No more lies about migrants

The traffic light coalition (Ampelkoalition) is like a deer caught in headlights: it has been letting migrants in for years and telling its fairy tales, its lies that it benefits the German economy and demography in the long run. Now there is a defiant professor of economics in Freiburg, Bernd Raffelhüschen, who has calculated exactly what the cost of this madness is. In his study for the Market Economy Foundation, he estimates the cost of “immigration” at 5.8 trillion euros. This is due to the fact that immigrants hardly integrate, and even if they are able to operate on the labor market after years of qualification, the taxes that they pay are too low compared to the transfers offered to them by the state and municipalities to be able to call them “profitable” citizens who contribute to prosperity. Without immigration, the financial gap for the tax and social systems would be 13.4 trillion euros instead of 19.2 trillion euros – i.e. 5.8 trillion euros lower, according to Raffelhüschen.

The traffic light coalition expects a rejuvenation dividend from immigration: immigrants are their godless religion, the politicians living in their unrealistic Berlin bubble worship colorful idols, but even if they hold the office of finance minister, they are not financial experts who care about the positive fiscal balance of their undertakings and decisions. The idiotic welfare state, which functions in a socialist way (everyone is equal and on an equal footing), is in danger of collapsing because the traffic light coalition gives the green light to non-taxpayers and imported recipients of benefits. Wouldn’t it make more sense to transfer these funds to the indigenous farmers in Cottbus and other German cities, to make life easier for those who manufacture foodstuffs?

The Errors of Russia

The end of the old year and the beginning of the new year make one think both about the recent past and the not-too-distant future. The conventional borderline separating the 31 of December and the 1st of January (actually not the precise astronomical turning point, which is 24th of December) makes us not only think about the prognostics based on science, but also about prophecies of whatever kind. Why, science has conquered the minds of the modern man, but it does not – and it cannot – answer all the questions. Strictly speaking, science is about repetitive things – occurrences – phenomena i.e. things that can be checked, and rechecked, and double checked. Yet, we know that reality is also made up of one-time events (all of human history) that can only be experienced once by a limited number of people. We cannot reproduce such events – experiences – phenomena, and yet we cannot do away with them, we cannot pretend that they are not part of our life, part of reality. Such are prophecies. They are experienced by very few and are not repeatable. If you want, you believe in them; if you do not want, you deny them. In any way, if you are open-minded, you take them into consideration and remain on the look-out whether they come true. If they do, then – well – then they are worthy of your attention, of reconsideration.

Such was the Fatima prophecy of 1917. The apparition of Saint Mary, the Mother of God in Fatima, Portugal – because that’s what we are talking about – said a few things about the future. The message was not strictly speaking cryptic; conversely, it was fairly compelling. One of the predictions was that the future world would be infected with the “errors of Russia.” It is important to bear in mind that the apparitions occurred in the same year when the two Russian revolutions or – properly speaking – coups d’état broke out. The first was carried out by the Russian bourgeois, while the second by the Russian social-democrats, better known – especially later – as communists. Consequently, hard times descended on Russia that people in the West have rarely been fully cognizant of. Persecution of the church or any religious faith, the empowerment of the uneducated and the slow-minded over the educated and the smart, mass dispossession of the propertied classes, cultural revolution on a large scale, the destruction of the family and the morals, the egalitarian utopia, the re-writing and re-interpretation of history, the devastation of social cohesion by among others the promotion of informants (even children were used to this purpose against their parents), character assassination (people were often forced to confess and accuse themselves before others), condemnation of the memory of persons that fell out of grace with the current authorities (damnatio memoriae: big public figures were removed from all publications as if they had never existed), and so on, and so forth.

A century has passed since the infamous October Bolshevik Revolution. What do we see? We can see the errors of Russia everywhere in the Western world. Survey the list above and put it up against any Western society the way you would put up a mirror against someone’s face. The Christianity in the West is as dead as it was in Russia in the twenties and the thirties of the previous century; the empowerment of the uneducated people of colour and the protection of the slow-minded (so long as they are immigrants) is in full sway; mass dispossession of the propertied classes is under way with the notorious phrase that is doing the rounds to the tune of “you will own nothing and you will be happy”; cancel culture on a large scale; the destruction of the family and the morals complete with cohabitation, childlessness, parades of homosexuals; equity promoted in furtherance of the egalitarian utopia; the re-writing and re-interpretation of history with people of colour being cast in typical historical or mythological roles occupied by white men and women; social cohesion being more and more diluted by larger and larger influxes of Third World people, which translates into the disappearance of societies and nations (understood as people that are genetically related) and the emergence of multiple ethnic communities; censorship based on a network of informants (mendaciously presented as the opinion of mysterious communities), character assassination by means of magic, powerful words like racist, xenophobe, antisemite, misogynist, right-wing, extreme-right; condemnation of the memory of historical persons – especially white males – and the erasure of their names from books, street names and the like. Enough?

