Ismail Omar Mostefai, one of Bataclan terrorists, lived in a suburb of Paris with his family, in a large beautiful house.

So neither a refugee, nor a victim of racist marginalization.

The most cited American literature book on Google Scholar and JSTOR is Toni Morrison ‘ s Beloved. And that’s not an exception. Five out of ten most studied and quoted American books in these databases are by African American writers. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck et al bite the dust when confronted with Ellison, Walker,  Wright, Morrison, and Hurston.

Brussels has been unlivable for women for years. Men who drag around shrouded female pieces of property create an intolerable environment for women who are not marked as any man’s property. Women talk about this among themselves but the media are indifferent. Female suffering never makes it to the front pages or TV news reports.

Today when it has become clear that Paris terrorists largely came there from Brussels, might we finally see a discussion of how life is for women in Molenbeek, one of Europe’s gang rape centers and, incidentally, the place where these terrorists resided?

Where did the Holocaust begin? We all know where it originated – Berlin, obviously, but what geographic area saw the first mass annihilation of all of its sizeable Jewish population within a very short period of time?

I missed the foreign policy part of the debate, and it’s just as well because if that’s what Bernie had to say, then what’s the point of listening:

Muslim nations in the region—Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Jordan—all of these nations, they’re going to have to get their hands dirty, their boots on the ground. They are going to have to take on ISIS. This is a war for the soul of Islam. . . But those Muslim countries are going to have to lead the effort. They are not doing it now.

Bernie’s position on foreign policy is consistently that of, “It bores me to think of it, so I’ll imagine how things might be in the perfect world and proceed from that fantasy.” Three “going to haves” in the quoted statement without any indication of how this imperial goal-setting will be received by the people in question.

Russia and China should care about global warming, Muslims should lead the effort on battling ISIS. They aren’t doing anything of the kind, of course, but what an infernal bore trying to figure out what they actually want and need. Let’s tell them what they are going to have to do instead and watch them jump to attention.

This is, yet again, the case of an American projecting his own needs on the world and then expecting the world to act as the mirror of his desires. The Other is not allowed any existence of its own because it has got to act as this perfect mirror.

On the positive side, O’Malley was even worse in the subject.

I will miss the first part of the debate but please leave comments if you are watching. I will update when I get to a TV.

P.S. OK, I’m in front of the TV. Bernie is making fun of Eisenhower, good for him. But where is the foreign policy debate? I swallowed my lettuce-wrapped burger whole to get to the debate, and what I get is a discussion of prescription plans? I feel grumpier than Bernie.

Conclusion: Bernie was clearly winning until the last 20 minutes when Hillary turned things around and won the end of the debate.

This Jihadi John fellow, the Daesh terrorist killed the other day by a drone, was taken off a plane a few years ago, drunk as a skunk.

These creeps are less Muslim than I am because I don’t even drink these days. Everything they claim to do for Allah is what they want to do for themselves. And whenever Allah becomes inconvenient, they push him to the side.

The Prophet told them to kill French concert goers, yeah, right. And St Teresa of Avila told me to stuff my face with half a cow at the local steak joint the other day. 

Ukraine shows solidarity with France:

On the negative side, Russia has already started pushing hard for the creation of an anti-ISIS coalition. The price of the coalition will, of course, be the removal of Western sanctions against Russia.

France has always been the weakest member of the international community that imposed sanctions on Russia, and now Putin has a great opening to push France towards giving up the sanctions.

Putin has been very lucky with the airplane crash and yesterday’s terror attacks in Paris happening in such close succession.

Reader el asks an important question:

“How can offering security from terror go together with porous borders and letting the whole world’s criminals into one’s country? If every criminal may enter, why not every terrorist?” . . . Unaccompanied refugee children are the next billion-dollar industry in Sweden. With an average cost of 2000 kronor ($233) per child per day, the 7000 refugee “children” who came last year cost 5.1 billion kronor ($595 million).

We are now in a transitional stage. The current state form is trying to be both something new and something old. And that is not going to work. In a world of porous borders, handing out benefits to every “child” – and let’s remember that for a nation-state everybody within its borders is its child – won’t work. You can’t be both things at one.

So for now the choice is:

1. Be a traditional nation-state that looks out for its “children” through welfare benefits, etc. This state form has very strictly defined borders that are controlled at all times. The question, of course, is whether it is even possible to have such a state any longer given that preventing both capital and human flows from going where they wish is a losing proposition. A state can still somewhat control the entrance. But it can do nothing to control the exit. 

2. Accept porous borders as a fact of today’s reality and ditch benefits. A constantly fluctuating population consisting of people who see every place of residence as transitory cannot be bound to each other with obligations of old-age pensions, childhood and unemployment benefits. It’s impossible to generate enough feeling of commonality of fate among them to make this viable. 

So what we are seeing now is the collapsing nation-state trying to stretch a fraying social safety net over people whose allegiances to this state are increasingly fragile. The welfare resources are becoming scarce, and citizens who don’t see any shared values or purpose lash out against each other in a fight over them. There is a huge likelihood that yesterday’s terrorists in Paris are not foreign terrorists who came from afar but local youths who fail to see themselves as citizens and whose lives are untouched by the disappearing safety net.

When the new state form really comes into existence and stops pretending to be what it isn’t, it will ditch welfare and shift all the resources to concentrate strongly on security from global threats. An enormous military / surveillance apparatus will stand in place of welfare provisions.

Sorry for the long post but this is not an issue that can be addressed with a few snappy slogans.

In 1941, within months of each other but completely independently of each other two groups of nationalists addressed formal requests to Hitler to liberate their land from oppressors and help them form their own nation-states.

What were these new nation-states going to be called?

The answer is under the fold.

Continue reading “Holocaust Studies, 3” →