Downfall Of Europe: Houellebecq's SUBMISSION On Track
07/29/2016
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Reactionary French novelist Michelle Houellebecq’s 2015 bestseller Submission about a 2022 French election in which the establishment parties rally behind a suave Obama-meets-Erdogan Muslim candidate who leads France’s (as of yet nonexistent) Muslim Brotherhood party to head off the disaster of a National Front victory was criticized for its unrealistically short time frame, a contention the Houellebecq admitted was valid.

And yet … events here and there in Europe are starting to resemble Houellebecq’s plot. Scattered acts of Muslim insurgency this summer have been met with government plans to discourage the press from mentioning the names of those who commit the atrocities.

On a different front, the new mayor of London is the Obama-like Sadiq Khan, a talented 45-year-old politician who may well be headed for even bigger things in a Labour Party that has lost the trust of its traditional base and whose main hope is in electing a new people.

Typically, politically ambitious Muslims haven’t seen much need in Europe to start their own political parties because the established ones have been so anxious to pander to their demands on immigration. On the other hand, white mainstream politicians have intended to farm Muslim and anti-white votes to keep themselves, personally, in power.

Now a new party in the Netherlands has been started to explicitly represent the Coalition of the Fringes. From the NYT:

A Pro-Immigrant Party Rises in the Netherlands By NINA SIEGAL JULY 29, 2016

AMSTERDAM — Europe has more than its share of angry anti-immigrant political parties these days. But one party has turned the politics of immigration on its head, positioning itself as perhaps the first in Europe with a pro-immigrant stance, run by people from immigrant backgrounds.

That party, called Denk, or Think, is led by a multicultural group of candidates seeking to combat xenophobia and racism in the Netherlands.

Denk has promoted itself as a kind of answer to the nativist and isolationist positions of the flamboyant far-right populist candidate Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party, which has been surging in the polls.

“What is unique about Denk is that it’s a party of people with a migration background who completely control the party,” said Cas Mudde, a specialist in European political and radical parties who was born in the Netherlands.

“Nonwhites have been in Parliament for a long time, but all the parties are still dominated by white Dutch people,” added Mr. Mudde, who is an associate professor at the School for Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. “We haven’t had a party dominated by nonwhite Dutch that has a potential chance of getting elected into Parliament.”

… Among the Denk party’s stated policy goals are banning from legislative forums a pejorative term often used for Dutch nonwhites, “allochtoon,” and to replace the term “integration” with “acceptance.”

It wants to establish a “racism register” to track the use of hate speech by elected officials and to bar those who promote racism from holding public office.

It also promotes the building of a Dutch slavery museum and it hopes to abolish the black minstrel character called Zwarte Piet, or Black Pete, who appears in Dutch winter holiday celebrations with Sinterklaas, or a kind of Dutch Santa Claus.

Denk was founded in 2014 when two members of the Labor party who have Turkish origins, Tunahan Kuzu and Selcuk Ozturk, left Labor in a dispute over surveillance of Muslims. They continue to hold seats in Parliament, and will do so until elections in 2017.

The Denk party has already broken the threshold of 1,000 members, making it eligible for about 165,000 euros a year ($183,000) in state subsidies.

Denk hopes to tap the significant population of the Netherlands with immigrant origins, estimated at about one million in a nation of 17 million people. According to the Dutch central bureau of statistics, about 4.4 percent of Dutch citizens have a Moroccan background and 3.5 percent are of Turkish origin.

The party’s founders have been criticized as being “puppets” of President for Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, but they have taken pains to expand the party’s base by enlisting important members from minority groups in the Netherlands.

In November, a former Miss Netherlands, Tatjana Maul, whose mother was an immigrant from Macedonia and whose father was Polish and Dutch, became Denk’s chief communications officer.

The biggest lift to the party’s profile came in May, when the Dutch TV host Sylvana Simons, a dancer and singer born in Suriname, announced that she was joining the Denk party campaign for seats in Parliament. In televised interviews, she said she joined because she felt racism had taken on “dangerous” levels in the Netherlands, which she also said was “in denial” about its colonial legacy and its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Her announcement elicited such intensely negative responses on social media — 40,000 racist insults, according to her count — that the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, took time in one of his weekly addresses to condemn what he called “repulsive” statements by “idiots.”In response to its critics, Denk has gone on the offensive, using its website’s TV channel to tell its supporters to distrust the media. Mr. Ozturk has proposed that journalists be forced to take an oath before being allowed to practice their profession. …

“At least you have a political party that is using the words ‘institutional racism,’ ” he said. “We are living in a country where white supremacy is alive, it has always been alive, and it is getting louder. We have to respond to that.

[Comment at Unz.com]
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