By Olivia Pierson
First published on Insight@theBFD 19/03/2020 

In what can only be described as a badly-timed asymmetrical war tactic, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been facilitating tens of thousands of Middle Eastern and African migrants to storm the borders with Greece and Bulgaria in an attempt to flood Europe with more third-world refugees.
 
Erdogan claims to be taking this action in retaliation for the 33 Turkish soldiers killed in Syria’s Idlib province in a Russian-backed Syrian airstrike in late February. The fighting in Idlib precipitated nearly another million Syrian refugees to move toward Turkey’s southern border for protection.

As his country already hosts 3.5 million refugees from Syria’s war, Erdogan has been threatening to open his borders for migrants to cross into Europe for a long time. It’s his number one blackmail card. In February of 2016, Erdogan reminded Jean-Claude Juncker, former President of the European Commission, “We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria any time… we can put the refugees on buses.’ 

After years of threats, Erdogan has now done just that. 

While the whole world obsesses 24/7 over the huge distraction of the Wuhan virus, Erdogan’s actions have become more extreme as he seeks to draw European powers into the war.

Greece has committed to defend its borders vigorously and aggressively.  Its economy is still struggling and the migrant crisis which started in 2015 has caused chaos inside the small country, as it has in every Western European country, but Greece still has many friends. Poland and Austria assisted by sending their own special forces to the Greek/Turkish border. The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary are also supporting Greece and Bulgaria, as are the leaders of Serbia and Croatia. The whole of the European Union stand in solidarity with Greece against Turkish aggression.
 
The fact that Greece and Turkey are both members of NATO complicates matters even further.
 
Turkey entered into an agreement with the EU in 2016. They pledged to shelter the millions of Syrian refugees in return for 6-billion euros of aid. But Turkey, now a major player in the war in Syria, wants a protected area in Idlib province to push Syrian refugees back into their homeland.  He has demanded that the international community – especially Europe – help him to do this by enforcing no-fly zones and financially aiding the refugees to make a new home within Syria’s borders. But Russia, Syria and Iran have a clear advantage in the conflict and no land has been ceded to Turkey by the Assad regime, and won’t be.

After so many of his own soldiers were killed in the February airstrike, Erdogan broke his agreement with the EU and provided transport for the mass exodus of Syrians, Afghans, Moroccans, Pakistanis, Iranians and Iraqis to begin their flow toward the Greek and Bulgarian borders, where chaos has ensued since. He has shamelessly used them as pawns in his attempt to blackmail Europe.

Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has declared his borders to be sovereign and closed to any interlopers, declaring they will all be turned back or imprisoned – and that is exactly what Greece is doing now with the moral support of the EU.  
What a turn around. 

After decades of Western civilisation being subjected to the sermonising of globalist elites as they preach their weird morality of open borders like knaves, and after witnessing President Trump receive almost world-wide condemnation for wanting America’s borders to be tightly controlled, one can only make the observation that the force majeure of the Wuhan virus has shown us just why the sovereign borders of nations ought to be safeguarded.
 
Now nationalism, properly understood, is well and truly back as the governments of each nation suddenly prioritise the safety first of their own citizens and I don’t hear anyone making arguments to the contrary anymore – except Erdogan, but his timing happens to be spectacularly off.

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"

By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Incite 5/10/18]
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Editor’s note:  Reprised for philosophical salience.

A little book found its way into my hands the other day, titled Turn the Tide – Reclaiming Religious Freedom in New Zealand.  It has been copyrighted by “The Barnabas Fund” and is available for download through the website OurReligiousFreedom.org.nz.

The book has a central concern that Christianity is becoming subject to increasing discrimination which the writer calls ‘Christianophobia.' 

Based upon the Casey Review, a study set up in 2015 to look into what the UK government should do about ethnic and religious minorities who fail to integrate into British society, the book cites case studies from within the UK that warn about hate speech laws (being arrested in Bristol for preaching the Gospel out in the open), compulsory registrations for Sunday Schools, a new “Test Act” requiring holders of public office to swear an oath expressing support for “British values” (including gay rights and abortion rights) and prohibiting certain actions, one of which is stated as “undesirable teaching.”  

This, understandably, has Christians, who happen to be aware of it, feeling very nervous, though it is clear to me the Casey Review was set up not to deal with an imaginary Christian problem, but with a very real Islamic problem.  So in order to be seen to be fair -minded (and perhaps politically correct), Dame Louise Casey has in her review, on occasion, lumped Christians, Jews and Sikhs in with Muslims, as if Christians, Jews and Sikhs are also some kind of threat to British society.

[8.34.The Casey Review 2016] “There are examples of inequality and intolerance in other ethnic and faith groups, with concerns expressed to us during the review about increased Sikh extremism (for example in disruptions to mixed faith couples’ weddings), the treatment of women in some strictly Jewish Orthodox communities (with children reportedly being taught that a woman’s role is to look after children, clean the house and cook) and newer Christian churches (with activists seeking to ‘cure’ people of homosexuality). All such instances undermine integration and should be challenged. We also came across examples of literalist interpretations and advice that we do not believe is happening everywhere but it does exist and, wherever it does, it is wrong.”

