NM's blog

Bertrand Russell warns that racial pride can quickly become harmful racial supremacy (1946): “Another passion which gives rise to false beliefs that are politically harmful is pride - pride of nationality, race, sex, class, or creed. When I was young France was still regarded as the traditional enemy of England, and I gathered as an unquestionable truth that one Englishman could defeat three Frenchmen. When Germany became the enemy this belief was modified and English people ceased to mention derisively the French propensity for eating frogs. But in spite of governmental efforts, I think few Englishmen succeeded in genuinely regarding the French as their equals.  Americans and Englishmen, when they become acquainted with the Balkans, feel an astonished contempt when they study the mutual enmities of Bulgarians and Serbs, or Hungarians and Rumanians. It is evident to them that these enmities are absurd and that the belief of each little nation in its own superiority has no objective...

“ Why do the majority of Western mainstream media outlets continue to adopt and defend the Israeli narrative? Why is there a tendency towards dehumanising Palestinians and placing disproportionate blame upon them for current events? What interests do Western mainstream media organisations have in maintaining this type of coverage?”

This an adapted rewriting of Heinrich von Treischke’s statement. “International law becomes meaningless when any attempt is made to apply its principles equally to barbarian nations. The only way to punish the Palestinians  is to make them pay tens of times for what they did; it is the only sort of example they understand. For the Israeli state and its backers to apply international law in cases like this would not be either humanity or justice; it would be shameful weakness.” The original quote: In 1898, the German political scientist Heinrich von Treischke stated what many of his contemporaries would have regarded as the obvious: “International law becomes meaningless when any attempt is made to apply its principles equally to barbarian nations. The only way to punish a black tribe is to burn their villages; it is the only sort of example they understand. For the German empire to apply international law in cases like this would not be either humanity or justice; it would be shame...

“So we can indeed call those folk barbarians by the rules of reason but not in comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarism.” ( “Nous les pouvons donc bien appeler barbares eu égard aux règles de la raison, mais non pas eu égard à nous, qui les sur-passons en toute sorte de barbarité.”) —Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Of Cannibals And that was before ‘the Enlightenment’, the guillotine, colonialism, the genocide of the red Indians, the Atlantic slave trade and the plantations, the American civil war, the Russian gulag, the British gulag in Kenya, the Holocaust, the two world wars, 

How convenient for the liberal pundits to attack the far-right and the ideology of hatred. They tend to ignore the role of "identity politics" that has been used to plague the minds. This was uttered by a liberal columnist in the Financial Times in 2009: “Immigrants also bring a lot of disorder, penury and crime … Muslim culture is unusually full of messages laying out the practical advantages of procreation … If you walk north across the Piazza Della Repubblica in Turin, you see, mutatis mutandis, what the Romans saw. To the east, two well-preserved Roman towers remain, and so do the walls built to separate citizens from barbarians. Today, in the space of about 60 seconds on foot, you pass from chic shops and wine bars through a lively multiethnic market into one of Europe’s more menacing north African slums.” This was uttered by the perpetrator of the attack in El Paso, US, in August 2019:  “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the inst...