These are the errors of Russia that have spread to the Western world as prophesied in Fatima in 1917. Take note of one fact. The errors were not transported to the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union; rather, they had been trickling on and on since 1917, so that by the fifties of the previous century two big Western (and Catholic, at least nominally) countries – France and Italy – were almost taken over by their respective communist parties. Think about Spain that was for a time and would have remained immersed in the errors from Russia even before the outbreak of the Second World War but for the intervention of General Francisco Franco. Notice also the following glaring fact. In 1989, when the Soviet Union disintegrated and relinquished its grip on Eastern Europe, which till that time had been dependent on Moscow, all those countries flocked to the embrace of the European Union, while the most enthusiastic supporters and champions of the membership in the European Union were former communists! If that does not speak volumes, then I don’t know what does. Surely, former communists did not turn capitalist and right-wing overnight, en masse. They desired to become a part of the European Union simply because the European Union was made up and run by their ilk.

And just such as persons as Francisco Franco of Spain and Antonio Salazar of Portugal were officially hated in the USSR, so they are hated by the European Union. And no wonder. These two were opposed to communism that the Soviet Union stood for, and socialism or liberalism that the European Union stands for; they were conservative and nationalist – in other words: they stood for the values that the European Union strives to – and the Soviet Union strove to – obliterate, expunge, stamp out.

What will 2024 bring us?

The economy is overheated. Or perhaps underheated? Efficiently networked or shackled by fragile supply chains? How can you not lose in a trade war and how can you make money in a conventional war? But only effectively and in the spirit of ESG (taking into consideration environmental, social, government facets). We will be saved by technology, the educated proclaim. Artificial intelligence will destroy us, proclaim the apostles of mainstream wisdom.

In 2024, for the first time in human history, elections will be held in 76 countries with more than half the world’s population, including eight of the ten most populous countries in the world: India, the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Bangladesh, Russia and Mexico. Every second adult on our globe will be taking politicians to task for the way they have governed in a time of decline, inflation, bloody conflict and widespread disinformation. In place of the shocks that tested the maturity of the political class, more black swans are sure to appear. There has been a pandemic, there is a war in Europe and, to make the end of 2023 even more stark, there is the eruption of a dormant volcano of savagery in the Middle East. The smaller, smouldering armed conflicts that have been going on for years are no longer noticed because they are no longer on our holiday or business agenda. On the other hand, we suppress the threat of war either unintentionally or deliberately.

It will be a year brimming with surprises, in which more than 4 billion voters worldwide will dance to the tune of the new media. Never before has social media been better placed to politically dominate such a large public sphere and supplant the authority of traditional mass media. This seemingly most democratic form of direct contact with the electorate has simultaneously become fuel for manipulation, disinformation, panic and the stigmatisation of opponents. Opinion leaders on Twitter now have infinitely more power to reach and mobilise the electorate than the dinosaurs of old-fashioned campaigning methods. Unverified sources of knowledge, non-existent opinion leaders, ubiquitous fake news driven by the vast capabilities of artificial intelligence…

On Europe’s socio-political radar, the boats of another violent wave of migration can be seen. The EU is supposedly testing new instruments to send people back to where they came from. However, they will prove to be as ineffective as all the previous ones. You don’t have to be a fortune teller to predict this. The EU’s external borders should be impermeable to migrants and solidarity regulations will only deepen the divide between Western and Eastern Europe because coherent Eastern European countries with their traditional societies did not and do not want immigrants.

The countries where elections will be held in 2024 generate more than half of global GDP. This is where the partners and customers who supply us create, produce and employ: with components, raw materials, food, services and expertise. And this is precisely where the economic systems will have to drift to the right or left. And you, as an entrepreneur, have to ask yourself the question: do you prefer a free market that leans to the right or to the left?

Whether we like it or not, we are living in interesting times.

Gefira 79: Those who control the words we say, control the thoughts we think.

The time draws near the Birth of the Word, which is why also Gefira has taken word as its topic. Both the theological Word and the human word have creative powers. Though the former has brought the whole of the universe into existence, the latter does not lag much behind: it creates little parallel worlds ensconced in ideological cocoons that envelop huge numbers of mankind. The comparison to a cocoon tells it all: a man entrapped in it has little contact with reality – the cocoon is the whole world, albeit microscopic in size.