[9.13.The Casey Review 2016]  "Such intolerance is in no way restricted to Islam. Many British residents are acutely aware of the ethno-nationalist violence in Northern Ireland, which is entangled in sectarian divisions between Catholicism and Protestantism. While we do not deal with the conflict in Northern Ireland in this report, it is hardly possible to discuss Islamic sectarian violence without noting the long running impact of Catholic- Protestant tension throughout the last decades of the 20th Century and the potential to learn lessons from it. "

It is utterly absurd on its face to lump Christian, Jewish and Sikh practices in with Muslim practices. Just how many terrorist attacks have Christians, Jews and Sikhs unleashed on the people of merry England in the last 20 years?  You would struggle to think of one.  How many terrorists attacks have Muslims unleashed in those same 20 years?  You’ve already thought of at least five…and counting. Terrorism today has one religion and its name is Islam.  Let’s just be honest about that without needing to regurgitate last century’s terrorism by the Irish Republican Army.  That’s well and truly over and took an immense amount of years and political negotiations to end it.  Islamic terrorism is another beast altogether - a Trojan Horse to be precise - and one that the Western world stubbornly failed to recognise as an enemy inside the gates.  This problem is only just getting going and should not be watered down by empty platitudes to search for faults in other religions, when those religions are not presenting themselves as any kind of egregious threat.

Turn the Tide draws its foundational principle for religious freedom from the 13th Century "Magna Carta":

“The English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired.”

Written 561 years before America’s founding, one can still hear the echo of Magna Carta’s phrasing in Thomas Jefferson’s enlightened pen as he sought to synthesise the many different denominations of Christianity inside Virginia while writing his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:

“…but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.”

My only criticism of Turn the Tide lies in the fact that it names ‘secular humanism’ as the arch-enemy of Christianity and the belief system which is eroding our culture.  This is often thought by Christians, but it’s not accurate.  The antithesis of Christianity is postmodern philosophy, the philosophy of anti value – a.k.a., nihilism. 

Postmodernism also happens to be the antithesis of humanism because it utterly despises reason.

Christians see humanism as its ideological enemy because humanists are usually atheists. They’re atheists because there exists no empirical evidence for Theism.  But humanism has a long tradition of emphasising human dignity and reason – objective thought – over mere superstition and dogma.  Petrarch (1304 AD) was the father of Renaissance humanism.  Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466 AD), one of the Reformation’s early instigators, was a Renaissance humanist and Thomas Paine, the Deistic, fiery revolutionary of early America was also a humanist.

So just to clarify definitions here: 
Theist = an interventionist God who cares about each and every person on the planet and answers prayers.
Deist = a non-interventionist God who may have been the first cause of Creation but doesn’t concern Itself with the petty details of human existence.
Atheist = no God at all, there is only nature to contend with and it is highly doubtful that consciousness survives the death of the body (encapsulated quite beautifully by Shakespeare in The Tempest: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”)

Humanists had an early creed which held that all things were within the human experience and man was the measure of all.  It was expressed in this dictum: 

“Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto,” - I am a human being: and I deem nothing pertaining to humanity as foreign to me. 

The early Renaissance humanists, such as Petrarch and Erasmus, elevated the study of classical antiquity, drawing heavily from Cicero over a millennia after his death.  Central to the study of humanism were the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Lucretius and Aristarchus. 

Humanism placed a premium on the value of human reason and natural philosophy, which if applied rigorously could discover the universal laws locked inside the workings of nature, which believers - and the Renaissance humanists were believers -  considered to be the handiwork of the Creator. By the time that the thunder clap of the Enlightenment rumbled around Europe, humanism was in full swing and was constantly drawing distinctions between religion and reason.  The phenomenal advancement of science and technology was the result due to reason and empirical evidence carrying the day.

But the grotesquely ugly philosophy of postmodernism came to dominate the 20th Century and is with us in the early decades of the 21st.  Postmodernism sought to turn culture upside down through its formulation of ‘critical theory’...(which means absolutely nothing except value nothing!) Critical theory attacked primarily the arena of human reason infecting everything it came into contact with: art, music, architecture, education, morals, ethics, the family, feminism, culture and sex. Critical theory succeeded in this by holding moral relativism as an absolute, even though with postmodernists, they claim there are no absolutes. If there is one aspect to human beings that postmodern philosophy set out to smash beyond recognition, it was the realm of human reason. 

Western civilisation has a wonderfully complex history, but its essential trajectory came from the philosophies of Athens, Jerusalem and Rome.  In other words: Greek logic, Judeo-Christian morals and Roman jurisprudence. These became integrated in the Renaissance, spreading throughout Europe (thanks to the invention of the printing press), and were then refined and enshrined in the Constitution of the American Republic during the Enlightenment (1776).

