The unfolding Danish crisis.

I like to talk about the iron laws of arithmetic and Solzhenitsyn's "pitiless crowbar of events." In political, social, and economic matters, these are seen in stark operation in events strongly resembling the automotive journey of Thelma and Louise over the cliff with, unfortunately, Thelma and Louise firmly in charge of direction and speed and millions of unwilling passengers in the back seat in control of nothing other than the initial earlier choice of Thelma and Louise as their drivers of choice.

More exactly, to conform more precisely to Western experience, the passengers become unwilling a few seconds after free fall is effected, but not before. As the front bumper clears the edge of the precipice, they are still happy and complacent, much like the voters in the U.S. election of Tuesday next who give every indication of still being indifferent to the facts (1) that the putative current "president" of the country has at all times been constitutionally unqualified to occupy that office and (2) that he began his political career in the living room of two communist terrorists. But two of the oddities that come to mind when this man's history is examined. Any one of these two oddities bothers the Colonel ad astra and all of them taken together make him the unbalanced individual that he is today.

Another T&L moment is unfolding in Denmark, which seems an unlikely place given its prosperity and its distance from the areas to the south like Greece, Italy, and Spain which have received so much attention in the recent past for their fiscal profligacy and consequent threat to the stability of the Eurozone. Isn't Scandinavia immune from problems created by the cousins of Zorba and Don Corleone?

Like those countries, however, the tension in Denmark between mentally healthy politicians vicious right wingers wanting to reduce social welfare spending and saintly left wingers wanting to pour taxes down a rat hole respond to every whim, impulse, quirk, and delusion of the voters resolved predictably, in 2011, in the election of a center-left government promising to do what center-left governments do, namely, spend like there's no tomorrow.

This the new government has found it is impossible to do and, as the author of the passages quoted below, Mr. Hedegaard, observes, this has made the government very unpopular. More specifically, Danish politics, he says, are now "in deep crisis [and if] elections were held today, the current government would be swept away."^[1]

But a mere change of leadership won't resolve the crisis that has developed because it is deeper than merely encountering certain inconvenient budget numbers. The crisis also manifests itself in the public schools which are "Danish society's most essential institution."

Here it is that the deluded Westerners' mindless embrace of multiculturalism has come face to face with the predictable and commonplace problems that arise after people from incompatible cultures are transplanted in the West. In response to the discipline problems created by Muslim immigrant children in the schools many Danes have put their children in private schools where there are fewer immigrant children.

In one Copenhagen neighborhood fully half of the families are choosing the private school option, a quite astounding fact. What makes this an instance of probable divine justice is that this neighborhood

is one of the reddest areas in the country, where voters routinely cast massive votes for left and far-left parties, i.e. the very parties that are particularly keen on more immigration and on upholding the public school system.^[2]

These Danes' choice of private schools is thus a stellar instance of what Lawrence Auster refers to as the "unprincipled exception" that liberals make when reality is dangerous or expensive and in stark opposition to sacred liberal "values." The liberal chooses to avoid the danger or expense without acknowledging the wise deviation or abandoning a firm commitment to liberalism.

The Danish response to one teacher's exasperation suggests that reality is beginning to register in certain quarters, particularly the reality of the danger posed by Muslim immigration:

This [the teacher's apology for making an accurate observation about Muslim behavior] would normally have re-established an idyllic political correctness, but something quite surprising happened: The Chairman of the Ejerslykke School Board, Peter Julius Jørgensen, wrote an op-ed for the newspaper Fyens Stiftstidende, in which he called attention to the kind of problems with "double-linguistic" pupils [i.e., students speaking both Arabic and Danish] that the school had to contend with. They didn't shy away from calling their teachers "fucking whores" and showed so little respect that it made teaching impossible.

* * * *

“The problem,” [the newspaper] Jyllands-Posten continued, “is not the principal but the ill-mannered children, who are not properly brought up by their parents but rather supported in their destructive behavior."

And why, asked the paper's editorial writer, may we not "call Muslims Muslims when they themselves put so much emphasis on this identity"?

The day before, the editorial writer for the daily Kristeligt Dagblad called for unqualified support for Principal Sonsby. To be sure, the paper thought it too "simplistic" to blame the pupils' bad behavior on their religion. Even so, the editorial writer admitted that there was a "real problem", which had not been openly discussed: "The fact that some double-linguistic pupils ruin the education for others and that their lack of respect has something to do with their religious and cultural background."

Despite some reservations, these statements amount to a revolution in a country where the only accepted explanation for the bad manners of the "double-linguistic" has so far been poor social conditions. In other words: If extra billions were pumped into the public schools and parents of naughty boys were given more money, the problems would disappear.

If, on the other hand, the public school system's collapse is entirely or in part caused by religion and culture and the fact that Muslim parents cannot or will [not] bring up their children to become integrated into Danish society, what could possibly be accomplished with more money?

Can Muslims be bribed to integrate into a Western society? So far it hasn't happened anywhere.

This sheds a new political light on the entire problem: By what right do Danish politicians allow further immigration of Muslims, knowing that the public school system – the institution that more than any other has made Denmark a caring and cohesive society – cannot integrate them?

So far nobody has asked that question. ^[3]

The United States inexplicably has also imported large numbers of Muslims and the lessons the Danes are learning are ones that will, as surely as night follows day, be taught here as well. Little indication, however, that substantial numbers of the beautiful people grasp the suicidal stupidity of multiculturalism.

At some point in the past, Westerners mostly abandoned a belief in witchcraft but it's not clear that the beliefs they adopted afterwards proved to be qualitatively different. Look to Denmark for instruction on how insistent and unpleasant realities play out in the minds of people who can't count, can't learn anything from 1,200 years of Muslim pathology, and do believe in Tinkerbell.

Notes
^[1] "Danish public schools facing collapse." By Lars Hedegaard, Dispatch International, 11/1/12.
^[2] Id.
^[3] Id. (Emphasis added.)