Humanity or rather large groups of it have always lived in such cocoons. In the recent centuries we have had large, medium-size and small cocoons of Leninism, Maoism, Trotskyism, Pol Potism, Three Represents (of China), anarchism, liberalism, conservatism, with their many subclasses or subcategories, and the list is virtually inexhaustible. These cocoons separate their advocates and followers from the evidence of their senses and suppress much of their reasoning. These cocoons act like templates for thoughts. They have been formulated in words, and they act as viruses or bacteria in that they infect the minds of people through the eye (reading) or the ear (listening) and take control over their thinking and consequently – behaviour. If you are taught that the world is all about class struggle, or the struggle between the sexes, or the conflict between man and nature, or equality of all, or supremacy of some, free market or redistribution, competition or equity or exploitation, and so on, and so forth, then you see almost everything through this lens. Some of us are prone to accepting this, others – that ideological virus, very few are resistant to the dominant ideology.

And just like biological viruses can tamper with parts of the genetic code of its vector or themselves, so, too, verbal viruses can have the same effect in that they are transmitted by words whose meaning is purposefully changed.

Gefira Financial Bulletin #79 is available now

Thought as a driving force
Words (and phrases) used as pseudo-intellectual fodder
Argentina and the ideas of Javier Milei
Hands off real estate

A gaping chasm

“A great chasm has been set in place” between the collective West and Russia, a mutually unbridgeable chasm. President Vladimir Putin’s words addressed to Plenary session of the World Russian People’s Council (November 28, 2023) illustrate this chasm exceedingly well. In his speech President Putin said among others what follows:

① Russia is fighting in Ukraine “not just for Russia’s freedom but for the freedom of the whole world”, against the dictatorship of one hegemon. In this struggle, Russia is blocking “the way of those who aspired to world domination and exceptionalism.” Most of the world understands it.

② Russians make up a “large Russian nation, a triune of Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians.”

③ Russia is “faced with the daunting task of developing vast areas from the Pacific to the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea.” To this end Russia needs to preserve and increase its population, which is a “goal for the coming decades and even generations ahead. This is the future of the Russian world, the millennium-old, eternal Russia.” This task can only be executed through large families that “become the norm, a way of life for all Russia’s peoples” because the “family is not just the foundation of the state and society, it is a spiritual phenomenon, a source of morality.” This daunting demographic challenge cannot be responded to “solely with money, social benefits, allowances, privileges, or dedicated programmes” because it is a “person’s points of reference in life matter more. Love, trust, and a solid moral foundation are what the family and the birth of a child are built on.” Which is also why

④ though “the Church is separate from the state […] the Church cannot be separated from society or from people.” Emphasis must be put on the “importance of the participation of representatives of all traditional Russian religions in the education and upbringing of our youth, and […] in the consolidation of spiritual, moral, and family values.”

⑤ Russia is a continuity and a total of “Ancient Rus, the Tsardom of Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and modern Russia.”

A great chasm, indeed. Rather than inviting and promoting immigration, the Russian leader calls on his people to “be fruitful and multiply [and] populate the earth abundantly”; rather than promoting patch-work, or single-mother families, or same-sex marriages, the Russian leader encourages the revival of the traditional multi-child family; rather than promoting secularism, the Russian president stresses the importance of religion; rather than promoting cancel culture, Vladimir Putin holds in high regard historical continuity.

Of note are Vladimir Putin’s words heralding and lauding Russia as a freedom fighter for the whole world or at least its majority i.e. the countries that do not make up, roughly, the G7 mutual admiration society. These words are reminiscent of the roles that both the Soviet Union and imperial Russia played while liberating Europe from, respectively, Hitler’s and Napoleon’s yokes. Notable is also the description of Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians as a triune large nation, words that act like a red rag to the Western bull(y).

Indeed, Russia is everything that the collective West is not, the collective West is everything that Russia is not. A deep chasm is gaping, an unbridgeable chasm, such that does not allow either of the opponents to even understand the opposing party. A civilizational rift.

Irish courage

On November 27 this year, The Irish National Party (An Páirtí Náisiúnta) made a statement in defence of the Irish nationality, against the uncontrollable, mass influx of foreigners. The statement denounces the “contemptible, bought-up political establishment” that is pursuing a policy of open borders and stepwise makes the Irish to become a minority in their own country. The statement expresses the concern of the National Party over the future of Irish identity and the survival of the Irish people. It calls the listener’s attention to the disastrous consequences caused by large numbers of foreigners in housing, employment, education and medical care. It condemns this ongoing deluge that is obviously encouraged and promoted by the treacherous elites. Much of the statement is devoted to rising crime as a result of the influx of aliens.

