What puzzles me is why they so much want to live in Britain. What’s wrong with France or Germany ?

Perhaps it’s just that they know a little English but no French or German.

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If in doubt, keep ’em all out…

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It really is beyond belief that these “children” (all male, no females in sight) wouldn’t have their age queried in a British pub. Are the PTB terminally stupid, or simply so arrogant that they don’t give a toss about our opinions and demands?

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The events of September last year when Merkel told the EU to admit a huge number of so-called refugees were the result of hysteria. Very few people seem to recognize this. I joined Facebook a few weeks beforehand and was privileged to witness it close up. It happened very quickly. I think it was early in the week, perhaps Monday or Thursday, that the picture of the drowned Kurdish toddler appeared. The response on the little bit of FB that I saw was almost unanimous: Let them in! There was one dissenting voice, albeit mildly given the ‘culture’ of that medium, and that was me. (‘tdf’, if you are reading, that is ‘that was me’ not ‘that was I’!). When I read the Saturday paper the issue had been decided. Leading politicians and our diminutive President Higgins, were demanding that Ireland admit several thousand *and* grant immediate citizenship.

The well-known Irish economist David McWilliams supported it. In his newspaper column he argued that social media had shrunk the world and poor people abroad now know much more about life in the West. I pointed out to him on his blog that the phones in evidence in the tv coverage were more likely for communicating with extended family already resident in the refuge-countries of choice. (He used to get the Eurovision voting wrong in a similar way: he thought it was tactical voting to ingratiate oneself with neighbours while I had always argued that it was emigrants voting for their own countries – Wogan figured this out live one year when wondering why Luxembourg had given such a high vote to a tuneless offering from Portugal – ‘Oh, I get it! Gastarbeiter!’.)

People might remember the scenes at a central European railway station (not ‘train station’, the remembered words of Clement Freud’s accuser) where a train packed with refugees waited to leave with everyone aboard apparently screaming *hysterically*, while another image was of a would-be immigrant throwing himself and his young children *hysterically* onto the tracks, where a train did not happen to be passing at the time.

A couple of weeks later I listened to Radio France (I think they call it ‘France Radio’) where a Belgian journalist, Clementine Le Forissier, who had worked as a Berlin correspondent for several years, stated that this was the first time she had seen the Chancellor make a decision without careful examination beforehand. Her decision was ‘rapide, émotionelle et pas rationelle’. Some have argued after the event that this was some kind of sly ‘master stroke’ to make up for some perceived manpower shortfall in Germany. They are entitled to their opinion.

How is hysteria transmitted? Is it by the usual means (greatly speeded up in these ‘interconnective’ times) or is there something less visibile, along the lines of what Rupert Sheldrake writes about? Fantasy is surely related. Richard Webster of course appreciated the importance of fantasy. For example in his excellent Flat Earth News article he mentions in passing that he had long ago “come to the conclusion that we live within a collective fantasy, or a set of collective delusions”. Earlier this year I read Chrstopher Booker’s 1968 The Neophiliacs which examines the rise of the Fab Sixties by documenting the events of 1955/6 onwards. Booker, a noted Jungian scholar, identified two fantasy cycles, each following a sequence of five stages (from memory): dream, frustration, nightmare, death wish and fading into reality (or following fantasy cycle). Peter Hitchens had written approvingly of the book and I got it second hand from Amazon. I don’t know if I could follow it according to his framework but it is an extraordinarily insightful book. I came across a talk by him on YouTube about the IPCC where he described the global warming panic in a very similar five-stage fantasy cycle. He doesn’t do this in his excellent The Real Climate Disaster, which like the other book, examines global warming in its historical context, following the events in chronological order, although it is obviously in his mind.

One thing about the Neophiliacs is Booker’s reference to the Suez Crisis as an example of a right wing fantasy. Of course nowadays the big fantasies are all of the Left (the Guardian is an excellent source). One worry is that when the present happy clappy multicultural fantasy collides with reality a right wing fantasy will replace it. I think this is Hitchens’s fear.

I find it remarkable that two writers I have been following in recent times arrive at similar, or at least comparable conclusions, working from different directions. My own ‘research’ (if I can dignify what I have done with that word) has come to the same conclusion from yet another angle, this time from studying extraverts.

I cannot remember if I linked to this before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMt8zkSP9xE

I probably did only a few weeks ago. Tino Sanandaji is a Kurdish immigrant in Sweden and economist. He says that his background enables him to say things about immigration into Sweden that Swedes (or ‘ethnic Swedes’) dare not. He argues that there is a strict taboo on the subject in Sweden, and of course it is little different elsewhere. For the benefit of those whose Swedish isn’t the best it is subtitled in English. The first half hour would do because after that I think he goes off into detail about how the immigrants (sorry, ‘refugees’), once they are in the country, find it very hard to find work.

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