In my coverage of the French elections, I’ve been vaccilating between optimism and pessimism. Obviously, Le Pen’s result – 34% of the vote – was unprecedentedly good, and her popularity seemed to be especially strong amongst French youth. On the other hand, it was perhaps not as good a result as could have been expected, considering she was facing off against the embodiment of an empty suit politician and representative of a political system that has worked hard to delegitimize itself in the past decade. In particular, her failures to make any inroads amongst the French intellectual and professional class, who control 90%+ of the media and universities, is particularly concerning.
Since then, I’ve taken the time to look through French post-elections opinion polls, and I am now leaning much more towards the pessimist side of things. I will mostly refrain from editorializing and just lay out the data, and maybe some of you could come up with a more positive interpretation.
(a) The commenter AP has suggested that the reason MLP performed reasonably well amongst younger French is because more of them stayed home. Indeed, at 25% of the electorate, the rate of abstention in this election has been the highest since 1969.
Moreover, just as AP posited, abstentionism was concentrated Melenchon supporters (36%) and 18-24 year olds (33%) and 25-34 year olds (34%).
According to this poll, 81% of Melenchon voters in the first round ended up voting for Macron anyway (of those who voted at all, obviously). Any talk of “Red-Brown” alliances remains as chimeric as always.
(b) In the OpinionWay poll released soon after the French elections, it appeared that French women – unusually for nationalist parties – were relatively more supportive of MLP than the men (37% to 33%). This would have been pretty encouraging, since women tend to be more conformist, and a better result for MLP amongst them would imply nationalist ideas are infiltrating the mainstream and becoming less tabboo.
Two consequent polls put paid to that, though. In this poll, men were more supportive of MLP than women (36% to 33%), and another IPSOS poll confirmed that picture (38% to 32%).
Still nowhere close to the 10% point or more gap in male/female voting in the recent US elections, but not a curious exception either.
(c) The biggest #blackpill, though, is the indication that support for MLP ebbs amongst the youngest age group, despite their high abstentionism.
Opinion polls in France have been conflicted on this question:
In particular, a voter poll released just now by OpinionWay is extremely encouraging – an amazing 44% of 18-24 year olds said they had voted for Marine Le Pen, compared to just 20% of over 65 year olds… This standards in positive contrast to a poll from the first round, which suggested that Le Pen’s support peaked at 29% in the 35-49 year old bracket, before declining to 21% amongst the youngest voters. It would also be a confirmation of polls from 2015 which indicated that support for the Front National increased monotonically as voters became younger.
OpinionWay, which has a sample of almost 8,000, shouldn’t be dismissed. On the other hand, though, the IFOP survey supports the interpretation that support for MLP peaks amongst the middle-aged, then begins to fall again amongst the youngest voters.
- Some more observations:
(a) The majority of Macron voters in the second round (57%) were not voting for Macron per se, but against Le Pen.
(b) There were… debates, about who had won the debates. This poll suggests it was Macron – more voters thought more favorably of him afterwards (10%) than of MLP (6%).
(c) The Coming Apart thesis: Of Macron’s voters, 80% said they had benefited from globalization, or at least not lost from it; in constrast, of Le Pen’s voters, some 74% said they were losers from globalization.
Also, a striking graphic from (see right) from The Financial Times in support: Macron won 84% of the vote in the 10th decile of France’s most educated communes, versus 53% in the least educated decile.
(d) As per usual, MLP remains the candidate of the French siloviks:
…In Versailles, it is shown by the two voting stations in the Satory plateau (No. 10 and No. 11). Marine Le Pen got 64.61% and 53.34% there respectively, against 35.39% and 46.66% for Emmanuel Macron. These are the only voting stations in Versailles that don’t put Macron far ahead. In the town, Macron got 76.15% and Le Pen 23.85%. Abstention was slightly higher on the Satory plateau than in the rest of Versailles. The only people living on the Satory plateau are gendarmes, military personnel and civilians working in the defence industry who benefit from social housing.
The same observation in Nanterre, with voting station 14 which corresponds to the Republic Guard barracks. Marine Le Pen was in front with 54.04% against 45.96% for Macron. The contrast with the rest of the city is also striking here: Macron 83.15% and Le Pen 16.85%.
3. IFOP: Confessional voting:
(i) Abstentionism at about 25% for all religious denominations, except Muslims, of whom 38% abstained.
(ii) Macron actually got a higher result (71%) amongst practicing Catholics than irregular (54%) and non-practising ones(61%). I assume on account of the age difference. The irreligious voted 70% for Macron. Muslims – a near monolithic 92%.
They also asked whom they had voted for in the first round. Fillon is the President of the Catholics. And Muslims vote highly Leftist: 37% for Melenchon, almost twice the national average, and 17% for the Socialist candidate Hamon, almost three times as high as the national average.
- The only foreign country where Le Pen won? Syria, LOL. (h/t Mohsen)
- But speaking of Syria, even in the event of an MLP win, their celebration might be premature. While browsing through IFOP’s database of polls, I discovered one more #blackpill for your delectation.
The Front National portrays itself as an anti-immigration, non-interventionist party, and the former at least is definitely true – only 4% of MLP voters support immigration, versus 30% of conservative (Sarkozy) and 60% of leftist (Melenchon/Hollande) voters.
Unfortunately, it seems to be much weaker on the anti-intervention side of the equation.
In the wake of Trump’s strike on Syria, IFOP polled the French on whether they agreed with it or not, and the results are as astounding as they are depressing.
62% of Front National voters and MLP supporters supported the strikes – that is virtually the same as those evil “globalist” En Marche!/Macron supporters.
Ergo for Fillon/conservative voters. Hamon supporters were 50/50, while Melenchon voters were actually opposed, at 45% to 55%.
This raises a disquieting scenario. Assume Marine Le Pen was to get into power by some miracle, and were to find herself hobbled by the universal hostility towards her populist-nationalist program from within and without.
What could she then do to break the deadlock?
Well, if the Trump experience is anything to go by, why not bomb some brown people in the Third World in the wake of the next round of dubious atrocity propaganda, with the quiet approval of her own electorate and the jingoistic cheers of the “moderate” centrists, who will go on to reward her “Presidential” actions with a few weeks of support before digging in their talons again.
AK, I think the immigration part of French public opinion is the best news. IIRC when asked who they liked on the issue more, Le Pen beat Macron something like 50-25%. In other words, a huge chunk of Macrons voters are actually closer to the NF than him. If Fillon had won, which looked likely at the start of the year he was promising to hold a national referendum on the issue. Alas, this looks like yet another lost opportunity to translate an immigration restrictionist political majority into concrete action.
Anatoly,
On the subject of Red-Brown alliances, there’s this to consider. My friend is a political statistician and he says basically, “in western Europe and the US, economic leftism is positively correlated with liberalism, in former Communist countries it’s anticorrelated with liberalism.” E.g. as he puts it, in eastern Europe you’ll find people who say “we should nationalize banks and also crack down on the Gypsies!” and other people who say “we should legalize gay marriage and privatize health services!” Whereas in the US or presumably, France, such a constellation of views would be much rarer. (Well, libertarians exist, but economic leftist / culturally conservative types are much less common).
If there is any hope of a red-brown alliance (that is to say, an alliance broadly between communists and ethnonationalists) it’s going to have to focus on eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and China, or at least start there. Not in countries like America or France.
Also, and I say this in a spirit of mostly friendly criticism, if you want to appeal to the left you really need to stop saying nice things about Richard Spencer, and at least tone down the anti-anti-racist stuff. And more broadly, eastern Europeans of the “red-brown” stripe need to make much more effort to distinguish themselves from interwar fascism than they have done up to this point. The victory over Nazi Germany and the victory over American racism towards Black people really were great moral triumphs. And in large part they were triumphs for the Left in particular. People who look back fondly on the communist days in eastern Europe and on the Great Society in America / its equvalents in western Europe are not going to take kindly to people who express sympathies for Jim Crow, Vichy, Antonescu, Horthy, and so forth, even if they might in principle be sympathetic to ethnonationalist concerns in principle. Nor should they. I’m sympathetic to a lot of ethnic identity concerns, in Europe more so than America, but I think if you want to really build a red brown coalition you absolutely need to separate yourself from the evils of (some) ethnic nationalist regimes of the past, and make it clear why what you’re standing for is not like what they stood for, why your context is different from theirs, and why you won’t repeat their crimes. (FTR, I think this can be done, at least for ‘decent’ ethnic nationalists, it will just take some work, and I think the far left needs to do the same).
The regular commenter here, German Reader, said smething similar over on Rod Dreher’s blog: people who worry about mass immigration in Europe discredit their whole cause when they assume we can simply re-enact the Reconquista and forcibly expel all the Jews to Israel and Muslims to North Africa.
Again, I say this as someone who hopes red-brown alliances, at least red-soft brown, can to some degree become a thing, and who really dislikes the tendency of some on the left to think that by calling something ‘fascist’ or ‘racist’ you can simply dismiss its intellectual or moral claims.
Because people are incredibly stupid, and don’t understand how all-important immigration is.
On an off topic note, Orbán is now losing his support among the well-educated in Hungary – not a good omen, even if he still seems to hold his support among the rest. He’ll probably easily win in 2018, especially since his opposition consists of incompetent hacks and idiots, but once a credible opposition arises, he’ll be finished. It probably won’t happen this time, but could easily happen by 2022.
Isn’t he losing a bunch of his well educated support to Jobbik?
Anyway, I’m curious what you’re thoughts are on this, where Thurmer, the leader of the (tiny) Hungarian communist party expresses his support for the Orban immigration policy. I know his party is at Jill Stein levels of support, but still, Jill Stein punches above her weight, and there’s at least a sort of kernel of red-brown alliance sentiment there that could develop into something in the future. Since you’re Hungarian, what are the relationship between Thurmer and the ethnic nationalist right exactly?
https://visegradpost.com/en/2016/08/30/gyula-thurmer-i-support-orbans-migration-policy/
No, I don’t think so.
But Thürmer doesn’t. He’s really a relic who’s made a good living for himself out of being a leader of a party driven by very old people’s nostalgia, who have mostly died by now. I think his daughter was a dating some far-right type for a while, something like ten years ago, but I haven’t followed the story because Thürmer has become really unimportant, and he never was very important to begin with.
It’s amazing how this issue brings out the inner faggot in people. Trump bombed an airbase because one of Assad’s goons got a hard on and went too far. Assad will be a bit more on top of things for a year to stop it happening again. No WW3, no quagmire, no nothing. Get over it.
Re-Red/Brown alliance. That is all true. However, the fact that it hasn’t worked even in Eastern Europe – there are very real differences between the KPRF and LDPR – just goes to further show how hopeless the project is.
Anyhow, a necessary clarification – I myself am not interested in or invested into any ideological project, including a Red/Brown alliance. I am primarily interested in what works. That is ambiguous, so let me clarify further: I am interested in the preservation of civilization and its betterment.
Things such as mass Third World immigration, dysgenics, and various existential risks imperil civilization.
Socialism per se doesn’t imperil civilization, though it seems pretty to clear to me taht free markets have tended to be more conductive to human flourishing. That said, average IQs are clearly more important, so I would be very willing to forego considerable economic freedoms if leftists offered a saner biopolitics (I do, after all, unreservedly support Le Pen over Macron). In practice, however, it is the European leftists who also tend to be the craziest open borders lunatics, so in practice it’s not a tradeoff that I personally even have to worry about.
Re-Richard Spencer. As per the above, I’m not on any sort of ideological crusade here. I am not going to say “nice” or “bad” things about people based on how well their ideas jive with a political program that I do not even share.
We don’t know why he bombed that airbase, what we know is that it didn’t much help him much domestically (they still want to impeach him, you guessed it, for Russia collusion, among other things), and it lengthened the war in Syria (which could only end with an Assad victory – because, as is well-known to everybody even minimally informed, Assad’s opposition is incapable of governance, so weakening Assad could only result in the sad deaths of even more children, either in a never-ending civil war like Libya, or in a now longer civil war ending with Assad’s victory).
Even if all the claims of an Assad chemical attack were true (which is far from proven, and to be honest, not even quite plausible), this would only mean that Trump would now be conducting his foreign policy based on sad pictures on teevee. Talk about some faggotry.
I don’t think there’s much point in trying to appease the “antiracist” sensibilities of mainstream lefties or conservatives. Ok, I can see how in the American context the hardcore alt-right comes across as very heartless and unfeeling; given the history of black-white relations in the US, there might still be a case for generosity towards slave-descended blacks. The situation in Western Europe is very different though. We’re not dealing here with some long-established minority with historic grievances and nowhere else to go, but with immigrant communities of very recent origin who have benefited massively from European welfare states, and caused a disproportionate amount of trouble in return. There’s also the whole issue how you’re dealt with by mainstream society as a nationalist. Here in Germany it’s basically open season on AfD politicians (who, despite a few dodgy characters, on the whole are definitely not Nazis, not even comparable to someone like Richard Spencer). They can expect not only to have their cars torched or their houses vandalized, but actually to be beaten up and threatened with death by Antifa activists. And there’s deafening silence about this (which I interpret as tacit approval) by mainstream left-wingers and conservatives who instead constantly parade their “antiracist” credentials. I don’t think there should be any attempt at dialogue or finding common ground under those conditions. You don’t talk to people who want to destroy you.
Regarding Richard Spencer, I really don’t get why the guy gets all that attention. It’s not like he’s a serious thinker or actually important, despite his bizarre delusions about his own personal grandeur.
Not as amazing as the degree to which American murders of foreign servicemen and conscripts bring out the inner hypocrite in most Americans.
The vast majority of the Americans who come out with the kind of faux hard-assed stuff you came out with here are the ones to blub loudest and girliest about dead American soldiers. Whether that applies to you personally, I obviously don’t know.
In any case, I don’t think Karlin was being sentimental about the victims of US military crimes of aggression. I suspect, like me, he is more concerned about the negative consequences of attacking the side we should be wanting to win in Syria and elsewhere. Worse than crimes, they are blunders.
As reiner Tor points out, there’s absolutely no good reason to believe the Syrian government was responsible for any chemical attack, and even if it was you can hardly get more faggoty than bombing foreigners because you were shown some nasty pictures.
Islamic fundamentalists do a pretty good job of running Saudi Arabia and a so-so job of running Iran. The myth that secular leaders are better at running countries than religious fundamentalists is just another piece of retro leftism that the alt right have jumped on to for want of being able to come up with their own ideas.
Obviously, the best thing would simply be for some other country to take over and run Syria. Russia has local connections, so they could do it. Saudi Arabia would probably do pretty well too. The problem is we can’t have imperialism any more, but that’s not Trump’s fault. It’s not really anyone’s fault, it’s just the rules we inherited from people long dead who didn’t really know what they were doing either.
Racially and religiously diverse countries with low human capital and excess unemployable males just shouldn’t govern themselves. Period. But they do, and there we are.
There’s nothing even mildly implausible about it. You don’t even have to bring in HBD. Look at atrocities during the American civil war. What do you think they would have done if they had chemical weapons?
But none of this matters. Trump bombed an airbase; people who watch NASCAR thought this was cool; his wife gave him a blow job; nothing bad came of it, no-one cares except monomaniacs.
He’s important because he went out there and took personal risks (like being sucker-punched in the head) to spread some message. He’s also a bit photogenic, though of course he’s also a ‘sperg like the rest of us. Since nobody else smarter and/or better looking is willing to spread a similar message, he’s gotten all the attention.
I don’t think his arguments are very good, and I don’t even agree with him on a lot of issues. By the way, he’s a bit pro-Stalinist (probably influenced by his wife) in that he has denied on Twitter that the holodomor was a genocide at all, says it was just an unintended consequence of some disastrous economic policies and natural disasters. (As far as I know, there’s no evidence for that; I read that in the early thirties there was no severe drought.) In any event, is that really fashy at all?
Given the level of FN support among the military and the gendarmerie, perhaps a military coup is a possibility in France? France had an abortive military coup around 1960. If the Macron economic reforms lead to general strikes and riots by unions and civil servants, and if there are one or more major terrorist attacks, I don’t think a coup can be ruled out. A Macron type inspires no confidence whatsoever in the police or the military. They might conclude that a French electorate that puts such an obvious “empty suit” in the Elysée needs governance by a stronger hand.
No, he was making a casual allegation of racism = faggotry. ‘Bombing brown people’ is the most faggoty lefty meme there is. In all probability it originated in one of Soros’ operations. All you need to do is type ‘bomb brown people’ into Google and it’s like you’ve been teleported into Berkeley.
Maybe it’s unfair (and I have to admit, I’ve never myself taken the risk of being punched by violent lefties), but frankly, Richard Spencer comes across like a silly narcissist to me. He seems in love with the idea of his own importance…when in fact he’s just got a crappy website and a Twitter account. Also all those dumb references to popular culture (e.g. there’s now a picture from a James Bond movie on his Twitter account…yeah, because ironic references to trashy low-brow entertainment will save the white race, haha)…just silly imo, no comparison to the more successful nationalist politicians in Europe.
I think the whole alt-right phenomenon is massively overestimated tbh. You can see this in the reaction by Trump supporters to the Syria missile strikes…large majority in favour. Those people probably have never even heard of the alt-right and Spencer. So I think Spencer will probably just become a kind of David Duke-like bogeyman for US media, a role which he seems to like…don’t see him ever becoming truly influential.
The problem with this idea is that the fight against anti-racism is in and of itself of vital importance.
The anti-racist taboo (including the related anti-anti-Semitism taboo) is the front line in the current leftist drive to suppress freedom of speech, and it is what justifies their generally illiberal approach to political and social dissent. It also is used highly effectively to distort domestic policy on immigration and foreign policy on Israel-related matters.
The political costs you identify to confronting it head on are very real, but the alternative you suggest, of trying to evade it and appease its advocates, will only draw more aggressive attacks an enable it to become ever more entrenched. For certain it will be much harder fighting past these taboos, but if they are accepted then any likely victory is likely to be the same as almost all other recent supposed “victories for the political right” in the US sphere in the past few decades: pseudo-victories that are actually disguised defeats, or acceptances of defeat.
Nobody said it would be easy.
“He’s really a relic who’s made a good living for himself out of being a leader of a party driven by very old people’s nostalgia, who have mostly died by now.”
On that note, it occurs to be that parties like the KPRF, Bohemia & Moravia communist party, etc. probably would be even weaker than they are if it weren’t for the low fertility rates in Eastern Europe. Old people have more political influence than they otherwise would because the median age in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is quite high. (In Russia that’s less the case because their fertility is now rather high by eastern European standards and their life expectancy rather low, but in the Czech Republic for example the median age is 42, which probably accounts for much of the KSCM’s continuing relevance).
This really shouldn’t come as a surprise, mlp was always going to get under 40%. The real blackpill was the sabotaging of Fillon in favour of this Macron weasel. I think the issue with “coming apart” is that in some sense, it hasn’t really happened. The actual elite is a very small proportion of the population. The most educated decile of the french population tink they’re beneficiaries of globilisation, but, without inherited wealth, theyre worse off than many blue collar workers were a generation ago. No extortionate college fees though, so plenty of grist for the mill. Comparentrast this with Turkey, where you have an arrogant urban bourgeoisie who are too small in number to stop the Turkish deplorables. The death penalty referendum over there should provide some entertaining triggerings of eurolibs.
Since this triumph black people are more likely to be murdered, more likely to be in prison, more likely to be on drugs, more likely to grow up in a dysfunctional home, more likely to be victim of violent crime and more likely to be unemployed.
On the plus side, a talented tenth of blacks no longer have to live among other blacks and can walk into job they want by showing up.
Go team!
Seems dubious to me, it’s quite likely imo Saudi-Arabia will blow up (maybe at some point in the 2020s) when they’re running out of their ill-deserved oil money and have to cut back welfare programmes.
As for Iran, who knows, the place might not have reached its full potential and do much better without the Islamic regime.
So I think Spencer will probably just become a kind of David Duke-like bogeyman for US media
Stop winning all the kewpie dolls; leave some for the rest of us.
Apart from the fact that it’s inherently ridiculous to suppose that the Syrian government would even consider allowing even the possibility of a chemical weapons attack, given such an attack can never produce more than trivial tactical gains and carries the real risk of snatching strategic defeat from the very jaws of victory in almost the only way it is plausibly capable of happening now – Libya-style.
To overcome that degree of inherent strategic absurdity, you’d need a lot more than all the questionable allegations and supposed findings from partisan groups and governments that have been paraded so far.
Perhaps ISIS or Al-Qaeda could run Syria relatively effectively, but
1) they would cleanse it of all Christians and probably most of urban elites, which would make it probably less efficient than the hopelessly inefficient Assad regime has ever been
2) there are at least two very large (already named) and a few smaller Islamist factions, and many of them are prone to further fission
3) the Libyan example shows that such loosely coordinated rebel factions tend to turn on each other once the evil dictator was toppled
4) even if one rebel faction managed to win and end the civil war, a lot of the population would still dislike it because the Syrian government wouldn’t have as much money as the Saudi government does currently have (at current oil prices, for a few more years; then, we’ll see)
First, it’s questionable if it really was sarin or not. The Syrians and Russians have offered to open up the airport in question to a serious investigation (traces of sarin could be detected long after it’s gone, so if it was true, they’d be taking a lot of risks here – of course, nobody was interested in the investigation), and the fact that the White Helmets were touching the victims with their bare hands also points that it could easily have been something other than sarin.
Second, such a bombing makes no sense at all. It was far from the front, basically a terror bombing with one bomb only. What did Assad (or his general) even try to accomplish here? This is the main point to me: it made no military sense at all. Bombing a besieged town would’ve made sense, perhaps even with one bomb. Bombing a far away town firmly in al-Qaeda hands made no sense whatsoever, except if the goal was to produce videos of suffering children.
And of course, having opened up the airport to investigation, the Russians and Syrians could’ve suffered if someone called their bluffs. Nobody did. Why?
It’s a pity the shah wasn’t more competent. But Iran is more civilized than Syria, and the Sunni fundamentalists are worse.
Iran has an average IQ of 84. It has the potential to be … Mexico. It was doing better under the Shah because it was de facto being governed by whites (even so it wasn’t doing that great.)
Lots of countries have oil, Saudi Arabia has done a good job with it. Compare with, say, Venezuela. You won’t find Saudi Arabia inviting James Petras in to give them economic advice.
Anyway, the point isn’t that Islamic regimes are better, just that they are no worse. The alt right seems to think that the most important thing in the world is that Syrian women can go to university and wear jeggings. I’m not sold.
Yes, I’m not the greatest fan of Iranian immigrants in the west (many of them are unpleasant leftists), but there’s a long history of civilization in Persia, that to some degree is independent of Islamic identity. I do hope that one day they get rid of at least the more oppressive elements of the present system….though unfortunately it might well come to war between the US and Iran instead.
Agree, the Sunni fundamentalists are the worst option in every way…they’ll eradicate all the minorities and present a permanent security threat to Europe if they get into power.
“Bombing brown people” is in a sense an aspect of the strategy Hector St Clare suggests above, of seeking to bring leftists on board with non-interventionism by playing on their sympathies rather than confronting them.
Faggoty or not, it’s an effective political tactic. For every one bomb-happy interventionist hypocrite (I don’t believe you’d be as cynically relaxed if the boot were on the other foot and Americans were the target) like you who finds it annoying, there are ten leftists who are nodding along with it (maybe not as many in this particular forum, obviously). It directly attacks the “R2P” idiocy that most leftists knee-jerk along to when the establishment needs them on board for some murderous act of military aggression.
I don’t know about that, it’s not like there wasn’t a significant history of civilization in Persia. But then modern Maya are supposedly quite dumb despite the impressive achievements of their ancestors. Hard to tell.
In any case it’s of course ultimately up to the Iranians themselves what kind of system they want to adopt.
I know you’re not American and so probably don’t ‘internalize’ the American social context (and I agree with you that from what I can tell the dynamics are very different in Europe). You’re correct that America is in a very different historical position here, and I personally find it super-annoying when people try to interpret European, Asian, Latin American or African politics through the lens of the American civil rights struggle. E.g. when people try to ask “Who are the Blacks in Malaysia? Who are the whites in Yugoslavia?”
Having said that, it’s not that there ‘might be’ a case for generosity towards US Black people: there definitely is a very strong one. If we’re concerned about the rights of ethnic groups to thrive in their ancestral land, America is at least as much the homeland of Black people as it is most white people. Most white Americans draw a large chunk of their ancestry from post-1845 and in many cases much more recent migration (from Ireland, Italy, Eastern Europe, Germany, Scandinavia, etc.): the ancestry of black Americans derives mostly from slaves who were brought here prior to 1808. Black Americans have a very strong case that they were treated horribly during the decades of segregation and even more during two centuries or so of slavery. I think anyone who’s sympathetic to ethnic nationalist causes in principle need to do a much better cause of regognizing the legitimate interests of Black Americans and their legitimate hostility to the idea that America isn’t their country. (N.B. there’s nothing in Black American culture that should militate inherently against the idea of ethnic nationalism. Malcolm X, famously, believed in separate states for separate ethnic groups. Modern day Black Americans have embraced liberalism largely because the Republican Party embraced causes and historical trends that Black Americans view with extreme suspicion, and with good reason. Trump’s tone-deaf language in speaking to African-Americans, and his embrace of tough criminal justice policies and willingness to cut the welfare state, have only cemented that suspicion).
I fully agree that Europe is in a very different position here- there are no “African-Americans of Europe”. As you point out, the European ethnic nationalists represent the indigenous populations here, and most of the ethnic minority populations are of very recent origin, came over voluntarily, and have in many cases caused quite a bit of trouble. That having been said, European ethnic nationalists have their own historical baggage that they need to divest themselves of. Cf. M. Jalkh’s comment’s about the Nazi death camps, the Greater Romania Party’s attempt to appeal fondly to the memory of both Antonescu and Ceaucescu, the inexplicable fondness of Jobbik and the Slovak National Party for the interwar fascist states, etc.. I would recommend that if you want to win people over, you kind of have to not do those things.
As for this:
“I don’t think there should be any attempt at dialogue or finding common ground under those conditions. You don’t talk to people who want to destroy you.”
Well, A) this is exactly what the ‘antifa’ liberals say, and B) this is not going to be a successful strategy when you’re a small minority of the population. Ethnic nationalists can win elections in eastern Europe, maybe, but in much of western Europe they’re a minority of the population that’s viewed as toxic by everyone else. You want that to change, and in many cases I’m sympathetic to you, but if you want to do that then yes, you kind of need to talk to people who want to destroy you and convince them not to destroy you, and that you’re not as bad as they think. The Danish ethnic nationalists have done this successfully. Thus far the French and German ones haven’t, and I’m not optimistic they will be able to.
Unlike whites and Latinos, Black Americans think their life situation has gotten better since the 1960s. Why don’t you ask them? I am not presumptuous enough to disagree with them about which situation they prefer.
“That said, average IQs are clearly more important, so I would be very willing to forego considerable economic freedoms if leftists offered a saner biopolitics (I do, after all, unreservedly support Le Pen over Macron).”
Funny note, since you said that. I know another guy (on the Left, but also a HBD believer) who said that in his view it would have better for Malaysia if the Communist rebels had won. As he puts it, “central planning is usually a bad idea, but the economic loss you would take from central planning is probably less than the economic gain from being governed by ethnic Chinese instead of ethnic Malays.”
Assuming this is even true, most blacks have a fantasy view of what their peoples’ past was like. Oprah Winfrey said that ‘millions’ of blacks had been lynched. The average black probably imagines that in 1960 he could be randomly murdered by klansmen if he tried to cross the street.
Germans/Nordics were once blond chimps too- all of Europe probably improved their IQ to world class levels through intense selection with declines in formerly more civilized areas
My default position as far as politics is concerned is pessimism, which I claim is justified by having watched the worst aspects of the political left (socially radical and politically illiberal, treasonously anti-patriotic, and murderously interventionist) in unholy alliance with the worst aspects of the globalist right (treasonously subservient to Washington and to international big business and murderously interventionist) triumph everywhere in the US sphere over the course of my lifetime.
I’ve said before that I think France might well come down to a race between the FN taking power and its “moderating” itself into just another tool for the globalist establishment. By the time it takes office, France might need to replace it with a new honest opposition, anyway.
But I think it makes more sense to just take the significant increase in FN vote on its face and accept it as another step forwards, and feel good about the result. 34% for the FN in 2017 would have seemed like a fantasy scenario a few years ago before Trump and Brexit raised the bar for “success” (unreasonably, imo). There’s a danger in overanalysing the detailed breakdowns of support. A few years back we were being told that UKIP could never win a referendum because their support was overwhelmingly concentrated amongst older people (we were told that – I’m not saying it was necessarily true) and would die out . You can’t easily draw a line from what people think at 18 to what they will think when they are 30, imo.
And the bottom line is that the problems that drive increased support for parties of national survival, including in France, aren’t going anywhere, and are only going to get worse, especially under the likes of Macron.
Of course, didn’t want to dispute that. I personally don’t really take a stance on relations between whites and blacks in the US, it’s not my problem, and I can see where you’re coming from…the situation of slave-descended blacks in the US still seems to be pretty depressing on the whole. From the outside, it also seems pretty clear that the US hasn’t really found a solution to its traditional race issue…there seems to be intense racial hostility on both sides, and there’s a hugely dysfunctional black underclass (and the only solution for that anybody seems to have come up with is locking up lots of black men).
I do however very much object to the attitude taken by many US liberals that you’ve described yourself above, with their idea that the American experience is somehow universally relevant. It isn’t. Even race relations between whites in England and black immigrants from the Caribbean are very different from the situation in the US. Turks in Germany may face at least some discrimination, and there have been cases of racist murders by Neonazis, but again, their position isn’t really comparable to the history of blacks in the US.
That’s true, and I certainly agree, linking yourself to the traditions of genuinely fascist movements shouldn’t be done, as shouldn’t stoking of revanchism about long-lost territories and the like (e.g. Hungary and the treaty of Trianon, Germany and its lost Eastern territories), also obviously nothing like racial discrimination against citizens and legal residents. However I agree with Randal…at some point you’re inevitably going to come into conflict with the prevailing establishment view. If you can’t come out in the open and say “I think Islam is a regressive ideology that doesn’t add anything positive to our society and I don’t want to see its influence increased” or “I don’t think we should open up Europe to millions of African immigrants”, then your nationalist movement is pointless. On these issues there just can’t be any accomodation.
No, you need to talk to people who have doubts, who aren’t racist on a personal level and may even have well-assimilated immigrant friends, but who fear Islam and don’t want to become a minority in their own country. And there are many people like that. It’s a fool’s errand by contrast to talk to people who are committed antiracist witchhunters, these people will always be enemies.
It’s an effective political tactic with faggots.
Because they are faggots. Is there something that is complicated about this?
We’re not “faggots” for demanding some actual EVIDENCE to implicate the Syrian government in the alleged gas/chemical attack.
Neither you nor we have any idea whether the thus-far unjustified missile strike on the Syrian base is a harbinger of much bigger, costlier, deadlier unnecessary intervention by the US government in that country. Let’s hope not.
Are we still on planet earth here? Whichever general made the order was trying to kill people he didn’t like because its fun. Maybe he had some third cousin who was hacked to death by Al Nusra.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Magdeburg
And if they’d had some Sarin they could have had a real party.
You’re right.
UKIP did not ‘win a referendum’ and UKIP are finished. Black pills don’t come much blacker than Britain.