So far, so good. The Irish, just as any other nationality, have the right to protect themselves against the influx of foreigners. If the human rights that are quoted on every occasion are to be regarded with the seriousness that they deserve, then any national community ought to be prevented from being diluted by a huge admixture of foreigners.

Also, the foreigners, the aliens, the immigrants – you name them – ought to behave with proper restraint. Surely, they wouldn’t like to have their countries changed by mass immigration; undoubtedly, they wouldn’t like to have to accommodate foreigners and provide for them; undeniably, they wouldn’t be happy about becoming a minority in their own countries. Why, then, do they inflict that calamity on others?

Because there is no such thing as human rights: we only have the right of the strong over the weak, and the right of the sly over the meek. Since the Western governments keep promoting immigration to their own countries, since they tolerate the everyday influx of foreigners and continue to take full care of them, the other ethnicities simply take advantage of it. They must think of the Western nations in terms of – forgive the word – being suckers.

For all that, if the foreigners were honourable people, they would not impose themselves on other ethnicities. They know it full well that they are not welcome by the common people, they know it full well that they only live off the fat of the land because the treacherous elites of Western nations think it right to exploit their own people and redistribute the wealth produced by them to immigrants. Sadly, as said above, there are no human rights: given an opportunity to make a killing, man will make a killing.

With all compassion and due understanding, the statement delivered by the National Party reveals more than it says. While discussing the consequences of the influx of foreigners, there is only one ethnicity that is named – three times – and these are Ukrainians. It is hard to believe that the National Party is so much upset about the arrival of Ukrainians. Ukrainians are white, European, (post-)Christian and – just as all Slavs – have a deep inferiority complex towards the West and everything Western, so this complex will drive them to go out of their way to assimilate and integrate themselves with the Irish nation. It is obvious that it is not the Ukrainians whose presence in Ireland is resented by the National Party: it is the Third Worlders that are not welcome, and rightly so. Why then does the statement of the National Party not mention them?

The Irish patriots have only so much courage as to point a finger at other Europeans.

The real background to the dispute between China and the USA

It is not about politics. It’s not about the eternal struggle between Chinese pseudo-communism (with the capitalist tinge) and American pseudo-capitalism (with the neo-Marxist face). It’s all about raw materials and semiconductors.

Last week, a meeting took place between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Among other things, it was agreed that contacts between the US military and the Middle Kingdom should be resumed.

It should be remembered that the military dialog was broken off following the visit of Nancy Pelosi (then Speaker of the House of Representatives) to Taiwan at the beginning of August last year. This was the first visit by such a senior US politician to Taiwan in 25 years. China protested strongly against the visit and even threatened the US with a military response. Well, Biden’s team has always behaved like a bull in a china shop when it comes to diplomacy (see the flight of US soldiers from Afghanistan and their approach to Russia).

Although a few gestures are now being made after the meeting between Xi and Biden that could indicate a de-escalation in mutual relations, the war on the semiconductor front continues. In the middle of the year, for example, China decided to restrict exports of gallium and germanium, two important raw materials for the semiconductor industry. This was in response to the American decision to deny China access to the equipment needed for chip production. Incidentally, China is the world’s leading producer of gallium and germanium. The Middle Kingdom controls no less than 98% of the supply of gallium and 68% of the supply of germanium.

In October, Joe Biden’s administration announced that the United States would shorten the list of semiconductor types that US companies are allowed to sell to China. With this move, Washington wanted to further cut off Beijing from chips, which triggered an immediate reaction in the Middle Kingdom. This time, however, China decided to strike on a different front by announcing a restriction on the export of graphite, a raw material that is essential for the production of batteries for electric vehicles, among other things. It is worth remembering that China controls 2/3 of the world’s graphite supply. This raw material is the largest component of electric car batteries by weight. Each vehicle contains an average of 50 to even 100 kg of graphite. That is about twice as much as lithium, the processing of which is also controlled by the Chinese worldwide.

Quelle: constructafrica.com

Since many of the raw materials that are indispensable for the green revolution preached by Western decision-makers are mined in Africa, China has been focusing on colonizing the Dark Continent with the help of cheap loans and direct investments since the New Silk Road initiative began in 2013. The regimes of black dictators are happy to go into debt to their Chinese friends because they don’t talk about human rights and environmental protection. Meanwhile, Americans are investing billions in AI and high-tech, which cannot function without Asian and African raw materials. They disregard the potential collapse of supply chains that has been underway since the start of this trade war and which the Chinese can exploit as a weapon.