When Compassion Fascists Stifle Debate, the Field is Left Open for Real Fascists

When Compassion Fascists Stifle Debate, the Field is Left Open for Real Fascists My, oh my, but the cradle of civilization seems to be having a series of bad hair days. Politicians who couldn’t win one percent of the vote in Idaho, are making serious waves in Europe. And it’s largely the fault of the left-wing thought police.
As they do in this country, the European thought police have endeavored to squash any debate on immigration. To question open borders is to invite ostracism and name-calling. Although they could scarcely have been more different, two politicians who dared to speak forbidden words have found their way into the headlines recently. Both have been branded as “fascist,” “far right-wing,” and “racist.”
France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen has never tried to hide what he is. He is indeed a racist and an apologist for the Holocaust. He shocked France and the rest of Europe by winning enough votes in a primary election to earn a general election ballot spot against incumbent president Jacques Chirac. He ultimately lost by the largest margin in French electoral history, but observers are still unnerved by the fact that 18% of the French population found his views appealing enough to vote for him, even without butterfly ballots.
In recent years, France has experienced a huge influx of largely illegal immigrants from North Africa. Suddenly, France has something that it always considered an embarrassing problem of the United States – slums. Those slums have also nurtured something else that the French considered uniquely American – crime, including violent crime.
Polite French politicians have refused to even acknowledge that there was a problem. To speak of it was to invite accusations of racism and to risk being labeled a fascist. The field was left open for Le Pen, who openly embraces fascism. Le Pen spoke to people’s anxieties and many held their nose and voted for him as the only person willing to address their greatest fear.
Another European politician in the news lately was Pim Fortuyn of the Netherlands. He was assassinated last week by an animal rights and environmental activist.
Fortuyn also rose to prominence with an anti-immigrant platform that inspired Euro-snots and the American media to associate him with Le Pen. But Fortuyn was not the openly crude racist that is Le Pen. Fortuyn was an erudite sociology professor who loved the Netherlands and its libertarian culture.
Like France, the Netherlands has absorbed a flood of Islamic immigrants. Fortuyn argued that such immigration should cease until the immigrants already in the country have assimilated. Fortuyn was not interested in the race of the immigrants. He was worried that unassimilated Moslems threatened traditionally liberal Dutch culture. The immigrants brought with them the culture of their homelands, which is largely intolerant, sexist and homophobic.
Fortuyn was a homosexual and had a vested interest in defending a culture that allowed him to walk its streets freely.
Hey, that reminds me, where is the outrage over the murder of an openly homosexual politician? Why isn’t this a hate crime? Sorry, I digress.
Despite his obvious liberalism, Fortuyn was tagged by the thought police as an “extreme right-winger” for questioning unfettered immigration. His opponents did not engage his arguments. They could do nothing more than call him names.
There are forbidden words and subjects in this country too. And they open the field to provocateurs and charlatans. Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Poobah David Duke received a disquietingly high percentage of the vote for governor in Louisiana some years back by challenging conventional wisdom on such matters as racial preferences.
In Washington, any elected official who dares suggest that the citizenry is overtaxed should expect rhetorical evisceration by big city editorial pages. Whenever a social welfare program is discussed, it is not considered proper to ask taxpayers how much of their own money they are willing to give. Rather, politicians go to the recipients of these wealth redistribution programs and ask them just how much of somebody else’s money they are willing to settle for. It seems a curiously out of balance system.
With no elected officials willing to risk defending their cause, taxpayers have been forced to turn to hucksters like Tim Eyman, who has organized several tax cutting initiative drives.
Squelching honest debate leaves the field clear for the extremes to thrive.