Incidentally, anyone know how the corruption investigation against Fillon is going?
wink wink (maybe)
That said, Iran probably has a wider distribution.
I don’t claim to speak for the Alt Right, but my impression is that they couldn’t give a toss (so long as they remain in their own countries).
(Though personally, as a proponent of civilization, I personally support both those things).
Even a broken clock is…
Anyhow, invade/invite are joined at the hip. Since European peoples no longer have the ruthless will (or the demographics) to just invade.
Concerning the red-brown alliance, what about Robert Fico in Slovakia. I believe he is from the political left but helped protect Slovakia from the migrant invasion in 2015. Also, some elements in Austria’s Social Democrats are in favor of working with the Freedom Party on the national level after elections next October. Would love to see such a coalition take power if in fact it led to less immigration and it would have the nice by-product of driving hip and trendy multi-cultural favoring Greens and others crazy.
The Blacks are developing their own ethnonationalism – it’s called hotep nationalism.
http://hotepnation.com/
They do have an annoying “we wuz kangz” svidomist-like element but overall they’re okay and I think I support them.
They are infinitely more sympathetic than the likes of Ta-Nahesi Coates, anyway.
Yes, they did.
UKIP are in exactly the kind of turmoil you’d expect from a party that was created to achieve a concrete goal and suddenly (rather unexpectedly, if truth be told) achieved that goal.
It has to reorganise and find new goals. Whether it will do so successfully remains to be seen. If it reorganises itself as a successful advocate of the broader agenda of modern parties of national survival (halting immigration, restoring national sovereignty in the economic, political and military spheres) then it will do fine. If it does not, it will probably fade away and be replaced by someone else willing to represent those political trends.
Regardless, it’s way too early yet to judge how it will go, only a few months after the Brexit triumph.
“On the subject of Red-Brown alliances, there’s this to consider. ”
Why consider it at this point?
Looking at these polls, it appears neither Melanchon’s nor Fillon’s supporters want anything to do with the FN.
Maybe the FN needs to come to think of themselves as “The True French.”
France appears to be a lost cause. Let the rest of them have as much Islam as they wish. The FN is concentrated in certain areas, make those strongholds. Then engage in a cynical program of shamelessly wresting every last drop from the government teat, all while engaged in massive tax evasion on a personal level.
Make those stronghold areas. Given France’s economic issues (and most of the other nations in the EU), I don’t think the center is going to hold very much longer.
Maybe the Reconquista needs to be in France this time. There are a number of countries in the world where different groups exist in various states of uneasy peace. Well for a time.
Would be better to save France, but I guess that’s not possible with anyone who wouldn’t vote for Le Pen in this election. My god, Muslims kill people with axes in train stations, engage in other acts of terrorism, rape, … all while doing nothing productive while sucking on the teats of the welfare state.
If that’s not enough to convince anyone, it can’t be done, or isn’t worth anyone’s time.
Maybe in twenty or thirty years Russia or China might provide support for an attempt to reclaim Paris. I don’t know what happens to that place if the French welfare state breaks down. It may not be worth taking back honestly. All the churches will have been burned. Anything valuable will have been extracted and sold. All the works of art will have been looted, and sold to anyone interested across the world. The universities will converted to chickenshit Madrassas, and all the books in the libraries will be burned (except the ones they can sell).
Glad it’s not my problem.
Yes, I really like Robert Fico. He is, yes, a social democrat who has decided to embrace culturally conservative causes (opposed to gay marriage, strongly opposed to mass migration especially of Muslims, for a tougher line towards the Roma) and is less pro-western / more pro-Russia than social democrats tend to be. And like trump he loves to troll the media whom he calls “lying prostitutes”. As I noted above, Slovakia is one of those places, like the rest of eastern Europe, where leftism anticorrelates with liberalism, so it’s the first place you would expect a red-brown coalition to emerge. I might be visiting Europe later this year and if possible I’d like to visit Slovakia.
Fico is probably my favourite European leader after Lukashenko in Belarus, so I was pleased to see they recently had a productive meeting where they agreed to try to intensify trade with each other. Fico in particular said he was looking forward to more trade with the “Eurasian Union” countries in future.
As for the FPO, in spite of the antipathy they arouse from some elements of the media and the political establishment, they appear to have been able to cooperate with social democrats in the past. They and the Social Democrats are currently vying for first place in Austrian opinion polls. President Van der Bellen has gone on record saying he’d refuse to recognize a FPO chancellor, so it may not happen any time soon, but I suspect it will happen eventually.
The FPO in Austria and the Danish People’s Party are two examples of ethnonationalist parties in Western Europe that have overcome the ‘toxic’ label at least enough to participate in coalition governments and influence the agenda.
Umm, do you really think this “hotep” nationalism (is that another one of those silly claims that ancient Egypt was a “black” civilization?) has any chance of taking off? Seems like just another fringe movement to me, like the Nation of Islam or similar nonsense. What’s it about America that it produces all those cult-like ethnonationalist movements that are so transparently silly? Similar with white nationalist movements…it’s all so obviously fake and artificial. Is is because everyone in the US (apart maybe from some Appalachian whites who live in the same areas where their ancestors have been for centuries) is so deracinated?
All ethnic nationalism has elements of svidomism when you choose to deconstruct it, but why would you? Myths serve an important social purpose (in this case, the purpose of preserving the variety and distinctness of human genetic and cultural diversity).
I don’t follow Indian politics in much of any detail, but in my idle moments I flirt with my own brand of ‘ethnic’ nationalism: I kind of wish the Southern Indian nationalists had been able to break away in the 1950s, as many of them hoped for, and form their own Dravida Nadu nation-state. Southern India is generally more educated / less patriarchal than the north, so of course they have lower fertility and have been losing demographic weight relative to the north ever since independence. That mythology of course has svidomist elements of its own, as do we all. (American patriotism is svidomist to the max, of course).
Some more UKIP thoughts. I wouldn’t be surprised if PM Cameron and now May pledging to reduce overall immigration into Britain to the tens of thousands per year (did MLP take this for her plan, just slicing off the “s” in tens, to ten thousand?) was a response to UKIP helping to move the Overton window over the years. Also, this election they are not running candidates against pro-Brexit Tories. I’d like to see them concentrate their fire against pro-remain Labour MP’s and for them to supplant Labour as Britains new working class party, much as FPO in Austria and FN in France has done. But, in a system without proportional representation its so hard for smaller parties of any ideology (just ask the British Greens about this) to win seats.
Um, Appalachian whites are actually some of the most ‘deracinated’ people in the country. In the sense that they’re most likely to list their ethnic identity as simply “American”, if you ask them. In New England or the Upper Midwest, white people much more commonly will self-describe as Polish, Slovak, Portuguese, German, Irish, etc..
I realize a lot of Europeans find it weird for a person who speaks no Polish, whose family have lived in America for three generations, etc.. to self-describe as ‘Polish’, but that’s typically how people in the northeast and rust belt describe themselves. In Appalachia and the South, people are more likely to self describe as “American” or “White”. Which actually seems weirder to me, since neither of these is actually an ethnic identity.
“Why consider it at this point?”
Um, because Anatoly brought it up?
Also for lots of other reasons (because the working class is a natural constituency of ethno-tribal politics, because cultural and economic collectivism plausibly go together, because diversity undermines the welfare state, because of a shared hostility to global capitalism and US imperialism, because both cultural change and neoliberal economics harm the working class, because there is no obvious connexion between tolerance of outsiders and one’s views on economics, because all actually existing socialist states had closed borders, etc..) But in this case it’s significant because Anatoly brought it up.
Regularly practicing Catholics only gave 29% of their vote to Le Pen, while Protestants gave 33% of their vote to Le Pen.
Yet another refutation of Moldbug’s “blame Calvinists” theory.
He could’ve killed way more children from al Qaeda affiliated families with way less fuss about it, just without chemical weapons.
They don’t have a lot of sarin, and it was closely guarded by the top leadership even before 2013, when they had a lot more of it.
You need to consider that in Syria the high-IQ groups were part of or at least supported the Assad government: weird religious sects (Alawites, the Druze), Christians, and urban Sunni elites. These will be mostly chased out or killed under any kind of Sunni fundamentalist regime.
The fact that even many of the dumb Sunni masses will also flee the paradise they created and thus swell the migrant populations already here in Europe will be a nice bonus.
But again, we’ve already assumed that one of the Sunni fundamentalist rebel groups will be able to destroy the rest and create some semblance of order. Unlikely. I’d bet on a Libya style continuing civil war.
But they’re a somewhat cohesive, distinct community, with roots in the country going back several centuries. Now I suppose this might be offensive to many Americans, but when I think about the US they, together with dwindling WASP types and the descendants of black slaves, are like the closest thing to being real Americans that I can think of, in the sense that the US would be literally inconceivable without them.
Anyway, I just wondered why the US has all those weird racialist-nationalist movements unhinged from historical reality. Now of course one may regard nationalism in general as pretty dumb. But at least England, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Russia etc. have all existed in some form for a thousand years…no doubt there is a lot of myth-making involved here, but at least there’s some historical reality as foundation when e.g. an English nationalist would celebrate King Alfred and his successors as the creators of England. White and black nationalists in the US by contrast create totally bizarre fantasy narratives. You can see this in the bizarre appropriation of ancient Egypt by black nationalists (instead of more or less authentic African survivals, which to my surprise seem to have existed in some parts of the US, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah ), but also in someone like Richard Spencer when he makes delusional statements like “I want a white empire in the northern hemisphere with global power projection capabilities”.
(sorry, if that’s a bit of an incoherent rant, it’s just something that I found rather weird).
Assuming they have any at all.
In any event, the fact that the American government was totally uninterested in any kind of independent investigations will not help me believe their claims.
Imagine a US with a White Party (the Republican Party with a WN-esque ideology), with nationalist parties like the FN or FPÖ or AfD (but more right wing than these) in power in European countries. Now, these countries together in NATO would already constitute some kind of “white empire in the northern hemisphere with global power projection capabilities”.
I’m often wondering that in maps of the early Roman Empire there’s often just a country in Italy, and some cities are marked with different colors based on their allied or Latin or Roman etc. status. However, the people at the time probably thought the allied cities as basically independent countries which happened to be the satellite states of Rome. Or I could see some maps of the Frankish Empire, where vassal states are marked with similar (or even the same) color. Similarly, we now think that Germany is not part of the US. But perhaps future historians, when drawing maps of, say, 1970s Europe, will draw all NATO countries with the same color, and calling them some kind of “nominally independent satellite states of the US”.
I wonder if it’ll ever get formalized. I guess Spencer wouldn’t be unhappy if it were. But it doesn’t matter so much.
No thanks, I don’t want all of us to become Americans, I’m sick of US influence as it is. I don’t want some stupid empire where we all have to speak English and be told by deracinated WN weirdoes like Spencer who we supposedly are.
I’m very much in favour of cooperation between European nations though.
“No thanks, I don’t want all of us to become Americans, I’m sick of US influence as it is. I don’t want some stupid empire where we all have to speak English and be told by deracinated WN weirdoes like Spencer who we supposedly are.
I’m very much in favour of cooperation between European nations though.”
German, but not white. That’s a pretty small tribe.
Not sure how many allies you will find in Western Europe and the Scandinavian countries either.
Counter-arguments:
(1) Any true nationalist resurgence in the Greater European world will have to be broadbased because any singular uprisings can and will be crushed. (The US, the metropolis itself, is the only constituent element that can go it alone. Maybe a Greater Russia. But that’s it).
(2) There are approximately one billion Europeans in the world. They will be far outnumbered by Africans half a century down the line, and there will probably be considerably more “smart fraction” Chinese people. Will small European nation-states, many of them riven by mounting ethnic tensions, be able to compete effectively in such a world?
Anyhow, while I don’t necessarily support this Hyperborean Confederation idea, I can definitely see where Spencer is coming from.
Don’t be silly, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. I actually do feel a strong white identity. It’s just that I find many of Spencer’s statements pretty strange, to say the least. But we’ll see if he ever produces something worthy of serious attention.
What could she then do to break the deadlock?
Well, if the Trump experience is anything to go by, why not bomb some brown people in the Third World
I don’t think Trump bombed Syria to increase his approval rating. I assume that he changed course on most issues because he was blackmailed.
I have my doubts that there ever will be meaningful change in the US in this regard, the whole “nation of immigrants”, constantly remade by new waves of mass immigration, mythology is just too strong there. And US influence in those matters is simply pernicious. So it would be logical for nationalists in Europe to adopt a strong anti-American stance, with the aim of throwing off US hegemony. Admittedly chances for success would probably be slight, and it would raise plenty of difficult and controversial issues (inter-European relations, relations with Russia, security structure etc.).
That would be the correct interpretation of the situation in the post-WW2 period (which we are only just emerging from now – big wars have big consequences). But for that kind of interpretation a lot probably depends on future outcomes. Historians drawing maps of the early Roman situation knew that the Latinate allies ended up being incorporated into the Roman empire, and that probably influenced their view of them.
Similarly if the outcome of the post-WW2 situation were to be the incorporation of the US’s European satellite states into some bigger unit under longer term US control (de facto or de jure), then that would probably influence how the earlier period is viewed.
Most likely, though, we’ve now passed the high tide of US global power, and Europe (mainland at least) will probably escape US influence and become a German-dominated independent power centre. That’s unless, of course, some other world event like the early C20th world wars manages (by chance or by intent) to hand them another period of global hegemony.
Sadly, I suspect there’s now little chance of my own country escaping absorption into the US bloc longer term. Too many dual loyalty and outright treasonous people in our elites who don’t see any difference between US interests and our national interests (if they see any national interests at all other than US ones, that is). There might have been a brief moment of opportunity to re-establish our national independence after 1991 if we’d pushed for the immediate dissolution of NATO, but by then we were ruled by traitors, not nationalists. The only issue in doubt was whether the pro-US traitors or the pro-EU traitors would sell us down the river faster and further.
I doubt that will happen…Germany might well go down in a bad way unless current trends are drastically reversed (which looks unlikely); I also don’t think economic prospects are that good long-term. And too much German dominance would probably lead to some sort of reaction among Germany’s neighbours anyway.
Regarding the UK, I find its entire trajectory since 1945 pretty sad, but apparently a large part of the British public has no problem with their country being merely a satellite of the US…certainly US hegemony and cultural influence never aroused the opposition the EU did.
A lot of the left-based nationalists have taken a pretty anti-American stance already (for different historical reasons, obviously) – smaller nationalist and secessionist groups like the Scottish nationalists, as well as the French FN and, I think, the modern Spanish and Greek movements.
The Irish nationalists would have as well, imo, if they weren’t getting most of their terrorism funded by Americans.
Part of the reason for the prevalence of the Russophobic nonsense in Europe, imo, is precisely to forestall any kind of anti-US consensus from getting established. For now, the European elites who use their media control to set the agenda on this kind of thing still see their own interests as tied in with the US money elites who still control all the main global money institutions.
It looks difficult now, but the key point is that the US share of global gdp (ppp) is still steadily declining, from over 20% in the 1980s (nearly 30% at its peak in the 1950s) to a forecast below 15% by 2020.
There’s a lot of lag in the power balances responding to that kind of steady relative decline, but in the end it’s going to tell, unless something dramatic happens to change the course of history again. As the German elites get more confident in their dominant position in Europe they are going to separate themselves from US control, and there’s going to be little the US elites can do to prevent it.
You and me both. Though the post-1945 subordination to the US was at least necessary, as I’ve noted before – we were in no shape in 1945 to resist either of the two superpowers devoted to destroying what was left of our empire, and the only option was to side with one or the other – that choice was easy, even if lots of our political and business leaders hadn’t been half or more American anyway.
There was no excuse for continuing that subservience after the Soviet Union disappeared, though. That was down to pure greed and treasonous external loyalties and interests on the part of our elites.
Apart from the aforementioned fifth column (if you can call it that when they are openly running the country), we lacked the protection of a distinct language. It’s a famous quip that the US and Britain are “two countries divided by a common language”, but in reality that is one of the fundamental protections against external domination.
That’s something I really don’t understand, the bizarre affection many people in Britain today seem to have towards the US. I know from my personal family background that it wasn’t always like this; I’m obviously quite thoroughly German and have spent all my life in Germany, but my father’s English, so I have some insight from his recollections into Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. According to him there was a distinct sense among many that the US had humiliated Britain during the 1940s and 1950s, and done much to undermine independent British power. My grandfather certainly didn’t have a positive opinion of the American troops he met in North Africa in 1942/43 (he thought them arrogant, with all their equipment and plentiful rations, while the British had so much less). Now those sentiments may have been very unfair to the US (after all alliance with it was necessary against the German threat), but they existed, and they can’t have been totally atypical. But somehow Britain seems to have developed in a very different direction in the past 40 years or so…it baffles me how those bizarre “Anglosphere” concepts have gained so much traction. I wonder if that illusion will finally evaporate when Hispanics and Asians get ever more politically influential in the US (both groups seem to feel no special affection or reverence for Britain).
But anyway, Germany isn’t necessarily that different in this regard…it’s fairly Americanized as well in some parts, and unthinking Atlanticism is the default setting for political and media elites.
That isn’t why he did it. He has to work with the GOP leadership, the armed services and with our allies abroad. His credibility would have been fatally damaged if he hadn’t done something. So he made a statement and did a show bombing but did nothing that actually hurt Assad.
I have to say that I am really surprised that you are British.
Anatoly,
Let me respond to a couple more things you said in more detail, now I’ve had a day to think.
Thank you for the clarification: I was unaware that you really don’t have a political program of any sorts. Even still though, regarding “not being on an ideological crusade here”, of course it’s your blog and you can talk, or not talk, about whatever you feel like. I’m grateful to you for providing a space for discourse, so I’m not inclined to try to suggest to you what to talk about. That said, if it were me, I would feel both an intellectual and to some extent a moral obligation to try to clarify my opinion on both where I agreed and where I disagreed with other ethnic nationalists of the present and the past, to offer some kind of indications as to why my ideas would avoid the worst evils associated with some ethnic nationalists in the past, and to express something about the limits beyond which ethnic nationalism ought not to go. I’m someone who, after all, has been tarred alternately as a communist, a fascist, and a theocrat, so I’m not unfamiliar with having to clarify my opinions and to express exactly what I agree with and what I disagree with about such regimes. Ethnic nationalism is probably the most significant political trend in the world right now, it is unquestionably going to shape the medium term future of much of Europe, and probably other parts of the world as well. To a great extent (in my view) I think it will do so for good, but it has great potential for evil as well. I think those of us who are sympathetic to the tiger that’s been unleashed, at least to some extent, have the obligation to use our intellectual and moral influence to try to control it and to tame its worst potential for excesses, and to criticize it when it goes too far. Then again, that’s just what I would do: you’re free to make or not to make whatever statement you choose. I know you don’t support things like Mr. Spencer’s creepy Nazi-esque cosplay, nor his dream of making America a white people’s homeland, nor the fantasies of some European tribalists about re-enacting the Spanish Reconquista and forcibly expelling all Muslims and Jews from Europe: neither do I.
On a more concrete note, regarding Red-Brown alliances, I don’t think the case for their being hopeless in eastern Europe is as clear as you suggest. Let’s take a few countries in order. And let me specify that when I say red-brown I mean red and brown, i.e. alliances between the far left and ethnonationalists, not liberals or the centre left.
Poland- there is no ‘red’ in Poland, so question doesn’t apply.
Hungary – the one truly “Red” party is as reiner Tor says, electorally irrelevant, so it doesn’t even matter. That said, Thurmer has gone on record as supporting Orban’s immigration policy, so it’s certainly possible.
Czech Republic- they have a significant ‘Red’ party but no significant ‘Brown’ party. This is probably because all the major parties are already quite tough on immigration, so they don’t feel the need for one. That being said, the “Reds” have gone on record opposing the mass resettlement of migrants in the CR, as has the Social-Democratic president Zeman. So I think you could argue here that the Reds already have a shade of brown in them.
Russia- as you correctly point out, the KPRF and the LDPR disagree on a whole hell of a lot, and are not going to ally any time soon. That’s fine though because the KPRF is already more critical of immigration than Putin is. E.g. consider how they responded to the Uzbek nanny gate scandal, or the statement that they issued about how mass immigration was a product of capitalist-induced inequality between nations. Again I think we can say the Reds here already have a shade of brown.
Fico- probably the best example of the left in power pursuing a culturally conservative “Brown” agenda. He’s the best example.
Romania- the Greater Romania party was a quite influential red brown alliance in the 1990s, but I suppose they’re defunct today. That said, there are some politicians in the socialist party who are trying to form a “social-patriot” movement critical of immigration.
Bulgaria- the Socialists endorsed an anti-migration general for president last year. IIRC the Ataka party is also left wing on economics while being ultra-nationalist.
I don’t think the case for red-brown alliances being hopeless, at least in the east, is as clear going forward as you think. In France, yes, you’re right that they have shown to be hopeless, as MLP’s failure demonstrates.
As to the points in the article:
I don’t get why Anatoly is surprised that people don’t care about non-interventionism. Why would they? Anybody who is surprised by this has spent too much time online. As long as there are no major wars and no boots and the ground, the public doesn’t mind blowing up stuff in the middle east.
I don’t know if Anatoly is trying to paint a pessimistic picture of France or what, but the big picture is that Marine doubled her old man’s performance from 15 years back and is now officially the leader of the opposition in France with the cucks having been disposed of. Those public opinion polls mean nothing, similar polls done in the US show that most working class whites want amnesty and yet they voted for Trump at historic margins. It’s called revealed preference.
The low turnout in the election is actually a good sign. It shows that the French public have lost faith in politics and their leaders. This is fertile ground for radicalization.
Macron still has to govern. It really frustrates me that people don’t realize this. He is going to fail spectacularly because France’s situation is unfixable. The failure of Macron will be devastating to the French political class, setting up Marine to win over 40% next time.
In the meantime, the growing Muslim population will be a great force against gay and women’s rights.
An observation, as true of France as of elsewhere.
Social mobility is largely a myth. For whatever reason (inherited intelligence, temperamental traits, family culture, etc.) those at the top tend to stay at the top. If you hope that France’s working class (including its cops) will ever have a chance of “taking the country back”, you will be disappointed. While successful revolutions and radical societal changes have often appealed to and presented themselves as being of the masses, in reality the critical component was that of an inter-elite struggle. Some of the successful ones that come to mind:
French Revolution – monarchs, nobles and the Church overthrown by lawyers and noble renegades
Russian Revolution – monarchy overthrown and country taken over by renegade-degenerates from the upper classes, alongside educated and resentful members of ethnic minorities, using workers as their instruments
American Revolution – British monarchy driven out by gentlemen planters and New England merchants
Khmelnytski uprising – Polish crown and magnates overthrown by lesser Ruthenian/Ukrainian gentry fighting en masse, leading the peasants (numerous previous purely peasant uprisings had all failed)
Abolition of slavery – led by rich Northerners, not a self-liberation of slaves
I can’t think of many radical changes that in essence occurred from the bottom up. There might be some examples (Haiti? – though the leader of that one was said to be the son of a captured and enslaved African prince) but these seem to be rare.
If you want something done in France, or elsewhere, you’ve got to get a lot of the elite on your side. Not all, but perhaps at least 25% of them. Accordingly, choosing to write off and vilify the Parisian (or Moscow, or whatever) elites as the enemy is self-defeating. Those are precisely whom you must convince if you want to succeed. Get them on board somehow.
Only because he shot his mouth off during the press conference with the King of Jordan. Before that he never said or indicated (quite wisely, in my opinion) that he cared what methods Assad was using.
Even fewer Protestants than Catholics practice their religion regularly in France.
You are a mendacious Zionist snake, and all your deceitful and mutually inconsistent arguments are deployed to serve the interest of Israel in the immediate context.
Is there evidence of Orban losing support other than from pollsters? As is no secret and this post confirms, many players in the polling industry, even in the richest countries, lack integrity or competence, often both.
For those worried about the FN’s lack of appeal to and support from the rich and well-connected, it’s worth keeping an eye on the potential disintegration and recomposition both of FN and LR. A new party could combine those unhappy with the MLP-Philippot line (including MMLP Herself) with LR figures like Laurent Wauquiez. Originating from the grande bourgeoisie and formerly on the centre-left, he is decisive, ambitious and has taken strong positions against Calais migrants and homo “marriage”.
It’s not as though I’ve ever made any secret of it…..
You are absolutely correct about older British attitudes towards the US. For a prominent exemplar consider the great British politician and patriot Enoch Powell. His recognition of the US as fundamentally a hostile rival power, albeit an ally of convenience, and of Americans as foreigners, was nothing particularly unusual in elite circles when he was growing up in the interwar years.
What changed was the status of Britain and the increasingly Americanised nature, interests and needs of the elites who rule Britain, and although those changes were under way in the interwar years, it was WW2 which administered the coup de grace to Britain as a global peer rival of the US and turned us into a lower level state that faced the choice of satellite or destruction.
But many, as you describe, still had attitudes formed in the previous period, when the US was a rival power. Those people were brutally side-lined like Powell, or just replaced over time by people of younger generations who were indoctrinated into seeing the US as the fount of all that’s good and cool. This served the purposes of the elites who set the post-WW2 media and political agendas, many of whom were either American themselves or had substantial family, business or work interests in the US. The exceptions were those loyal to the hard left who tended to align themselves with the Soviet or non-aligned states in world affairs and saw the US as an ideological threat, but that group were comprehensively defeated in the 1980s.
So it’s partly a change in the underlying realities, and partly simple indoctrination, that explains the dramatic change in attitudes. But there is still quite a lot of healthy anti-American national self-respect around, it’s just not often openly expressed and usually coded as anti-capitalism.
I think that will likely change when the economic basics change. As I noted, the US still has its post-WW2 control of the main levers and institutions of global economic power, but that cannot last forever in the face of US relative decline, and certainly the Chinese and Russians are working to provide mechanisms to evade and escape that control. So far the US elites have managed to postpone the inevitable, but the pressure will only build higher and higher as the US becomes ever less central to the lives of people around the world. Eventually it will break, and then the German elites (as with many others around the world) will see their interests as lying elsewhere. This process has already started in east Asia.
I mean, I wouldn’t overestimate the significance of “Hotep” nationalism, of the Afrocentrists who draw connexions to ancient Egypt, or for that matter of white nationalism. All of these are pretty marginal movements numbers-wise. White nationalism just got in the news recently because they were energized by Trump’s victory (we’ll see how long that lasts). Most Americans, black or white, to the extent they’re nationalistic at all, are captivated by the American civic-nationalist, Founding Fathers myth. Black people and liberal whites take a liberal line on the myth, and conservative whites take a conservative one. As I mentioned above, Malcolm X was one example of a Black intellectual who totally rejected the founding American myth, and was an ethnic nationalist. His ideology never converted all that many Black people though (for example, his goal for a separate African American political party totally failed).
“I want a white empire in the northern hemisphere with global power projection capabilities”.
I can’t express how creepy and disgusting this is, and it’s more evidence, if you needed it, that Richard Spencer is evil. He doesn’t consistently reject the “invade the world, invite the world” paradigm. He wants to invade the world without inviting them. That is to say, he wants to re–create the Age of Empire without re-creating the immigrant flows that it (unfortunately) led to.
I dislike mass migration movements in general (there are exceptions) because I want to protect the freedom of small ethnic and national communities to be themselves, and because that depends both on the ability to exclude and the ability to control people leaving. Empires are totally incompatible with that. Empires are dedicated to bigness and power, which inevitably means squashing the independence of smaller and weaker peoples, and also means losing your own distinct identity as you swallow up subject peoples. Most empires I can think of has been multicultural to some degree, which is a good reason for people who believe in a world of distinct tribes- as I do, certainly, and as I think you do- to be hostile to the idea of empires. Humility and modesty are virtues for nation states as much as they are for individuals.
In addition, as of course you’ve pointed out, ‘white’ is a garbage identity that doesn’t convey much of value, and that risks collapsing the distinction between different ‘white’ ethnic groups (as well as conjuring up fears from other people who have concerns, ill-founded or not, about falling victim to a ‘white’ empire). There are very significant differences- genetic, aesthetic, cultural, phenotypic- between Russians and Danes, and equally significant differences between either of them and Greeks. The ethnolinguistic differences between Danes and Germans, to pick two countries right next to each other, were enough for the whole Schleswig-Holstein question to become a thing. And the genetic population structure within Europe is significant enough that you can pick it out on genetic maps. Trying to synthesize some construct of a ‘white’ race is as unproductive and pernicious in my view as assuming that all’brown’, ‘yellow’, or ‘black’ people have a lot in common or belong to a common racial group. I don’t want to protect the identity of black people, or white people, or anything of that nature: I’d like a world in which Denmark can continue to be Danish, Czechia can continue to be Czech, Botswana can continue to be majority Tswana, Uganda for that matter can maintain its own cultural and ethnic makeup, and so forth.
Counter-counter-arguments.
1) Africans don’t think as a unified ethno-racial group any more than Europeans do. They unified in the past on exactly one issue (South Africa), that was a special case due to the history of colonialism in Africa, and even then the unity wasn’t total. I don’t know any other foreign policy issues where African countries are all unified. Certainly I haven’t heard much criticism from African countries about restrictive immigration policies in Denmark, for example. On the contrary they quite like Danish people because of their extensive foreign aid.
Individual European states will be able to compete exactly the same way individual Asian, Latin-American or African states do: through trade, economic productivity, diplomatic alliances, and so forth. There’s no inherent reason why African countries would be upset with restrictive immigration policies in a particular European country, if they feel like they’re benefiting from that country in other ways (e.g. through foreign aid, exchange of skilled personnel and technologies, and through trade).
2) Regarding China, actually China could serve as a useful ally for European countries that want to defect from the liberal world order with all its implications. So could Russia. The Czech Republic, which by some opinion polling is the most Euroskeptic country in Europe (or at least was a year ago), is so partly because they can afford to be Euroskeptic. They do so much trade with China that they could afford to see some of their trade with the EU dry up. The biggest threats to ethno-nationalists in Europe aren’t coming from China or Africa, or Russia: they’re coming from liberals in their own countries, and from the EU. Better relations with China could serve as a sort of counterweight to the EU, at least down the road when China is the world’s largest economy.
3) As I noted to German Reader, trying to synthesize / construct a ‘white’ race loses out on all of the interesting distinction in genetics, physical phenotype, culture and history that makes European countries what they are. I don’t want to see Denmark and Germany folded together into some kind of trans-ethnic confederation, much less Germany and Poland, and much much less America and Russia.
4) Anyway, this whole ‘we must unite to keep from being overpowered by bigger neighbors’ is exactly the same poor logic that has justified many empires through history, including the EU and NATO. (And yes I know you said you don’t support it). The basic flaw in the logic is that very often, the very act of uniting inspires fear among your opponents and draws into being the very kind of opposition and hostility that you were afraid of in the first place. Look at the way European nationalists have already suffered by association with Trump for example. Precisely because they’re small and weak countries, Czech and Danish ethnic nationalism don’t really scare people that much. The prospect of a global alliance of white people however is going to scare people very much, for many reasons, some of them good. (Scandinavians and Eastern Europeans were never imperialistic in Africa, for example: some other subgroups of ‘white people’ certainly were. And Black people in America probably couldn’t care less about nationalists in small European countries, but for good reason they are going to fear the concept of ‘white power’ quite a bit).
