The Peaceful Political Expression Of ConservatismFrom the desk of Michael Presley on Mon, 2011-07-25 21:48
A Google search shows over 5,000 references to The Brussels Journal and the Norway killer, Anders Breivik. Two of the most notable sources are the UK Guardian, and the German Spiegel Online. From these and others we find that Breivik's own writing contained references to material sourced from The Brussels Journal and another blog, The Gates of Vienna. From both venues the anonymous writer Fjordman is cited. The implication is that The Brussels Journal's political writings are in some way responsible for creating an intellectual ground leading to the murder of innocents.
Der Spiegel's Frank Patalong labels The Brussels Journal a window “into a “strange scene.” That is,
“...pro-Western, exceedingly pro-American and friendly to Israel -- but extremely anti-Muslim, aggressively Christian and openly hostile to everything which is liberal, leftist, multi-cultural or internationalist. It is a "patriotic-nationalist" scene which detests the Nazis but is sympathetic - to the point of maintaining informal contacts -- to the Tea Party Movement in the US, to the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria, to the right-wing football fan group known as the Casuals and to the stridently anti-Muslim English Defence League.” [see footnote]
In addition, Patalong explicitly accuses Fjordman of being the “actual author of several hundred pages” of Breivik's manifesto, when in fact the latter merely cut and pasted the former's words into his own political treatise-collage.
The Guardian's Andrew Brown, as we stated previously, writes how “[Fjordman] has also written for The Brussels Journal, a fanatically anti-EU blog.” He then goes on:
“Obviously these people cannot be held responsible for the use to which their ideas were put. No matter how deranged a killer's ideas, he still needs a deranged personality to put them into action. But anyone tempted to take them seriously should consider what were almost Breivik's last words: "For the last three years I have been working full time on a cultural conservative work which will help to develop and market these political ideas." “
The intentions of Patalong and Brown are clear. It is to delegitimize and in fact smear conservative political writing. No more and no less. It is an attempt to silence political thought by associating political ideas with criminal acts. In Patalong's list of thought crimes, the most telling is his understanding that the very heterogeneous conservative voices at The Brussels Journal do have one thing in common: a dislike (Patalong uses the charged word “hostility”) of leftist liberalism.
No Brussels Journal author has called for, much less expressed a hope or longing for political violence. I myself have indicated that continued violence is what we can likely expect, but to say so is simply recognizing the world for what it is, and what it is becoming — a collection of individuals forming groups with no clear cultural-social-political homogeneity or bond. And that is the most anyone here has ever stated.
Perhaps the greatest contribution of Western civilization to our present well-being is democratic institutions that allow for peaceful political expression. Clearly political action cannot be grounded upon violence. It is, instead, the anarchist, the anti-political nihilist who champions civil discord, and who then justifies his actions in the name of revolutionary progress. The Brussels Journal and its writers exist within and argue for our continued civilized Western political tradition. To attempt to associate the Journal and its contributors with anarchic criminals is despicable.
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Remark from the editors: While it is not our intention to systematically deny every wild assertion or far-fetched guess about The Brussels Journal and its writers, and while we are not tracking every footstep of our contributors, we think it is highly improbable that any of our current authors have contacts with the English Defence League, the Casuals football fan group (whatever that may be) or the Austrian Freedom Party, contrary to what Mr. Frank Patalong from Der Spiegel suggests.
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http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4778