Denmark: "In One Generation, Our Country Has Changed"

by Judith Bergman • January 16, 2019 at 5:00 am

The decision to send the criminal inhabitants of the asylum center to the uninhabited island of Lindholm caused great relief in Bording -- an element the international press appears to have missed. Clearly, the right of law-abiding citizens to live in peace does not count for much on the scale of international moral outrage.
Significantly, the outraged international press did not offer any answers to the legitimate question of what governments are supposed to do with hardened criminal asylum seekers, who pose a genuine threat to their surroundings and have been sentenced to deportation, but cannot be deported from the country because of international human rights obligations.
The problem is far from a uniquely Danish one: virtually all European countries have signed international human rights conventions that leave them with the same dilemma.
The country did not just "change". Danish politicians, with their policies, changed it.

In his recent New Year's speech, Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen mentioned that Muslim parallel societies constitute a problem and that immigrants must learn to put secular values over religious ones. He just did not say how he planned to address all that. Pictured: Rasmussen in October 2018. (Photo by Rune Hellestad/Getty Images)

Denmark made international headlines in late November 2018, when the Danish government announced a plan to send certain asylum seekers to the small, uninhabited island of Lindholm. The international outrage was intensified when it came to light that the island currently houses a research center for contagious animal diseases; that the ferry which the asylum seekers will be able to take to the mainland during the day (it does not operate in the evening) is named "Virus"; and that the asylum center will be accompanied by a constant police presence on the island.

The group of asylum seekers meant to live in Lindholm consists of criminals of various sorts, including those who have been sentenced to be deported from Denmark, those who are considered a security threat to Denmark, and so-called "foreign warriors".

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The Peaceful Takeover of Europe

by Jan Keller • January 16, 2019 at 4:00 am

The concept of the clash of civilizations assumes that there is a conflict between religions. This view often appears to be true where Islam is concerned; the religious aspect of Islamism appears to be a powerful motivator. That desire illustrates how deeply flawed were the sociological and political theories of modernization, according to which the entire world eventually would undergo a process of enlightenment, similar to Europe's.
Whereas traditional Marxists believed that a dictatorship of the proletariat would result in a classless society, the neo-Marxists apparently believe that a dictatorship for the benefit of minorities will result in a society of absolute freedom for all.
To this end, they seem to think, it is necessary to build an anti-discrimination bureaucracy to break the domination of the majority over the minority and force the majority to demand an end to its own privileged position. It is not enough for the majority to tolerate otherness; it must embrace and love it.

The vast majority of Western politicians and members of the media today appear to be guided by the idea that it is better to be wrong about Francis Fukuyama's The End of History than to be right about Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. Pictured: Huntington (left) and Fukayama. (Image sources: Huntington - World Economic Forum/Wikimedia Commons; Fukayama - Fronteiras do Pensamento/Wikimedia Commons)

The vast majority of Western politicians and members of the media today appear to be guided by the idea that it is better to be wrong about Francis Fukuyama's The End of History than to be right about Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. This seems simply an abbreviated expression of a widespread unwillingness, or inability, to call things by their real names. Let us examine the reality that is so hard for many members of liberal societies to acknowledge, and which explains why Huntington's diagnosis of the current era is far more fitting than Fukuyama's.

Huntington's working hypothesis for analyzing current events basically follows German sociologist Max Weber's "sociology of civilizations." Yet the term "shock of civilizations" was coined in 1957 by the historian Bernard Lewis, in the aftermath of the Suez crisis.

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