Eliding distinctions between European nations in the service of forming an empire or confederation is not just going to sacrifice individual national ethnicities and cultures (which would be bad enough), but by forming a powerful bloc it will also promote fear and oppositions among people elsewhere in the world and will ultimately make you weaker. I have a better solution: let England be English, Poland be Polish, Austria be Austrian, Russia be Russian, and so forth.
I don’t know what you all are talking about here. That global alliance (minus Russia) does already exist, and is called NATO. (Actually, if informal etc. members are also added, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, perhaps even Taiwan, maybe Singapore could also be added. And some more, depending on the context. So it’s a fairly large alliance.) If “an alliance of white people” would be scary, it certainly wouldn’t be much scarier than what we have now. That was my point somewhere at the beginning of the thread.
The average black probably imagines that in 1960 he could be randomly murdered by klansmen if he tried to cross the street
Well, actually in 1960 the average black could have been murdered for inappropriate behavior towards a white person on the street, in the South, anyway. And in a few instances, no behavior at all was required.
you really don’t have a political program
Apparently Russian nationalism doesn’t qualify.
to self-describe as ‘Polish’
Grandma makes the world’s best pierogis is sufficient.
I don’t want to protect the identity of black people, or white people, or anything of that nature:
You want to freeze-frame existing identities in the face of the fact that ethnicities and identities have been coming and going since HSS arrived on the scene.
Thank you four your reply; it confirms my impression of Britain’s post-war development…though I still don’t fully understand the process (maybe my father’s youth in 1950s and 1960s Lancashire was atypical, but he doesn’t recall many people in love with the US as seems to be so common in today’s UK…instead quite a few very right-wing nationalists, and left-wingers who admired the Soviet Union).
Regarding Germany, I think its prospects are extremely bleak long-term…it may look dominant now, but a lot of that is built on feet of clay in my opinion. There are many fields of technology in which Germany isn’t relevant at all and infrastructure is decaying. The main problem of course is the extremely low birth rate; couple that with Merkel’s open borders lunacy, and it’s hard not to feel that Germany is finished unless things change drastically (and they won’t, Merkel is set to win the election in September, and after that “family reunification” for the invaders she let in, will escalate and bring hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, more to Germany; it’s our own version of what happened to Britain under New Labour). I also can’t see German elites ever rebelling against the US, it would require a total change of mindset on their part…paradoxically German national self-abasement gets ever more extreme with increasing distance in time from the Nazi era (it’s now reached the stage after all where Germany can be blackmailed and humiliated by a country like Turkey).
I’m not sure I’d call Spencer “evil”, but I’d definitely agree that judging from his statements he’s really into power worship. It’s probably for the better that he doesn’t have any real power himself and is unlikely to ever acquire any.
I’m responding to Anatoly’s remarks.
I’m responding to Anatoly’s remarks.
I was too.
I don’t know about that, it’s obviously not a topic really studied, but it wouldn’t surprise me if many Africans actually do feel good about their increasing share of world population and their increasing presence in many parts of the world, especially Europe…it’s not like racial sentiments of that kind are unimaginable. Keeping up migration pressure also gives Africans a means to blackmail Europe (plus the economic benefit of remittances by migrants), to exert power over Europeans, and that must be an exhilarating feeling given the tendency of quite a few Africans to blame the continent’s ills on colonialism.
Admittedly that’s anecdotal, but I can’t recall ever having read about some African intellectual stating that Europeans have a legitimate interest in preventing African mass immigration to Europe…whereas it would be no problem to find many stating things like “Africa can’t be a prison for Africans, global freedom of movement!”. I had the misfortune of once sitting through the lecture of one such type (from Cameroon iirc) who basically blasted his audience for “racism” with a lot of postcolonial jargon (“black Atlantic” – one more piece of evidence for the pernicious influence of the Anglosphere on continental Europe) and railed against the (non-existent) “Fortress Europe”. Of course he was enthusiastically lauded by the professor who had invited him, and the cucked Germans in the audience all clapped (I didn’t, but then I may be atypical in this regard).
Needed to be said. Human ethnicities are a bit like their languages – always in flux; the English language cannot be what it is without the Norman invasion.
In the classic sci-fi novel Dune, one of the themes is an idea that once in a while humans go through cataclysmic wars and upheavals that overturn the prevailing order – and all this is nothing we can prevent because it is actually (at its core) the need for human genetic admixing to prevent stagnation. Interesting theory whether one agrees with it or not.
Doing an objective study of history one may come to this conclusion – there are no such things as borders, unless one has the ability and wherewithal to defend them. Now Africans want to settle in Europe and before, Europeans wanted to settle in Africa…que sera sera…
Now…where did those Hittites go? Can find those darn guys anywhere.
Peace.
Admixture is the biological reality.
History and politics is the story of attachment to one particular strain and the efforts to keep it and do away with others.
‘The problem of leadership is inevitably: Who will play god?’ Paul Muad’Dib
Peace.
Well you don’t, but Richard Spencer does and he says
What I don’t get is, if you want to hero worship foreign leaders, why don’t pick someone actually cool, like Duterte?
Civilization was going pretty good without them. Not so much since.
And I ‘could’, in the bare sense, be murdered if I walked down the street too. However, a black person is many times more likely to be murdered for no good reason after the ‘triumph’ over racism.
Let’s return to Oprah’s belief that ‘millions’ of blacks were lynched.If we interpret her statement in the most minimal sense possible and cap it a 2,000,000, that’s over 10,000 a year! (Assuming they think lynchings go back to revolution. If they have a more accurate impression of the historical phase of lynching we are talking 100,000s a year). If blacks think that, it’s really no surprise they think things have improved.
I’m generally averse to 1985 analogies, but one I think does hold up is the way democratic regimes maintain legitimacy by propagating wildly exaggerated ideas of how bad things were in the past.
Your points are all valid, and, for what it’s worth, I think its undeniable that everything would have been much better had Assad successfully crushed the rebellion at the off. However, you’re living in a fantasy world if you think he can just retake power when over half of the country would like nothing better than to slaughter him with their bare hands.
So what should be done? I’ve already said the only sensible thing is for some other country to run it. Turkey would actually be a good choice. After all they have a much better claim to be rightful rulers of Syria than some Alawite-Socialist mob family who hooked up with the Soviets. Another similar option would be to have small reasonably ethnically homogeneous states under the suzerainty of a regional power.
But all the sane options are ruled out before the discussion begins because in the upside down world order FDR built borders must simultaneously be infinitely porous and inviolable at the same time. So we are left with insane options. Normies fantasize about a moderate opposition that doesn’t exist, Alt-Righters fantasize about a Cold War puppet junta somehow regaining the power it has already lost.
What is clear is that anything is better than civil war. The least bad option you can hope for is that something barely sane can be cobbled together out of the less extreme rebels and the old regime. Russia could facilitate this, but one of Putin’s worse features is his insistence on backing up leaders till the end, even when, as in Venezuela, they literally destroy their country.
But this has nothing to do with the case in hand, which is Trump’s strikes. Someone used chemical weapons. Trump bombed an airbase; now the more intelligent Ba’athists will do a better job of keeping a handle on the hotheads (a fortiori, if you are correct). Trump projected American power after 12 years of non-stop humiliation, he looked decisive, he picked up some free Arab popularity, and he sowed a bit of dissension between liberals and he far left. All that for no downside whatsoever. The closest thing I have got to a coherent explanation of why this is such a disaster is that it undermined your position in a Hungarian internet forum.
Risking tedium, no they didn’t.
Not really. After the referendum UKIP were polling around 16%. What happened is that
(i) Nuttall flunked a winnable by-election by falsely claiming to have been at Hillsborough.
(ii) The party responded by launching a bizarre campaign to get rid of their only MP (who, I agree is a bit of a knob, though good on monetary issues).
But that’s really an epiphenomenon of a broader issue, which is that UKIP was never more than a collection of plonkers held together with sticky tape by Farage. The reason for this is simple. Any MP in a mainstream party who has been in parliament for a decade can simply walk into a position as ‘strategic adviser’ or ‘consultant’ at hundreds of companies. Nuttall will be lucky to get a job in a chip shop (that is unless it’s a chip shop whose business model involved being attacked by Antifa). Thus intelligent, ambitious people don’t join UKIP. I’ve tried to encourage at least half a dozen people to join UKIP and stand as MPs, but they are not interested. The same goes everywhere. Who is in Wilders’ party except Wilders? Why do all the famous people in the FN have the same surname?
These are the basic structural features that maintain the liberal democratic system.
It’s not mutually exclusive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_during_the_Syrian_Civil_War
Really, we’re talking about a civil war that’s been going on for six years, fought by low IQ people who hate each other, and your argument amounts to ‘why would anyone do something so against his enlightened self interest?’. I have aspergers, but yeesh!
Assad’s regime controls the major population centres, with the majority of the population that’s still remaining in Syria, so this doesn’t seem like a correct assesment.
Obviously, it may well be that the regime won’t reestablish full control over all the country…but so what? Certainly doesn’t mean Turkey should somehow get to run the place. If anything, it would be far better to actually create a Kurdish statelet in Northern Syria, since Turkey ought to be punished anyway for its anti-Western insolence.
In Wilders’ case that’s intentional…if I understand correctly, he wants to retain total control over the party…
But you actually raise a valid point, the violent actions by Antifa scum and the like – which is tolerated, and sometimes encouraged and supported by the establishment – is a real problem for political dissidents.
(i) Moldbug’s argument is solely about the genesis of left-liberalism in the Anglosphere. This is actually one of its main weaknesses, but it makes your argument impertinent.
(ii) Moldbug’s argument is that left-liberalism grew out of Dissenting Christianity. The political opinions of those who didn’t keep up is neither here nor there. Moldbug is obviously aware that evangelical Christianity is tied up with American conservatism and this actually plays an important role in his thought.
(iii) Back when I used to read about these things, I think I read that the geographical centers of the Hugeunots when on to be the heartlands of French socialism. Perhaps someone can confirm whether this is so or not.
Back when I used to read about these things, I think I read that the geographical centers of the Hugeunots when on to be the heartlands of French socialism.
French Protestants were more on the Left historically, perhaps as recently as the 50s when they seemed to be overrepresented in opposition movements to the Algerian War, or at least some of things happening there like torture. Since then they’ve pretty much been fully integrated into greater French society.
I recall (maybe early 2000s) reading an attempted analysis of Protestant voting patterns and political representation within each party. The older generation were a bit more to the Left – they were more likely to see themselves as a minority somewhat separate from the mainstream French nation – but not overwhelmingly so like the Jewish population, which French Protestants have historically been on good terms with. The young however were the same as Catholic French.
Protestants have voted for the the FN at the same rate as Catholic French since approximately the 1988 election.
The town of Orange, namesake of Protestant Europe’s first family, has had Jacques Bompard as mayor since the 1990s. He was the first National Front mayor. The counter-Reformation arrived in Orange later than elsewhere, since it wasn’t technically part of France until annexed by Louis XIV.
Brittany, a traditional Catholic stronghold, voted overwhelmingly for Macron.
I am not defending Oprah’s claims. I was pointing out the factual incorrectness of your assertion.
In the 1960’s, in the South, a black person had a higher risk of being killed at random by white people simply because they were black than they do today in 2017. That has little to do with blacks killing blacks in Chicago or Baltimore today. (Although if we wanted to work at it we could speculate about the reasons for the northward migration, segregation in the north, etc., but that is above my pay grade.)
since Turkey ought to be punished anyway for its anti-Western insolence.
Interesting sentiment coming from you.
Anyone know the pertinent section of the NATO charter that is controlling when one member attacks another?
I’m not in favour of attacking Turkey, but hey, come on, Turkey is an ally in name only by now anyway. Erdogan’s quite openly hostile and using the whole refugee issue for blackmail, all the while sending his goons to intimidate dissidents in western countries (didn’t his bodyguards just beat up demonstraters in Washington or something of the sort?). Admittedly, one should proceed with caution (I’m an unimportant commenter on an obscure blog…so I can afford extreme statements at times, obviously people in charge should behave more responsibly…)…but at some point there has to be a reaction to Turkey’s persistent provocations.
NATO was an effect of the Cold War and Turkey was an anomaly within the organization. There is no current need for NATO and certainly there is no need for Turkey to be a member now that the secularists are on the way out of power.
I’d argue Turkey’s membership is actually potentially quite dangerous at this point…I don’t think it’s beyond Erdogan to try engineering a crisis between Russia and the West for his own Islamist pet projects (arguably the Turks already tried that when they shot down that Russian jet in late 2015). That’s obviously not in the interests of Europe or the US. Still, it’s admittedly hard to see what course should be taken…Turkey in its present state is a destabilizing factor in the region, but if it disintegrates into civil war or something of the sort, it will make matters even worse.
I know very little about the internal situation in Turkey other than it is my impression that the secularists have been purged and Erdogan is riding the fundamentalist wave. I don’t know how secure he is within the fundamentalist power. I do know that nothing can be ruled out when an authoritarian is trying to hold onto power. Too bad the Greeks petered out we could have turned them loose.
disintegrates into civil war or something of the sort.
Other than the Kurds what do you see?
He already tried to start a war with Israel and then backed down when Uncle Sam told him he’d be on his own. He’s a big talker but he knows that NATO wouldn’t bail him out against Russia.
The refugee crisis exists with or without Erdogan. Blaming him is weak sauce.
Right, it is not Turkey in NATO that is destabilizing, it is the existence of NATO itself.
The Alt Right loves Assad but the Greasy Right supports Erdogan.
Well, I’m hardly an expert on Turkey (there’s some other commenter on Unz, “Uebersetzer”, who knows quite a lot about the internal situation there from first-hand experience, has written some interesting comments about it)…but clearly there are still a lot of people who are opposed to the re-Islamization of Turkey as advanced by Erdogan and his supporters…old-style Kemalists, secularists, and not least the Alevi who are fearful of the Sunni majority (not without reason, given that there were numerous acts of extreme violence against their community as recently as the 1970s-1990s; those divisions of course also extend to Turkish immigrant communities in Europe, e.g. my father’s partner gives English lessons to a teenage Alevi girl, and that girl seems to hate Erdogan and apparently had Putin as a kind of hero when there were Russian-Turkish tensions). Erdogan barely won his referendum for constitutional change after all, and quite possibly there was fraud involved. So Turkey seems divided, and who knows what will happen? It’s not like there isn’t a tradition of political violence in the country (there was quite a lot of it in the 1970s if I understand correctly, with death squads by the Grey wolves and similiar outfits just killing their opponents).
I agree to some extent, he can only blackmail the Europeans because the Europeans with their foolish humanitarianism let themselves be blackmailed…they should just defend their borders themselves instead of outsourcing the job.
Don’t know what’s going on in Erdogan’s head…frankly, I’m not sure the man isn’t somewhat unhinged.
I say this with particular sadness as a German-American, but the Germans’ suicidally low fertility rate will ensure that their “tribe” is a rapidly diminishing and eventually relatively insignificant and weak group.
To my German cousin: I understand your resentment of US and NATO warmongering, the baleful influence of what passes for popular culture in the USA these days, etc. But in light of the above, you will need us good & likeminded people from the USA and all the other help you can get.
Hey, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I hate or despise Americans in general, I know you guys commenting here are mostly good, intelligent and educated people. I just have my doubts you’ll manage to turn the US around again (but it’s not like it’s different in Europe…many Germans are dumb assholes and will vote for Merkel again; and as you correctly write, the birthrates are so pathetically low the nation is set on a course to extinction anyway).
Well put, sir. I’ll just note that the US government, NATO, the UN, the IMF, Hollywood, etc., are manifestly NOT serving the interests of us Americans, either. They’re not even trying to serve our interests, in fact.
Good Germans, good Americans, and normal people from other European countries are in a very similar boat and must get together against heartless globalism, endless warfare, warrantless surveillance, and mass immivasion / demographic replacement.
That’s something I really don’t understand, the bizarre affection many people in Britain today seem to have towards the US.
I haven’t lived in the UK for 15 years so take for what it’s worth, but in my 40+ years I’ve never noticed this “bizarre affection” – unless, of course, you are a typical leftist who thinks any ethnic connection between peoples is a “bizarre affection”.
I know British politicians tend to be American lickspittles but that’s obviously different from the people themselves, who don’t vote on foreign policy, so I’m wondering what you are referring to.
What “ethnic connection” is there exactly between the US and Britain? Ok, might be like that with white southerners in the US who are to a large degree descended from British colonists. But the US has had lots of non-British groups in its population for a long time, some of them with quite strong anti-British attitudes (ok, the Germans were successfully crushed by Anglo-America during WW1 as a cultural entity, but that still leaves Zionist Jews and Irish nationalists). The majority of white Americans today is either not descended from British people or emphasizes other elements of their ancestry (if I understand correctly, British ancestry is massively undercounted when white Americans state their identity…which to me indicates that it’s just not seen as cool).
Of course there are Anglophile traditions in the US, and certainly some Americans at least have sincere affection for Britain as their mother country. But will all those Hispanics and all those Asians who will make up a large part of the US population/elites in the not too distant future have such feelings for Britain (because they’re such ardent admirers of Magna Carta, the rights of free-born Englishmen and all that)? I doubt it.
So sorry, I don’t get it. I could understand such attitudes with regard to Canada, Australia and New Zealand because they clearly belonged to a greater British identity not that long ago. But it seems misguided to me regarding the US, a coping mechanism for not having to face the truth about Britain’s decline. But that’s just my personal opinion of course and I’ve got little inclination to get into an unproductive argument about it.
why does Germany need more people? Where would you put another 10 million Germans? Actually, I can think of one place but the last time somebody had the same idea it didn’t work out so well…
The beauty of being on the side of truth and justice is that even if you lose, you still win.
Yeah, they’re just plain evil and thats why they use their gas to kill a few dozen kids for the lulz instead of to soften up a strongly fortified position to obtain a breakthrough of the line. Evil dictators always lose wars because of this kind of misallocation of assets.
Bombing of Madeburg, 1944
I’ve never stated I wanted “more” Germans. Some controlled decline with a stabilization at lower levels would be best of course. However the birthrate is so low there will be probably significant problems with keeping a sufficient workforce around and financing the pensions system. Wouldn’t be the end of the world either, but this isn’t happening in a vacuum…there’s intense migration pressure from the failed societies of the Islamic world and from Africa, and somehow it’s become established wisdom that the solution to our demographic woes is in accepting migrants from there…which is bound to end in disaster imo.
I don’t know about that. It’s not that I really understand what’s going on in the US, but the whole spectacle around Trump’s presidency and the attempts to overthrow him (at least that’s what it looks like) is pretty disturbing in a way…doesn’t look to me like the sort of people who comment here are “winning” in any way.
The “greasy right” eh? Nudge, nudge – wink, wink…and who does the “greasy left” support?
https://cdn.meme.am/cache/images/folder619/600×600/11976619/dr-evil-little-finger.jpg
Peace.
Note: We really got to get you married man…
One day, perhaps much closer than you think, you’ll learn about the human condition and the variables that they throw into any calculation.
Numbers are all fun and games…. but humans seem to do all sorts of retarded shit that throw numbers off.
Don’t be a McNamara. I’m serious. Do you really want to get your epiphany in your late eighties? Think about it….
It’s people like you that lose wars… “the numbers… they said I was winning! I swear!”
Good for you!
Catholics are more immune to racial theorizing. In the US the identity of being white was foreign to most Catholics. The process of breaking down citifies that destroyed ethnic communities changed that.
The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing, Michael E. Jones
I think the Greasy Right consists of Greasy William and nobody else. I could be wrong.
That’s my impression also. It seems similar to India in that respect, with significant very-smart and very-stupid fractions. The country is also less than half Persian, with large nomadic/primitive minorities like Lurs, Baluchis, Kurds, Turkmen and others.
American culture and just their general behavior is very different from the UK, or Australia. Friends of mine have mentioned that in America, you are considered as ‘American’ once you have a passport; in Australia people are still much more likely to press ‘where are you [i]originally[/i] from?’
This attitude is changing fast though. I was out recently and asked someone obviously of African descent what country he was from, and several people around interpreted this simple question as ‘racist’, ‘he’s Australian!’ etc.
I think Alawites are higher IQ than the rest of the Syrian population. Could be much higher, I’m not sure if it’s really reliably measured anywhere, but Greg Cochran wrote of Maronite Christians that they had an average IQ of roughly 100. I’m not sure that applies to Alawites, but they, too, have much lower levels of Sub-Saharan admixture, and lower levels of inbreeding. I’d be surprised if they were below 90, even if they are lower than 100. An average IQ of, say, 95, is well within the European range. Which means their talented tenth cannot be very much dumber than European elites. (OK, I guess European elites are dumb enough, but dumb in sophisticated ways, not dumb in dumb ways.)
Setting aside the averages of Alawites. Assad is an ophthalmologist. He was probably granted better grades because of his father, and ophthalmologists are not the sharpest knives in the medical drawer, but still… we’re talking about a doctor. He needed to be interested in medicine long enough to sustain him through medical school, and it’s probably one of the most difficult fields out there. He could’ve just opted for a political science degree or something like that. I bet you he’s not low IQ, even if probably not genius level either.
His family might be totally dumb, of course, because, as we all know, genetics has nothing to do with intelligence, and having a couple sharp knives in the drawer (like Hafez and Bashar) tells us nothing about the sharpness of the other knives there, but I’d bet you the Assad family members are not significantly dumber than most Western politicians.
Oh, and Assad was said to have destroyed all of his sarin stocks years ago. You (and Trump, and the US Intelligence Community) are implying that he didn’t destroy all of it. Possible. But I bet you dollars to donuts that this is among his best-kept secrets, for obvious reasons. Again, positing he’s not suffering from Down syndrome or something, which he doesn’t seem to. I’ll also bet you dollars to donuts that this means that if he has any sarin left, it’s under the control of a well-trusted and relatively smart family member. I cannot imagine this not to be the case. (There were reports in 2013 of regime officers complaining to each other that the high command didn’t let them use chemical weapons, so even back then, when knowledge of the existence of chemical weapons was not a secret at all, and when they had more reason to think they might get away with it, and when their victory in the civil war was closer to certainty, the weapons were already relatively well guarded by the top leadership – as you would expect.)
So you’re essentially accusing an Assad family member of not understanding how dangerous it is to use chemical weapons, stealing them from Assad, and using them in the dumbest possible way*, because, that’s what they enjoy to do. MMA fighters or boxers do not always have the smarts to get a degree in medicine, but they usually are smart enough to understand some simple rules, which is why Tyson biting off Holyfield’s ear made the headlines: it was unusual. OK, I guess you think the Assad family acted like Mike Tyson or something, because you think they are as dumb as Tyson, but I think you are wrong.
Besides that, there is the fact that the Trump administration is basing its knowledge on the assessment of the very same Intelligence Community which is out there to impeach him, which let the Iraqi WMD hysteria pass, which let the “Serbs are massacring tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Albanians in Kosovo” lie unchallenged, so which is not a very reliable source. The fact that the Intelligence Community has for years armed Syrian jihadists raises the possibility that they are playing politics here. I bet you they can lie in ways which are not, technically, lies. (I don’t think they dare tell a direct lie to the POTUS, even if the POTUS in question is Trump. But they can use enough weasel language, if they wish to.)
Of course, there’s the sarin thing. They are pretty strongly stating it was sarin (because sarin would make it much more likely that it was the Syrian government, whereas any fool could have chlorine, and I think chlorine is not even a forbidden chemical weapon), when the available evidence is not conclusive, to say the least, and all of it is coming from al-Qaeda and Erdogan.
And, to top it all off, the Russians and Syrians have invited an impartial international investigation to come to the airport from which the attack was alleged to emanate. It might’ve been a bluff. But then, nobody called this bluff. It cannot but raise my previous estimation that it was not this airport (which cannot but raise my suspicions that it wasn’t the Syrian government at all).
Of course, smart people do dumb and risky things all the time. Occasionally they do dumb things in dumb ways, and things which are risky in dumb ways. So I’m not saying that it’s impossible for Assad (or one of his minions) to have committed the chemical attack. I’m saying it’s not very plausible based on evidence coming from al-Qaeda and Erdogan and the Intelligence Community, especially when all of their other statements (that it was sarin and that it came from that particular airport) are also in question, and they are totally uninterested in any impartial investigation.
*Chemical weapons can be used in a number of ways, like against fortified positions, against massed enemy troops preparing to attack (this is the way Aleppo’s defenders have used them, I think), or strategic bombing of enemy cities. It was here allegedly used for the latter, but only one round was used, which is a dumb way to use a chemical weapon.
As German Reader has noted, Assad is in control of the majority of the population centers. Let me add that probably the other half of Syrians supports Assad, and even many of the rest are opposed to the Islamists, so relatively speaking Assad has the highest support of any faction.
So we have the highest IQ faction, with the largest support, which also happens to be militarily the strongest, in control of almost all the major population centers, supported by troops and air force by Iran and Russia, and with a relatively sane government, as opposed to militarily weaker, less popular, and dumber head-chopper factions, in control of the desert and Idlib and Raqqa, and you think that it’s insane to think that the former is the only force capable of governing… You top it off with the proposal that the whole thing be ruled by Erdogan, which quite contrary to Europe’s interests, with all of Erdogan’s blackmail, his open call for European Turks (and perhaps other Muslims?) to colonize the place and wage a war of the womb, etc. It is also totally unrealistic (if for nothing else, because neither the Russians nor the Iranians will accept it), unlike Assad’s victory in the civil war, which bound to happen in the absence of American meddling. It is you who is living in a fantasy world, I’m afraid.
The military channel of communications was closed by the Russians, which makes an accidental conflict between the Russians and the Americans more likely. The Russians are shipping more anti-aircraft weapons to Syria (I bet you they are also supplying them with Russian personnel), which, you guessed it, makes a larger scale conflict more likely. The US also restarted its regime change policy, with all the implications (the deep state is now again allowed to send weapons to the rebels).
By the way, the Syrian Air Force is flying less sorties from that airport as a result of the attacks. They only have probably less than 100 aircraft capable of ground attacks, destroying just one is already more than 1% of the air force, and they destroyed several. The claim that they didn’t weaken Assad is bogus.
So the rebels got stronger as a result, and the Syrian government weaker. The Russians probably also diverted some resources from the campaign to shore up the air defenses instead.
In any event, it made it more likely for him to be dragged into the war if another chemical attack happens. You might be aware that chemical attacks are happening quite regularly in Syria, perpetrated by the rebels. I guess orchestrating a false flag is not simple (especially not for clannish people who don’t want to kill children belonging to their tribe, whatever the benefits), and it could’ve been an accident, but now he cannot just shrug his shoulders if another sad video emerges on teevee. Starting a major war (which he didn’t do, but as I explained above, got closer to do) would destroy his presidency. That’s a risk.
Starting military conflict is always risky, and best be avoided. Only people with no skin in the game don’t understand that. I have a lot of skin in the game – Budapest was flooded with refugees just two summers ago. I want the civil war (and so both the excuse of the warmongers and the excuse for people wanting to force Hungary to accept refugees) to end. Assad is my best bet, and against it you can only offer the fantasy of Syria being colonized by Turks (I guess the Russians would just retreat, if they heard Gabriel on Unz Review proposed that it would be the best solution).
I also have theories why you are holding the positions you have.
I hate both sides of the invite the world / invade the world, and while Trump promised to do away with both, he’s now backtracking on both. The Syria attack was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. (Of course the media and the NeverTrumpers keep pushing me back to the Trump train.)
I tried to convince a liberal American (and other liberals, including Hungarian and Western European liberals) IRL that the danger of ww3 was actually lower under Trump than under Hillary. (They started the topic by actually telling me they were afraid of ww3 under Trump. Apparently many people thought this.) So yes, I did spend some personal capital on this issue.
It is. Relations between the US and Russia are much improved and the attack on Syria had zero military significance, Assad was back to using it the very day the strikes were launched.
Also, the attack was with Tomahawks. You do not use Tomahawks if you want to shut down an airbase for any length of time.
The attack did nothing because it was designed to do nothing.
Great comment, I agree wholeheartedly.
I also don’t get why GabrielM thinks there have been “12 years of non-stop humiliation” of American power…that’s just a very weird perception from my point of view. Is anything but the most total dominance by the US some sort of “humiliation”?
Hey RT,
Yes, and this is the problem – he needs a wife so she can support him with her greasy right. Know what I mean gov’na – know what I mean??!!!
Peace.
Lest we forget: Syrian Christians (who will be totally cleansed from Syria in the event of Assad’s collapse) are culturally much closer to us than Muslims. Actually, the same is true of Alawites (where women aren’t forced to wear hijabs) and the Druze. Genetically speaking, Christians, as well as the rest of the strange sects (Alawites, Druze) are closer to Europeans (less Peninsula Arab ancestry, less Sub-Saharan African ancestry) than Sunni Muslim Arabs. And among Sunni Muslims, the more secular urban elites (which mostly support Assad) are probably the closest to us. Of course, they are closer to us in terms of IQ. On average, it’d be easier to have a conversation about anything with an Assad supporter than with an opposition supporter. (Apparently the Free Syrian Army is more popular than its military strength would indicate. It’s probably a case of many lukewarm supporters.)
So, if we take the concentric circles of loyalty (which is normal), it’s abnormal to support the dumbest Sunni Muslim factions against the rest.
Analysis of figures is great, but this analysis reminds me of ‘there are lies, big lies, and statistics’.
It is not my opinion that there is anything wrong with the analysis, just that the most important issue is missing.
What is missing is the decades long fight of old Le Pen with French jews.
This fight does not seem to be over anything important, for an unbiased observer.
Pierre-André Taguieff, Michèle Tribalat, ‘Face au Front national, Arguments pour une contre-offensive’, Paris, 1998
The word offensive in French does not need explanation.
The book is written by two French jews.
No what are the arguments against FN:
1 Old Le Pen does not say thet gas chambers are a fairy tale, he does say that they are an ‘apostrophe’ in history.
The exact translation of the word, its meaning is probably ‘footnote’.
2 Old Le Pen characterised the German occupation as relatively ‘benign’, not too bad, is probably the best translation
3 FN estimates the costs of immigrants far to high.
The larger part of the book is complicated estimations etc. to show that FN is wrong, however, as soon as any immigrant has got the French nationality, the writers no longer see him or her as immigrant.
Now, objectively, if one accepts the six million figure anyone will admit that not all were killed in gas chambers. The total number of deaths in WWI is estimated 60 million, or far more. Four million on sixty is 6.7%. Not impressive.
The German occupation, two or so years ago WWII pictures were found on an attic. The French were startled, full terraces in Paris, single German soldiers walking unarmed through Paris. This is also what an allied officer with the Normandy 1944 invasion said ‘the French were not at all happy with us, familiar with their cozy lives under German occupation’.
Then the immigration costs.
Since nearly two years now France has martial law, numbers of policemen and military on the streets are enormous, all the time more French police men and women are added to the force.
Unemployment in Muslim areas, the banlieuses, is enormous.
Police going there is afraid, they often are attacked.
I do not see how the French ‘immigration’ problem can be solved, Macron, already nicknamed Merkron, seems to want a French Muslim religion.
I hope he succeeds, here, but even if he does, it will take decades.
So in my usual not so modest opinion, FN is right on all three counts.
What then, is the real objection to FN, just nationalism, in my opinion ?
Jews fear the nation state, the multi ethnic Great European Salvation State is their goal, a USA clone.
Friends of mine have mentioned that in America, you are considered as ‘American’ once you have a passport; in Australia people are still much more likely to press ‘where are you [i]originally[/i] from?’