Postmodern thought detests the tradition of Greek logic (because all things are subjective and relative; truth cannot be known).  It considers Roman jurisprudence to be patriarchal and oppressive (because all things are subjective and relative; it’s wrong to make judgements about anything)... and it utterly despises Judeo-Christian morality for its societal order with strong family ties (because all things are subjective and relative; there is no such thing as a moral absolute).  The only condition postmodern thought actually defends to the point of violence is Chaos.  Postmodernists are the cultural Marxists who are anti-values in every single respect.  They’re anti-capitalist nihilists who wormed their way into universities, government bureaucracies, schools, theatres, films and books. Their chaotic, anti-values influence is what has eroded our culture.

Secular humanism too often gets the blame from Christians, but really - and I know this sounds strange - humanists and Christians, despite their monumental metaphysical differences, are very much on the same page when it comes to earthly values.  Humanists, like Christians believe in morality and ethics (for the humanist, the good life and human flourishing, not the dictation of an abstract deity, is the standard of value).  Humanists believe strongly in a society built around justice and objective moral judgements, since the human mind is highly capable of determining these important matters.  Humanists also value order and strong family values because it is within this context that the best springboard into life naturally occurs.

Postmodernism would blow all these values to hell in a heartbeat, and it has, and it does, for that is exactly what we are witnessing within their natural political home – the Left – as it scrabbles around to keep pushing their agenda of anti Western civilisation.

As an atheist and a humanist, I would rather be friends with the value oriented Christian than a fellow atheist who displays a postmodern thought process (i.e. no rational values at all).  To the postmodernist there is only one thing I wish to scream at them with full-throated conviction - and that is,  “Get thee behind me Satan!”

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​ ​​​

​

By Olivia Pierson
First published on Insight@theBFD 12/03/2020

As observed in last week’s overview of Natural Rights according to John Locke, America’s Founding Fathers beautifully echoed Locke’s liberty rights in the Declaration of Independence: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

These liberty rights require nothing from others, except that they exercise the virtue of tolerance (live and let live), hence being often referred to as “negative rights.”

Thus Locke’s concept of a liberty-oriented, self-governing society based on natural law placed rigorous personal independence and responsibility at the very heart of its potential to flourish.

James Madison penned these words during the framing of the Constitution:

“…what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In forming a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” [James Madison, The Federalist, 51]

As we all know, human beings are far from perfect and some folk are even downright malevolent. The justification for creating governments instituted by men lies in this fact and so also does the conviction of the Founding Fathers that government be limited and have its powers continually restrained – hence the Bill of Rights which sets amendments of the Constitution into federal law.

But since Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s pet project – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – was adopted in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly, natural rights have been completely flipped on their head.

Instead of continuing to develop a system of rights, and laws to protect those rights built upon the bases of reason and personal independence, ie, universal human identity in a state of nature, the new laws began to supplant the old on the bases of weakness and personal dependence. 

What was once a natural right to “the pursuit of happiness” was rewritten in empathetic-sounding language to mean a right “to demand happiness” via the vehicle of constant approval and acquiescence from all other citizens.
Consider the wording of these new rights in the UDHR:

The Right to Social Security #22 – “Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.”

The Right to Work #23 – “3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

The Right to Play #24 – “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” 

The Right to Education #26 – “2. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”

Responsibility #29 – “1. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.

2. In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

3. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”

If one reads through all of the rights laid out in the UNDHR, the term “dignity” is used a lot – and so is this strange term: “and the free development of his personality,” along with, “due recognition and respect for the rights and freedom of others.”  These phrasings can facilitate a shit-load lot of nonsense and have done so. 

As just one example illustrates so well, the charge of the Woke Brigade has been campaigning to compel others (everyone) to use nonsensical pronouns like “zir,” or “ze,” in deference to the demands of neurotic, gender-obsessed individuals.
 
It was this point which rocketed Professor Jordan Peterson into the public eye when Canada sought to enact Bill C-16, an amendment to the Human Rights Act and their Criminal Code, making it illegal to not recognise and respect the rights of gender identity and gender expression.  Not using correct personal pronouns, which are not even in the English language, was to become a crime, and now is.
 
Peterson always stated that he didn’t have a big problem with using pronouns like “zir” or “ze” to individual students if they asked him to; what got his goat was the State making laws to force people to use language they would not normally use. That, in Peterson’s mind, was a giant leap too far and something reminiscent of totalitarian regimes and Orwellian “Newspeak”.  He was right.

This is exactly what “due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society” means.  If you don’t willingly give such active due recognition and respect etc, you’re a criminal. 

When Peterson said, “No! I will not be compelled to speak a state-imposed language,” he felt the full brunt of Canada’s human rights laws come down upon his head.  His own traditional natural rights and freedoms were irrelevant.
 
Freedom in the classical liberal sense now means something quite different than that which John Locke’s liberty rights conceived of, and that which the Founding Fathers midwifed into existence during the birth of American liberty in 1776. The purveyors of the ever-widening dimensions of so-called human rights have sought to overthrow them – and they are by no means done yet.
 
Rather than societies flourishing on a foundation of personal independence and individual responsibility which requires only tolerance from others of the live and let live variety, the new rights compel citizens to acquiesce to the weak-spirited subjective-happiness-demands of others as they cite their “right to be recognised and respected,” over everything from their diverse cultural and religious scruples to the active development of their personality and gender-fluidity.
   
And hell help you if you don’t.