define” we mean write something down which is internally coherent, comprehensive, not over-inclusive, and easy to hold up to any given set of facts to see if it fits in the frame.
I’d observe that this insistence of being able concretely to define “Islamization” is not at all dissimilar to the insistence that unless you can define “obscenity” you can’t be against that, either. I forget which of the Supreme Court justices it was who, in an unfamiliar outburst of common sense, pointed out that whatever “obscenity” might or might not be in the abstract, he knew it when he saw it. By like token, you can tell Islamization when you see it.
Like this story from this morning’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: A 19-year-old girl was found dead in Darmstadt, in a park. No missing person report was filed, no attempt made to hide the corpse’s identity. Turns out the perps were her parents. Her parents. Both parents. Her father strangled her, then he and her mother carried her body to a park and dumped it. Dumped out in the leaves and dirt the little girl she bounced on her knee, whom she taught her first words, her colors. Whom she tickled as she bathed, and with whom she laughed at all the silly things tiny children say.
The reason: She wanted to marry a boy they didn’t approve of.
Parents, daughter, and boyfriend are all described as “Germans of Pakistani origin.” Bullshit. They’re Pakistanis who happen to living in Germany.
And this, all you hand-wringers, is Islamization of the Occident. Now, in 2015, it is acceptable in that culture to slaughter your own child because you don’t like whom she fell in love with. Let’s put this in perspective: Not even in the Dark Ages, in the time of the Merovingians, did ordinary European parents kill their daughters for loving out of bounds. I can’t even recall reading on any instances in which nobility or royalty, for whom these decisions had peace-versus-war implications, killed their children, male or female. Might have locked them up in a convent or monastery, sure; but I’m going to take a lot of convincing before I consider that as being in the same league as taking your own hands and choking off the breath of life in your 19-year-old daughter’s throat.
Someone remind me again why it’s a wicked thing to question whether the continued uncontrolled introduction of people from cultures where such things are not only done, but the done thing, is a good idea for Western Civilization.