No, it’s very common to ask that question in America. Less so in the south and west, I think, but in the northeast and upper Midwest white people are usually quite conscious of their ethnic origin, and it’s not an uncommon question to ask.
Cf. that Guardian article where they interviewed Trump voters in Macomb, Michigan (one of the counties that flipped from Obama in 2012 to Trump last year). The guy they interviewed said “I’m not white, I’m European American of Polish descent.” That’s not all that uncommon.
I agree with most of what you say, but hasn’t Fidesz been fairly successfully at keeping out the refugees / migrants?
The “established wisdom” is of course kind of silly, but it’s not inevitable that it has to become established wisdom. There are societies (Japan, and eastern Europe) that have ultra-low fertility coupled with hostility to mass immigration, and they seem to have made their peace with population decline. As you say, population decline doesn’t have to be a bad thing, and e.g. the Japanese seem to have decided they prefer it to being swamped by Filipinos.
There’s still a lot of pressure.
Also, he let through a lot of them to Germany. In spite of the fence, it’s a difficult situation, because some persistent refugees are camping at the border. The fence is fully on the Hungarian side, and so theoretically we’re responsible for anybody even on the outside of the fence.
Talha,
I don’t think any of us here, certainly not me, is arguing for no immigration, genetic admixing, refugees, etc.. I think the rate right now is too high. I like the existence of human phenotypic, physiological and cultural diversity, and as we all know, diversity depends on the existence of some barriers to migration. As I’ve said in the past, I don’t want the Andamanese who are my distant genetic relatives to disappear from the human family (Ancient South Indians, the racial group to which they belonged has more or less disappeared as a distinct group, although they contribute about 70% of the genetic makeup of southern India), and I don’t want phenotypic traits like blue and green eyes, blonde hair, etc.. to disappear either. Yes, change is a constant of human history, that doesn’t inherently tell us whether at any given time a particular change ought to be resisted or accelerated.
It’s sort of true, and sort of not true, that “there are no such things as borders, unless one has the ability and wherewithal to defend them”. Even in the absence of borders, if it wasn’t for large economic disparities between nations, migration would happen at a much lower level.
Is it so much a case of “total dominance,” or simply a matter that no one else is bothering to throw their weight around?
Moldbug said the English Dissenter faith conquered the Western world – by military force – in 1945. Vatican II confirmed it with respect to Catholics.
Francis is a flagrant Dissenter #NoBorderNoWall #liberté #égalité #fraternité
Seems to support Moldbug’s view that mainline Protestantism conquered the world.
I don’t know about that, it’s obviously not a topic really studied, but it wouldn’t surprise me if many Africans actually do feel good about their increasing share of world population and their increasing presence in many parts of the world, especially Europe…it’s not like racial sentiments of that kind are unimaginable.
Oh they’re not unimaginable, and yes, I’m sure at some level many Africans do feel good that Africa is an increasing share of the world population. In practice however, most Africans (just like most Europeans) think in terms of particular ethnic groups, not in terms of ‘race’. The idea of a unified black race doesn’t really make much than a unified white race, and there are plenty of ethnic tensions within Africa just as there are within other parts of the world. The idea of an ‘African union” has been mostly a bust.
I’m sure there are are Africans who get very upset by “fortress Europe”, and I’d guess you find them more among educated elites. (My three years in Africa was spent mostly living among peasants, not among these sorts of folks). In the main though, African people tend to be among the most skeptical in the world of mass immigration into their own countries. Audacious Epigone posted on that a couple years ago, from the GSS, but I can’t look for it right now. It’s not hard to make the case in that context, that consistency should mean they extent the same right to Europeans. Also, in my experience, the most un-PC / pro-HBD remarks I’ve ever heard came from people I lived around in Africa. I think that the slice of Africans who fall in lock-step line with PC / liberal talking points is probably very small, albeit an elite one.
As far as elites go, it’s worth pointing out that the “why don’t you give us more foreign aid and especially family planning aid, and that way you won’t have as many migrants” compromise was suggested to Angela Merkel by the president of Niger. She declined, becase of course she did.
Well, it’s better that they live in Germany than in Hungary, no?
I was aware that there’s a lot of pressure on Poland and Hungary (and the other eastern countries) to take refugees, and I hope they can successfully resist. It’s such an absurd thing for the Germans to be pushing anyway, even if you don’t object to Muslim migration. Most of the (token) number of refugees that went to the Czech Republic promptly left and moved to Germany anyway.
if it wasn’t for large economic disparities between nations, migration would happen at a much lower level.
This is the point. Once the standard of living of Americans (and Europeans) has been driven down to the levels in less developed countries, the economic motivations for immigration will be gone.
May 8, 2017 Macron Started A New Party, Is Now President Of France
People around the world are sick of the same old political parties. Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks it down.
https://youtu.be/skWhi7hQbXA
I’m much more a fan of trying to industrialize / develop African and Middle Eastern countries, personally. Though I agree that the modern level of consumption in the United States and probably the richer countries in Europe is unsustainably high. And I also agree that promoting contraception and smaller families in Africa / the ME / parts of South Asia has to be a major priority.
I’m much more a fan of trying to industrialize / develop African and Middle Eastern countries, personally.
If this is not possible, what is your plan B?
Hey Hector,
I wasn’t endorsing anything actually – I was laying out plain historical reality. Borders are abstract things unless you are talking a mountain range or a river or an ocean, etc.
Remember what Gore Vidal said, “…history is nothing more than the bloody record of the migration of tribes.”
People move around to what they feel is in their advantage, that’s what they’ve always done; what the hell were the Spanish doing in the New World or the Mongols in the Volga? And when they can, they usually send a vanguard of grim men with spears and shields. Just a little while ago, Europeans were establishing nice beach fronts all along the North African coastline because it was nice real estate. And before them, they sent grim men with rifles and bombs.
Europe has a lot to offer, thus people want to move there to better their livelihoods – there’s nothing evil or pernicious about it – any more than Swedes wanted to move into America during their crop failures.
A border, if it is to mean anything, is something that others (on the inside) need to have the will to enforce.
I actually expect zero from Europeans and non-Muslims – I think the Muslim world has the wealth and land internally to be able to take care of these people. I only ask Europeans not to stir the pot on a situation that is already boiling over; case in point, the political decapitation of Iraq, Libya, etc. Just stop.
You may not, but if they don’t care about it enough that they only marry within the in-group, then the writing is on the wall – they’ll join the Akkadians and other such historical markers.
You would be surprised, it doesn’t just go one way. My sister in-law (Swedish) married a swarthy Egyptian fellow (one daughter looks totally European – light eyes, skin, blond – just with slightly crinkly hair – other daughter only got European light skin). I don’t think they’ll disappear – I mean, if you just look at Bosnians and Albanians who both converted to Islam and were under Ottoman hegemony for centuries – they didn’t feel the need to admix much with the Turks. Admixing doesn’t happen unless people want it to – certainly not in the West. Promote a “save the whites” campaign or something if this is such an issue or White parents should just teach their children how the priority for them is to marry a White spouse above other considerations – it’s not rocket science.
Agreed – it is all subjective really. People make the choices in mates they want – check out the Fred Reed article on sexbots – the dysfunctional relationship between white males/females is the biggest hurdle right now. Many people seem to like the concept of “Whiteness” as long as they don’t have to deal with marrying White people and having kids with them. Coming back to my example; my wife and her younger sister converted and married darker Muslim guys from a traditional background (between us we have 6 kids and maybe they’ll add another). Just me and my wife have more kids than all her 5 cousins (who live in Sweden and are in psuedo-relationships with Whites) combined. Her older sister never converted and married a White guy she had known for 10 years – within two years of her marriage, the guy cheated on her and ran off. After that, she has been through serial relationships with more White guys that either are losers or won’t commit. She is nearing 45 – genetic game over. You get a few chances to press that reset button, then it’s gone, the human race moves on without your genetic contribution. As I said to another person on this forum; I’m fine with saying (in the genetic sense as a Pakistani) I’m an anchovy-mushroom pizza and White guys are the-works – but if the-works delivery ain’t coming, a White woman would be stupid as hell to die starving because she refused to eat the anchovy-mushroom.
I’m sure the Irish liked it just fine on their little island before that nasty potato famine.
Peace.
Immigartion into France has gone down dramatically already. To 25 000 last year!
So – Le Pen has already won, just for being there, if you compare these numbers to Germany, which took in another 320 000 in 2016 and will “welcome” 240 000 in 2017 as is estimated by now.
Except for that: Le Pen did not grasp, what’s so obnoxiously wrong about EU-financing. Fillon had better and much clearer ideas about necessary reforms of the French economy (at least) than Le Pen. She should have just cold blodedly copied them. People did not trust her, as far as the economy is concerned – and they did not distrust her for no reason.
Plan B is foreign aid, then.
I agree with you that vast economic disparities between nations, at least at the level we see today, is unjust. I’m in favour of solutions to that, just not solutions that see the erosion of distinct European peoples and nations. In the United States, which doesn’t have an ethnic identity in the same way that Poland, Ireland, Denmark, etc. do, I favour a much more liberal immigration policy than I do in Europe.
Talha,
Andamanese are dying off due to their lack of disease resistance (which in itself is probably a result of their long isolation). They don’t intermarry at all, quite the opposite (they commit infanticide against mixed-race babies, which is quintessentially evil).
I actually don’t have anything against ethnic intermarriage in principle, at the individual level. I’m not attracted to my own ethnic group after all, so it would be pretty inconsistent if I did. I think there’s an optimal amount of it though, and that level is below 100%. (That is to say, what’s good and healthy for one couple, probably shouldn’t be universalized to the whole of society). I think we’d be better off if there were a constant but fairly slow level of cultural and genetic mixing between groups; I don’t want a borderless world, obviously, but I also don’t want a world of total isolation.
I also am terminally allergic to the idea of telling individuals who they should marry or have sex with, including my own hypothetical children. I’d much rather maintain the distinctness of different groups thorugh limiting immigration than by limiting people’s sexual and relational freedom.
Also on a more happy note, it’s possible that down the line CRISPR – mediated gene editing might let us re-create rare human phenotypes or even create new one. Eye color might be one of the easiest traits to edit, since blue eye color (for example) seems to be controlled by two loci. Maybe gene editing will help replenish genetic and phenotypic diversity to counteract the effects of mass migration in diminishing it.
Also, to be clear, I oppose French imperialism in North Africa, British imperialism in your and my homelands, etc.. (I don’t much care that British imperialism in south Asia was racist, but I do care about how badly they mismanaged the economy, resulting in entrenched poverty and famines. The economic growth rate for about 50 years under the British was 0% per capita).
I do not believe that unjust is the correct word to describe the disparities.
I favor a complete immigration hiatus for the US, legal and illegal, except for Einsteins and supermodels.
I don’t see any justification or grounds for saying that European countries are more entitled to use immigration restriction than the US, unless you want to operate from a basis other than the nation state.
Eye color might be one of the easiest traits to edit
Why not just get blue contacts?
Hey Hector,
The Andamanese have signed their own death warrant then; they have low tolerance for disease and are refusing (violently) to admix with another population that will possibly furnish them this advantage. It is sad, but people cannot escape the consequences of their actions.
Sure no problems here. Admixing usually happens on a marginal level – like I mentioned of the Bosnians and Albanians. People are usually attracted to their own folks based (not just on looks) but familiarity of religion, language, culture, etc.
This is also tough in this day and age. Again, reference the Free Reed article. White guys talking about going to SE Asia, picking up a young hottie and bringing her here – is that immigration supposed to be stopped? Or does that fall under the marginal category? But I agree, massive immigration is usually a recipe for eventual disaster or conflict.
Once everyone can be special, no one is.
Peace.
As if Europe is not full of articles and books about the disaster euro, such as
Thilo Sarrazin, ‘Europa braucht den Euro nicht, Wie uns politisches Wunschdenken in die Krise geführt hat’, 2012 München
As if not 70 Dutch economists already warned in 1997 that the euro would fail.
The problem is that most people see no further than ‘no money to exchange on vacation’.
Next to impossible to make them understand that onne cannot abolish exchange rate mechanisms without a price, or prize, price for the southern countries, including France, prize for Germany.
Well what do you do in Sweden (I take it?)
Is Sweden better off for you being there?
You say Europe has a lot to offer. Will it still have so much to offer with a higher Pakistani population?
As far as I know, Pakistan willing, everyone who likes Anchovy Pizza is totally free to move to Pakistan. So why doesn’t that happen?
And note, I could substitute Syria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, lots of places, for Pakistan.
What benefit, name me a single benefit, Europe gets from having Muslim one in any of their nations?
Feel free to make whatever argument you wish. But explain to me any way in which Europe is better off? I guess you could say something about soccer? But that is a bread and circus activity. It wouldn’t matter any less if they had a rule where only left handed people could play the game.
Hey Hector,
Is now America – I don’t consider myself Pakistani (and frankly, when I visit, my relatives don’t either – they know I’m a visitor). I get annoyed when Pakistanis wave their flags on these shores; bring your language, your food, your poetry – but leave your flag elsewhere – as far as I’m concerned, it isn’t welcome here. I have lived here since 6, breathed the air, drank the water and the earth that will attest the most to my prostrations on the Day of Judgement is here. I don’t know any other; my kids certainly don’t. And if I bury my parents here, it’ll be the “land where my fathers died”.
If I have to leave, I’ll have to make a new homeland; which is OK – God has made the earth expansive, He grants it to whom He wills.
Agree with you about British management of the economy – wasn’t India outproducing Europe for a very long time?
“By and large, however, in return for their goods Indian merchants insisted on payment in gold or silver. Naturally this was not popular in England and the rest of Europe, and writers on economic affairs in the seventeenth century frequently complained, as did Sir Thomas Roe, that ‘Europe bleedeth to enrich Asia.’ The demand for articles supplied by India was so great, however, and her requirements of European goods so limited, that Europe was obliged to trade on India’s own terms until the eighteenth century, when special measures were taken in England and elsewhere to discourage the demand for Indian goods.”
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/ikram/part2_17.html
We wuz kangz!!!
Peace.
Hey Sunbeam,
I’m in the US.
Don’t know – ask them. Maybe they want lessons in how to breed.
Peace.
Macron’s vote total like Clinton’s is meaningless.
Both were given their ‘votes’ or their ‘vote numbers’ simply made up from air.
The System controlling Macron/France learned from The System in America
and made sure the corruption would be complete.
Clinton received maybe 15 million to 20 million actual votes(there are that many corrupt and stupid people).
Mac received enough actual votes to fill a popcorn box.
He was simply declared the winner.
“I’m in the US. ”
Why don’t you go back to Pakistan? Sure, sure xenophobia got it.
But explain to me why you wish to exist here, instead of in Pakistan? I can imagine many reasons.
But in the end you choose to be here instead of in Pakistan. So why is this place better for you than your native country? And why exactly is that the case? I mean why exactly do you find living here better than Pakistan?
And if too many Talhas came here, why wouldn’t this country just become another Pakistan? Where’s your grandkid going to move then?
Then explain to me, how I benefit in any manner from you being in the US.
This isn’t about you. It’s about me. Explain to me what loss would occur if you went home?
[even when, as in Venezuela, they literally destroy their country]
Mendacious Zionist snake doesn’t know what the word “literally” means.
I’m very far Left, at least as far as economics go, but there can be no doubt that Mr. Maduro has been disastrous for Venezuela, and to a large extent the seeds of the disaster were there under Chavez, although at least he managed to keep things running fairly well under 2010 or so. Thie root of the problem (well, one of them) is that Chavez chose to prioritize social spending and to systematically under-invest in maintaining PDVSA’s productive capacity. (Number of barrels produced per year declined even when the economy was growing). This has nothing to do with socialism or communism per se (the Eastern Bloc economies tend to invest a high proportion of their government revenues, which was one reason people complained about the poor quality of consumer goods). It’s a problem of left-populism more than it is a problem of communism, although Chavez was never really just a left-populist. That being said, whatever you call it, Chavez made some very serious errors in running the country and Maduro just made them worse.
No, I’m seriously wondering where this idea is coming from that somehow the US has shown “weakness” during the last few years and now needs to make clear again who’s top dog. Obama may have been less reckless than Bush II (or than Mccain and possibly Romney would have been), but he still was a very interventionist president who inserted American power into all manner of conflicts which are clearly not that important to vital national interests of the US. And yet somehow the US not getting its way in all those conflicts (like not succeeding with the stupid regime change project in Syria) is supposed to be some great “humiliation” that has to be made good by increased belligerency. It’s just a really weird perception of what has happened in the last ten years or so imo.
There is “Red” in Poland. The “RAzem” party with 4% support, with a leader seen with traditional communists and retards with Che Guevera t-shirts. There is also some 4% older SLD. And, there is communist party of Poland, despite years of offert to delegalise it (because supposedly constitution forbids only totalitarian methods, and communist party which only advocates peacefully for communism is within range of political views allowed by constitution). Similarly, the “Brown” are NOP (number of supporters in the range of few hundreds) and, slightly less radical and vehemently denying that they are fascists, ONR (number of supporters in the range of few thousands). Then, there are nationalists proper, few percentage of voters. The rest are normal parties, though I guess in the Western Europe they would be called dangerous fascist neo-nazi populist parties, because they refuse to walk in LGBT events, admit immigrants and they do not think sovereign states are something wrong.
Well yes, I know that Africans can be quite xenophobic…both towards other Africans and towards “outsiders” like the Indians who were expelled from East Africa. However, people aren’t necessarily consistent in their values…people can be very nationalist themselves and still accuse others of “racism” (e.g. Turks who are certainly among the more chauvinistic peoples on earth and have never dealt honestly with their dubious 20th century history really enjoy playing the Nazi card against Germans).
However, I have to admit that my thoughts in the previous post were quite speculative…I don’t really have any data that would show what Africans think about those matters.
Hey Sunbeam,
I like it here – a lot of Pakistan is quite a mess isn’t it? Why would I go back? If I leave to the Muslim world I may settle in Selangor or Amman or Alexandria or Madinah.
Wow – I actually have to explain that one? Really? I like living here instead of Pakistan for the same reason you do – it’s not rocket science.
Also, my wife doesn’t want to leave – she is a native-born White American of Swedish heritage. She has this funny notion that she has as much right to be here as you do…who listens to their husbands these days?
I manage a web development group. My IT director has stated he doesn’t know how he would manage without me – so there’s that. I’m also on my local town’s telecom advisory committee. And I have a great relationship with my neighbors.
Bro, if you don’t feel you get any benefit then get with your congressman/senator and other representatives and tell them to officially send out a Federal notice that all Muslim immigrants are being stripped of citizenship and are supposed to leave. I’m not going to beg massa’ to let my po’ house nigga’ self to stay. If the US population overwhelmingly wants legal deportation – I promise, I won’t fight. I mean – I might laugh next time Westerners want to lecture Muslims about civil rights.
But I’m a husband and a father – you don’t really expect me to tell my wife and kids to start packing their bags because some anonymous internet guy doesn’t feel I bring any benefit to his life – do you? Do you live your life like that?
Feelz…that’s nice…
Peace.
I am glad to see you so animated and expansive. It is many years since I’ve been to Hungary, but I always liked German-Hungarians. They always struck me as old style, cheerful German Lutherans stranded behind the Iron Curtain, unlike East Germans who seemed like a bunch of miserable ghits.
You are right about Lebanese and Syrian Christians and heterodox “Muslims” like Druze and Alawites. They were not permitted to take slaves, nor did they want to. They are essentially the same white Caucasian population that inhabited the Levant in Roman times.
I speak from personal experience. I was employed by a Syrian Christian family for several years in their family business. They were the salt of the earth. They were unfailingly helpful and honest. They had come to my homeland after the Ist Gulf War. They told me then that if Saddam Hussein and Assad were overthrown, then all Christians would be in peril. They decided to leave early.
In the scheme of thing, I would be willing to accept every Middle East Christian, and send every Pakistani and other Muslim BACK !
I find that hard to believe…sure there’s not some trickery like “net migration” involved? Though it might perhaps be possible…surely France is much less deluded than Germany about those matters.
“I might laugh next time Westerners want to lecture Muslims about civil rights.”
Trust me, if I ran things there would be no lecturing of Pakistan about anything.
“Also, my wife doesn’t want to leave – she is a native-born White American of Swedish heritage. She has this funny notion that she has as much right to be here as you do…who listens to their husbands these days?”
That’s an interesting point. I think though that she really ought to give living in Pakistan a try. After all, as a Muslim she wants to live in an Islamic society right? So why wouldn’t she like Pakistan? So what’s her reason for not wanting to live in an Islamic state?
I figure a decade or so ought to be enough time for her to really get into things.
lessons in how to breed
We tried that. The results are not encouraging.
Muslim immigrants are being stripped of citizenship
There is no legal mechanism for stripping natural born citizens of citizenship. If there was fraud in the naturalization process, naturalized citizenship can be revoked. After the Civil War, former confederates were denied suffrage and the right to serve in a public office for a few years.
If we had no Muslims, there would be all that empty wasted space in Mosques. 🙂
I suppose the young French are more aware of danger from immigrant community areas.
From what I can gather from reports since he got elected, Macron is a financial sector Petain, selling out the nation for EU (German taxpayer’s) mutualisation of French bank’s toxic assets. These are bad loans to Italy that they will never repay. The issue became urgent for Franch banks in January this year
I think it far more likely that Marine Le Pen would win because Macron is seen as having sold out France and turned it into a vassal state of Germany Almost every revolution in history has been caused by the failure to successfully assert national interests. The American revolution was sparked by the Quebec Act–seen as a concession to Catholic powers. French reverses at the hands of Austria caused the popular unrest that was an important cause of the French revolution. Being defeated by Japan caused the 1905 , and reverses at the hands of Germany in WW1 caused the 1917 Russian revolutions.
When Athens became a democracy, the caution of the aristocratic rulers was abandoned, and several foreign wars were embarked on. The common folk demand an assertive foreign policy, which includes levying war, and that is why Russian people back you know.
Marine Le Pen could come into power with a mandate to be beastly to the Hun, or their open EU border at least, but I don’t see any meaningful intervention happening outside Europe. Embarrassing if the perfidious French have to blow up Russia’s French-built amphibious assault ships.
Hey Sunbeam,
Why not – so why is Pakistan the only option? Because it fits your narrative? I know of at least five families that moved to Muslim lands to safeguard the religion in their kids. Two moved to Pakistan, one in UAE and two to Saudi. I’ve talked about moving with her; we’ll move if we see crazy signs in our kids – because safeguarding their faith is the priority. You’re not talking to a SJW Muslim here; you have nothing to sell me because material comfort is not the most important thing in my life – I’ve learned under men that don’t care to sacrifice material comfort for the bigger picture:
https://youtu.be/8IqaAqyycvQ?t=6s
And I’m not afraid:
“Those to whom the people said: ‘Surely the people have gathered against you, therefore fear them!’ But this increased their faith, and they said: ‘Allah is sufficient for us and a most excellent Protector.'” (3:173)
Until I get that Federal notice in the mail – I’m gonna do my thang!
And frankly, if I do not prove (to God – not you) that I am of service and a benefit to the people of the US, then I 100% deserve to be kicked out on my backside.
Uganda is around 85% Christian – why don’t Christians move there to get a taste of Christianity?
No reason other than inconvenience really; getting used to a new language, etc. We can practice our religion here just fine – thank God. If The US started putting restrictions on, say, building of mosques or banning the teaching of the Qur’an, we’d likely move without the federal notice.
Peace.
what’s her reason for not wanting to live in an Islamic state?
Well, I’m not her, but, since I doubt she reads the Unz Review, perhaps because she was born here, her parents are here, her relatives are here, her whole life is here, etc.?
I’m a Catholic, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me I need to move to Ireland or Poland to suit your convenience.
On the other hand, were Talha’s wife to decide to move the family back to Sweden, I’m sure she’d have no difficulty finding an Islamic society to fit into…
EDIT:
In a display of synchronicity I see Talha has responded at the same time I have, but I’ll leave this up anyway for the joke in the last sentence.
Hey iffen,
Not yet – we’re in a different ball game altogether now. I have no idea what lies ahead with the White majority shedding numbers as they are – desperate people do desperate things.
True – and nobody buying up abandoned churches (like the one I attend) – the Bosnians in our area just got a nice one (Lutheran I think it was).
Peace.
“Why not – so why is Pakistan the only option? Because it fits your narrative? ”
Because you said you were from Pakistan. I could have used lots of other countries.
By the way, we did travel to Sweden and Egypt in our first year of marriage or so – she liked Alexandria very much; everything including the food, culture, people, etc. That is probably first on the list.
We also traveled to Kosovo (she was working with a relief agency) and she liked that area very much too (Bosnia/Albania).
Hey Sunbeam,
Yeah – but what does it matter where I go as long as I’m gone, right? My point is; there are plenty of places in the Muslim world that are not outhouses like you think they are:
https://www.google.com/search?q=selangor+skyline&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwit8JC2lvrTAhVF22MKHUVlAWYQ_AUICigB&biw=1344&bih=774
Peace.
There’s an ongoing intifada in France.
Every year there are ritual confrontations with the police and one day the number of rioters and geographical spread* will be enough to win.
At that point the biggest French cities become 1970s Belfast and France’s slow descent into Lebanon will begin.
This is inevitable now so imo the only two things that matter are 1) what percentage of the white youth are already mentally prepared for it and 2) when it comes will the US be controlled by globalists who will help the anti-French side.
#
my math may be wrong but
if FN got 44% of the white yout vote then even with 33% abstention that’s 30% – anything 30%+ is good enough for me
Even were the U.S. at some point to take the absurd step of stripping all foreign-born Muslims of citizenship, something I do not advocate and would not support (though I am in favor of limiting Muslim immigration and, especially, treating Salafism as a complete bar, like anarchism or communism), provided things were handled humanely I think we could still profitably lecture certain Muslims on civil rights, as we did in 1805 despite our also holding slaves at that time.
Talha said:
“Also, my wife doesn’t want to leave – she is a native-born White American of Swedish heritage. She has this funny notion that she has as much right to be here as you do…who listens to their husbands these days?”
I take that to mean she is descended from Swedish immigrants to America. That could have happened anytime since the 1800’s, though it basically just quit happening after a certain point.
Now the story behind this can’t possibly be known, without Talha supplying details. Did she convert, then meet Talha? Or did she convert after deciding to marry him? I don’t think it is important though.
The important thing is she converted to Islam. You know that religion’s been in the news a good bit lately.
Interesting religion. You know they have quite a history of spreading the faith by the sword? You know there is also a special term for invading a place through immigration?
No doubt Talha will claim “Hijra” refers to the original migration from Mecca to Medina only or some such. But you see, cough* this isn’t their first rodeo taking over a place using the immigration tactic.
Now obviously the US is way behind what they’ve done in Europe. But why let it ever get to that point? There seems to be absolutely no redeeming feature of Islam and Islamic societies. Heck they don’t even want to live in them. Yet they insist on recreating them wherever they might go.
Whatever, it’s their thing, and theirs alone. But frankly I don’t want to deal with them. Ever.
Or have this place become some doomed monstrosity like France.
Hola Senor,
Sure thing. What you propose seems reasonable. That Salafism thing is a very tricky one – how do you bar a strain of a religion (what are the parameters of how you define it – is it anyone who rejects the four Orthodox schools – well then you get a boatload of modernists in that camp too). I guess Russia banned the Jehovah’s Witnesses so….
Frankly I’m pretty tired of Muslim countries being high on the list of things like; torture, lack of rule-of-law, etc.
What happens to our generation that was born here? I mean, one can shut off the tap – for sure – but the majority of the Muslims in the US, probably within a decade or so will be native born. That is already the case for the overwhelming majority of the Muslims who are Black.
Peace.
How can anyone know ?
France has open borders, as anyone can see who enters France by train or car.
Those who want to go to GB do not register anywhere.
Then there are the so called asylum hoppers, not accepted, or disappointed, in one country, they file for asylum in another country.
The EP just torpedoed laws to prevent it.
A brake can be that French financial regulations are about the worst in Europe.
Netherlands and Germany are the preferred countries.
Asylum rejected ?; nobody is really sent back.
What I see, think I see in the Netherlands, that at first immigrants are happy here, safe, a roof over the head, enough to eat, excellent health care.
The problems seem to begin with those born here, from immigrant parents.
They begin to realise that culturally they’re not Dutch, do not speak the language good enough, speak their mother tongue at home, in their community, are religious, we Dutch hardly are any more, have different ideas about women and girls.
Diferent ideas about politics and politicians, Dutch just vote, do not expect to be rewarded, jobs, preferred treatment, in some cases.
And we are, our politicians, quite stupid.
Imams for mosques used by those of Turkish descent are Turkish by nationality, civil servants paid by Ankara.
No, I’m seriously wondering where this idea is coming from that somehow the US has shown “weakness” during the last few years and now needs to make clear again who’s top dog.
It’s a neocon talking point that has been pushed on conservative news outlets since Obama’s first term. Those doing the pushing usually accused Obama of “leading from behind”. As neocon warmonger (but I repeat myself) Charles Krauthammer said of the phrase back in 2011:
And it surely is an accurate description, from President Obama’s shocking passivity during Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution to his dithering on Libya, acting at the very last moment, then handing off to a bickering coalition, yielding the current bloody stalemate. It’s been a foreign policy of hesitation, delay and indecision, marked by plaintive appeals to the (fictional) “international community” to do what only America can.
The Obama Doctrine: Leading from behind
IOW the USA must not only act it must always lead. Failure to do so is weak and America’s so-called enemies sensing this weakness will take advantage. Hence, the theory goes, Obama allowed Russia to expand its influence in Syria by failing to act decisively back in 2013.
The west is unable to accept that the human rights the west says are universal, are not accepted by anyone on the world.
On top of that, try to explain to Palestinians, Afghans, Iraqi’s, how we treat them is in accordance with our human rights.
I’ve been watching your French coverage silently but now I just must say that you are literally obsessed with France, or at least with its elections. Why such an extreme interest in France? Do you have connections there? Or you are planing to go to live there? Have you been there? Because, well, for a Russian nationalist few things can be more boring than France, and its very predictable elections are as twice as boring. Well, a couple of posts are alright, but not a dozen (or more?). Whatever might be happening to France, particularly to its demography, it is in practice irrelevant to Russia. Well, LP may have ended the sanctions, but the president in France is not a monarch and s/he must face the French parliament as well as the whole hostile establishment. So I wouldn’t have been very overoptimistic about her hypothetical presidency. Many have already fell victims of their illusions by placing too much hope on Trump, it’s time too be a little bit more skeptical. In short: why to care at all about France?
Difficult to see how five million Muslims can win a civil war against the rest of France.
That such a war, in my opinion already going on since 2005, has more and more serious consequences, sure.
Deportation is discussed on French TV quite openly, to where, not.
True, but the 25 000 figure seemed suspiciously low to me even in regard to legal immigration. As for the rest, you’re of course right that the real trouble with Islamic immigrants often starts only in the 2nd or 3rd generation.
Does anybody know how France is in regards to asylum, deportation of rejected asylum seekers? I guess it’s quite a bit tougher than Germany and Sweden, but that’s not that hard after all.
Because it’s a kind of important country (you know, one with nuclear weapons and, despite its problems, significant industry)?
It’s not like some peripheral country like Sweden whose descent into immigration-induced chaos could be watched with equanimity from afar and provide a source of morbid entertainment. What happens in France has repercussions for the rest of Europe, and in some way that’s going to affect Russia as well.
Well you can point out which assertion is incorrect.
If I kidnapped you and locked you in my basement, then you would be at a much lower risk of getting run over by a car. I could lecture you on the dangers of road accidents for hours a day without ever telling a lie and no doubt, in time, you’d come to thank me for saving you from such a terrible fate.
Soviet peasants are no longer being pushed around by noblemen. This has nothing to do with them starving all the place. Totally separate issue.
Since some commenters were asserting here that Trump’s action against Assad was a one-off, not to be repeated, let’s just check if that’s still holding up.
I’m seriously wondering where this idea is coming from that somehow the US has shown “weakness” during the last few years
I think that it might come from the failure to achieve the goals of the various recent interventions. It is humiliating not to “win” and one of the reasons for not “winning” is being too weak.
On the same subject, it seems to me that if we think of winning at whack-a-mole, a possible move would be to whack all the mole holes at once. It is not clear to me that the US has been “weakened” by all of our recent foreign interventions.
Hey Sunbeam,
Yes, converted first – she didn’t convert in order to marry me.
Nonsense – Muslim political hegemony was spread by the sword for sure. The faith wasn’t spread by the sword – though there were exceptions to the rule and were historical instances of forced conversions.
You mean like Whites took this continent or…Australia? You can call that Hijra too if you want; Hijra means migration.
Listen, I don’t pussyfoot around with this stuff. As long as immigration policies will allow Muslims to come here – a number of them will. Now if you claim most came here in order to spread the faith, then you don’t know what you are talking about. Most came only for material gain. They then realized that they were going to lose their kids to the culture and started building mosques. The younger generation is split; we have people that are very much into the religion and some that want to go secular-homo. And we are getting people coming into the faith as well. And you have to deal with African Americans who have a fairly positive view/experience with the religion. Are we going to take over? Maybe – I really don’t know. It’s a demographic game – anybody who has the most kids will take over. Right now the Latinos have the baton and are in the lead.
And – oh snap – the nightmare convergence:
“By most official measures, Latinos in the U.S. are considered to be the fastest-growing demographic. They are also the fastest-growing group of Muslims in America, according to organizations that cater to Hispanics converting to Islam.”
http://www.ibtimes.com/muslims-america-more-latinos-converting-islam-us-population-grows-report-claims-2242465
There is no conspiracy; it is simple – in fact it is Aesop-level simple. You read the tortoise and the hare? What about the ant and the grasshopper? People who are willing to sacrifice and have stable healthy families will win the day – that’s all it is – forget airplanes, skyscrapers, museums and all of that – this is basic biology + mathematics. Whether that’s Latinos, or Whites, or Mormons, or Muslims. I have four kids – it requires serious sacrifice. Other people don’t want to put in that sacrifice – to each his own.
If the US ever becomes super-majority Muslim, it will not be like the US that you see now. I am certain of that. It will also not resemble Pakistan. I am certain of that as well.
Like I said – if you feel we are rivals to you, you have four choices I can think of; 1) work to politically enact the same kinds of restrictions that non-Muslims have in Muslim lands (they can’t become president or serve certain high offices or do certain things in Muslim-majority localities, etc. – basically legally make us dhimmis), 2) have any notions of our citizenship stripped and forcibly removed (the Daesh option), 3) work to make us apostate or at least secular-minded (in which case they don’t breed much, if at all), or 4) out-breed us.
Either way you got your work cut out for you – no such thing as a free lunch. Good luck.
Peace.
Actually, I agree with you that Muslim immigration should be limited. But if the woman in question is a native-born American, I don’t see why she should leave the country, especially this avowedly secular country, merely because she has altered her religious views, even if ill-advisedly. I mean, unless you also want to airdrop all the members of the CPUSA over China, deport all Jews to Israel, and send all the Mormons somewhere, it seems excessive.
I’m not quite so worried about France as you. Things are bad there and will get worse as long as they put off stopping immigration, but in the meantime it is the secular part of France that is becoming increasingly Islamized and thereby weakened in its identity. Most importantly the army will probably become even more French Catholic than it is now, at least the effective parts of it, especially since any (Arab) Muslim-dominated parts will fall victim to the usual factors affecting them.
Yes, that’s my impression as well. I have to say I find it somewhat disturbing that this distorted perception seems to fall on fruitful ground among the dumber kind of Trump supporters (at least I got that impression by their reaction to the Syria strikes which many of them greeted with “America’s back again!” enthusiasm)…they might be stupid enough to let themselves be manipulated into supporting another Mideast war because of their hatred of Obama (who was pretty dreadful in many ways, but not because he wasn’t interventionist enough). As if getting involved in the Syrian mess would do anything to solve America’s problems.
Hey JD,
Good points! Even the current Western idea of human rights is an ever-changing framework. Many of these rights would have not been accepted as valid in Napoleonic France or the US colonies – or even a few decades ago. Could it be that there are too many rights for the individual to the detriment of the society? This is something Western man must ask himself.
Peace.
You make a good case, certainly better than any I’ve seen so far, and you’ve certainly put a lot of thought into it. You obviously make a lot of assumptions about the internal structure of the Syrian army and ba’ath party which wouldn’t be my default assumption, but perhaps you’re basing them on something.
My view on the matter is based on
1) Pretty much the entire western media and every supposedly impartial organisation seems to say that it came from the regime. I guess this is not very consistent of me, but it’s hard to know when to trust the media and when not. I trust them with tennis results after all. Probably I should reappraise this one.
2) False flags don’t really happen that much and they are hard to pull off. Even history’s most famous false flag turns out to have not been a false flag after all.
3) People do really shitty things when they are in drawn out wars with people they hate. I hardly think I need to start citing examples. Your allusion to MMA suggests that you don’t want to deal with this point.
4) Both sides have already used chemical weapons, though – as with all war crimes – the regime has done more of it.
Is the quote about Kosovo an actual quote? I was in school at the time.
Well yes, but that should be a reason of being wary of such no-win projects that might even be arguably detrimental to US interests and certainly cost a lot of blood and treasure. It should be obvious by now that western interventions in the Mideast have been spectacularly unsuccesful. It depresses me that many people in the US still seem to be unable to recognize this and buy those stupid talking points about “showing resolve”, “credibility” etc.
“Is the quote about Kosovo an actual quote? I was in school at the time.”
Supposedly the Serbs planned to expel ALL Albanians from Kosovo:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Horseshoe
That plan seems to have never existed in the way it was presented by scum like Joschka Fischer at the time. It’s still somewhat controversial (and certainly the Serbs did commit some atrocities…as did the KLA), but probably mostly a fabrication.
You mean, “lessons in how to irresponsibly breed children that you know you can’t adequately support without leaching off a host population.”
As one of our regular commenters likes to say, “There, fixed that for ya.”
Though, of course, the self-hating, timid, terminally naïve Europeans who can’t be bothered to have children, do deserve your mockery.
The chances of a black person being murdered for “racist” reasons in 2017 is miniscule compared to the chances of that happening in the first half of the 20th century. Just like the chances of a black person being denied their civil rights is minuscule compared to first half of the 20th century.
Even things like Republican efforts at voting restrictions and impediments are not “directed at” blacks and other minorities, but at likely Democratic voters.
It’s not just white people who should be prudently afraid of muslims settling in our country, Talha, it’s any non-Muslim of any race who has observed reality.
It should be obvious by now that western interventions in the Mideast have been spectacularly unsuccesful.
No argument from me on this point. As a practical matter I point out that we are up against false positives and that is probably what carries the day time and again.
“Right now the Latinos have the baton and are in the lead.”
Actually, this isn’t really true. Latinos as a whole have a fertility rate of 2.15 as of a couple years ago, and it’s continuing to drop. (Mexican-Americans have a TFR of 2.4 or so, Cubans and Puerto Ricans are well below replacement, and “Other Latinos” are higher than Mexicans). By 2050 or so the Pew Research estimate is that Latino and white fertility rates will be more or less equal.
https://www.unomaha.edu/news/2015/01/fertility.php
Right now the highest fertility groups in the US are Mormons, Hasidic Jews, and Muslims. (Mormons are at 3.4, much higher than any Latino group). None of them except the Mormons are very significant size at the moment, of course. People who are worried about Americans of English descent being ‘replaced’ should take comfort in the high Mormon fertility rates, since they’re mostly of Northwest European heritage.
Oh, and Talha, you should take comfort in Leah Libresco’s estimates of what the US population will look like at ‘equilibrium’. 19% ‘unafilliated’, 25% evangelical, 22% Mormon, 9% mainline Protestant, 6% Catholic and….8% Muslim.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/evangelical-protestants-are-the-biggest-winners-when-people-change-faiths/
I can’t say I like any of your four choices, and honestly I’d prefer to pass on some sort of demographic war; that is one of the many silly potential future universes I can do without. The concept disgusts me, and as for saying it’s inevitable: well, if we really wanted, the U.S. could with relatively little effort sterilize the entire continent of Africa and replace its children with Donald Trump clones, a hardly desirable process or outcome. The best way to win a demographic war, like most others, is not to fight, and if Muslim immigration is limited to a trickle I really won’t worry all too much about converts; you can take a place in the “race” with the Mormons and Amish.
As for secularization, that seems to be already happening, even though the U.S. seems to get a better (and, therefore, I would imagine, more religious) class of Muslim than does Europe: just look at the divorce rate! Perhaps this problem will be solved in the next generation, and I really do wish you all luck, but somehow I doubt it.
“It will also not resemble Pakistan. I am certain of that as well.”
Now how can you know that? Looks to me as if Muslims make new Pakistans, wherever they go.
“As long as immigration policies will allow Muslims to come here ”
I think that immigration policies should be changed. Zero Muslim immigration for any reason.
As for your other options, I care nothing for 1), nor for the hearts and minds in 3).
Pakistan can be Muslim till the end of time, and it won’t bother me. I won’t be thinking about it at all.
4) is the Red Queen’s Race, and it is high time this strategy was recognized as the weapon it is (though that leads to uncomfortable ground that has been well covered in history).
So some version of 3) is probably what I would do.
However, since I am a practical man, I think California (You did say you lived there, right? Think I remember reading that) should be spun off into an independent Republic (actually the whole West Coast unless someone wants to form the state of Jefferson).
Then you can do whatever. I think you run into cold, hard, Chinese reality at some point, but that’s down the road. A little ways.
Well said, Sunbeam.
Erdogan has been quite open about using immigration and high fertility rates to gradually dominate and colonize a non-Muslim country.
Other Muslims are just wise enough to keep quiet about it while the frog’s water reaches the boiling point.
Russia and Iran ‘support’; America ‘meddles’. Got it.
Anyway, either my language was imprecise or you are muddling two issues. Obviously whichever side is strongest will win the war, that’s how war’s work. Obviously, absent America, the regime will win the war because Iran and Russia are willing to invest more than Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Obviously, in the bare sense of the term, Assad could wield power over the country, (though the same is true of anyone, ISIS included).
What I mean is that it is fantasy to suppose that Assad can rule in normal peacetime fashion. Outside of Moldbuggian thought experiments, you can’t have normal civilian government when half (and most people say more than half) the population wants to kill the government.
The rest of this paragraph is irrelevant. What I said is that under a sane world order someone else would take over Syria. Turkey is the obvious choice because it ruled Syrian for seven times longer than Syria has been an ‘independent’ country, and would still be doing so if European countries hadn’t ‘meddled’. It’s interesting to make this statement and watch how baffled people become because it shows how colonized their brains are by obsolete versions of Leftism. But, suffice to say, it was a quip, not a serious suggestion.
I was also perfectly clear about what I view as the best solution given the way things are: Russia gets rid of Assad and cobble together a government with as much of the FSA and some other groups as possible. Such an entity could gain the acquiescence, if not the support, of most of the population, and would have a good shot of keeping violence against minorities to a minimum whilst eliminating ISIS. Since Assad is only President because his brother had a ‘car accident’, it’s not like this is a crazy idea. The thing standing in the way seems to be Putin’s ‘stand by your man’ policy, which is a good principle to hold, but can be taken too far like, for example in Venezuela. I read today that they are eating zoo animals now.
But this is not the main issue, which is whether Trump’s strike was a big deal or not.
This is bull.
(i) At most Syrians have made up 50% of the refugee flow into Europe. Genuine refugees from Syria, in any case, are mostly content to remain in the Middle East. The immivasion of Europe hinges on one issue: your will to resist.
(ii) No offense, but refugees don’t want to go to Hungary. The risk to your country is that Merkel wants to put them there and you can’t say no without forgoing a lot of $$$ (my keyboard, perhaps significantly, doesn’t have a Euro sign). The future demographics of your country have a lot to do with internal politics in Germany, but not a lot to do with internal politics in Syria.
(iii) If, as you hope, Assad regains military control over the country with Iranian and Russian support, he will use the opportunity to improve the demographics of his minority occupation government. In fact, that’s what he has already been doing. A lot of the military tactics you otherwise find so senseless make sense if the goal is to encourage Sunnis to leave the country (which is not a stupid goal at all, from his point of view).
I didn’t speculate on your motives, I simply repeated what you told me last time I asked the question. Since then you’ve worked out an explanation, but it would be unutterably rude of me to suggest this was an ex post facto rationalization.
Talha,
As far as America goes, I’d favour strategy 3 rather than any of the others. In Europe, some kind of Partition-of-India or Peace of Westphalia situation coupled with strict immigration restrictions might be the best solution. But as far as America goes I think there’s something to be said for the model of a society that welcomes everyone irrespective of colour or creed. Both the tribal and the cosmopolitan models of society have their merits, and though I prefer the tribal variety, I want some cosmopolitan nations to exist.
I certainly would hope to convert you (or more probably your descendants though). And I realize from your point of view, 3) is probably the least appealing…..
Hey RC,
We will eat your children!!!
Bwaahahahahahaha!
Bro, I can’t take you seriously. On another thread you were advocating for Russia to exterminate or forcibly remove Muslims (Avars, Chechens, Daghestanis, etc. ) from their ancestral homelands in the Caucasus. Stop fronting as if you have morals different than Daesh – you only shave and wear a tie. Figure out your narrative, drop the hypocrisy, learn some bonafide Christian values – then we can talk intelligently.
Peace – or piece of your children.
So?
Maybe I’m crazy, but I think ‘because you look like someone whose brother was in a gang that dissed my ho” is ‘no good reason’.
Such predictions over the very long term are silly. Who in 1900 would have predicted our current situation?
A Muslim-dominated France or UK with nuclear weapons is certainly NOT in Russia’s interest. Or Americans’ interest.
Moreover, it is normal and healthy for good people to side with the French against islam. It is especially natural and wise for other primarily-white / European people around the world to wish the best for our cousins elsewhere, whether in France or UK or Italy or Greece or Russia.
I’ve been to France for two days in my life and care very much about what happens to those people.
Is it difficult to see how TWENTY million confident, aggressive, mostly-younger Muslims win a civil war against an older, declining, timid French population?
Because on fertility trends like those we see now, the Muslim population will keep growing every year and the native French population will keep shrinking. This is a “double swing” in terms of population composition, and it can make a meaningful difference in just a decade, let alone a generation.
What exactly will prevent Muslims from becoming a majority in France if the French won’t have children and won’t kill or deport the Muslims? Nothing. Just a matter of time.
You are absolutely correct that revolutions, all of them, are one faction of elites against another faction of elites.
The only difference between Phillip d’Orleans and George Soros is that Soros stole his fortune and Orleans inherited his.
We have no English, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh ancestry as far as we know, yet my grandparents and parents taught me that the Brits are naturally and rightly our friends, bound to us not just by genetic and cultural heritage like other white European (and Russian) people but also by our common language and principles for society and government.
They were right to teach me that. And we will teach our children the same thing about loyalty and affection for and solidarity with whatever real non-brainwashed non-suicidal white British people there are left in the UK.
Hey Sunbeam,
Because neither Jordan, Bosnia, Morocco, or Malaysia look like Pakistan.
Sounds reasonable to me – if the US decides it only wants young, fit Argentinian models to be allowed inside, it’s up to the citizens to make that choice.
I think you meant #2 – the Daesh option – correct?
I’m in Illinois actually – very family-friendly.
Peace.
Well, Russia and Iran are there at the invitation of the recognized government (iirc Russia even has some sort of defense treaty with Syria), whereas there isn’t really any basis in international law for US interference. Now you can of course argue that a regime that does such horrible things as Assad’s regime has done loses any legitimacy, and that’s what all those “R2P” people are arguing. But by standards of sovereignty according to the Westphalian system of international relations, reiner tor’s wording seems quite accurate to me.
If it were that clear-cut and more than half of the population really wanted to see Assad gone at any cost, Assad’s regime wouldn’t have survived six years of civil war, with its opponents being supported by numerous outside powers.
Personally I think it’s quite possible Assad’s forces did use gas, and certainly his regime is responsible for a lot of atrocities, but his regime clearly has significant support among many Syrians (even if that support may be more of the reluctant rather than the enthusiastic kind).
That’s true, but things like that are usually a good snapshot of what is happening now. Of course “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
Reading that article though, Jews are only 2% of America? Is that only religious ones? At some point I encountered some demographic factoid that they were between 4 and 5% of the American population. That probably dates to the 80’s, but I imagine absolute numbers are pretty much the same as then, while the total US population has increased. Eh, what we are at about 150% of circa 1980 population? I guess it might make sense.
Seems little low though.
Greasy, what about when civil war and street-to-street, house-to-house fighting comes to Germany? Such a frightening scenario is not unlikely, even in the BETTER scenario (another plausible scenario is quiet submission and gradual disappearance of actual German people).
Numbers of people matter very much then.
Numbers of native German people also matter when voting and otherwise trying to structure, preserve, and improve one’s society and culture in the face of a confident, aggressive, alien people in your midst.
Keep telling us that the population of Germany doesn’t matter. But don’t forget not to leave the house without growing that beard. And teach your daughter or granddaughter to shut her mouth and know her place like a good Muslim woman, because the Muslim immigrants certainly will if you let them.
Wake up and smell the (Turkish) coffee, pussy Germans.
That’s a good point though, quite obvious that Assad’s regime would like to get rid of the more troublesome Sunnis.
“A controlled decline” would be the best course for the German people? Wow, that’s some impressive love and loyalty for your people there, Leser.
To AT LEAST one woman, right, Talha? Just a little teasing from your Kafir buddy (while I am still allowed prior to the onset of dhimmitude).
“I think you meant #2 – the Daesh option – correct?”
Yes.
“I’m in Illinois actually – very family-friendly.”
Maybe you’ll like California.
Hola Senor,
Sure – then Farakhan would likely be right about the White man being the devil. LOL!
y
Honestly, I’m not having a race. I’m just doing what has come naturally to human beings for the vast majority of their history across all cultures. Others aren’t that’s the issue, that’s their choice. I was simply explaining the mechanics and mathematics. I don’t feel others are my rivals – I have good relations with my co-workers and fellow citizens – I am not interested in shipping my fellow citizens out on boats. That’s why I told him “if you feel we are rivals to you”.
Same back to you.
Peace.
Every one of my parents and grandparents — “Roman” Catholic all — identified proudly and clearly as white European-descended people despite all being born in the USA. Never a question about it.
Other Catholics here might be more confused or deracinated / brainwashed, especially in the past few decades. They are then part of our existential problem — as is the official Catholic Church and its immivasion agents (National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Catholic Charities, etc.).
Great name, though.
Hey Sunbeam,
Oh OK – LOL! The Alhambra Decree it is! So much for principled justice/legal frameworks. Rule of law – pfffshshsh – you can’t eat that!
Which is fine; you’ll be asked about what you advocated, I’ll be asked about what I did. Just keep in mind one thing, a little Anglo-Saxon lesson:
Peace.
There are too many people on the planet anyway, and I don’t see why a population of 40-50 million Germans would necessarily be a bad thing. However at some point of course birthrates would have to rise to replacement levels again to keep the population stable. And the problem of course is that German birthrates are so catastrophically low at just the time, when the failed societies in Europe’s neighbourhood are exploding demographically and sending us their invading masses.
Believe me, the thought of German national self-extinction doesn’t make me happy at all…there’s obviously something wrong with a society that fails so massively at reproducing itself.
Hey RC,
Sure thing – but I thought Jews left polygamy a while back.
Peace.
I actually moved here from So Cal. Used to live within earshot of the fireworks at Disneyland.
Hey Hector,
Good points, I kind of feel the same way about a statelet/autonomous region model – a bit like what Russia has with the Caucasus, but with tougher restrictions on inflow/outflow.
Sure thing, we’re trying to do the same – that’s no secret. Again here what I see is:
1) Some Muslims do apostate, but they mostly go agnostic/atheist
2) Some definitely go liberal leaning while staying Muslim
3) Those in #2 don’t have many kids, which means…
4) The more religious ones will be ascendant as a growing percentage (as with any other religious group of traditional vs liberal interpretations)
Peace.
You’re in Illinois? I’m in Illinois too! (And not the Chicago, part, either).
“Oh OK – LOL! The Alhambra Decree it is! So much for principled justice/legal frameworks. Rule of law – pfffshshsh – you can’t eat that!”
You are certainly correct.
Look this is a statement of personal philosophy, not a rejoinder based on anger at reading your comment.
1) I am not religious. Not opposed to religion on a basic level like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, but I have yet to encounter a religion I could believe it.
2) I am not an idealist. “Rule of Law,” seems like a pragmatic thing to me. Things work better if you have it. But if you encounter groups that game it, then pragmatism is what it’s all about anyway.
You may have meant it as an insult. I’m not insulted though. “If you can’t eat it, or screw it…”
3) Alhambra Decree? I guess that has something to do with Spain and the Reconquista?
I just looked it up actually. It worked didn’t it?
The concept disgusts me, and as for saying it’s inevitable: well, if we really wanted, the U.S. could with relatively little effort sterilize the entire continent of Africa and replace its children with Donald Trump clones, a hardly desirable process or outcome
We could, at the cost of sacrificing our entire morality…..
Hey Sunbeam,
No problem here – I’m for rule of law. Certain principles are immutable, if they can be broken – then one has no principles. And that’s fine; if you have no religion, your outlook is utilitarian and pragmatic – I can dig that.
It did. And there’s a reason why Europeans evolved their legal framework in a way to prevent something like that from happening again. And that had zero to do with accommodating Muslims. Like I said, if I get a federal notice that I am supposed to leave I will – without fighting.
Open up the gates, that your own ancestors shut, at your own risk – it’s your future.
Peace.
Well, yes. What part of “hardly desirable” failed to register?
1) the age/gender distribution is the key factor not absolute numbers and where it is concentrated – they’re probably a majority of the young in cities like Paris already
2) their initial “war aim” will be expelling the French state from certain cities/towns or sections of cities/towns and formalizing that legally – two states (this already happening but informally) – from there it will turn into a long running guerrilla campaign out of those enclaves i.e. slowly turning into Lebanon.
given that the powers that be don’t want people to react to their replacement i don’t think you can trust the official figures – in one example from some years back the media reported a number which when i looked turned out to be the number of heads of household so a massive understatement of the total number – this is even more true regarding illegal immigration.
Whereas the chance of a white person being murdered for racist or other reasons by a black person is vastly higher.
“their initial “war aim” will be expelling the French state from certain cities/towns or sections of cities/towns and formalizing that legally – two states (this already happening but informally) – from there it will turn into a long running guerrilla campaign out of those enclaves i.e. slowly turning into Lebanon.”
Now that’s logical. Except…
How is all this going to be funded? These areas you talk about earn and produce nothing. If it weren’t for the French welfare state they couldn’t exist.
And if crap hits the fan as you describe, I don’t think there will be a French welfare state.
So what then? I can see social disorder, brigandage, all sorts of nasty things. But unlike a recent civilization (Russia) that hit the wall, I can’t see tax collection and the rest of it taking place.
I’m not Jewish, T-man, and must have missed the Jewish angle here. Please enlighten me.
The Mormons have largely abandoned polygamy, too, but we weren’t talking about them, and they’re not colonizing, intimidating, attacking, and leeching off of Europeans in Europe.
Too bad, I could’ve bought ya a beer at Angels Stadium. Or not 😉
The Koran says Muslims should attack non-Muslims until they
1) are all killed
or
2) convert.
Christians and Jews get a 3rd option
3) submit to Muslim authority and pay a special tax
(but only Christians and Jews get that, Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists, Shintoists etc only get the first two.)
By the time France truly collapses — becomes unable to pay out welfare benefits and/or has hyperinflation trying to print money to pay for it all — Muslims will be a substantially higher percentage of the population than they are now, and in a better position to fight and win.
Wealthy Muslim individuals and governments, including but not limited to the Saudis, can send massive financial support to help their brothers conquer part of France. The Saudis already fund the construction of mosques and pay for hateful imams and teachers to staff mosques and madrassas in the “West”, without much resistance from the future dhimmis.
I won’t be happy to be proven right on this.
Hey RC,
I’m more of a hockey fan – I might have gone to a Ducks game across the freeway though!
Chicago is out, so hope Anaheim takes it!
Ahhh, that’s some good hockey:
Peace.
P.S. Unlike Americans, French people own few firearms in private hands. Without firearms, it won’t go well for older Frenchmen trying to defend themselves with bare hands or knives against typically younger Muslims.
Big hockey fan myself. Was at Game 7 of the Ducks’ second round this year.
A lot of players grow a “playoff beard”, too, so you’d fit right in, I presume 😉
good point – how was it funded in Lebanon?
Sorry no – the majority opinion is that everyone gets option 3. The school I follow (Hanafi) and the school of much of the Maghreb (Maliki) are explicit that the ruling that the Companions (ra) made for Zoroastrians also applies to the all people. These two schools were the ones applied for the majority of Muslim history for the majority of lands (being the schools applied by the Ummayyads, Abbasids, Ottomans, Mughals, etc.). The Shafi’is certainly dissented (but even among them there was a difference of opinion as to what people could be considered are recipients of revelation), but where was this rule applied? Cite your sources.
We know the Malays and Javans were following the Shafi’i school (which opinion did they follow) – there are no records of mass forced conversions in those areas. Likewise the Kurds, who have been some of the most staunch adherents to the Shafi’i school (and produced some of its most illustrious scholars) – why didn’t they eliminate the Yazidis in their midst centuries ago.
Don’t be lazy – do your research.
Also a fourth option is available which is that Muslims can be in a mutual non-aggression pact with a non-Muslim sovereign/government. In this case, the treaty must be upheld. And while some scholars say that treaty can only have a time limit of 10 years, the Hanafi school believes it is fine as an indefinite agreement. This is one of the basis of the Muslim nations joining the current international framework – practically everyone is Hanafi when it comes to international relations.
Peace.
Hey RC,
Greasy is – we were talking about getting him hitched.
Peace.
See that actually sounds like a good thing to me. It is time to cut back on women’s rights. There are a (statistically very small) group of Muslims who take it waaaaayyy too far, but in general they have the right idea. We need to drastically reduce the status of women.
As for civil war: I don’t think the numbers really matter. If Apartheid South Africa had gone to outright civil war the white minority would have crushed the blacks in 24 hours. When the civil war comes, it will be more about will and organization than raw numbers.
Hey RC,
Yeah – easily. I take my boys out to do the inline type when I can. Hopefully, i can get them into the ice version soon.
Another invention the world can thank White people for!
Peace.
I don’t have the lingustic or religious knowledge to come to an independent judgment in this matter, but the Yezidis actually claim that there’s a long history of their community being persecuted by Muslims throughout the centuries (they apparently have some sort of oral history about “72 genocides” perpetrated by Muslims against their community), e.g. for those who can read German see this:
https://books.google.de/books?id=IEAiBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA172&lpg=PA172&dq=yeziden+72+verfolgungen&source=bl&ots=8Lj8lSadOz&sig=VwVLEbVnlia5SA3R9RHFdspjoyo&hl=de&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwimnprXxPrTAhXlIsAKHTrWBLYQ6AEITDAH#v=onepage&q=yeziden%2072%20verfolgungen&f=false
which mentions among other things Ottoman dignitaries in mid-19th century Iraq supposedly hunting down and enslaving Yezidis.
So whatever the truth may be, it seems at least certain that Yezidis have a rather negative perception of Islamic tolerance towards their community.
yes – that’s why i think the key metric is the percentage of white youth who are already mentally preparing for it.
yes – whatever a religion says most normal people prefer a quiet life so it’s only now and then they get fired up to kill their neighbors – but over time the target population shrinks until they are all gone.
Also, that imperative:
Is a specific command along with all the hadith that clarify the subject (again) have a difference of opinion on them. The Hanafis considered this to be targeting the Arab pagans in the Arabian peninsula – the Malikis considered it only to be a command against the pagans Quraysh. The Shafi’is considered it to be an imperative order against all non-Muslims for eternity – thus they have historically held that non-Muslims are fought specifically for their disbelief. However; 1) it is a minority opinion and 2) the late Shaykh Ramadan Bouti (ra) – one of the greatest contemporary Shafi’i scholars – in his excellent work dissented and stated that the evidence for the Shafi’i position just isn’t up to snuff:
https://www.amazon.com/Jihad-Islam-How-Understand-Practice/dp/1575472228
That command is still in effect by the way; if you come across Arab pagans (we’re talking OG Arabs – not people who simply speak Arabic – good luck finding them), they are not allowed within the entirety of the Arabian peninsula. I’ve not come across a dissenting opinion on this, if you have, please share it.
Peace.
Hey GR,
I’m not going to doubt this because other communities were also persecuted at times. That’s no surprise. What I am saying is that if the letter of the law of the Shafi’i school was to have been applied – there would have been no oral tradition – they would have been annihilated or forcibly converted.
Ottomans also enslaved Christian children and turned them into slave super-soldiers – a gross violation of the dhimmi contract:
“This effectively enslaved some of the sultan’s own non-Islamic subjects and was therefore illegal under Islamic law, which stipulated that conquered non-Muslims should be demilitarized and protected.”
Conflict and Conquest in the Islamic World: A Historical Encyclopedia
Sometimes Ottomans were very enlightened – other times – not so much. I’m not about to defend their crimes in violation of the sacred law. They can answer to God Himself when they meet Him.
I’m talking legal theory – not what certain Muslims did or did not do. You want to know how bad Muslims could be? Look up Tamerlane.
Peace.
Well yes, but I find all those discussions about Islamic law always rather unenlightening (not a criticism of you, since it wasn’t you who brought up the topic in this thread). Most Westerners (myself included) have no idea about the contents of Islamic jurisprudence anyway, and don’t have the ability to evaluate the matter for themselves.
But anyway, just wanted to mention the Yezidis’ perception, I’ll drop out of this discussion again.
“Most Westerners (myself included) have no idea about the contents of Islamic jurisprudence anyway, and don’t have the ability to evaluate the matter for themselves.”
That is a valid argument. But if you can’t evaluate the matter yourself, how do you know the unknown isn’t going to club you over the head, as opposed to not being a threat?
And to be blunt, based on the Constitution or any of our propaganda the US is no threat to any country in the world.
But we bomb whoever nonchalantly, drone strike different areas for … I have no idea. I do not know what they are trying to achieve, or why it is important. Seems totally random and mindless to me.
It’d be comforting if it actually was about oil or unobtainium or dominoes or something. This bunch isn’t going to last long as a world hegemony (70+ years isn’t very long). More like Athens bankrupting itself invading Sicily.
So how can you know ahead of time whether something is a threat or not, other than the evidence of your own eyes, and history?
that was me but my point was trying to explain why it’s not just the West vs Islam – there’s groups like Boko Haram and janjaweed in Africa – stuff happening in western China, Mindanao in the Phillipines etc as well as bombed churches in Egypt and Pakistan and yazidi slave girls – very widespread.
I’m opposed to mass immigration of Muslims because it’s obvious that a large percentage of Muslims in many majority Muslim countries is highly intolerant and quite ready to use violence; and this isn’t just a matter of “anecdotal” cases (like that somewhat secular-minded student who was recently lynched – by other students – at some university in Pakistan), there’s at least some statistical data supporting that view. AK had a post a while back about the results of a PEW values survey among Muslims in many countries…the results are quite disturbing in some cases.
Plus, there’s now a history of 40-50 years of Muslim immigration to Western Europe, and in general it hasn’t been a positive experience (not always a total catastrophe either, but in no case is it clear that the positives outweigh the negatives).
You can of course also add the long history of tensions and conflict between (post-)Christendom and Islam. But in any case, detailed discussion of what’s in the Koran, the Hadiths etc. isn’t really needed to come to the conclusion that more Islamic immigration is probably a very bad idea.
“So how can you know ahead of time whether something is a threat or not, other than the evidence of your own eyes, and history?”
Well, that’s enough, isn’t it?
“Well, that’s enough, isn’t it?”
Apparently not. France voted for it’s own dissolution. Germany sure to follow.
Well yes, but you mention real-life examples of Islamic intolerance…why do you feel the need to opine on what’s in the Koran (have you read it? I haven’t) or what Islamic theories of war (which may or may not be relevant today, depending on whom you ask) have traditionally mandated? That’s merely giving people an opportunity for claiming you don’t know what you’re talking about.
(and I’d be careful even with some of the examples of present-day Muslims behaving badly…it’s not clear in all cases that Muslims are the aggressors, e.g. you could plausibly construct a case that Uighurs in Xinjiang are merely reacting against Chinese colonialism).
That’s a bit of an over-simplification, but I see your point. Anyway, I’m merely stating my own opinions, if I had any clear idea what to do about the present situation, I wouldn’t be just a pseudonymous commenter on some blog.
yes i read all of it (and the associated stuff) after 9/11 – that’s how i know Isis in Syria have been behaving exactly as allowed in the Koran, for example with the Yazidis – almost suspiciously so – to make it difficult for Muslims to condemn.
sure – i let myself get side-tracked into that aspect. my main beef is with the entire western political-media class denying what the Koran actually says (regardless of whether people act on it or not)
#
on a side note this is very relevant to what is going on at the moment with the US admin
US generals are making the same mistake they made in the Cold War; they are prioritizing “winning” a short term guerrilla campaign against groups like Isis using Muslim proxies – Kurds, Iraqis etc – so they don’t want Trump to say anything negative about Islam and don’t want travel bans etc.
by doing so they are just ensuring the guerrilla campaign will eventually come to the US.
I agree with you about travel bans, immigration restriction…it’s just dumb that even after 9/11 the US has let so many Muslims immigrate…the US could isolate itself from the Muslim world easily if it wanted (Europe’s position is much worse in this regard because of geography and a much higher number of Muslims).
I don’t think though that some great speech about the evils of the Islam would be helpful…admittedly it’s disgusting that Trump will probably give some pro-Islamic eulogy in Saudi-Arabia of all places. But it’s actually true, if you want to defeat ISIS you have to some degree to work with Islamic actors in the region, and I don’t think there’s a need to pointlessly antagonize ALL Muslims there. The problem is more that the US and other western countries are allied with the very worst and most extreme actors in the region like Saudi-Arabia and other Gulf states.
Anyway, respect for having read the Koran…I don’t imagine it was a fun experience for you (certainly wouldn’t for me).
if you want to remain in the region and defeat Isis in the region then yes
but the US could simply leave the region entirely
or, if Israel or oil is keeping them there then simply invade Saudi, ship out all the non locals, take the oil and let the Arabs go back to herding camels in the desert – removing their revenue source would solve 90% of the problem world wide.
immoral obviously but no less so than the neocon wars we already have and much less stupid
yes – largely because they have vast sums of money to bribe people with
So you would have nothing against a mass immigration to Germany of Chinese or Koreans (or Latinos for that matter)? I kind of think it would be a shame to visit Germany and find no Germans there (or likely even sooner Holland without Dutch people), in fact this is the primary reason I am opposed to mass immigration.
I think it’s an intolerable security threat for a jihadi cult like ISIS to control a quasi-state…probably less so for the US, but certainly for Europe. So I want to see ISIS’ state destroyed. However, it’s certainly time for as much disengagement as possible from this dreadful region, presence of Western troops there is counter-productive, and regional actors should do the main work of combating ISIS and similar groups. For that one has to maintain relationships with the various actors in the region, so too much open clash-of-civilizations rhetoric should probably be avoided (that doesn’t mean though that one shouldn’t take steps to restrict Islamic influence in the west and stop Islamic immigration…that’s absolutely necessary).
Yes, corruption certainly plays a large part in this.
No, I didn’t express myself clearly enough, you’re right, I’m opposed to mass immigration in general, and I don’t think Islam by itself is THE problem. However there are still important differences…if by some sort of miracle several hundred thousand young Chinese women had come to Germany in 2015 instead of hordes of mostly Islamic young men, the consequences would probably have been rather different…
sure but Assad would have won years ago if Isis hadn’t had funding from Saudi Arabia
(and covert support from neocons in the US)
Excellent – good for you. Did you come across this verse?
“Allah does not forbid you from those who do not fight you because of religion and do not expel you from your homes – from being righteous toward them and acting justly toward them. Indeed, Allah loves those who act justly.” (60:8)
How did you simply dismiss that in your evaluation?
I had another exchange with a person on this same topic. He didn’t provide any useful answers – perhaps you will.
There is no difficulty – Daesh has been condemned by the most knowledgeable Muslim scholars and institutions around the world. Here is some proof, you can go down to the bottom to see the list of names:
http://www.lettertobaghdadi.com/14/english-v14.pdf
Also this one (by a scholar who is no friend of the Assad government and is currently in exile in Morocco):
http://www.refutingisis.com/
Tell me why the top scholars of the world – who have studied this religion for 40-50 years – have no problem condemning and refuting Daesh and their actions while you think they are legitimate. Do you think they haven’t read the Qur’an? Do you think they haven’t memorized the Qur’an?
And you can also tell me why one of the first things Daesh did was to eliminate hundreds of the most knowledgeable Muslim scholars in Iraq:
Why is Daesh so extreme that is has been condemned by al-Qaeda and even Salafi jihadist preachers like al-Maqdisi in Jordan:
“Denouncing the extremism of the Islamist group that, according to him, is shedding the blood of other Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and setting a bad example for the youth across the region, Maqdisi said he had received death threats ahead of the release of his statement from rival groups for being allegedly biased against IS.”
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/07/jordan-maqdisi-jihad-iraq-isis-caliphate-qaeda.html#ixzz4hUIpm8Em
Why is it that the people who join Daesh are consistently the least knowledgeable Muslims? Oliver Roy profiled 100 people who either committed terrorism in France or Belgium or went to fight for Daesh from there. He came to these conclusions:
“They did not live in a particularly religious environment. Their relationship to the local mosque was ambivalent: either they attended episodically, or they were expelled for having shown disrespect for the local imam….To summarise: the typical radical is a young, second-generation immigrant or convert, very often involved in episodes of petty crime, with practically no religious education, but having a rapid and recent trajectory of conversion/reconversion, more often in the framework of a group of friends or over the internet than in the context of a mosque. The embrace of religion is rarely kept secret, but rather is exhibited, but it does not necessarily correspond to immersion in religious practice…No matter what database is taken as a reference, the paucity of religious knowledge among jihadis is glaring.”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/apr/13/who-are-the-new-jihadis
It says a lot of things – the better question is; who is qualified to interpret it and derive rulings from it? Answer this, and you’ve answered the puzzle.
Peace.
Debating about individual Koran verses is quite pointless for most of us reading here; and the standard reply to you pointing to “philanthropic”, tolerant verses in the Koran would be “Yes, but those verses come from early in Mohammed’s career when his movement was weak, later on with success he got far more bloodthirsty and intolerant, and Islam deals with contradictions in the Koran by abrogation, that is later verses override earlier ones” (not saying this argument is valid in this case or in general, but it would be the standard reply).
Anyway, whatever may be in the Koran or not, as I pointed out above it seems quite clear that pretty extreme views, by modern Western standards, are not that uncommon in many parts of the Islamic world; some of the results in the PEW survey I mentioned above are extremely disturbing (e.g. majorities in Pakistan and Afghanistan think “apostates” deserve death, about half of Egyptian Muslims think sharia should apply to non-Muslims as well)…it doesn’t matter to me if those people are misunderstanding what’s in their sacred texts, their immigration to western countries would obviously be extremely undesirable.
you know what abrogation means – and so do i
There is every difficulty in condemning their specific actions – like taking Yazidi slaves – because those actions are specifically condoned in the Koran in the context of a legitimate jihad – which is why Muslim authorities don’t condemn their specific actions.
They condemn Isis on the basis that Isis does not have the authority to call a legitimate jihad.
How many Muslims do you know personally? If you get to know some Muslims you will see that their is a huge gap between what they claim to believe and what they really believe. I would say about 90% who say things like Sharia should apply to non muslims don’t really believe that.
One thing that I have never heard explained: If Islam is so bad, then how come Arab Christians love it so much? They have been living under Islamic rule for 1300 years and yet they all think Islam is great.
I suppose you have some personal experience of the Mideast (which I don’t have), so I probably can’t just dismiss this…but it seems like a pretty strange idea tbh.
Hey GR,
Quite right – I’m conducting a lesson in Epistemology 101 – please observe.
As I’ve made clear on multiple occasions; being that we Muslims are currently dealing with an Islamic reformation attempt gone seriously wrong (the Salafi-Wahhabi school that is only about 150 years old has splintered and almost exclusively is the backdrop ideology for the extremists) – I can see the wisdom in complete closure of borders.
Peace.
Now we are getting somewhere. Next step; abrogation implies chronological ordering of the verses of the Qur’an, but the verse I brought out comes in chapter #60, while the verse you appeal to is in chapter #9. How do you know which verse precedes the other? The Qur’an makes no internal reference on this matter.
Please read the links I sent before responding, I didn’t post them for my own benefit. They have been condemned for trying to revive the practice of slavery among other very specific as well as general acts. Furthermore, what right does Daesh have to unilaterally abrogate a standing dhimmah agreement that has been in place for centuries. What school of law allows this? Please cite a valid Muslim authority – since your opinion is irrelevant. This is not a boy scout religion. Imam Sarakhsi (ra) did not write Al-Mabsut (partially from memory due to him being in jail) so some anonymous non-Muslims could simply read the Qur’an in English and claim they legitimately know what the Shariah states on a given matter:
https://kitaabun.com/shopping3/product_info.php?products_id=2306
This is another consideration. You can’t just claim a ‘jihad’ and it automatically becomes one. Which scholars have backed them up? Scholars have readily accepted a jihad when it is valid. The latest one was that which was legitimized against the US invasion of Iraq by leading Muslim scholars (including the late Shaykh Ramadan Bouti [ra] – who I referenced early) around the world. Just like you can’t break into some guys house to steal his TV and then when he comes at you, you shoot him and claim ‘self-defense’. It doesn’t work like that except in the minds of those who are ignorant of the complexity of sacred law.
I’m asking simple questions; why have the Muslim scholars (who have spent decades of their life studying these source texts) condemned both the actions and the direction of Daesh? Why are Daesh targeting them for elimination?
Peace.
Hey GR,
Many of them certainly have a much more balanced approach to viewing the religion – especially the ones who are researchers and historians. Here is an article by Prof. Najib Saliba (an Orthodox Lebanese Christian):
http://www.syriacstudies.com/2013/07/09/christians-and-jews-under-islam-najib-saliba-phd/
I will say one thing though; these random religions like the Yazidis, Druze, Alawis are doomed. Not from Muslim oppression (that might actually revive them), but from education and progress. These cult-faiths where only a few elders know the divine secrets do great when the group is physically isolated and marginalized and the followers are poor, rural and uneducated. If Daesh was smart, they’d get these guys modern education and internet access. Try legitimizing the idea of a holy trinity consisting of the Prophet (pbuh), his son in law Ali (ra) and Salman al-Fasri (ra) (as God incarnate) in the post-atomic age. These guys won’t know what hit them; I’m guessing maybe 2 or 3 (possibly 4) generations before their identity basically becomes a psuedo-ethnic one.
This is actually a very good article on the subject – they will either go Shiah or Sunni. My bet is on the Sunni (if you see the way Bashar is seen praying in the many photo ops the government puts out – it is an obvious signal to the Sunnis):
“If they really want their religion to survive they need to be more aggressive in promoting it among their own. Eventually sheikhs will have to promote religious literacy to save their tradition’s viability*.”
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/even-with-syrias-iranian-ally-shiism-drives-alawites-to-religious-extinction/
Peace.
*And I think by actually making its beliefs open in the light of day – will be the death knell for their faith.
Nobody seems to know that Islam, until approx 1500, when Europe began conquering and terrorizing the world, the Islamic world was tolerant.
The Islamic world extended from present Morocco until in China, and to the middle of Africa.
Wealth came from overland trade, trough Africa, from China to present Turkey.
European shipping changed all that.
European guns were a great help, to suppress Muslims, the Dutch VOC in present Indonesia forbade Muslim traders to trade.
The Ottoman empire, wealth from overland trade went into decline.
As Europe conquered more an more, resistance increased.
Alas, nowhere in the Islamic world does one find much iron ore, or coal, so constructing good cannon was difficult.
When the west discovered the uses oof oil, thins went from bad to worse.
IS and terrorism have little to do with religion, much with resistance against oppression.
But, as Anatol Lieven already at the end of sept 2001 wrote in the Guardian, the west must attribute resistance by Muslims to their faith, otherwise the west has see itself eye to eye.
Yes, ISIS/Daesh needs to be slapped down, and hard. Why is this proving so difficult? Surely the Alawites and Christians (together well over 1/5 of the country, and presumably highly motivated), and with the only effective air support in the country barring the idiosyncratic US, can be organized into a force as effective as the Iranians and other Shiah who seem bizarrely to bear the brunt of the toughest fighting? Or have they lost all military qualities by now? I know the US is supporting al-Qaeda, which hurts the SAA, but then we’re also supporting the Iraqi army which has precious little to show for the fact.
Maybe an alternative would be to offer French or other Muslims in Europe free homesteading rights if they can conquer the land from Daesh? It might remove the most aggressive-minded — but then it’s almost certainly not going to work, the more pity that.
RB
For 10 points:
stood on lands formerly belonging mainly to
a) Christians
b) Hindus
c) Chinese
Those nasty imperialistic* Byzantines, thinking they had a right to rule … Byzantium!
*Hey, that’s actually the correct word! But surely, claiming as its sultans did the title of Qaysar-i-Rum (Caesar of Rome), the Ottoman Empire was also imperialistic?
I had to google it, it’s not very easy, because it’s totally been memory holed, and even Wikipedia doesn’t mention these claims (as if they were unimportant at the time to drum up support for the war).
So here are the results of my research (really took several attempts at googling to find them; I didn’t give up because I was already in my early twenties and I remembered having read that at the time):
1) this is a summary
2) a 1999 article claiming that “the allies now have a firm tally of 5,000 murdered Albanians, although this figure is thought to be a gross underestimate of the true scale of the atrocities. As many as 225,000 men from Kosovo are unaccounted for.”
3) this is an official NATO briefing, saying things like
“You have heard in the past our reporting to you of the number of men unaccounted for, we simply don’t know their whereabouts in Kosovo or what has become of them. We have talked in the past about a figure of around 100,000; more recent reporting that we have places that figure higher now, a figure of about 225,000 in terms of men who are unaccounted for. That does not mean a kill figure, that means unaccounted for, we do not know what their fate is, a large number of them could in fact be alive but the point is we don’t know their exact fate at this time and that is a figure that is part of the internally displaced figure of about 550,000 but we simply don’t know the actual fate of these particular men at this time. Those are men between the ages of 14 and 59 approximately.”
See how he doesn’t quite say that they killed these men, just that they didn’t know what happened to them, and they “could” in fact be alive (implying that they could already be dead).
4) here’s William Cohen saying that 100,000 men in Kosovo “may have been murdered”
I guess it’s enough. But it’s not on Wikipedia, it’s not even a scandal. I think the Iraq WMD scandal was huge and the people responsible should be in jail for the horrible torrent of pointless suffering unleashed, but this wasn’t any better, and it’s totally underreported. The Iraq WMD scandal is at least in the public consciousness.
I’m not so sure about that. The cult of Mithras did extremely well and the Freemasons even better (very nearly taking over much of the world) using that general game-plan. People (especially men) love secrecy and mystic rites in strange robes. Mithraism got its death-blow from Christianity which also had the dress-up-and-perform-rites aspect, and Freemasonry died (to the extent it has) from … well, I don’t know, becoming respectable, I guess, or more likely from its own offspring, anarchism, socialism, and communism.
Thanks. very revealing. In general, the terrible treatment of Serbs since the Cold War beggars belief. It’s a prime example of how nationalisms are arbitrarily dumped in the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ category based on nothing more than geopolitical affiliation.
Iraq was an example of ‘men not measures’. It was one of the more stupid wars America has gotten into, but it was broadly in keeping with post FDR foreign policy. However, there was temporary political advantage for the inner party (the Democrats, media etc.) in exposing what a FUBAR the whole thing was, so they did, even at the cost of the long-term legitimacy of the regime.
First, by specifying 12 years, I was clearly including Bush, not, as someone said, making a ‘neocon talking point’
Secondly, the following are humiliating:
1) Failing to defeat insurgents in Afghanistan.
2) Failing to defeat insurgents in Iraq.
3) Allowing Iran to de facto take over Iraq after you just spent billions of dollars trying to make it an American satellite.
4) Giving a big speech in Cairo about how things are finally looking up in the Arab world then watching as everything turns to s**t.
5) Declaring ‘red lines’ then doing nothing while people openly flout them.
6) Telling Putin to stay away from Ukraine then doing nothing when he ignores you.
7) Having your embassy sacked by Libyan peasants.
8) Having roughly 1,000,000,0000 memes on the internet about how Putin has just humiliated you once again ‘like a boss’.
Now, you may respond that the best way to stop being humiliated so much is to stop picking fights and keep out of it. And you would be right. Putin, certainly the greatest statesman of our time, has a simple rule: only ever pick fights you know you will win. Reagan had the same rule.
So far, Trump also follows this rule. The fact is that Russia huffed and puffed and did squat; Trump increased his popularity in the Arab world, Putin lost a bit of cred. Trump 1 Putin 0.
Now, I agree that none of this is very important, but that’s actually my point: none of this is very important.
That’s my impression of what Assad has been doing since the beginning of the war. That’s what Israel did during the War of Independence, and it’s what a number of Central European countries did to their German minorities after WWII. It’s completely understandable, given the mortal threat Sunni Arabs pose to the continued existence of Syria’s Alawites. In the Sunni Arab mind, Alawites are worse than Christians or Jews – they are at best pagans or even apostates who should be killed on sight, not rulers over the faithful. In 1992, Robert Kaplan predicted chaos upon Assad pere’s passing. He was early, but prescient, nonetheless.
If you’re referring to terrorist attacks in Europe I don’t think so. While European terrorists may pledge allegiance to ISIS, they (most of whom are of North African origin) are largely home grown. Moreover, to the extent that ISIS is a direct threat, it is to neighbouring (and perhaps) regional countries, so let them deal with it.
The ultimate irony, or perhaps not, is that ISIS is a direct result (unintended or perhaps not) of US-led policy in Iraq and Syria. General Flynn noted this publicly some time ago, which is no doubt when the knives began to be sharpened for him.
It is not unlike the situation in Afghanistan, where there would almost certainly be no Taliban if the US had not gotten involved at an early stage (including almost certainly “seeding” the ground for Russian intervention in 1979).
For me the US (my former country) is, and has been for a long time, the great destablizing force in the world. For it to claim the moral high ground is ludicrous. You’re probably too young to remember, but without US intervention (including bombing, more than the entire amount in WWII) there would have been no Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. And when the Khmer Rouge was eventually overthrown by the neighbouring Vietnamese, what was the US reaction? It supported the Khmer Rouge at the United Nations.
Of course, in the Middle East one cannot dissociate US policy from that of its so-called 51st state.
I agree completely, although I have found the discussion quite interesting. In the Bible one can find verses supporting diametrically opposing points of view on lots of subjects (e.g., Jesus on family values) and it serves no useful purpose pointing to a particular verse to defend the virtue of your religion. I imagine those who suffered at the hands of the Inquisition would not have found much comfort in Jesus’s words to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).
It is largely true, I believe, or at least until pre-Israel times it was. Even today, there is quite a thriving and vibrant Jewish community in Iran, which comes as a surprise to many Westerners.
While Jews had generally had good relations with their Muslim neighbors pre Zionism, they were never as gung ho about Islam as Arab Christians are. Arab Christians are the biggest Islamophiles you will ever meet.
There really isn’t. It’s a dying community that likely will be completely extinct in 50 years. And unlike in the Arab world, the Jews had bad relations with the Iranians long before Zionism.
Largely,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamidian_massacres
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians#Persecution_of_Christians_under_Islamic_rule
Between 1500-1800 things were a lot better though, that’s true enough.
quite thriving is about right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Jews
But it used to be bigger
I wonder why?
Oh.
It seems to be a worldwide convention adhered to by all when describing Jewish communities that ‘thriving’ means ‘not thriving’.
Post-1979 has obviously not been so easy for Jews in Iran. But then again, going back to an earlier point I had made, post-1979 Iran would certainly have been a lot different had it not been for US/British intervention in Iran, notably the 1953 “coup”.
That being said,
Jewish life in Iran was ‘always better than in Europe’
http://www.dw.com/en/jewish-life-in-iran-was-always-better-than-in-europe/a-38847143
For the record, my father was Jewish (although he gave it up pre-Bar Mitzvah for reasons that I have never discovered) and when he was stationed in the US Army near Virginia Beach at the outbreak of WWII, there were signs on the beach “No dogs or Jews allowed”. He also couldn’t get in the University of Pennsylvania (he was from Philadelphia) because of Jewish quotas.
I could answer all your points, but my point was that it was far from a certainty, and this coupled with the other fact that the Americans are thoroughly uninterested in an impartial investigation should be enough to make it at least questionable.
What was the most famous false flag of history?
I find that fascinating for a couple of reasons. The big one, I guess is that he was in the Army when WWII broke out. Assuming he wasn’t an officer, that’s pretty blue collar. Heck for the Northeast being an Army officer was pretty blue collar at the time.
There have always been Jewish intellectuals. But once upon a time, there were working class Jews. Athletes (Philadelphia Hebrews, Hammering Hank, a number of successful boxers, etc).
Even Koufax though he was from a slightly later era.
All gone now. I’ll leave it to others to speculate about “the Tribe” or whatever. But now they are all metrosexual Bobos. And they used to be a lot more interesting and varied. Now it’s just Billy Kristol’s or Eric Cantor’s wherever you look.
Heck they even seem like they’ve lost the music.
Yes, Russia and Iran support the internationally recognized government of a UN member state, which is not only higher IQ, but also is more popular, than the other groups, while America is supporting dumb headchopper rebels. That is what I call meddling. I’m totally opposed to supporting dumb rebels against a more or less civilized (admittedly by low third world standards) government. OK, unless you ca
America didn’t meddle in South Vietnam, because that was an ally, and the government was more popular there than the commies, also it represented a saner ideology than the idiotic commies. (But it was ineffectual, so perhaps it would’ve been better not to support it too much.) The USSR, however, did meddle there, at least I would use that word to describe their involvement.
The survey I gave you indicates that it’s half of the almost exclusively Sunni refugees. Half of the Sunnis is at most 35% of the population, not half. And since the refugees skew Sunni, probably they skew to the opposition, too. So the real number might be even lower. Any other group can only drum up a tiny fraction of the well over 60% support the government seems to enjoy, at least based on that data point. Since the rebels can still hold their own, it also points to the rebels being more ruthless.
Also, since the most popular opposition group is the FSA (which has very little military presence), probably most opposition supporters are quite lukewarm in their support. Lukewarm opposition supporters can be ruled easily. In Hungary the majority of the population thought Kádár (the party first secretary installed by the Soviets after the revolution in 1956) to a traitor, best be hanged. But they were lukewarm enough that the government managed to organize a mass rally already on May 1, 1957. This leaves us with an unruly 15-20% of the population, which is itself quite divided among supporters of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other smaller groups. I don’t understand why you think it’d be impossible to rule over this small minority. As always, it’d need some violence and a credible threat to use more violence. As has always been the case. People that traveled there extensively told me that Syria has always had a very large and visible military and security forces presence, at least in the large cities. Assad’s problem was that he (partially) liberalized the system.
You seem to believe that Assad could just easily resign and go into exile. That is not the case. His family has a line of succession, so he cannot just resign. He’s not the Führer of Syria, just the most senior member of the ruling clan.
The Russians couldn’t easily drop him, especially not with the Iranians and Hezbollah there (on whom they also rely on the ground, because of the low quality of government troops), the FSA is an enemy of the Russians, their only allies there are the minorities. If they dropped the minorities, they would gain nothing in exchange.
I don’t think I answered all your points, but I have no more time.
I seriously doubt that.
Dunno. I can tell you that I have heard anecdotal stories from Navy veterans that you would see actual signs in Virginia Beach circa the 60’s and before that said: “Dogs And Sailors Stay Off The Grass.”
I always took it to mean “Pass out somewhere else,” and given the nature of their other Sea Stories it wasn’t just a random thing.
Not a stretch for me to believe “No dogs or Jews allowed” except: Jews in the South tended to have been there for generations. They had their areas where they lived. Everyone knew where those were. Nobody talked about it. No one cared.
That one is pretty hard for me to get. Not sure why anyone in the Norfolk area would have had a sign specifically mentioning Jews. The South I am familar with wouldn’t have been thinking about them at all really, for good or ill.
Reichstag fire.
Fine, let’s drop it. My wife’s mad at me anyway.
Same here. She just doesn’t understand that it’s really important stuff. Like someone’s wrong on the internet!
He was ROTC at Temple University so he was a lieutenant at that stage. Within 3 years he was a lieutenant colonel (and shortly thereafter a full colonel, I believe). But his parents (immigrants from what is now Ukraine) were obviously working class.
…the US could isolate itself from the Muslim world easily if it wanted
I would have agreed with you before Trump was elected. Now I think that the idea that we can regain control our borders is up for grabs.
Thanks. It seems obvious but is rarely mentioned, and if mentioned is poorly understood.
In the debate with Macron, Le Pen came across as uninformed and unprofessional. She didn’t have the numbers right, she looked doomed.
I agree with you, that Sarrazin for example gives a pretty good analysis of the European Union and the Euro. But – big but: Marine Le Pen is simply not able to communicate these facts and thoughts – and I even doubt, that she understands the more complex ones like the OMT-system or the Eurobonds or the masked Italian deficit-spending via credits from Brussels…
As I said: She would have been much better off, if she would have cold-bloodedly copied Fillons concepts, including his proposals for a EU-reform.
PS
Sarrazin did not necessarily opt for the end of the Euro – and I think, he has good reasons for his position.
Anyone in the southern euro countries sees th
No need at all to be able to analyse the ECB hocus pocus, and tricks.
Anyone in the southern euro countries understands that the euro took away the mechanism by which these countries became competitive over and over again, devaluation.
The absence of this mechanism is he cause of the staggering unemployment figures in those southern countries, the reason Italy realises it must leave the euro.
Sarrazin indeed just writes that we do not need the euro, he can live with it if Maastricht is not violated.
As a German this is understandable, Germany is the country that benefits, easy exports in the euro zone, and control over Brussels.
Yes, it’s pretty clear that the US regime is in fact continuing with the regime change effort in Syria, despite the increasingly desperate denials of Trump apologists.
That initial report you linked contains only information form the US side and many of its assertions (“pre-agreed deconfliction zone”, “in the apparent vicinity of US troops operating inside Syria”, “designed to protect the US forces based at Tanf”) appear to be deceptive at least, if not outright false. Here’s another discussion of the strikes by an informed analyst:
Incident at Al-Tanf
According to Syrian sources quoted, a convoy of five T62s was attacked, two of them destroyed and an AA gun damaged and six more Syrian military or members of allied military force were murdered by the US regime.
(I use the term “murdered” because that is what it is when you intentionally kill members of a foreign military with whom you are not at war, as of course all the American Greasy-type hypocrites who try to dismiss it as just hardball foreign relations and no big deal would undoubtedly insist, while weeping and wailing and insisting on retaliation, if it were American servicemen similarly killed.)
Hey Hector – yup I’m around the Chicago area. Love it here. Weather takes a bit of getting used to, but hey – life’s about bigger things.
Peace.
as of course all the American Greasy-type hypocrites who try to dismiss it as just hardball foreign relations and no big deal would undoubtedly insist, while weeping and wailing and insisting on retaliation, if it were American servicemen similarly killed.
Greasy is an Israeli, or at the very least an Israel Firster from the US. Rest assured there’d be no weeping and wailing from him if American servicemen were killed.
As for Greasy’s nationality, if you say so.
But it makes no difference to my point. Those displaying his attitude are almost always hypocritical whether it’s an America or an Israeli doing so, given that the kind of militarist who makes such faux cynical comments dismissing murderous acts of aggression as just hardball foreign affairs is almost invariably the very same ones who weep and wail and rend their shirts the most about military casualties of their own side (be it Israeli or American).
(Actually I disagree with you about Israelis and/or Israeli firsters not weeping and wailing about US military casualties – that’s exactly what such men would almost always do, in public, if the killing could be blamed (truthfully or falsely, it makes no difference) on rivals or enemies of Israel, in the hope that they can thereby increase their leverage to “influence” US policy in the directions they want it to go.)
That’s almost certainly a “tall tale”, a sailors’ story that maybe grew from one actual incident, with the original of course possibly being facetious. Snopes has a page on it, for what that’s worth.
Bruce Lee picked it up for “Fists of Fury” and I think the theme has become more popular since then (besides having spread to China).
Hey JR,
There are a few complications here – let’s take it point by point:
Yup.
Yup.
Nope – only the extremists claim this based on a minority opinion rejected by all the other schools. As Shaykh Muhammad Yaquobi pointed out; apostasy is an act – you actually have to be Muslim in the first place to be able to apostate. Alawis aren’t Muslim, ergo, apostasy is logically impossible.
Only the extremists take this position. Sh. Yaqoubi is a foe of the Syrian government and has been exiled, yet he makes it clear Alawis are no different than other non-Muslim citizens as far as legalities are concerned:
“From a theological point of view, we oppose this because people may be unbelievers, they may be polytheists, but they may not be killed. These extremists who pose this ‘challenging’ ideology—it doesn’t challenge anything. Their numbers are very small and everyone opposes them, all scholars including Ikhwaan. Here is the major difference between the Hanafi school and the opinion of Ibn Taymiyya (whose positions are not adopted by any of the four schools, but only by the Salafis): Although ‘Alawis are considered kufaar in the Hanafi school, as a sect we accept their legal presence within the Muslim community. They are not to be executed as murtadiin [apostates], because they were not Muslims who rejected Islam. They were born within their sect!”
http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/sheikh-muhammad-al-yaqoubi-interviewed-by-syria-comment/
And even if they were hypothetically apostates, I can’t think of a single scholar that states that the apostate is not given a public trial before punishment.
Yup – damn straight. When we see a Western country’s entire security, military and highest government branches being staffed and run by, say, Jews or Hindus – we’ll think about being open to being lectured.
I mean, I guess the West can virtue-signal and say; hey man, we’re so totally cool with that because of liberal awesomeness, why aren’t you?
Muslims don’t play that game.
Peace.
Hola Senor,
Good points. I would say, I doubt the Cult of Mithra would survive in the post-atomic age either. People do seem to like those strange rites and secret societies, and I’ve heard/read of very credible accounts of occult practices within the place that hold the levers of power; government, Hollywood, etc. I would say, these secret societies, based on acquisition of power, will likely retain these practices, but it likely won’t keep a hold on the masses; I mean, are the freemasons easy to join for your average plumber?
By the way, I’m just stating a personal opinion here – obviously not a fact – this thing has always rubbed my the wrong way. There’s just something about it that exudes an ancient pagan vibe:
https://www.google.com/search?q=sedia+gestatoria&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwjQoeOwrvzTAhUrKsAKHUf_A3YQ_AUIBygC&biw=1344&bih=774
I’m sure there is some justification for it.
Peace.
“I seriously doubt that.”
Well, you shouldn’t doubt it because my father told me he saw it and he certainly wouldn’t have lied about it. And his is not the only first hand recollection.
And here’s another
I do. It sounds suspiciously like that urban/sailors’ legend already mentioned.
Steve Sailer has already had any number of blog posts (it seems to be an obsession with him) documenting the exaggerated stories about Jewish exclusion from golf clubs, and your two written mentions are from Jews in exactly the same context. Others exist online, all in the same vein.
“No dogs or …” seems to be a fairly common theme, which has actually become reality in China with Chinese referencing “Fists of Fury”.
So my best guess: No Dogs, Irish, Jews, Blacks, Sailors, Mexicans, Chinese — but most especially, no photos. No protests at the time either in a time of fairly philosemitic government and an extremely philosemitic press.
It was tolerant in comparison with European Christendom which was an exceptionally intolerant civilization by world historical standards. I’m not sure Islamic tolerance was that great when compared with Greco-Roman antiquity or Chinese civilization. It certainly rejected in principle that non-Muslims could have equal legal standing with Muslims, and there were at least episodes of pretty hardcore Islamic religious violence (e.g. Almohads and Almoravids).
Yes, US policy in this regard has been pretty disastrous and has certainly contributed much to empowering Jihadist movements. In hindsight it was a bad idea to support the Mujahideen in Afghanistan (probably totally not worth it, since the Afghan war seems to have had at best a small impact on the decline of Soviet power).
Regarding ISIS, personally I think their controlling some kind of state can’t be tolerated, it’s a huge inspiration for jihadis everywhere, also offers capabilities for training terrorists on an unprecedented scale. But it’s a difficult question what to do…endless Western interventions in the region will probably make the situation only worse.
Yes, I don’t think you can really “understand” a religion just by looking at its texts…it’s what its believers do, that counts, and sometimes the relation between the two isn’t that clear.
No, I think that actually really was a thing in parts of the US, there’s even a term for it: resort antisemitism (similar to Bäder-Antisemitismus in Germany, that is exclusion of Jews from certain resort areas, spas etc.: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A4der-Antisemitismus ).
What someone promises while in opposition and while fighting a staunch foe in fear for its very existence is quite different from what that someone says (or does) once ensconced in power. If Khomeini had promised to annihilate the Communists (the Tudeh Party) once the Shah was overthrown, the Soviets would have killed him while he was in Paris, rather than order Tudeh members to cooperate with him in Iran.
Non-Muslims in Muslim majority countries are imprisoned, tortured or killed for chance remarks concerning Islam all the time. The Christian mayor of Jakarta, the capital of an ostensibly moderate Muslim state, is in prison for disagreeing with the Koranic contention that Muslims should not be friends with non-Muslims. Muhammad isn’t even mentioned in the Bible. It’s not hard to imagine the kinds of fireworks that would ensue when an Alawite says – in the presence of a Sunni Arab – that Muhammad is but one of the prophets, and that Ali is the religion’s Jesus figure. Daniel Pipes has the goods on the religious basis for the ummah’s visceral hatred of Alawites:
Clerics far older and far more influential than Yaqoob have declared Alawites to be persona non grata, to be killed whenever possible:
Over a thousand years of Sunni persecution bely soothing words by Sunni Arab clerics hoping for a quick victory over their Alawite opponents:
The weight of both history and contemporary Sunni Muslim treatment of religious minorities less objectionable (to Sunnis) than Alawites would tend to discourage the notion that the Alawites would be better off surrendering to the Sunni Arabs rather than expelling them from Syria.
Yes, but that’s due to the political system in the US…obviously my statement would only apply if the system were responsive to popular pressure…that may indeed be no longer the case…
Steve Sailer notwithstanding, not every story is an urban legend. And we’re not talking about golf clubs. My father told me about this in the 1960s, recounting what he had seen with his own eyes in 1941. I am sure he was telling the truth, and the fact that one can easily find other first hand accounts supporting his observation only adds further weight.
So my best guess: No Dogs, Irish, Jews, Blacks, Sailors, Mexicans, Chinese — but most especially, no photos.
I guess my father should have taken a picture on his cell phone and posted it to his twitter account?
I realize that this is a controversial point, and that lots of people deny that such signs existed. I am not saying that they were common, but I know, as far as it is possible to know, that in this particular case related to me by my father that such a sign did exist.
And it should not be all that surprising: that anti-semitism was not uncommon in those days in the US is no secret, even if at certain levels of government the “Jewish lobby” already had a substantial degree of influence.
Point taken, although as you acknowledge yourself the “Reds” in Poland are not a politically significant force. Thanks for the information though, I was unaware that the communist party was still legal.
Two points are important to consider in that regard.
First, much of the actual motivation for western-based jihadists has come from US sphere mainstream media demonising the Syrian government. The second generation immigrants in Britain who have been the targets for recruitment do watch BBC news, even if they are selective about which bits of the BBC propaganda they choose to regard as propaganda and which they take as gospel (the latter being the stuff that aligns with what people in their own community are saying about the evils of Assad and the Syrian government). I’ve no doubt much the same applies to second generation immigrants throughout the countries of the US sphere.
Second, it’s US sphere (and I include in that US protectorates such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel as well as military official allies such as Turkey) policies that allowed IS to gain control of large areas of land, and US sphere policies that mostly have prevented IS from being defeated by the Syrian and Iraqi governments, by keeping the former menaced and worn down by constant fighting in more vital areas to the west and the latter constrained from dealing with the matter with the required force and required levels of Iranian backing. Without massive external backing from or winked at by Gulf Arab states and later logistical access allowed by Turkey, IS would never have lasted more than a few months, even against the Iraqi and Syrian government forces with their allies.
If the existence of IS as a territory were really the concern of US policy makers, they would have been putting pressure on the Gulf Arabs and Turkey, not Syria and Iran, and the problem would have been solved years ago.
I don’t see any justification or grounds for saying that European countries are more entitled to use immigration restriction than the US, unless you want to operate from a basis other than the nation state.
Let’s put it this way. I think both tribal societies and cosmopolitan societies (to use very coarse descriptions) have their costs and benefits. I think most people, most of the time, like to live in relatively homogeneous ethnic communities (that would be the ‘tribal’) model. However, there are minority groups all over the world who don’t have their own nation-states. (The Roma are one, my own Tamil ethnic group in south India is another, until the foundation of the State of Israel Jews were in that position, etc..) And there are individuals who for whatever reason don’t feel much attraction to ‘their’ nation-state. Maybe they don’t feel a deep connexion to people like them, maybe they rank high on the “Openness to Experience” personality trait and thrive on difference and diversity, maybe they’re really attracted to cultures and groups other than their own, maybe they have differences with their government, maybe they face persecution, maybe they just don’t like the weather in Israel or Poland or whaerever. Unless there are strong reasons to prohibit them migrating (and I’m not opposed in principle to countries limiting emigration as well as immigration) I think the world is a better place if people like that have a place to live too. And let’s be honest, a lot of Asia and Africa are really terrible places to live, as Talha noted; people do have a legitimate interest in leaving.
That interest has to be balanced against other interests, of course: I don’t believe in an abstract right of global freedom of movement. Peoples and nation states have a legitimate interest in preserving the ethnic and cultural identity of their societies, nation states also have an interest in not seeing their most skilled people all leave, and so forth. Freedom of movement is a good that needs to be balanced against many other goods. I think the way to balance competing goods is to have a multiplicity of societies, some with closed borders and others with relatively open ones. I don’t want all the world’s societies to be open to mass migration, but I think it’s a good thing if some, or at least a few, are. It was good for European Jews back in the day that America existed as a sort of refuge, for example. It might be good for European Roma today if they were able to migrate to America. It’s good that Talha can live somewhere besides Pakistan, since he clearly doesn’t like the idea of living there any more than I would want to live in India. As long as we’re going to have a world in which there are some cosmopolitan centers for migration, the US and Canada are the most plausible countries to fill that role.
Where I violently disagree with the liberals is that I don’t think America’s openness to migration is an unfettered good. It’s a fettered good, in other words it comes with serious costs as well as benefits, and it needs to be balanced against other competing goods. I don’t want to universalize American immigration policy any more than I would want to universalize communism or capitalism or any other political value-system.
This is fucking ridiculous:
This is really simple stuff. No hypocrisy.
As for the US strikes specifically: if Trump really wanted to remove Assad, Assad would be out. My defense for Trump’s actions is that he is operating under certain political restraints that limit his options and force his hand in scenarios like this (Trump ran on repealing DACA, ending the refugee program and leaving NAFTA but he has done none of those things because he simply cannot). Anybody who can’t see this is either willfully blind or just a fucking idiot; in your case it might be a bit of both.
Even though I hate Syrians, I don’t want the US involved in bringing Assad down. But if Trump has to kill some Syrians to stay in power, it’s a cheap loss as far as I’m concerned and 99.99999999% of Trump voters feel the same way. But despite all that, Trump has managed to greatly improve US relations with Russia and so far has done an admirable job of preventing the expansion of US involvement in Syria, despite truly massive pressures to do just that. Pressures that you obviously don’t appreciate or understand.
Remember: Ron Paul was a homo who had 0 popular support and his butt boy brigade are 1000 times more marginal than even Jill Stein supporters are. Outside of the Islamic world, Latin America and the internet (we’ll call it ILAI for short), nobody gives a shit about the Syrians, the Iranians or the Palestinians. Trump could order the physical extermination of every Alawite man, woman and child and live stream it online and non ILAI’s wouldn’t even blink. It is not that Americans, Italians, Indians and Japanese don’t know about the US/Jews killing Arabs/Muslims, they do, it’s that they don’t care. And that will NEVER change.
Here is how the Ron Paul Butt Boy Brigade operates: since they have 0 popular support they like to attach themselves to other movements and then think that they own them. In the mid 00’s they attached themselves to the anti war movement and thought “wow, the public cares about dead Iraqis as much as we do!”, and then after Obama was elected and it was revealed that the public never gave a shit how many Iraqis were killed, they just didn’t want American soldiers to be stuck in the middle eastern quicksand, the Butt Boys got real quiet. Alas, it was not to last because then Trump came along and they attached themselves to him only to scream betrayal with the whole Syrian thing. But the fact is that Trump’s election had nothing to do with wars in the middle east and his ultimate success and failure will be determined by how things shake out domestically.
As Golem said, “You don’t have any friends. Nobody likes you.” That said, you have provided some entertainment to real people. Rubbing your faces in the dirt never gets tiring.
It’s a little unclear to me what ‘it’ is that exudes a pagan vibe to you- what are you referring to exactly?
BTW I strongly disagree with you that religions like the Alawis- or more generally, ‘mystery religions’ with a tendency to construct complex cosmologies, etc.- can’t survive in the modern age. I’m not sure what you find inherently unbelievable about the Muhammad – Ali – Salman trinity, but lots of people find the Christian Trinity or the Hindu gods unbelievable / silly too. Some mystery religions (the Gnostics in late antiquity, the Manichaeans and later Albigensians, etc.) had very complicated cosmologies and were also able to develop quite a mass following. Manichaeanism lasted for a thousand years and was the state religion of the Uigher Kingdom, the Albigensians managed to convert much of France before they were wiped out by Catholic persecution, etc.. And then in our day there are the Mormons, as well as new religious movements like the Cao Dai in Vietnam.
What is it you find so unbelievable about the Alawi doctrine?
Cameras were widespread. I have plenty of pictures from my grandfather’s wartime service, several even from Europe. There was this substance called silver iodide, you see, and it had some remarkable properties…
I don’t know you or your father and, most importantly, I don’t know the circumstances of his recollection or of his retelling. My father once told me that when he was in college in Texas there was a law that if you found your wife in bed with another man you could shoot your wife, but not the man; now, he was undoubtedly sincere, but he was also wrong. Many tales get embellished in the retelling or even the remembrance, and since this is a theme so common in stories but so uncommon in reality, you will understand if I doubt this particular incidence.
I went hunting and all I could find that was remotely contemporary (still removed by quite a while) was that the Martha Washington hotel had billboards declaring it had a “Christian clientele” .
Would such an unnecessarily offensive thing have been likely in a town where the Mayor and prominent Christian leaders attended the cornerstone-laying of the local synagogue in 1950?
(http://www.isjl.org/virginia-virginia-beach-encyclopedia.html)
Where a Jew, Michael Wagenheim, became chair of the school board in neighboring Norfolk in 1944?
The Cavalier Hotel certainly barred negroes and jews, except as help in 1927: no mention of dogs, which is not surprising because the hotel allowed you to “bring your own hunting dogs”! As did most hotels at the time if 30s movies are to be gone by.
Is it possible that after too many viewings of “Fists of Fury”, your father mentally transposed “dogs” and “negroes”?
I don’t doubt you or your father at all.
For me though, the world I grew up in Jews were in the Old and New Testaments. You heard about … things circa 33 A.D. at the latest.
Now Jewish people were around. Not many. The grownups seemed to know who was Jewish and you might hear a comment about it. That was it. No special anything. Not even any curiosity really. It wasn’t till I was much older I realized that there were synagogues around. I had never paid any attention to them. It’s not like they were playing in the softball leagues like the Baptist and other churches.
Now the Norfolk area was one of the bigger metros around south of DC back then. Maybe it worked differently there, with people actually rubbing shoulders with people who actually cared or felt like sticking out.
But considering that was a military town – why would there have been more Jews there, and why would their pattern have been different than Charlotte, Atlanta, Birmingham, Charleston, any of the other southern cities?
You tell me this happens in DC or Baltimore and it makes more sense. I won’t say southerners were incapable of being antisemitic – simply that it just never came up in my life, and I never heard much about it as opposed to integration or something.
I don’t care much about the issue, but that’s not a convincing argument for most non-Jews (apart from Christian fundamentalist nutcases in the US). If you want to convince people to support Israel, you have to use other arguments (e.g. “Israel exists as a majority Jewish state, it would be unjust to dismantle it”, “Jews need and deserve their own nation state because of their long history of being persecuted” etc.).
The religious angle doesn’t work in today’s world except among a fairly restricted audience.
That’s really an inane comment. But you’re right, you don’t know my father and you don’t know me. I know what he told me was true, and the fact that you don’t accept this shouldn’t bother me, because after all I don’t know you either. Next, though, I suppose you will tell me that the Jewish quotas at the University of Pennsylvania was also a fiction?
What is so difficult about accepting that there used to be a fair amount of anti-Semitism in the US? I’m not Jewish (half Jewish, and never saw myself as Jewish) but even I experienced mild degrees of anti-Semitism growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. But I supposed you won’t believe this either?
An illustrative snippet of the US mainstream media propaganda machine at work, from the Guardian:
US jets attack Iran-backed militiamen in south-eastern Syria
Note that the only reason to believe it was “Iran-backed militia” that was targeted in the attack in Syria is the say so of the US and its regional tools. The Syrians officially describe the column that was attacked as a Syrian army operation. which seemingly included both regular Syrian army personnel and those of allied Iraqi militias. Whether any Iranians were there or whether Iran “backs” the militias in question (it does) is utterly irrelevant to the basic truth that this was a Syrian government operation. Of course, the falsehood is prominently advanced in the headline and the truth buried as “Russian and Syrian government statements” in the body of the piece.
Note that the US military has no legal basis for operating against Syrian government forces (whether or not “backed by Iran”) in Syria at all, and if US and proxy forces in al Tanf didn’t fancy being approached by the Syrian government forces coming to retake control of the area to pursue the campaign against IS in the east, then their only legitimate option was to leave, not to murder Syrian government military personnel in a supposed attempt to deter their movement within their own country. The US is openly flouting international law again, acting as though it is entirely above it, and the Guardian makes no mention of this inconvenient truth – something you would think a newspaper that claims to stand for a law based world would regard as quite important, and which they certainly would be shouting about at every opportunity if it were the Russians doing what the US is doing here.
Note that the Guardian attempts to push the transparently spurious US regime line that Iran supposedly needs a land route across eastern Syria in order to support its ally Hezbollah. Note the inherent absurdity of this claim, given that Iran has never before had such a route available, and that has not prevented it supporting Hezbollah against Israeli aggression perfectly adequately in the past. The road is certainly something desired by all the allies for obvious reasons, but it is not the primary concern that the US propaganda operation seeks to paint it as.
The primary concern is preventing the US regime and its regional proxies from blocking the reestablishment of Syrian territorial integrity, and the reason why US sphere propaganda is shifting in this way is probably to do with the likely near future loss of the “fighting IS” pretext for a presence on Syrian soil and the need to establish another one that maintains the pretence that this is not just about trying to regime change an uncooperative power that is a regional rival of Israel and of Saudi Arabia. “Preventing Iran from establishing a route to support Hezbollah” is transparent nonsense strategically and as a legal argument, but it’s good enough to bamboozle the propagandised and ignorant masses in the US and its European satellite states.
PC nonsense
Arab Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Muslim_conquests
Turkish Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire
Arab slave trade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade
Does anything I said suggest that there was no antisemitism in the US at the time?
Look, here is the primary fact: when the Cavalier Hotel barred Jews, it admitted dogs! How do you get beyond that point?
When did your father tell you this? It must either have been in your childhood or several decades later. If the former I suggest you misremembered it, if the latter that he did. Why are you so invested in the exact wording of one particular sign, which wording is incredibly unlikely, while exactly tracking a popular rumour/meme about various signs across the world, never substantiated!
the difference is no one tries to hide what is in the bible: comedians will point out strange rules from the Old Testament to mock it; journalists in interviews will specifically pick lines out of the New Testament as a moral club to use against people who claim a Christian motivation but there is total silence from the media-political class about what is in the Koran.
(and Muslims online lie about it all the time but you only notice that when you know what’s in it)
And nobody in his right mind should trust you and your coreligionists, “Bro”, even if you make a big show of being a “friendly” worshipper of the pedophile prophet, liking hockey, using colloquial Western language, and the other superficial trappings.
We personally know Christians living in the USA and Canada who had to flee their long-long-time homes and homelands (Syria, Iraq, and Indonesia, respectively) because of muslim violence and intimidation. (And yes, the muslims did plenty of that in those areas before the US et al. ever started these vicious and unnecessary non-defensive wars in the Mideast and Central Asia in the past 26 or so years.)
“Who are we going to believe, you (‘Talha’) or our lying eyes and ears?” as the sarcastic old question goes.
Not concerned with whether you “take me seriously.” I take your aggressive, hateful, expansionist religion quite seriously.
Also you’re mostly wrong to speculate that I “shave and wear a tie.” Rarely either, “Bro.”
This is just as much religious fanatic bullshit as anything the islamists come out with, and irrelevant to anyone who is even minimally rational and who does not share the minority religious interpretations making such Old Testament dictats relevant in any way to the modern state of Israel.
This is laughably untrue (except of course in the literal sense in which everybody human dies in the end, including all the people who lived long, happy and successful lives after killing jews or stealing their land over the past couple of millennia), as a matter of simple observable historical fact.
This is a fatuously irrelevant point, because the whole basis of my comment was that the US is not at war with Syria, and that is why Trump regime killings of Syrian soldiers in Syria are every bit as much murder as it would be if the Iranians were to launch a missile at a US air base in the US, or an Israeli military base in Israel tomorrow.
And of course in that event you would be beside yourself with outrage and demanding retaliation. Because you are, as I pointed out, a shameless hypocrite.
This is another open lie, because Trump has done exactly what you claim he has not and expanded US military operations in Syria, with now two open military strikes against Syrian government forces (something Obama never did) as well as the openly admitted deployment of US marines to Syria.
US Marines Move into Syria with Howitzers
military.com. 8th March 2017
Why do you even bother trying to push such easily refuted stupid lies?
I understand them all too well. I just think they should be opposed, not appeased as you seem be claiming to think is sensible.
This is not just a lie, but another particularly stupid one, considering he’s a long term married man with five children.
And this is why we got to get you married man.
Peace.
There’s another possibility, one which I mention only with trepidation, but which, if I may, seems to be suggested by this comment of yours…
Perhaps your father, being rather a jollier fellow than you, talking about discrimination in general, made what some might regard as a “humorous exaggeration” or even –bear with me– a joke? Which falling on dour ears failed to germinate, like the seed which fell on the path and was eaten by birds …
Hey RC,
Yeah – and I know Muslims whose families suffered tremendous pain during the sanctions on Iraq and their relatives couldn’t even send them medicine because it was illegal.
Let’s pile up the bodies on each side and let’s see whose pile is bigger.
I like Christians that actually live up to their Christian framework – they have much respect from me. I can’t take hypocrites of any stripe seriously.
Peace.
Look, it’s no big deal, perhaps as you say with the fog of time I misremembered. But on the other hand, perhaps it really was true. Okay?
Regarding the US attack on Syrian forces there’s an interesting comment by Giraldi here:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/report-u-s-bombs-pro-regime-forces-in-syria/
Hey Hector,
The ‘it’ is basically that ‘it’ looks like every painting I’ve seen of a god-emperor institution – like this:
http://factsanddetails.com/media/2/20120502-Tissot_Pharaoh_Notes_the_Importance_of_the_Jewish_People.jpg
Again, it’s just me – since we don’t have anything like that.
Without going into the logic of it. I mean if some people find the god-incarnate thing to be acceptable – then I can’t really see a reason why they wouldn’t accept god-incarnate into multiple people at once, or a volcano, or…so you’re right, somethings just appeal to some people.
Now – as far as historical evidence; none of these men claimed divinity and the Caliph Ali (ra) is on record as having a man executed for claiming he was divine. So – what does one exactly do with that? I guess one could say, well Muslims made everything up. OK – then what’s the proof that Salman al-Farsi (ra) ever existed? Unless he was able to secretly tell a super-secret bunch of elders the real truth and that they have carried this awesomeness with them to this day and only they know the what really went down, but they can’t divulge it because secret awesomeness.
Peace.
It strikes me that Muslims are in a remarkably similar position regarding Christ.
Was the man executed for claiming Ali or himself as divine?
Will possibly try to write more later; if not I recommend Benson (http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14021/pg14021-images.html) for a look at a world in which a slightly transfigured Freemasonry has become dominant as a facet of a kind of humanism.
Hey JR,
Correct – do you really think Sunnis are afraid of Alawis? We have the ball my friend and we are in the lead, all we need to do is run out the clock. The Alawis are on their way to being absorbed into either the Shiah or the Sunni. In fact, it’s the idiot extremists who are screwing up the whole thing. The Alawis were actually getting absorbed fairly rapidly (not as quick as the Druze, but still) because most don’t know their own faith and are marrying into other Muslim families – their children being raised as Muslims. This has precedence; the Mongols, the Turks all came in as non-Muslim conquerors into the Muslim lands – they were eventually absorbed. The best thing to happen to them was gaining power – the worst thing to happen to them was gaining power.
This is a good point. First, torture should be out completely. Second, blasphemy laws should not be used to score political points or stupid things like that. They are there for a specific reason; to make sure people do not denigrate or mock God or His messengers (pbut) in public. To use them for ulterior motives is mocking the law itself. I 100% agree with you that many times these are used for completely illegitimate ends. So I can certainly see Alawis being worried about this.
Problem here – Imam Ghazali (ra) was contemporaneous with the spreading of the sect among Muslims in medieval times – thus his pronouncement is actually valid, in that those Muslims were actually apostatizing. How does this contradict anything Sh. Yaqoubi said – do you know of Shiah or Sunni Muslims becoming Alawi? Really? The direction of conversion is only going one way.
As far as Imam Ibn Taymiyyah (ra) – Sh. Yaqoubi already mentioned him and made it clear his ruling goes against consensus – so why should we follow an extreme minority opinion? Sure, Salafi-Wahhabi extremists love his position – but that’s the problem – we’re talking about a Syria after the extremists have been eliminated or at least have laid down their weapons and dispersed.
Nonsense – Daniel Pipe’s opinion on the matter is irrelevant unless he can produce clear proof from our scholars. Sh. Muhammad Yaqoubi has already refuted this by stating the Hanafi position which is also backed up by the Maliki position (which is in one of the earlier links I provided) that they are to be treated as dhimmah. I mean, Mr. Pipes can keep repeating it as often as he likes – the fact is, the guys wearing turbans call the shots when the rubber meets the road.
You are sticking to the examples that support your narrative and completely ignoring the counter examples. For instance Malaysia, Morocco, Jordan are fairly good about the treatment of minorities – basically wherever the extremists can be kept in check. In fact, Morocco hosted a recent conference of prominent Muslim scholars that called on the Muslim nations and peoples to respect the rights of religious minorities – even the Yazidi leader spoke there:
“The gathering here of about 300 muftis, theologians and scholars last month responded far more broadly by issuing the Marrakesh Declaration, which calls for Muslim countries to tolerate and protect religious minorities living within their borders — among them Christians, Jews, Hindus and Bahais as well as Yazidis and Sabians.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/03/world/africa/muslim-conference-calls-for-protection-of-religious-minorities.html
One can say that the lion’s share of history would show that Jews had a better time living in Muslim lands, however, they definitely fair better in Christian lands now since about the 18th century. Things can change.
While I agree that the extremists need to be put into check before any meaningful dialog can begin – do you seriously think Alawis would win an all out war against Sunnis? Do you think Iran (who actually operate quite cautiously) would be stupid enough to back them up on that? How do you think they are still holding onto power? The Sunni economic sector supports them as well as a major part of their army being Sunni, not to mention the many Muslim scholars that have sided with (or at least stayed silent about) the government. Take a look at these photos:
https://www.google.com/search?q=bashar+assad+praying&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiKyYCf8vzTAhVL5WMKHX1yCUsQ_AUICigB&biw=1344&bih=774
I love this video; guys, guys – don’t screw it up, the Hanafis are watching !
Why is he praying like a Sunni Hanafi – who is he signaling to? The Shia chat rooms are lighting up about it. He married a Sunni wife. Is he supposed to expel her? Do you think his kids will be raised Alawi?
Peace.
Hola Senor,
He claimed the Caliph Ali (ra) was divine.
Interesting.
Peace.
Oh, you mean the pageantry surrounding the Papacy?
That’s fine, but three points.
1) obviously I’m a very heterodox Christian and don’t credit the claims of the Catholic Church myself.
2) Catholicism and Orthodoxy are quite up front about the fact that they borrow much of their institutional structure, manner of dress, art, etc. as well as much of philosophical superstructure, from pagan Greco-Roman models. That doesn’t make Catholicism or Orthodoxy a pagan religion: the core of the religion revolves around the Holy Trinity, to whom worship is due alone, and not to any pagan deities.
3) The pope is not at all equivalent to a pharaoh, a pagan high priest, etc., in that he faces very strict limits on his power. The scope of matters where he claims special authority is rather narrow, he doesn’t make any claims to be a direct intermediary with God or a “revelator” or anything like that, and plenty of popes have been excoriated after their death. One or two have even been accused of heresy, plenty have been considered criminal, and one even had his body dug up and put on trial.
I know a Muslim brother who became Sunni (coming out of the Dawoodi Bohri break away from the Ismaili branch). He recently stated most of the lay people don’t even know much of the doctrines and would be shocked at some of the more esoteric stuff that is kept out of the public eye.
And Bohras are far less heterodox than these other guys. Like I said, I think opening this stuff up to daylight will not do wonders for their faithful.
I mean, I think Christ was God Incarnate so obviously I don’t have a problem with the notion of God incarnating himself (or for that matter any sort of lesser being, e.g. an angel or the like, incarnating themselves). In theory I don’t see why God couldn’t take on any form he wished.
On the historical issue you have a good point. I’m aware Muhammed didn’t claim to be divine, and if Ali and Salman didn’t either then that poses a problem for the Alawi claims, I suppose. This also puts them in a different position than Christians, since the Gospels contain explicit and implicit statements of Christ’s divinity.
Do the Alawis claim to be the custodians of a secret revelation like you suggest? If so, then it’s certainly difficult to disprove their claim, you either believe it or you don’t.
NB: I’m a big fan of Tissot’s paintings myself.
The majority Sunni Arabs, for the same reasons the Assads have made a lot of aggressive noises vis-a-vis Israel without doing very much about it. Alawites have survived over 1000 years in the face of Sunni persecution. If they were going to convert, they would have done it long ago. Taqiyya isn’t just a Sunni custom – any minority looking to survive Sunni tyranny practices it. Next you’ll be telling me that Obama is a recreational skeet shooter, because of the White House issued photo of him with a shotgun.
Hey Hector,
I know – I don’t think people actually worship the pope at all. It’s what you said, it looks derived from pre-Christian norms. Again, it’s probably just inner bias since the big scholars/authorities in our tradition are on the down low when it comes to flashiness – here’s a photo of the late Sh. Abu Ghuddah (ra) with his teacher (who was one of the last great Ottoman Hanafi scholars) Sh. al-Kawthari (ra) – that’s about as classy as it gets:
http://aboghodda.com/oldimages/w_zahidbig.jpg
Dag yo! That’s hard core – did he win?
Peace.
Hey JR,
LOL! It’s never been, bro. It’s specifically a Shiah thing. Probably because they’ve always been the minority. I was friends with Shiah brothers back in UCLA – they were quite open about availing of the practice. It actually didn’t sound to bad to me, their motive was simply to not cause friction when there didn’t need to be in a majority Sunni environment.
And that’s fine if Alawis want to do taqiyyah actually – we only judge and interact with people people based on outward actions – God judges their intentions. So if they want power while pretending to be normal Muslims – awesome – go for it.
Peace.
Hey Hector,
That’s the thing, I don’t think anybody really knows what they believe. Have they published a widely known public work like Aqidah Nasafiyyah or Aqidah Tahawiyyah, etc.? I have no clue. I’m going off of what I’ve gleaned from open sources like these:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Alawite
http://religion.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-85
Peace.
You know, reading Talha’s material, and some stuff I’ve casually (yeah I used that word) googled.
Certain things sounded awfully familiar to me. A bit of reflection leads me to think though that groups find or instinctively know certain strategies. And while it’s not just religion (and I’ll admit Christianity did it, and probably still does it in some quarters), I mean communists or nazis probably used the same playbook. Or Deep Staters, or SJW’s…
Anyway, any of this sound familiar?
“The answer depends on how you define the word and to whom you are talking. For purposes of liberal religious examination, this is our working definition of a cult:
A religion or sect, generally considered to be extremist or false, under the guidance of an authoritarian, charismatic leader for whom members exhibit fixed, even religious, veneration.
Groups that meet this definition tend to have an escalating negative impact on the lives of followers. These groups exhibit many common characteristics:
Now obviously Mohammed has been dead for 13, 1400 years? And statements like “A religion or sect, generally considered to be extremist or false” are in the eyes of the beholder. After all, “The answer depends on how you define the word and to whom you are talking. ”
I might add a cynic (I’m one) could apply this to Richard Dawkins as well. Actually why not? I invite the philosophy department of Oxford to teabag my nuts. Add the biology department too if Dawkins still hangs out there.
What made do a google for something like this (this actually comes from our good friends, the Unitarians) was some of this stuff we’ve been covering about Islam (and some of Taleb’s writing on it).
Also kind of makes me think of Amway. And no, I’m not trying to be funny. I think that Islam, probably all religions, use techniques that are applicable in other areas.
Thing is, when it comes to religion, I want the TRUTH. And I can tell it isn’t in Islam, and it isn’t in Christianity. I doubt it has existed in any form of religion practiced by Man. Or maybe the truth is, there is no truth. Life’s a bitch, then you die.
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
Actually, it was Sunni before it became Shiite. First as spies and infiltrators. Then as conquerors, as they co-opted non-Muslim warlords and warriors into their army, while re-assuring the natives that they would rule with a light hand. Only then came sharia and massacres of non-believers.
Islam’s end will come, but it will arrive pretty much the same way Islam spread – through relentless pressure to apostasize and the imprisonment, torture or execution of Muslim religious leaders and rebels. Assad has shown that a population outnumbered six to one with Sunni Arab rebels receiving significant financing from Sunni countries can force significant numbers of Sunni Arabs to leave while fighting the remainder to a draw that is increasingly tilting in favor of the Alawites, non-religious Sunni Arabs and their non-Muslim allies.
Tamil girls are hot. I believe that the (terrible) musician MIA is a Tamil.
Hey JR,
If you say so. There was nothing hidden about what the first Muslim generation did. They came out swinging pretty hard and rolled up the Sassanid and Byzantine empires within a very short time frame. As one non-Muslim historian put it, they destroyed armies with a “magnificent brutality” (usually out-numbered too). Want to keep an empire? Then learn to defend it.
Uh yeah – because you say so…cool.
But, we’ll totally cop to historically providing incentive (financial, social mobility, etc.) for people to become Muslim – no problems there; it’s part of the framework.
For anybody interested in serious history, this is one of the best and most balanced articles on the conquests of the Companions (ra) – aka the Rashidun (as written by the late Patricia Crone – an absolute expert on non-Muslim source texts and archaeology – who writes in order to dispell the liberal revisionist narrative):
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/42023/among-the-believers
Peace.
I doubt any knowledge of the truth about the universe is attainable to us, at least in mankind’s present form…there’s a phrase about it in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo…the universe as a succession of incomprehensible images (the character who feels that way eventually commits suicide), a fitting expression imo. We just don’t know, and I doubt we ever will. But that’s a deeply discomforting thought and humans seem to have an innate desire to create a meaningful narrative to make sense of it all. Personally I regard the claims to truth of revealed religion as bizarre, it seems transparently man-made imo…but it clearly fills a deeply felt need for many people. I just don’t want people who think like that to have any power over me and my life…especially so in the case of a faith like Islam which in addition to being highly implausible imo, has also been historically alien and hostile to my own civilization.
By the way…
The secular nationalists (and especially the communists – it was brutal in places like Uzbekistan) like Ataturk tried this on the Muslims. Isn’t working out very well, is it?
That’s of course historically correct, but I have to say I find it bizarre and quite disturbing, how you present the fact that Islam spread through legal discrimination of non-Muslims (that’s after all what “providing incentives” means in fact) as part of some exemplary “framework”. Ultimately this means it’s just all about power relations, not about persuasion by argument or exemplary lifestyle.
A social Darwinist couldn’t have expressed it better. It’s of course true on a purely descriptive level, but as a statement of values it’s just “might is right” power worship.
Uh, Byzantium held out quite a while.
Oh, and the Great Khan says hi.
What’s your take on the Tamil Tigers?
I think we can learn a lot about the universe through a combination of science, looking at points that all the main religions agree on and through self exploration of altered states of consciousness.
If anyone is interested this is what Nassim Taleb has to say:
“The One-Way Street of Religions
In the same manner, the spread of Islam in the Near East where Christianity was heavily entrenched (it was born there) can be attributed to two simple asymmetries. The original Islamic rulers weren’t particularly interested in converting Christians as these provided them with tax revenues –the proselytism of Islam did not address those called “people of the book”, i.e. individuals of Abrahamic faith. In fact, my ancestors who survived thirteen centuries under Muslim rule saw advantages in not being Muslim: mostly in the avoidance of military conscription.
The two asymmetric rules were are as follows. First, if a non Muslim man under the rule of Islam marries a Muslim woman, he needs to convert to Islam –and if either parents of a child happens to be Muslim, the child will be Muslim[3]. Second, becoming Muslim is irreversible, as apostasy is the heaviest crime under the religion, sanctioned by the death penalty. The famous Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, born Mikhael Demetri Shalhoub, was of Lebanese Christian origins. He converted to Islam to marry a famous Egyptian actress and had to change his name to an Arabic one. He later divorced, but did not revert to the faith of his ancestors.
Under these two asymmetric rules, one can do simple simulations and see how a small Islamic group occupying Christian (Coptic) Egypt can lead, over the centuries, to the Copts becoming a tiny minority. All one needs is a small rate of interfaith marriages. Likewise, one can see how Judaism doesn’t spread and tends to stay in the minority, as the religion has opposite rules: the mother is required to be Jewish, causing interfaith marriages to leave the community. An even stronger asymmetry than that of Judaism explains the depletion in the Near East of three Gnostic faiths: the Druze, the Ezidi, and the Mandeans (Gnostic religions are those with mysteries and knowledge that is typically accessible to only a minority of elders, with the rest of the members in the dark about the details of the faith). Unlike Islam that requires either parents to be Muslim, and Judaism that asks for at least the mother to have the faith, these three religions require both parents to be of the faith, otherwise the person says toodaloo to the community.
Egypt has a flat terrain. The distribution of the population presents homogeneous mixtures there, which permits renormalization (i.e. allows the asymmetric rule to prevail) –we saw earlier in the chapter that for Kosher rules to work, one needed Jews to be somewhat spread out across the country. But in places such as Lebanon, Galilee, and Northern Syria, with mountainous terrain, Christians and other Non Sunni Muslims remained concentrated. Christians not being exposed to Muslims, experienced no intermarriage.
Egypt’s Copts suffered from another problem: the irreversibility of Islamic conversions. Many Copts during Islamic rule converted to Islam when it was merely an administrative procedure, something that helps one land a job or handle a problem that requires Islamic jurisprudence. One do not have to really believe in it since Islam doesn’t conflict markedly with Orthodox Christianity. Little by little a Christian or Jewish family bearing the marrano-style conversion becomes truly converted, as, a couple of generations later, the descendants forget the arrangement of their ancestors.
So all Islam did was out-stubborn Christianity, which itself won thanks to its own stubbornness. For, before Islam, the original spread of Christianity in the Roman empire can be largely seen due to… the blinding intolerance of Christians, their unconditional, aggressive and proselyting recalcitrance.”
Maybe the guys in Idiocracy talking about Brawndo were on to something. But this leads to a problem. What happens if some Muslim in Germany decides to become a Buddhist or Christian. And he gets whacked.
You know it’s probably happened already, multiple times. Just the German government doesn’t have the guts to release the fact, and is unwilling to do anything about it.
Nazis my ass.
I don’t think I’m going to take any mushrooms for that…
Don’t know if comparing the points of the main religions will tell us about the universe…though certainly a lot about human nature (and I’m not saying there’s nothing of worth at all in religious traditions). But about the universe, there’s so unfathomably much we just don’t know. I mean, there are people who claim it might be just some sort of simulation 🙂
Religion of any kind may be false, but I think it simply incorrect to call it transparently so.
To quote from the book I recommended Talha:
Oh, of course, no doubt about that, just a few weeks ago in Bavaria an Afghan woman who had converted to Christianity was stabbed to death in front of a supermarket by some Afghan asylum seeker (while her small children had to watch). It was reported then that the woman’s relatives believe the murderer did so out of religious reasons, because he wanted to punish the woman for “apostasy” (and that’s not unlikely, after all according to the PEW survey I already mentioned there is majority support for killing “apostates” in Afghanistan and Pakistan). Haven’t found any reports confirming this as proven beyond doubt in this case (German media doesn’t follow up on such stories…), but such cases certainly do happen from time to time even in western countries.
I was merely speaking for myself, but in any case, not all religions might be transparently false to the same degree. It’s obvious to me that Mormonism is basically just a succesful fraud (even though many Mormons certainly are very nice and decent people). Obviously I can be much less sure that Christ’s resurrection didn’t happen. I don’t believe in it, but I can’t be 100% certain either.
Mushrooms never worked for me. I use hemi-sync and I strongly recommend it.
Great incentives, too – exemption from a special tax on non-Muslims, exemption from periodic massacres of non-Muslims, exemption from having Muslims seize non-Muslim property via blasphemy charges, etc. What worked for Muslims against non-Muslims should work for non-Muslims against Muslims.
China seems to be doing a bang-up job with its slow escalation of measures against its Muslims. All they have to do to avoid this persecution is leave the religion:
Now, Muslims are perhaps 1.6% of the Chinese population, but they are, in the main, indistinguishable from non-Muslims in China. Despite blending in seamlessly from the standpoint of facial features, they have yet to successfully execute an attack against China anywhere on the scale of 9/11, although attempts have been made. The Chinese government is now giving the country’s Muslims an incentive to not give their newborns traditional Muslim names:
I expect that if a non-Muslim country imposed a head tax on Muslims similar to the jizya, many Muslims would respond to the financial incentive by either apostasizing or leaving the country. What would you do?
This thread is getting long, and I’m sure I am going to say nothing you haven’t heard before, or have thought yourself.
But what the hell is going through the minds of Merkel and her supporters? Do they honestly think they are going to coopt the belief system of the people they are bringing in?
I’m starting to think it was designed to be impervious to any kind of ideological threat. Sure you could, but it would require you using naked force without apology.
And they think they are going to indoctrinate these people into becoming little SJW’s?
They are freaking lunatics (Merkel & Co). You and your nation have my sympathies.
Hey Sunbeam,
True that. And they struck back pretty hard in the tenth century and recovered some lost territory – very formidable (and at times admirable) foe.
Sultan Baybars sends his salaam. Whatever happened to the Great Khan’s armies anyway?
Oh yeah, they became Muslim.
Peace.
That’s not true though in regard to the Uighurs in Xianjiang who are the main target of China’s anti-Muslim measures; Razib Khan had an interesting blog post about this a few days ago:
https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/05/18/islam-in-china-is-not-one/
I mean, the ones who conquered Muslim countries did.
The ones who stayed home in Mongolia went Buddhist, as did the Kalmyks. (And there was even a chance some of the Mongol Khans might go Christian at one point, Hulagu Khan’s wife was a Christian, though that never panned out).
I mean, half the problem here is that (in my view) Western European criminal justice is too lax, which is why I doubt this guy is going to get punished as he deserves.
It’s total lunacy imo. Even the integration of Turks has been only partially successful, and Turkish Islam is comparatively moderate. Number of really extreme Salafist types has also been rising steadily over the last few years. Now you get Arabs, Afghans etc. who come from a much more extreme background. But many people are just dumb and naive about this. In January 2016 I spoke to a female acquaintance…who was a bit bothered by the number of veiled Islamic women she saw around us (a lot of them were probably Arab tourists, or there for medical reasons…in any case probably not asylum seekers). I then asked her why, if she was bothered by such displays of religion (she’s also an atheist who has even formally left church – which I haven’t yet done), she was in favour of Merkel’s asylum policy and the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Muslims. Her answer: “I don’t believe the people now coming to Germany are really that religious at all”. And that woman is a university-educated phd student! Such people live their nice bourgeois lives and just go along as good conformists with what’s supposedly the right opinion to hold.
Recent polls now have Merkel’s Christian Democrats at 38% for the elections in September…so probably she will win, it will be hailed as a great triumph for her, and things will go on as before. Really makes me feel like emotionally giving up on the country…if people are that stupid, they deserve what’s coming for them. Just sucks for people like me though.
I mean, if you mean it was morally unjust, you might have a point (the communists were often brutal in their repression of all religions). It ‘worked’ in the sense that effectively secularized people. Muslims in places like Kazakhstan, Bosnia, the Tatar regions of Russia, etc.. are very secular. Something like 2% of Kazakh Muslims wants Shariah Law to be the law of the land, which is probably less than the fraction of American Christians who want Dominionist theocracy.
I think this is more or less accurate- the picture of bloody “convert or die” spreading-by-the-sword isn’t really that much more accurate as regards Islam in general than it is regarding premodern Christianity. (The difference is that Christianity didn’t acquire a major imperial army until almost three hundred years after Christ, Islam started out with one). Egypt and Palestine weren’t majority Muslim until relatively shortly before the Crusades, right?
Just out of curiosity, how do you think Muslim states should deal with Muslim ‘heretics’ like the Ahmadiyas?
Not sure in this case, if it’s found to be premeditated murder due to religious reasons he will probably get a long prison term of at least 15 years. The laxness of sentencing is more evident in cases of the sort “Gang of 20-year olds beats someone to death for trivial reasons, gets treated as juveniles and is out of prison after a few years again”.
I have my doubts though anyway that you can deter someone willing to kill for religious reasons.
Most are close enough to pass, if they lose the beards and traditional native costumes. Look up pictures of Uighurs on Google, and you’ll see what I mean. The Caucasoid admixture may come from the Tocharians from around 2000 or more years ago, combined with de- or never sinified Mongoloid ethnies.
Close enough to pass for your eyes. The Chinese will probably notice the difference.
Hey Hector,
If one looks at the history from an academic viewpoint, then one sees that the lion’s share of credit goes to the traveling Sufis.
And how – though it was mostly made of up citizen-soldiers out of the Hijaz and their Bedouin confederates and not professionally armed and trained men. They were certainly very tough though – they hit the Byzantines and Sassanids like a wave. It helps quite a bit to know the language of fire and steel early on in that land of so many of the world’s ancient empires. You recall the way the Christians were treated at the receiving end of the Imperium for those three hundred years, right? Destroyed churches, burned manuscripts, martyred scholars…the Companions (ra) weren’t playing that game.
“Should” is above my pay grade; I am a student of sacred law and nowhere near the place where I can pronounce what the sacred law says “ought” to be done as concerns the rights of human beings. I can say what the scholars have said or what I think will likely happen. As such, I don’t see why they wouldn’t simply fall under the same category as the Alawi as Sh. Yaqoubi laid out. They aren’t heterodox like, say, Shiah or Ibadis – they simply aren’t Muslim.
As far as Khazkhstan and its numbers. They recently came out of a communist-induced stupor. I have read somewhere that there were 60 mosques at the time the USSR fell apart and now there are 2500. If you polled Tunisia or Egypt in the 50’s or 60’s, you would have come up with fairly close numbers to what you are describing. Islam seems to be rising:
“At the moment an explosion of islamization can be observed in Kazakhstan. A spiritual leadership of Kazakh’s Muslims has been established. The religious pilgrimage to Mecca becomes more and more popular. There is a growing number of mosques, Islamic schools and Medresse, academies and institutes, as well as of Islamic print products in Kazakhstan.”
http://thedailyjournalist.com/theinvestigative/the-islamic-situation-in-kazakhstan/
I think the bigger question is; will the old-guard Sunni-Sufi order be ascendant or the Salafi-Wahhabi brand?
“A special role in propagation of Islam among Turkis-nomads was played by the Sufi clergy. The founder of the Sufi order – Khoja Akhmet Yassawy (1103-1166/67) is considered by the Turkis Muslims to be the second sacred leader after Prophet Mohammed, and the city of Turkestan in the south of Kazakhstan where he preached – minor Mecca.”
There’s them Sufis again*…
Peace.
*The order I belong to has special roots from central Asia; the Naqshbandis are named after the Sufi sage Bahauddin Naqshband Bukhari (ra):
https://www.google.com/search?q=Mausoleum+of+Bahauddin+Naqshband&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj74bK33P3TAhUC0mMKHYpdDNMQ_AUICigB&biw=1536&bih=760
I’m not really thinking about deterrence in the rational, “if I do this, bad things will happen to me” sense. I agree with you that isn’t a big factor here, that’s not how human psychology works. However, I do think a lot of people (not the kind who read Unz Review or The American Conservative, but you know, the standard popcorn-mucncher) at some level don’t think about matters of morality very deeply, and they just take their ideas about right and wrong from what the law says. Harsh punishment of murderers would send the message that society takes murder seriously, and that in turn makes people think it’s a Bad Thing.
Hey JR,
Yup – they could also get out of this with military service, but that was usually only offered to tough and rugged people like Turks, Kurds, Armenians, etc. not your city-slicker baker or cobbler who would have been a liability on the battlefield:
“Early Muslim rulers have at times entered dhimmah agreements which eliminated the jizyah altogether—as in the agreement entered during the time of the second caliph `Umar with the Turkish tribe of Jarajimah which welcomed the Muslim forces and declared its dislike of the Romans, but stipulated that its members be allowed to remain Christian; this was agreed…The tribe also agreed to help the Muslims in the event of any military engagement with the Romans. The Muslim party agreed in return to protect the tribe and also relieved its members from payment of jizyah.”
http://arts.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/2297733/ISIS_Origins,-Ideology,-and-Responses-by-Mainstream-Muslim-Scholars.pdf
Yes, this has been a problem in our history (kind of like Christian pogroms against Jews). Though this kind of vigilante mob violence is not sanctioned, it was at times a catalyst for quite a number of converts; one of the more famous instances being at the time of the Mamluks who unfortunately did not fulfill their duty to prevent it:
“The Copts…found the new regime of the Bahri Mamluks to be frequently uninterested in maintaining its ‘part’ of the traditional covenant of protection. In this sense, the Bahris may not have perpetrated any official oppressions or persectutions against Copts and other non-Muslims, but they did attract a tangibly dark shadow over their dhimmi relationships…Donald Little argues that the most clear cut result of these cycles (which reoccurred at least in 1301, 1321, and 1354) and were always a result of mob pressure than government policy) was a wave of mass conversions of Copts escaping the repititions of violence and increasing societal hostility toward them.”
Coptic Identity and Ayyubid Politics in Egypt 1218-1250
One of the main reasons not to destabilize governments that are actually keeping the peace.
I wouldn’t support anything of this kind being done against non-Muslims by a Muslim government. Why should Muslims interfere with their practices as long as they pay taxes and don’t revolt or insult the faith? Do you actually support what China is doing? If Muslims were doing this exact kind of thing to non-Muslims, I presume you’d be pleased?
Yup. What I would do depends on the taxes. I mean, if it’s reasonable then I’d stay, if not, I would leave – pretty simple really.
Peace.
Hey Sunbeam – I’ve read that article by Mr. Taleb before, it is absolutely a great (and mandatory) read.
Peace.
Yup – need to really, really get you married.
Thankmar Freiherr von Münchhausen, ‘Mameluken, Paschas und Fellachen, Berichte aus dem Reich Mohammed Alis 1810 – 1849’, 1982, Tübingen
The Copts as ruthless tax farmers, and enriching themselves by cooking the tax records.
When there is violence in the ME against christians, for example Assyrians were almost completely driven out of Iraq, I always wonder if these christians caused the violence themselves, by collaborating with colonial regimes, western oil companies, or puppet regimes.
How does Islam feel about mysticism? In Judaism is is very strongly discouraged except for the scholarly elite who are over the age of 40.
Once one accepts that one is simply a “witness” to historical change about which little or nothing can be done (and let’s face it, even under the best of circumstances it is almost certainly too late), it becomes a bit easier. Or at least this is what I continually tell myself.
Hey GR,
Some people are on the margins of their religion, a little money or social mobility will push them over. Sincere ones can never be bought. As Mr. Taleb mentioned, their subsequent generations will eventually become more and more sincere.
And yes, we have legal discrimination in Muslim lands like; non-Muslims can’t be head of state, military or certain positions. That makes sense in a state in which the state religion is defined; even the king of Thailand partially derives his legitimacy by being the defender of Buddhism in that realm. I mean, if Western countries were to institute laws that stated Muslims couldn’t hold any government positions on a national level or could only vote for local elections, etc. then that would certainly be discriminatory, but I would hardly call that “oppressive” – maybe some SJWs would. That might actually get people to stop peeing in their pants about a Muslim presence if they knew there were legal safeguards in place from allowing them too much power.
The majority of spread of Islam occurred with the Sufis, and continues to this day. Prof. David Cook, an expert on jihadi movements, mentions that 90% of converts go the Sufi route rather than the Salafi route (listen for five minutes):
https://youtu.be/2VQ9AvJB_k4?t=50m23s
We only worship the One Who holds all power. But when you live in a world of empires you conduct yourself with that framework in mind; all powers are considered hostile by default unless proven otherwise. We live in the completely opposite world. Even if the situation was turned and Muslims had the inverse of the military might vis-avis the West, I would never advocate scrapping the international framework and going back to the age of empires. We have an imperfect but workable system that tries to end unnecessary bloodshed.
If I believed “might makes right” then I would not consistently condemn the actions of various Muslim sovereigns throughout the centuries that oppressed their dhimmi citizens. In the book I referenced by Sh. Yaqoubi (“Refuting ISIS”), he mentions what some of the great Hanafi jurists have stated:
“Imam Kamal al-Din Ibn al-Humam went further and said, ‘Backbiting him [a dhimmi] is unlawful just as backbiting a Muslim is unlawful.’ Ibn ‘Abidin adopted this opinion in his sub-commentary known as Radd al- Muhtar*, explaining that oppression against a non-Muslim citizen is worse, saying that it is ‘because with the contractual dhimma (pact) everything obligatory towards [one of] us is obligatory towards him, so if backbiting a Muslim is impermissible then backbiting him is [also] impermissible. In fact, they [scholars] said that oppression against a non-Muslim citizen is worse.’ Ibn Hajar al-Haytami mentioned the
same in his book entitled ‘Deterrents from Committing Enormities’. The Prophetic statements prohibiting oppression against non-Muslim citizens are mass-transmitted and beyond doubt (mutawatir*).”
Power will be a source of humiliation for those who abuse it on the Day of Judgment.
Peace.
*Radd ul-Muhtar is the current text one has to master before becoming a mufti in the Hanafi school in any of the institutes from the East to the West – it is one of the most definitive guidelines to the school’s positions:
https://kitaabun.com/shopping3/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=80Products&products_id=5700
**Meaning at the same level of authenticity as any verse of the Qur’an.
Bro – you are talking to a Sufi. Game is on! Though I don’t know if “mysticism” is the right word. I would put it more at spiritual purification; cleansing the heart, annihilating the ego, etc.
Traditionally, Sufism has been as much a part of our religion as the juristic tradition. Some of our most famous scholars were and are Sufis. The mufti I learned Islamic creed under (who wrote this book):
https://www.amazon.com/Imam-Hanifas-Al-Fiqh-al-Akbar-Explained/dp/1933764031
…is also a Sufi. Imam Ghazali (ra), Sidi Ahmad Zarruq (ra), Shaykh Thanawi (ra), etc. were all Sufis. The only people who have an allergic reaction to it are the Salafi-Wahhabi types, but that’s because they see some Sufis doing really whacky stuff and then assume we all do that nonsense.
I take my kids to our weekly dhikr gatherings.
Peace.
You’re right in stating that Italy (and Greece) have lost the devaluation mechanism.
I tend to think that this is a psychological thing: Household discipline has by and large the same effect.
Looks, as if other countries stay competitive within this new economic order (Poland, Ireland, Slowakia, the Baltic states (!)).
Greece coud have left the Eruro – they preferred to keep it – result: The highest subsidized economy in the history of Greece. The Slowaks, the Slowenes and the Finns for example just say: Do like we do, and stop whining… Biggest obstacle in the Greek way to prosperity: They have no well functioning state and rank pretty high on the worldwide corruption index.
Sarrazin (and Sinn…) both said, it might have been easier for the Greeks, if they would have left the Euro. But the Greeks themselves did not want to do it and the foreign money keeps flowing in, and proves them somewhat right…It’s all part of the human comedy… (If you think of the Chinese, who are not only overtaking African Railroad systems, but also Greek harbours – and that the Chinese manage to accomplish, what the Greeks failed at: To make a profit with Greek harbours…
Maybe, and in a way it’s quite interesting watching this unfold, you can certainly gain interesting insights into people’s behaviour. Still, very depressing.
Ok, maybe I’ve misinterpreted your remarks. I’m not expecting Muslims to feel perennially guilty about the way their religion spread, if you sincerely state that conditions today are different, that’s enough for me. I’m still somewhat disturbed by a few of your comments, but then that is probably inevitable given my general beliefs in religious matters.
I don’t see your point about China. Though I may have missed something, from the article it appeared China was doing several main things:
To me, these don’t seem all that much of a contrast with traditional Muslim treatment of members of other religions, though you might argue that the fines in #3 are excessive; I wouldn’t know.
The only thing that seemed bizarre was the mention of “forced breaking of the Ramadan fast”. How do you even do such a thing? Send soldiers round to every house with a gun and a loaf of bread saying: “Take a bite if you want to live”?
Now, I’m not in favor of this sort of thing at all, but then I’m not in favor of applying it in Egypt or the Levant either. It also reminds me of the English treatment of the Irish, which, fortunately, mostly failed to work.
The other problem I see with this method is that Islam ends up continually recruiting the worst and most degraded element of each generation of Christians (or Hindus, etc.). The end of it is the regrettable state of religious disinterest and ignorance (what Catholics would call a catechetical problem) which, as you rightly note, is fairly common in the Muslim world (it’s happening to Christians, too, for different reasons). I hesitate to blame this also for the fact that Muslim armies, once the terror of the world, are now its butt, but it’s interesting to note that the Turks and the Moroccans (I’ll add the Afghans and the Persians), peoples who mostly didn’t go through this process, are also the most decently organized groups, militarily and otherwise*, in the Muslim world.
*Well, not the Afghans. But not really their fault.
Hola Senor,
After looking at it a bit more you are right about a good number of the practices the Chinese are doing. The fines do seem excessive to me for peasants. The biggest issue I have is trying to force women to bare their heads or men to shave their beards or forcing breaking of fasts. Non-Muslims shouldn’t have to wear headscarves and such in Muslim lands, should they? Should Muslims have the right to force feed people during Lent?Asking Muskims to dress distinctly is fine – non-Muslims were asked to distinjguish themselves at times. However, when it comes to Uighurs, I realize this is much more of a ethnic/political issue than a religious one (they do have the very bloody Boxer rebellion in their history to know how these things can get out of control and unleash a backlash) – since the article does say the Hui can practice openly. And honestly, I don’t expect much from post-Mao China on this front, the republic was different in this regard.
And while I can understand putting restrictions on outward or public religious ceremonies in the middle of Chinese areas, why should these be restricted in the Muslim areas/sectors?
The name thing is a bit invasive, but I’m not sure it is a “right” that people are necessarily involved in national health/welfare/education systems – in the past, Muslims usually left all of this up to the local millets to manage. They can probably keep a legal name as necessary and use a nickname – converts rarely ever change their birth name but at times take an Arabic name that they are known by in the community.
Again – good points.
Peace.
Hey GR,
No problem. Just to clarify…
A Muslim with a healthy sense of history and metaphysical reality does not feel guilty or proud for the actions of others in the past; they will be punished or rewarded for their actions, and we for ours. As such, I praise and condone the ways in which the religion was spread and where it requires condemnation and rejection, that’s what I do.
My opinion is irrelevant – the scholars have recognized this to be the case. Any notion of an offensive jihad (which many scholars still deem to be defensive, in the sense that sometimes a good offense in the best defense) is interdicted by international protocols which all Muslim nations have signed up to*. The imbeciles we have running around keep referring to the fatwas of Sh. Ibn Taymiyyah who – shock of shocks – lived in Damascus during the time of the Crusades and the Mongol invasions. Apparently they haven’t gotten the notice, those ended a while back.
Now, to be honest, if the international order breaks down completely (something I do not wish for) and it goes back to the law of the jungle, then the older rules may be revived** – again, above my pay grade, just being honest as to what could happen. Thus it is in everyone’s interest to keep the current framework alive and well and improving.
I hope this makes things clear.
Peace.
*Keep in mind, these are the same rules that make sure armies don’t cross between that border you guys have with France. If you have read up on European history, then you will know how absolutely bizarre it is that an army has not crossed in either direction for seven decades.
**One thing that makes this highly doubtful is the nature of modern war. One of the purposes of an offensive jihad was to bring down a rival political power in order to make it clear for preaching the message to people – I doubt Byzantium was going to have any of that in their lands if they could help it. That was not so bad in an age when you could have battles like Yarmouk, Qadissyah, Manzikert, Mohacs, etc. out in open plains away from civilian areas and then civilian populations would capitulate to simply another power who was going to tax them (sometimes better than their previous hegemons). Modern warfare has made war so utterly destructive that if you do conquer a people you do so by turning their cities into Stalingrads and completely destroying their infrastructure, they will hate you and whatever you stand for. Thus, war in these times potentially has a completely opposite effect than the desired result.
Note how limited the warfare was as described by the traveler Ibn Jubayr during the time of the Crusades:
“One of the astonishing things that is talked of is that though the fires of discord burn between the two parties, Muslim and Christian, two armies of them may meet and dispose themselves in battle array, and yet Muslim and Christian travellers will come and go between them without interference….This Sultan invested it, and put it to sore straits, and long the siege lasted, but still the caravans passed successively from Egypt to Damascus, going through the lands of the Franks without impediment from them. In the same way the Muslims continuously journeyed from Damascus to Acre (through Frankish territory), and likewise not one of the Christian merchants was stopped or hindered (in Muslim territories). The Christians impose a tax on the Muslims in their land which gives them full security; and likewise the Christian merchants pay a tax upon their goods in Muslim lands. Agreement exists between them, and there is equal treatment in all cases. The soldiers engage themselves in their war, while the people are at peace and the world goes to him who conquers.”
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/prh3/259/texts/jubayr.htm
Can you imagine such a description these days coming out of besieged towns in Syria or Iraq?
Since you brought up the Battle of Mohács, let me mention that the population of the area conquered by the Ottomans in Hungary mostly was destroyed by the following two centuries of near constant warfare, they left no descendants, or just very few of them. The most devastating of all was probably the war of liberation, i.e. the last one of them. War was already quite destructive in those times, especially since it never came alone, always brought famine and disease with it.
Hey rT,
Yeah, it sucks to be the punching bag in between the Hapsburgs and Ottomans – not fun.
Again, drives home my point that wars that are overly destructive leave a horrible taste in the mouths of those peoples who experienced them. It is not surprising, given the Ottoman conduct in certain areas, that people of that region have negative views about the religion they followed.
Peace.
To be honest Christian armies (including the Protestant rebel Hungarian army of Thököly) weren’t much nicer to civilians in that era. The destruction in the war of liberation was, after all, brought about as the Christian armies ran through the area previously occupied by the Ottomans.
Nah, immigration for supermodels only. No need for more Einsteins.